Good morning! I’ll confess up front: I couldn’t do it. The president held his last two rallies of the campaign on Sunday, in Dubuque and Salina, and I lasted about two minutes in each. That was long enough to catch him informing a crowd that the protesters in their midst had been paid $250 apiece by George Soros, and long enough to hear the crowd answer with a round of “USA! USA!” Gag me with a spoon. I turned it off and let other people’s reporting do the suffering for me.
They definitely earned their pay. In Salina, Senator Roger Marshall joined Trump onstage. by comparing the president to Elvis Presley, marveling that the King needed a band and backup singers while Trump is a “one-man show.” Marshall knows a thing or two about one-man shows. In recent weeks he went around his own campaign leadership, hired his own film crew, and shot his own ad defending his old habit of suing patients over medical debt. The final New York Times/Siena poll has him five points down in Kansas, a state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. When you’re trailing in Kansas two days out, Elvis comparisons cost nothing.
The president finished the thought himself on Sunday evening, posting a doctored portrait to Truth Social: half his face, half Elvis’s, stitched down the middle. He has been angling for this comparison for years. In 2018 he told a crowd in Tupelo, Elvis’s birthplace, that people said he looked like Elvis growing up, “other than the blonde hair.” In March he took a detour to Graceland in the middle of a war to sign a replica guitar in the Jungle Room. He doesn’t want to be compared to the King. He wants the crown.
Once you scrape off the sequins, a pattern appears. For nearly two years a small circle of people has treated the federal government as a family business, theirs to run, to profit from, and to protect. Tomorrow the people who actually own it get their say.
The Family Business
Start with the stage. This afternoon, on the eve of the election, the president delivers his closing remarks at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, “just to show how beautiful it is.” He promised to fix the century-old monument in days for $1.5 million. The project has cost more than $16 million, the new blue lining peeled, and the water turned green. Trump blamed vandals, even after his own Justice Department attributed the widespread damage to botched construction. On Sunday he was still insisting the pool had been