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Category: National Politics

  • Renee Good’s family sues U.S. government and immigration officials over her killing in Minneapolis

    Renee Good’s family sues U.S. government and immigration officials over her killing in Minneapolis

    Renee Good’s family sued the U.S. government and the architects of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown on Thursday, saying “the time is absolutely now for accountability” after her killing in January by a federal agent in Minneapolis.

    Good’s partner, Becca Good, and brother, Brent Ganger, accused the government and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot into her SUV and killed her, Jonathan Ross, of unjustified and excessive use of force.

    The Jan. 7 shooting, captured on bystander video, was “the predictable and intended product” of the Trump administration’s crackdown on Somali and other immigrants in Minnesota, an exercise that officials dubbed Operation Metro Surge, the lawsuit said.

    “I’m here today because last January the whole world had to watch as our entire universe was destroyed,” Becca Good said at a news conference announcing the lawsuits.

    The killings of Good, a 37-year-old mother, and another U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis just weeks later sparked outrage across the country and calls to rein in immigration enforcement. At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration officers during Trump’s second term.

    “What happened to Rene was completely senseless,” Ganger said. “And the fact that there’s been no accountability, no investigation, no expression of condolence, no change in policy is completely mind blowing.”

    “The hole in my family and myself created by my sister’s passing is hauntingly apparent,” he added.

    The lawsuits — one against the government, the other against Ross and officials including White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, ex-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House border czar Tom Homan — seek unspecified damages for wrongful death, conspiracy and other violations.

    “Our government has become a grave and mortal threat to its own citizens,” the family’s lawyer, Antonio Romanucci said.

    The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

    Officer shot Good as she turned her car away from him

    Renee Good was fatally shot Jan. 7 as protests against immigration raids flared across the city. According to Becca Good, her partner stopped their car in a street to support neighbors during an immigration operation.

    Bystander video shows Renee Good in the driver’s seat of a red SUV blocking part of the road and repeatedly honking her horn.

    Two immigration officers get out of a truck, their faces covered, and one orders Good to get out of the car. She reverses briefly, then turns the steering wheel as the officer says again, “get out of the car.”

    Almost simultaneously, Becca Good, standing in the street, shouts: “Drive, baby, drive!”

    One officer standing in front of the vehicle pulls his weapon and fires into the windshield. He lurches back as the car turns away from him. The officer, who is now very close to the open window on the driver’s side, fires two more times, fatally shooting Renee Good, according to an analysis of the videos by The Associated Press and others.

    Federal officials at the time said the officer acted in self-defense and that Good had engaged in “an act of domestic terrorism.”

    One lawsuit alleges wrongful death

    The lawsuit against the United States of America seeks damages for Good’s wrongful death and “the immense suffering Renee endured in the final moments of her life and for the profound and permanent losses that her death has inflicted upon her family,” according to a news release by lawyers for Ganger and Good.

    The lawsuit, which seeks a bench trial, also alleges “intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress” on Becca Good.

    Becca and Renee Good, the mother of three children, were not legally married, according to a family lawyer, but referred to one another as wives. They had only recently relocated to Minneapolis from Kansas City, Missouri.

    Another lawsuit alleges conspiracy to conceal evidence

    The other lawsuit alleges a conspiracy to interfere with civil rights and seeks a jury trial. It says the federal government moved to hide the evidence of what actually happened on Jan. 7.

    It describes a “carefully planned, coordinated effort between senior federal officials and private actors to make two ethnic communities — Minnesotans of Somali and Hispanic descent and origin — the object of aggression and abduction, and to silence by intimidation, arrest and violence the neighbors and allies of those targeted communities who observed, documented and warned of that campaign.”

    Other defendants include: Corey Lewandowski, a Trump campaign manager who also served as one of Noem’s advisers; former acting director of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons; former U.S. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino; and 10 unnamed federal agents.

    Good’s partner acknowledges other lives lost in immigration crackdown

    In social media accounts, Renee Good described herself as a “poet and writer and wife and mom.” On Pinterest, a profile picture shows her smiling and holding a young child, alongside posts about tattoos, hairstyles and home decorating.

    In an interview shortly after her death, Renee Good’s mother, Donna Ganger, told The Associated Press: “She had this way of making you feel special and loved that I didn’t even understand that until we lost her.”

    Good’s partner noted the broader loss to communities nationwide.

    “As we have tried to navigate our own massive loss, I am also devastated by how many other lives have been destroyed in this darkest of times,” Becca Good said in a news release Thursday. “So many other families are dealing with the loss of their loved ones; to everyone who has had to witness it — the pain of this moment extends far beyond our family. What happened to us should never happen to any family.”

  • Bipartisan bill seeks to ban cellphones in schools nationwide

    Bipartisan bill seeks to ban cellphones in schools nationwide

    A new bipartisan effort could create a national ban on cellphones during the school day, the most sweeping attempt yet to keep screens out of classrooms.

    The bill, filed Wednesday by Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), would send money to states that adopt policies barring students from using personal devices – including cellphones, smartwatches, tablets and similar technology – during the school day.

    If the legislation is approved by lawmakers, states would be able to use the funding to enforce device bans, including paying for lockers, lockboxes or pouches for students to store their devices. The legislation makes exceptions for children who need devices for special education or medical needs.

    “Arkansas kids deserve classrooms free of distractions,” Cotton said in a statement. “This bill would support Arkansas public schools that choose to tailor their classroom cellphone guidance to ensure students have the most productive school days possible.”

    Cellphone bans have become popular in recent years, with most states enacting policies designed to restrict cellphone use in schools. Students are often required to stow their devices in lockers or locked pouches during the school day.

    Supporters of these rules hoped keeping phones out of the classroom would help students focus, boost test scores and improve mental health. But the results have been mixed.

    While cellphone bans have reduced unauthorized usage in schools, there has been little academic benefit, according to research by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

    “There is clearly justifiable enthusiasm for school phone bans, but it’s important to recognize that building effective, phone-free learning environments does not appear to be a simple or quick fix,” according to Thomas Dee, a Stanford University professor and one of the authors of the report.

    “The very early experience schools have with phone bans is sobering, but there are also indicators that as schools adjust to phone-free policies, the benefits of these bans may be realized,” he said in an interview posted on a Stanford website.

    And, in some cases, teens reported using their phones more often at school, particularly at schools with lax enforcement, according to a Brookings Institution survey. Students in that survey also said cellphone bans had no impact on their happiness, stress or relationships with teachers.

    A spokesperson for Kelly said the measure is intended to give schools the resources to make phone bans work and enforce them consistently. While no single policy will solve every challenge in the classroom, reducing distractions can help, the spokesperson said.

    “Phones in schools have been a disaster for learning,” the senator said in a statement emailed to The Post. “Getting phones out of classrooms will mean fewer distractions and more time for kids to focus on their teachers and lessons. We’re giving schools the tools to make that happen.”

    Some advocates continue to link cellphone use with grades. Amid declining math and reading scores among teenagers, more than half of public school leaders say cellphone usage hurts a student’s academic performance, federal survey results show.

    The U.S. Surgeon General’s office has also warned that excessive screen use can lead to anxiety, depression, lower grades and weakened interpersonal relationships.

  • Most Americans blame Trump for high prices as midterms approach, a new AP-NORC poll finds

    Most Americans blame Trump for high prices as midterms approach, a new AP-NORC poll finds

    WASHINGTON — Americans are deeply frustrated with President Donald Trump’s handling of the economy and rising prices, with most panning his performance and blaming his policies as higher costs threaten his party’s chances in November.

    A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that only 17% of U.S. adults approve of the Republican president’s handling of the cost of living. Just 26% approve of his handling of the economy overall, marking a new low.

    A majority, 65%, of U.S. adults now blame Trump’s policies for persistently high costs more than factors outside of his control, signaling growing weariness over his aggressive use of tariffs and continued unhappiness with the war with Iran.

    The dismal numbers come just weeks before midterm elections that will determine whether Republicans maintain control of Congress and while Trump is hitting the campaign trail with an aggressive schedule of rallies. But Trump — who has asked voters to pretend that he is on the ballot as he tries to bolster turnout — remains deeply unpopular, with even many Republicans faulting him for failing to deliver on promised relief.

    “I was hoping it would be better or different, but it’s not really good,” said Robert Gault, 66, a retired factory worker from Bradford, Pennsylvania, who describes himself as a Republican.

    “Our president, I thought, was going to help the country, and so far he has not really seemed to have done that with the economy or in general. He’s not really done what I was hoping he would,” said Gault. ”He said, ‘Make America Great Again.’ And I have not seen him do that.”

    Costs drag on Trump as the economic pain keeps coming

    Over the last few months, Americans have grown more worried about being able to afford basics like groceries and gas. About half of U.S. adults now say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about being able to fill their tanks, up from 39% in July. About half are also highly concerned about being able to afford food.

    Prices are “extremely exorbitant. Just the cost of everything is going up as a result of fuel,” said Pedro Sanchez, 52, of Perris, California, who voted for Trump and works in law enforcement. “I used to have a lot more disposable income. I don’t have that any more. It’s gotten eaten up because of all these increases in the cost of everything.”

    Trump’s current approval on the economy is a 14 percentage point drop from March 2025, just after he took office for the second time. His struggles on the issue mark a significant departure from his first term, when the economy was often a point of strength.

    Trump spent much of the 2024 campaign hammering President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats, on inflation and promising to lower prices. Now, there’s widespread disappointment with his performance. About 7 in 10 Americans say Trump’s handling of the cost of living has been “worse than expected.” That includes roughly half of Republicans, who are also broadly concerned about being able to afford groceries and gas.

    “Groceries are just like kind of out of control. It seems like everything is going up,” said Bethany Lnenicka, 41, who operates a small farm in Fairfax, Iowa. “It’s just one thing and the next week it’s another thing. It’s just insane. And of course your income doesn’t go up.”

    A political independent who typically votes Republican and has voted for Trump three times, Lnenicka said she had hoped his second term would be more like his first.

    “I just do not feel like it has gotten a lot better,” she said.

    About 6 in 10 Republicans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the cost of living, according to the new poll, up from about half in April.

    “It definitely doesn’t feel like we have trended in the right direction,” agreed Kristen Slaven, 41, a mental health therapist who lives in Gluckstadt, Mississippi, and typically votes Republican. She said Trump is focused on the wrong things.

    “Obviously wars don’t help. When they’re necessary, I understand. But our focus on renaming bodies of water and pieces of land, that’s just stupid to me when people can’t feed their family,” she said.

    “I had hoped that it would be better,” Slaven added.

    Some Republicans are still willing to cut Trump some slack

    Despite their frustration, most Republicans, 67%, say factors outside of Trump’s control are more to blame for high prices.

    “I think inflation is a very difficult thing to tackle,” said Fred Naumann, 51, a Republican and longtime Trump supporter who lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

    Though he would like to see interest rates come down, Naumann, who works in the automotive industry, supports tariffs and the war with Iran, believing it was necessary.

    Overall, however, most Americans, 69%, continue to say the war has not been worth fighting, up slightly from 64% in July. Only 28% approve of how Trump is handling Iran.

    Americans are also unhappy with Trump’s trade wars. Only about 3 in 10 U.S. adults approve of how he is handling trade negotiations with other countries, down from about 4 in 10 in March. And 64% say he has “gone too far” on imposing new tariffs on other countries, up from 58% in January.

    Overall, the picture is not better. Only about 3 in 10 Americans approve of how Trump is handling his job as president. And about 6 in 10 say the country as a whole is “much” or “somewhat” worse off than when he began his second term.

    The issue on which Trump maintains relative strength is border security, with about half of Americans saying they approve of his performance.

    Trump faces more blame than Biden did

    Trump’s low grade on the economy rivals Biden’s 28% approval rating in June 2022, when there was record-high inflation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    But Americans were less likely to blame Biden in the lead-up to that year’s midterm elections, a sharp contrast with the solid majority who hold Trump responsible now. In October 2022, 44% of Americans said Biden’s policies were responsible for high prices, while 55% blamed factors outside of his control.

    Sanchez, a Republican who voted for Trump, blames him, at least in part.

    “I think he has a lot to do with it. This war in Iran, the tariffs that he’s placing on other countries, obviously are affecting us. Those two things are things he’s been directly involved in that directly affect the economy,” he said. “I think with Biden, a lot of the stuff was outside of his control. It was all the COVID and how that affected everything else. I don’t think that there was much that he could have done.”

    He had high hopes for Trump’s return. Now, things seem worse than under Biden.

  • Hegseth talks tough as Republican doubts about his leadership grow

    Hegseth talks tough as Republican doubts about his leadership grow

    WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has survived in office by projecting an image of strength.

    His combative style has won praise from President Donald Trump and support from the Republican base. “He loves war,” Trump said earlier this year, slapping Hegseth on the biceps.

    By many measures, though, Hegseth has never been weaker. He is leading the military through an unpopular war. Republicans in Congress complain privately — and increasingly in public — that he and his staff are dismissive of their questions and frequently unprepared for briefings.

    If Democrats win a majority in the House, Hegseth will likely face new calls for his impeachment.

    Hegseth’s firing and sidelining of senior military officers, often with no explanation, has fed mistrust and led many in the top ranks to question his leadership.

    How Hegseth manages the contradiction between his tough guy image and his growing vulnerabilities in Washington and around the world could determine whether Trump — the person Hegseth must ultimately please — keeps him in the job.

    Hegseth’s most immediate problems are in Iran, where the U.S. war shows no signs of ending, and on Capitol Hill. In the aftermath of the midterm elections, Hegseth will have to persuade a skeptical Congress to pass a $1.5 trillion defense budget and confirm nominees for key Pentagon posts. Several of his choices are being blocked by Republicans in the Senate.

    He will also have to persuade Congress to keep paying for the war, which the American people broadly oppose.

    On Wednesday, Hegseth focused on the part of the job that plays to his strengths. Onstage at a military base outside Washington, with a giant American flag behind him, he attacked the media and promoted his victories in the culture wars.

    “The complainers, the ideologues, and the poor performers are no longer in the driver’s seat. No more silly PowerPoint trainings or drag queen shows,” Hegseth said. “No more gender pronouns. No more identity months. Only the warrior ethos.”

    He also laid out an ambitious agenda that included building a massive military base and establishing a major new command focused on preparing the military for wars dominated by robots and artificial intelligence.

    Most of those initiatives will require support from lawmakers who view him with unease, if not disdain.

    A year ago, Hegseth stood on the same stage outside Washington and delivered a similar speech to a room full of more than 800 generals. He blamed them for acceding to overly restrictive rules of engagement intended to protect civilian lives. He bashed them for allowing liberal ideas, which he called “toxic ideological garbage,” to infect the force. And he accused them, without evidence, of lowering standards to accommodate women in the ranks.

    The senior officers sat stone-faced. Many said privately that they found Hegseth’s speech insulting.

    This time Hegseth’s audience included about 600 junior officers and enlisted leaders.

    Since taking office last year, Hegseth has overseen a purge of generals and admirals unlike anything the military has experienced in decades. He has fired or blocked the promotions of more than 80 generals and admirals.

    On Wednesday, Hegseth made clear that his work was not done.

    “The number-crunchers say we fired 10% of the generals and admirals across the force, and that number sounds about right,” said Hegseth, citing figures first tabulated by The New York Times. Almost half of those fired or removed were women or minority officers.

    Hegseth’s day began outside the Pentagon, where he led the 600 junior troops in pushups, stretching, and a morning run, just as he would have when he was an Army captain two decades earlier.

    To drive home Hegseth’s message of toughness and lethality, the service members traded in their military-issued workout gear for “This is War” T-shirts of the sort that Hegseth has recently modeled during his workouts, which his staff members regularly post on social media.

    But Hegseth is no longer a junior officer, and the biggest challenges he faces are not among the frontline formations.

    The war in Iran, which Trump started and Hegseth now leads, has drained the military’s stockpile of critical munitions that it needs to defend U.S. troops and allies in the Middle East, and to deter an even larger conflict with China or Russia. Replenishing those magazines could take two to three years, according to defense experts.

    The war is also creating economic problems at home. The average American could tune out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We’re at war; America’s at the mall,” U.S. troops fighting overseas often bitterly complained.

    By contrast, the war against Iran and the battle over the Strait of Hormuz have caused fuel and food prices to surge. Republican congressional candidates in Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, and Michigan have increasingly questioned the rationale for continuing the conflict.

    “The war in Iran needs to end, and end quickly,” said Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate nominee in Michigan and an early supporter of the war.

    Hegseth’s stewardship of the military, particularly his firing of generals and admirals, has alienated Republican national security hawks in Washington.

    “It’s not the right way to treat people,” Rep. Don Bacon (R, Neb.) an Air Force veteran, said in a recent interview. “It’s not decent.”

    Hegseth’s clashes with lawmakers extend beyond the firings. Republicans in Congress have complained that he and his staff have misled or lied to them about recent decisions to pull Army brigades out of Poland and Romania.

    “We didn’t think we were treated honestly,” Bacon said.

    And lawmakers from both parties have said that they cannot get answers to basic questions about the conduct of the war in Iran, or about the Pentagon’s budget requests.

    “You want to sell people on your needs,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R, N.C.), who cast a key vote in confirming Hegseth as defense secretary. “You want to sell people on your priorities. Then you have to engage.”

    He added: “I don’t think Hegseth has developed any productive relationships, even with Republican members.”

    The Pentagon’s recent $67 billion request to pay for operations in Iran was only seven pages, compared to the Iraq and Afghanistan spending bills, which typically ran more than 100 pages and included detailed accounting of the department’s needs.

    In his speech to the troops Wednesday, Hegseth answered some of his critics by suggesting, as he had previously, that the war against Iran had already been won.

    “Allow me to lay it out simply for the anti-American losers in our media,” he said. “These Americans, right here, and their peers, these have destroyed Iran’s navy, destroyed Iran’s air force, destroyed their air-defense systems, their leadership and their military industrial capacity, their entire defense base.”

    His analysis did not account for Iran’s large stockpile of missiles, which it continues to fire at its neighbors and oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Nor is it likely to satisfy skeptics in Congress.

    “He’s not working with Democratic senators,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R, Iowa). “He works very little with Republican senators.”

    Ernst added: “We need more transparency for the good of the Defense Department and the good of the nation.”

    The result is that many of Hegseth’s top priorities in Congress are going nowhere. Earlier this year, Hegseth fired or forced out the Army chief of staff, the Army secretary and the Navy secretary. Senators are refusing to confirm the leaders Hegseth has chosen as replacements.

    The defense secretary also has struggled to persuade lawmakers in the House and Senate to pay for any of the Pentagon’s spending bills. In the near term, the Pentagon will have to make do with last year’s budget of about $890 billion, or about 40% less than it is currently budgeting.

    The difference will force the Pentagon to reallocate money set aside to repair barracks, train troops and buy weapons to pay for more pressing needs, such as sustaining 50,000 troops in the Middle East. In the coming months, some of Trump’s top priorities, such as his proposed Golden Dome missile shield for the United States, will likely come to a halt.

    None of those setbacks seemed to dissuade Hegseth from sketching out an even more ambitious and costly agenda. He spoke of standing up a new autonomous weapons command led by a four-star general.

    He laid out a plan to make all U.S. military bases energy independent. “If an adversary takes down the grid by cyberattack, by sabotage, or by any means, our bases stay lit,” Hegseth said.

    He promised to launch a competition among all 50 states and governors for the new military base, which would house as many as 25,000 troops.

    “We’re talking hundreds of thousands of acres with organic power generation, modern air defenses and cutting-edge technology,” Hegseth said. “Think a fortress.”

    Hegseth barely spoke of the $1.5 trillion defense budget that the Trump administration sent to Congress earlier this year. It is a budget that even Republicans concede has little chance, in its current form, of passing.

    At some point Trump may have to make a choice.

    “Trump really likes Hegseth, and I think that’s based on style,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow focusing on defense at the American Enterprise Institute.

    Trump chose Hegseth in part for his bravado, which was on full display Wednesday. The question now is whether pressure from Republican lawmakers will force the president to find a leader for the Pentagon who is less politically combative and more eager to make peace with a frustrated Congress.

  • As violence falls, crime isn’t paying as a Republican line of attack

    As violence falls, crime isn’t paying as a Republican line of attack

    A central line of attack in the waning weeks of the 2026 midterms comes straight out of the tried and true Republican playbook: Democrats are soft on crime.

    But as crime rates plummet across the country, it’s been a hard case to make. In Michigan and Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, Republicans have struggled to pull voters back to the violence and disorder that followed the onset of COVID-19.

    Nowhere is that clearer than in the Senate race in North Carolina. One Republican ad there tried to blame Roy Cooper, the former governor running for Senate, for a murder that took place in the wrong Carolina, the one to the south. Another asserted that he had given the man who fatally stabbed a Ukrainian woman on a light rail train in Charlotte, N.C., last year an early release from prison; he did not.

    A third presented the story of a man whose son had been murdered, implying that Cooper’s policies were responsible. After it was released, the father, a Democrat, complained that he had been “swindled, hoodwinked” into making a political endorsement when he had been told the topic was gun violence.

    Republicans have soldiered on, spending $18.5 million in North Carolina on ads about lawlessness and murder. But polls show Cooper, a former governor and attorney general, consistently leading his Republican opponent, Michael Whatley.

    “It really does not seem to be having much traction at this point, and the folks who are long schooled and well versed in North Carolina politics have wondered why Michael Whatley didn’t take a different approach,” said Mitch Kokai, a senior political analyst at the John Locke Foundation, a free-market think tank based in Raleigh, N.C..

    For Republicans, that different approach is proving elusive. The chaos at the border — a reliable political target since 2018 — has calmed. State laws barring transgender students in athletics have taken some of the sting out of that issue as well. The war on Iran is unpopular. Voters say they are most concerned about the high costs of everyday necessities.

    And crime — usually a winning issue for Republicans, who are generally more trusted to keep law and order — is seeing a staggering drop. The downward trend that began during the Biden administration has only accelerated. One analysis found that the murder rate last year was the lowest it has been since 1900.

    “This is the first election really in my lifetime where I have felt that it’s not an issue,” said Holly Harris, a veteran Republican strategist who is now the executive vice president of advocacy at Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy with a focus on criminal justice. “I remember when I was at the Republican Party years ago, every ad that we wrote was focused on crime. And it’s just not hitting the same mark.”

    The good news on crime has posed a challenge for Republicans. How do you take credit for the peace while simultaneously blaming the other side for what President Donald Trump has called “American carnage?” At a recent campaign rally in Gastonia, N.C., Trump pivoted from blaming Cooper for the “blood-soaked killing fields” of North Carolina to hailing his own record within half an hour.

    “Last year, we achieved the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded,” he said.

    In The Charlotte Observer, Andrew Dunn, a conservative political commentator, wrote that the president’s description of the state as “one of the most violent and one of the worst in the whole nation” would backfire, even with those who agreed that Cooper had a poor record on crime.

    “Who is buying that description of North Carolina?” Dunn asked.

    Violent crime in North Carolina this year is down 22% compared with the same period in 2024, outpacing the national decline of 14%, according to data collected by the Crime Index. Property crime is down 18% compared with 2024, about the same rate as the national decline.

    Republicans have spent $105 million on ads about crime, more than a quarter of total spending, compared with $35.5 million spent by Democrats, according to an analysis of spending on federal races in the general election by AdImpact, a media tracking firm.

    In the previous two election cycles, attempts to tie all Democrats to far-left positions like defunding the police and abolishing prisons proved effective, in part because crime had spiked to alarming highs right after the pandemic and the police brutality protests in 2020.

    Such attacks were often met with an uncomfortable silence, and Republicans were able to connect crime to a border that appeared to be exceptionally porous. Candidates repeatedly raised examples of violence committed by immigrants without permanent legal status and rising rates of fentanyl overdoses.

    Those links have broken as drug overdoses drop, the border grows quiet, and even some Republican lawmakers say the president’s immigration crackdown has gone too far.

    In the current climate, soft-on-crime attacks risk looking out of tune with the electorate’s deeper concerns, “especially when voters feel that they’re getting robbed at the gas station every day,” said Jim Kessler, the executive director of Third Way, a centrist Democratic organization in Washington.

    Cooper, who was first elected to statewide office 26 years ago, as attorney general, has noted that many of Whatley’s accusations were found to be false and has defended his record. A campaign spokesperson said, “Roy spent his career putting rapists and violent criminals behind bars and signing tough-on-crime laws.”

    “Most people look at Cooper, they don’t see somebody that is soft on crime,” said Carter Wrenn, a veteran Republican political consultant.

    But for candidates without Cooper’s profile, strategists have counseled against trying to out-tough Republicans on crime. “If you’re going to be Republican lite, then people are going to pick Republicans,” said Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic strategist.

    The Vera Institute, a nonprofit that works to reduce mass incarceration and has used focus groups to test messaging on criminal justice policies, has offered “serious about safety” as a rival slogan. The idea was initially met with some mockery — one social media post said it sounded like a college sex talk — but candidates have increasingly adopted safety as a buzzword, with a new set of talking points to go with it.

    James Talarico in Texas and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, both Democratic candidates for the Senate, talk about recruiting and training police officers and explicitly link public safety to increased spending on housing, education, mental health care, and drug treatment.

    El-Sayed, the former health director for Wayne County, Mich., has gone from praising the “defund the police” movement for wanting to devote more resources to fighting poverty, to offering “a vision for public safety that I think all of us can agree with.”

    “We want to know that we can get home safely,” he told CNN in June. “We don’t want to worry about being the victim of somebody’s violence, whether it’s from a neighbor or the state itself.”

    Harris, the veteran GOP strategist, said, “Democrats are adopting some of the Republican talking points, to be candid.” Both sides are retreating from more extreme positions, she said, creating an opportunity for lawmakers to return to more nuanced, evidence-based policies. She characterized tough-on-crime attacks as “outliers.”

    This week, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, who has touted his experience as a former FBI agent, dropped his own crime attack ad. “It’s Abdul El-Sayed who would surrender our borders to the drug cartels,” a father whose son died as a result of opioid use says.

    But Democrats are also playing offense this year, with ammunition from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Republicans, they charge, are protecting child predators, and Trump’s pardons of drug traffickers, fraudsters, and the rioters of Jan. 6, 2021, have been grist for their own soft-on-crime attacks.

    In Nebraska a political action committee supporting Dan Osborn, an independent, unveiled an ad this week attacking the Republican incumbent, Sen. Pete Ricketts, for pardoning a man who had raped a woman three decades earlier.

    Talarico has accused his Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, of an “Epstein-style sweetheart deal” that initially would have allowed a child molester to spend just one day in jail. Paxton’s office has said that the deal, which required the man to surrender his law license for five years but did not require him to register as a sex offender, was reached because the victim was unwilling to testify.

    In North Carolina, skirmishes over “pedophile protectors” have proliferated, spurring lengthy examinations of the sex crime rap sheets of pastors, board presidents, and party operatives.

    In July, a Democratic PAC spent more than $2 million on ads about Harvey Lee West Jr., a child sex offender who did time in prison and then ascended the ranks of the state Republican Party, winning influence and committee appointments while Whatley was the chair.

    Whatley’s campaign spokesperson said that the candidate had never hired West for a paid position. But the ads accuse Whatley of “putting politics over safety.”

    FILE — Michael Whatley, Republican’s candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina, joins President Donald Trump on stage during a campaign rally at the airport in Gastonia, N.C., Sept. 16, 2026. Across the country, and especially in the North Carolina Senate race, Republicans have charged opponents with being soft on crime, even as President Trump brags over plunging crime rates. (Kenny Holston/The New York Times)KENNY HOLSTON
  • Senate committee advances Nicole Saphier’s nomination for surgeon general

    Senate committee advances Nicole Saphier’s nomination for surgeon general

    WASHINGTON — Nicole Saphier, President Donald Trump‘s third nominee for surgeon general, moved a step closer to confirmation after a Senate committee voted to advance her nomination on Wednesday.

    Saphier, a radiologist and former Fox News Channel contributor, was advanced out of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on a 12-to-11 vote to serve as surgeon general after she was grilled at her confirmation hearing earlier this month about her stance on childhood vaccines.

    She expressed support for vaccines and told lawmakers she didn’t believe they cause autism. The Trump administration has sought to revisit claims about a link between vaccines and autism, although widespread scientific consensus and decades of studies have firmly concluded there is none.

    Timothy Westlake, who was nominated to serve as assistant secretary for mental health and substance use at the Department of Health and Human Services was also advanced out of committee on the same en bloc vote.

    It was not immediately clear when the officials would face a full Senate vote for their confirmation but they are expected to be approved.

    During her confirmation hearing, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy pressed Saphier to declare whether she believed there was a link between vaccines and autism. Saphier responded that she does “not believe childhood vaccines cause autism,” adding that “the MMR vaccine is our greatest tool for combating measles,” in response to a question by Cassidy over whether parents should give children that shot.

    MMR stands for measles, mumps and rubella, and the president recently called for the shots to be spaced out, against the guidance of medical groups.

    The surgeon general position carries limited policymaking power but serves as a loud megaphone as the nation’s top communicator to Americans on public health issues.

    Cassidy, who led the inquiry into Saphier’s views on vaccines, ultimately voted in support of her nomination.

    Sen. Bernie Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate HELP committee, said ahead of Saphier’s vote that he would vote down her nomination because in part Saphier “has questioned the need for the hepatitis B vaccine at birth, when the data science has been clear.”

    “We need a surgeon general who will tell the truth about vaccines, not someone who misleads the public,” Sanders said. At her confirmation hearing, Saphier said the universal birth dose of hepatitis B was safe and effective.

    Chris Klomp, who was nominated to serve as deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, was advanced out of the Senate Finance Committee last week on a 15 to 12 vote. He was questioned during the same hearing as Saphier about his duties associated with the role as the current chief counselor of the Department of Health and Human Services under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as well as about his vaccine stance.

    In protesting Klomp’s nomination at the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden said Klomp “tried to create the impression that he will be the adult in the room on vaccines. Yet, as we sit here today, the vaccine chaos that we’ve come to expect from Robert Kennedy’s HHS continues.”

  • How a planned steel mill in Iowa reveals Trump’s midterm strategy

    How a planned steel mill in Iowa reveals Trump’s midterm strategy

    President Donald Trump, staring down a rough midterm season for Republicans, unveiled plans for an Iowa steel mill project Monday that he said would plug billions into the economy and create construction jobs in a state hit hard by his policies.

    Voters in Midwestern states were crucial to delivering a second election win to Trump, but now, those voters are among the hardest hit by tariff-driven manufacturing costs and a rise in fuel prices driven by the war in Iran. When a reporter in the Oval Office asked him Monday why several Republican candidates in Iowa were working so hard to protect their seats, Trump seemed mystified.

    “I don’t know,” said Trump, who is traveling to several states this week ahead of the midterm elections. “I love Iowa. I’ve always been very strong with Iowa.”

    The project in Iowa is one of several job-creation announcements Trump is expected to make as he traverses the country. He will travel to several reliably conservative states this week, including Oklahoma and Alabama. He is also scheduled to visit Ohio this weekend in support of Republican Sen. Jon Husted, an embattled incumbent facing several challenges, including a lack of name recognition among some of the state’s most devoted conservatives.

    Trump said Monday that he would also visit Iowa, where he hopes the planned steel mill will boost prospects for Republicans in tight races — and perhaps his own fortunes as a kingmaker who has asked supporters to pretend he is on the ballot in November. Americans have signaled that they are doing just that, but in a way that could backfire on him. The war in Iran and the cost of living have both eroded his support.

    So Trump has leaned into the promise of the mill, which is part of an $18 billion investment from Mesabi Metallics. Supporters of the project say it will be one of the largest steel mills in the world when it is completed.

    In the Oval Office on Monday, Trump, several Cabinet members and Iowa Republicans said the project would remind voters that Trump’s policies have created jobs. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, who is facing a tough reelection race and who last week voted to curb Trump’s war powers, appeared to be behind Trump, telling reporters that the steel mill could create some 6,000 construction jobs and 1,750 permanent jobs, with salaries that could exceed $100,000 a year.

    “We’re going to mine it in America. We’re going to mill it in America, and we’re going to make it in America,” Miller-Meeks said.

    Mesabi Metallic is owned by Essar Group, a Mumbai-based conglomerate controlled by one of India’s wealthiest families. The Iowa mill project follows another initiative led by Mesabi: a $2.5 billion iron-ore mine and pellet plant in Nashwauk, Minnesota.

    That project, described as the first new operation of its kind in the state in about 50 years, has been supported by EXIM Bank, a U.S. federal import-export bank that announced it would extend loans to the company worth up to $10 billion. Some analysts consider the EXIM loan to be risky because Mesabi has faced financial problems and significant delays over the years.

    Alec Varsamis, a spokesperson for EXIM, said that Mesabi had so far been granted a $770 million loan for the iron-ore mine in Minnesota.

    “We are operating at no cost to the taxpayer, and we are on track to repay our congressional appropriations to the U.S. Treasury,” Varsamis said.

    In the Oval Office on Monday, Trump said that the project would go forward even if control of Congress changed hands, or if a “less friendly” president took over. Rewant Ruia, chair of Mesabi’s executive board, and Ravi Ruia, co-founder and vice-chair of the Essar Group, were also in the Oval Office for the announcement.

    The company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2016 and has been entangled in a lawsuit with Cleveland Cliffs, another steel manufacturer.

    Mesabi executives have leaned on a Trump-world insider as the company has sought to expand its footprint in the United States. The company hired Jason Miller, a longtime Trump adviser, as its lobbyist, paying him at least $240,000 through his company SHW Partners, according to lobbying disclosure records. The government of India also hired Miller’s company, paying $150,000 per month for “strategic counsel, tactical planning and government relations assistance on policy matters before the U.S. government,” according to federal filings under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

    On Monday, Miller said in a text message that he had stopped his work as a lobbyist for Mesabi and deregistered at the end of July. He has since joined the administration as an unpaid special government employee. He was not present in the Oval Office.

    Rewant Ruia, chair of Mesabi Metallics, spoke in the Oval Office on Monday, and said the new steel plant in Iowa “will use the latest technology and will compete head-to-head with any steel plant in the world on size, quality and on cost.”

    Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that tracked Miller’s lobbying on behalf of Mesabi and the Indian government, said that the extension of potentially billions in taxpayer-backed loans from EXIM Bank deserved more scrutiny because of Miller’s role.

    “In any other administration, this would be treated as a monumental scandal,” Weissman said. “But in this one, it’s just another day.”

    Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican who attended the Oval Office event, said in a statement that the deal would be transformative for her state.

    “Our commitment in Iowa to fiscal responsibility, tax competitiveness, and long-term economic stability has created one of the nation’s strongest environments for business investment,” she said. “Now, this opportunity will fundamentally change the economic trajectory of our state and the entire region for decades to come.”

    The steel mill project is part of a broader election-season attempt by Trump to push back against widespread voter frustration with his policies, including tariffs that have been punishing for American manufacturers, particularly in the Midwest.

    Trump and his advisers believe that any polling predicting a blowout for Democrats is overrated, and to some degree, they have history on their side. On Monday, Trump again called recent polling “fake,” and complained that the news media had not appropriately trumpeted employment numbers, 401(k) account gains and a host of other accomplishments.

    “Nobody talks about all of the incredible things,” Trump said.

    But this is not 2016, or 2024. In 2026, Americans are deeply unhappy with the cost of living and frustrated with the war in Iran, which has driven up prices further. In response, Trump has taken to calling the concept of affordability a Democratic hoax, while promising that prices will come down as soon as the war ends.

    “We’re going to win that war very soon. That’ll be over, and the gasses, gas prices, will come tumbling down,” Trump said, forecasting the future. “So nobody else could have done that. Nobody else.”

    Trump’s self-congratulatory messaging on the war has done little to help GOP candidates in tough races across the country. In the past week, Republicans running for Senate seats in Iowa and Michigan have called on Trump to end the conflict. A slate of other candidates, including two running for governor in Wisconsin and Michigan, and Husted in Ohio, also have said that the war needs to end, and soon.

    This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

  • News organizations ask court to bar White House enforcement of access ban until case is resolved

    News organizations ask court to bar White House enforcement of access ban until case is resolved

    Three news outlets that President Donald Trump abruptly banished from White House grounds this month asked a federal court to block the action until the case is resolved, saying the administration has “persisted in unpredictably and inconsistently implementing its ban” despite a judge’s restraining order — including selectively keeping CNN from participating in White House pool duties.

    “The White House’s words and actions leave little doubt that it will immediately reinstitute a complete ban of CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO if allowed the opportunity,” lawyers for CNN, MS NOW, and Politico wrote in a filing late Monday.

    ”Because the ban is an unlawful assault on the most fundamental First Amendment freedoms and will inflict irreparable harm on Plaintiffs and the public if not restrained, this Court should preliminarily enjoin its enforcement pending the resolution of this case,” the filing said.

    It was the latest development in the back-and-forth saga of the Trump administration and the news media during the second term of his presidency. It has been a contentious relationship that has raised multiple First Amendment questions, produced sanctions and restrictions on White House and Pentagon reporters and led to several lawsuits that are winding their ways through the federal court system.

    A two-week temporary restraining order on Trump’s ban of the three organizations, issued by U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly last week, restored the outlets’ White House access, but expires Oct. 8. The preliminary injunction requested in Monday’s filing would extend the White House access until the case is finally resolved.

    In a statement emailed to the Associated Press immediately after the filing, the lead attorney for the three news outlets called the ban “a blatant violation of the First Amendment and due process.”

    “The president and his administration have continued to make clear that this ban has only one purpose: to punish reporting he doesn’t like,” said the lawyer, Theodore J. Boutrous Jr.

    “That’s retaliation and viewpoint discrimination, pure and simple,” Boutrous said. “With the district court’s temporary restraining order expiring this week, it is critical to ensure that the White House continues to be prevented from implementing this unconstitutional ban on the free press.”

    On Tuesday, the ACLU of the District of Columbia filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the news outlets and suggesting the president’s residence is different from a private property.

    “The White House is the people’s house, not the president’s private golf club,” wrote Arthur Spitzer, senior counsel for the ACLU of D.C.

    White House still says access is a privilege, not a right

    The filing came a day after the Trump administration made clear it was not backing down from its contention that the sudden ban, which began Sept. 19, was justified.

    “When it comes to the White House, it is the people’s house,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said on ABC on Sunday, invoking an argument the administration has made since the beginning. “It is a privilege, and not a right, to be there.”

    Monday’s 42-page filing reiterated many of the arguments that the news outlets made in their original lawsuit against Trump and the White House, filed two days after the reporters were banned.

    It also added mention of the White House broadcast pool rotation, which has become a battleground in the last few days in the standoff between Trump and the media.

    The White House, it said, “has persisted in unpredictably and inconsistently implementing its ban, including by barring CNN from fulfilling its role as designated television network pooler on Sept. 26 — to the detriment of CNN, its fellow pool members and, ultimately, the American public.”

    When the ban was implemented, CNN was removed from its duties as part of the broadcast pool, which consists of the five main networks: CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News. In solidarity, the other networks decided to suspend the pool until CNN was allowed back in.

    On Friday, CNN was allowed to cover the president with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the National Archives. But in a new setback Saturday, the White House banned the network from Air Force One, preventing it from covering Trump’s trip to a college football game in Tennessee. The rest of the pool declined to provide a replacement, in solidarity with CNN.

    Blanche defended that decision, too. “The president has every right to decide who gets to fly on his plane,” he said in the Sunday interview. He added that Trump was “sick and tired of certain media outlets just refusing to report accurate news.” He added that news coverage he described as “misinformation” amounted to a national security issue.

    “That is what is a national security problem, when you have complete misinformation coming out of the White House,” he said.

    Kelly threw cold water on that argument in his ruling last week granting the temporary restraining order against the White House ban. “The court is skeptical … that defendants’ interest in safeguarding national security is the actual motivation” for removal of access, Kelly wrote.

    His ruling did not directly address the TV pool rotation. In the new filing, the plaintiffs describe the important function the pool provides and make the case that it’s an important part of the regular access to the president, and his activities, that the media has traditionally had — and must be restored.

    It singles out the Air Force One case. “CNN received no official communication from the White House explaining its exclusion,” the filing says. “Because CNN was excluded and no replacement designated, no primary television network pooler accompanied the President on the trip.”

    Pool access issue has presented tough choices

    For now, networks in the pool have decided to address the ongoing standoff on a case-by-case basis, according to a person familiar with the pool’s operation, speaking on condition of anonymity to give details of ongoing discussions.

    On Sunday, Fox covered a pool event; on Monday, NBC was covering the president in the Oval Office. CNN is not in the rotation until Thursday. If the network is again barred from a pool event, the networks will decide together, presumably based on the newsworthiness of the situation, whether to provide a replacement or to refrain from coverage as they did previously.

    The issues at stake are difficult. On the one hand, the networks want to take a stand on behalf of press freedom and against efforts to intimidate coverage. On the other, media outlets have an obvious purpose of providing news to their audiences.

    “There are not a lot of good options,” said David A. Schulz, director of the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School.

    Should the White House continue to bar CNN, Schulz said, networks may choose “to exert their market power and say, ‘We’re not going to play ball with you.’”

    The question, Schulz added, is: “Who’s going to back down first?”

    The networks “may well feel like they’re between a rock and a hard place,” noted RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah.

    “Capitulation might be perceived as abandonment of core components of press freedom,” Andersen Jones said. “But the practicalities of lengthy White House news blackouts are also complicated, and refusing to cover major news at the highest levels of government might itself feel like a failure to serve the goals of democracy.”

  • Senate passes college sports bill that would rein in athlete payments and transfers

    Senate passes college sports bill that would rein in athlete payments and transfers

    WASHINGTON — The Senate passed a sweeping bipartisan bill on Monday that would regulate college sports, an attempt to end “chaos” in an industry that has been upended by skyrocketing athlete payments and near-unrestricted transfers between schools.

    The overwhelming 77-22 vote to pass the legislation is the strongest effort yet by Congress to set national regulations governing payments to college athletes for their name, image and likeness and how often they can transfer. It would give the NCAA new authority over those rules and limited antitrust protections to enforce them.

    The bill is the product of years of Senate negotiations that intensified after a 2025 lawsuit settlement uprooted the college sports landscape by allowing colleges to pay their players. The legislation, which would still have to pass the House, would codify the settlement into law but also establish new guardrails around the system in an attempt to rein in the runaway costs for colleges.

    “It would be nice if college sports could somehow magically fix itself, but this is a matter of law, federal law, and only Congress can fix it,” said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who negotiated the bill with the top Democrat on the panel, Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell.

    The bill’s backers — more than 70 senators from both parties — say it aims to curtail constant litigation and uncertainty across college sports for athletes, schools and fans. It would also give hundreds of thousands of student athletes new health and labor protections.

    But critics say the bill doesn’t do enough to protect athletes or curtail the enormous sums of money flowing to coaches, colleges and conferences.

    “This is a bill that essentially ensconces a system of exploitation, and it doesn’t fix the broader problems,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat who has worked with labor and civil rights groups to rally opposition to the bill.

    The bill’s future is still unclear.

    President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed an interest in the legislation, and the White House formally endorsed the bill last month. But it could face an uphill battle in the House, which failed repeatedly over the last year to get a different version to the floor and is in recess until after the November elections.

    Lawmakers will have to start over in the next Congress if the bill doesn’t pass both chambers by the end of the year.

    Bill addresses skyrocketing spending, unlimited transfers

    College sports have been reeling in the wake of the 2025 court settlement allowing colleges to directly pay players for their name, image and likeness. The fallout has reshaped the industry and led to football roster payrolls that can exceed $40 million.

    The bill would codify the court settlement, including a revenue cap that allows schools to share up to $21.5 million in revenue with their players. The legislation would more than double that amount for some schools, allowing up to an additional $27.5 million in payments through a retention fund — a change that helped win the support of the two largest conferences, the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference.

    To help schools raise more revenue, the bill would give schools and conferences the option of pooling their TV media rights.

    The legislation also aims to stabilize the NCAA transfer portal that has led to players constantly switching teams. It would restrict player transfers to one “free” move over five years without sitting out a year, with some exceptions, and also would restrict players to five years of total eligibility.

    The proposed eligibility limit comes amid backlash to schools that have increasingly pushed boundaries, including LSU’s now-canceled plans to place players on the roster who had participated in NFL training camps.

    “That was probably like a big lamp for some people who saw it and said, ‘Oh my God, this is so out of control,’” Cantwell said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

    The bill also would restrict coaches from leaving their schools during the season, force schools that want to switch conferences to spend three years as an independent and prevent conferences from growing larger than 20 programs — an effort to prevent so-called “superleagues” from taking over sports. A last-minute amendment proposed by Florida Sen. Ashley Moody raised that cap from 19 in the original legislation.

    The vote was delayed several hours on Monday as senators negotiated Moody’s amendment and others that were eventually adopted, including provisions to make it easier for athletes to sue over sexual assault and a requirement to disclose foreign financing.

    The Senate rejected an amendment by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., that would have put limits on ticket prices for fans and two by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., that would have capped coaches’ salaries at $5 million a year and increased compensation for athletes who have catastrophic injuries.

    Critics say it wouldn’t do enough to help athletes

    The legislation includes new protections for athletes, including caps on agent fees and guarantees for health insurance and scholarships. It would also require schools to maintain a minimum number of sports and roster spots — an effort to ensure that women’s and Olympic sports are not cut in favor of football, basketball and other sports that generate more revenue.

    Still, some Democrats say it wouldn’t do enough to limit the big money in college sports.

    The legislation “places a cap on the students’ cut of the revenues, but there are no caps on coaches’ salaries or on the size of donations to athletic programs,” Murphy said last week.

    Groups like the NAACP, Congressional Black Caucus and AFL-CIO have also opposed the bill, in part, because it leaves unresolved whether athletes should be considered employees with the ability to collectively bargain.

    All four Black Democrats in the Senate — Booker, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland — have opposed the bill.

    Booker, who played football at Stanford in the late 1980s on a scholarship, noted the “outsized role” that Black athletes play in college sports. He said it wasn’t until college athletes were able to begin to win cases in court that the power started to shift, “and now the NCAA is coming here to the United States Senate, asking for sweeping powers” to exempt antitrust laws.

    “We know who this bill is protecting,” Booker said.

    House passage is uncertain

    Despite strong bipartisan support in the Senate, the bill faces a murky path in the House.

    House lawmakers won’t return to Washington until mid-November, after the elections. And it’s unclear what will be on Republican leaders’ agenda in the chaotic last few weeks of the session.

    Pressure from Trump could help push the bill to passage. But some House Republicans have insisted on language explicitly stating that athletes are not employees, which the Senate bill does not have — a key concession to Cantwell to win enough Democratic support.

  • At every turn, Trump’s ideas for aiding U.S. consumers run into resistance

    At every turn, Trump’s ideas for aiding U.S. consumers run into resistance

    First came a proposal to permit tariff-free beef imports, but that immediately angered America’s farmers and ranchers.

    Then came a plan to ban exports of domestic diesel fuel, but that met with pushback from major oil companies.

    In between, President Donald Trump pitched the idea of simply cutting $5,000 checks to adult Americans frustrated, polls show, by high food and gas prices — if the GOP maintains control of Congress. But that idea, too, has come under fire, even from some Republican lawmakers concerned about the potential hit to the budget deficit.

    With just five weeks until Election Day, the White House has thrown out multiple ideas for combating persistent inflation, which has outpaced wage growth. But experts say it is unclear whether Trump can execute any policy that would placate inflation-weary voters and help the GOP maintain control of Congress.

    “These are symptoms of panic in the administration about problems that they have in part created,” said David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution.

    Inflation has been running over the Federal Reserve’s target rate since 2021, but an array of Trump policies have fed the problem, economists say. Trump’s decision to join Israel in going to war with Iran has disrupted the global oil supply, leading to elevated energy rates. His tariffs have produced higher prices for some imported goods. And his administration’s immigration crackdown has made low-cost labor harder to find, keeping price pressures on domestic companies high.

    Consumer frustration is reflected in polling. The gap has steadily widened between voters who approve of and disapprove of Trump’s performance as president, and 73 percent of Americans said they disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy in a recent poll conducted by SSRS for CNN. Only 27 percent approved — his lowest approval rating on the issue ever recorded by the survey.

    Against that backdrop, Trump has floated a parade of ideas for cutting prices.

    “President Trump pledged to lower costs and raise real wages for everyday Americans, and the Administration continues to rigorously evaluate every option on the table to deliver,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.

    On top of the political hurdles, however, these policies have been “small in the grand scheme of things … if they’re helpful at all,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “So it’s not like it’s moving the dial on the affordability crisis.”

    Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a conservative-leaning think tank, said it’s not uncommon for politicians to try to bring down prices in the run-up to elections, especially when their party’s control of Washington is at risk.

    President Joe Biden did the same ahead of the 2022 midterms, notably by calling for a federal gas tax holiday and releasing millions of barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to bring down sky-high gas prices.

    “This whack-a-mole with particular prices is something the Biden guys tried,” said Holtz-Eakin, who was a senior economic adviser to President George W. Bush and the 2008 presidential campaign of then-Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona). “It doesn’t solve the economic problem, and it doesn’t seem particularly politically successful.”

    For Trump, time is running out, said Rebecca Patterson, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

    The U.S. economy is so big and so complex that improving affordability “is simply not something anyone can do in a month,” Patterson said. “Actions taken today might help in the medium and longer term. But between now and the election, the best you can hope for is that voters appreciate that you’re trying.”

    One idea the administration has executed is buying back Treasury bonds. But so far, the payoff has been minimal.

    In part because of the competition for cash from massive private-sector spending on artificial intelligence, investors are demanding higher interest rates for Treasury bonds. Higher bond yields, in turn, raise interest rates for consumer loans such as mortgages. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate hit 7 percent last week for the first time since January 2025.

    In August, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced he would intervene in the bond market by buying back longer-term Treasury bonds to try to slow the rise in yields. That has not yet worked in bringing down yields, though Bessent contended in a recent congressional hearing that it is nonetheless a success because “we then proceeded to have the two most successful Treasury auctions that we’ve had in 20 years.”

    While Bessent was wrestling with the bond market, Trump decided to tackle meat prices.

    In late August, the president signed a proclamation that rolled back tariffs on foreign beef trimmings for 90 days in an effort to boost imports and lower ground beef prices, which have risen almost 25 percent since the beginning of Trump’s second term.

    But that drew rare pushback from farm-state Republicans, including Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), Sen. Pete Ricketts (Nebraska), Sen. Roger Marshall (Kansas) and Rep. Ashley Hinson (Iowa), who is running in a competitive Senate election in her state.

    The lawmakers argued that a flood of cheap foreign beef would undermine American farmers and ranchers, who are already struggling with high fuel, grain and fertilizer prices due to the Iran war and other factors.

    Trump issued a follow-up executive order aimed at helping ranchers, and the Agriculture Department announced new policies aimed at supporting American beef producers. The administration is now reportedly considering reversing course on beef imports — though the White House has denied that.

    Then came the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, where Trump made his biggest pitch yet: If Republicans keep both the House and Senate on Nov. 3, Trump said he would give every adult American a $5,000 dividend to spend within the United States.

    Some Republican lawmakers applauded the idea, but others were skeptical, saying the checks not only could exacerbate inflation but also could increase historically large budget deficits. The proposal could cost more than $1 trillion at a time when concern is growing about the nation’s outsize debt, which recently surpassed $40 trillion.

    Public interest groups blasted the idea; Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the left-leaning consumer watchdog Public Citizen, called it an “explicit and desperate attempt to buy votes.”

    And voters largely have not been swayed: A YouGov poll released earlier this month found that 64 percent of U.S. adults felt they would probably or definitely not receive the dividend if Republicans were to win the election.

    So far, there have been few signs of interest on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers would have to draft legislation to authorize the checks and vote to approve it.

    Last week, after diesel prices hit a record high, Trump and Bessent announced a new idea for tackling soaring fuel prices: a ban on diesel exports. Their theory was that a ban would boost the diesel supply for American consumers, lowering the price at the pump.

    Several Republican candidates in competitive congressional races supported the idea. But major oil companies and Energy Secretary Chris Wright objected, arguing that such a policy would incentivize companies to lower diesel production, which would further raise fuel prices.

    By midweek, the fate of the diesel export ban, too, seemed uncertain: Wright said any new limits on diesel exports were likely to be voluntary.

    Scott Clement contributed to this report.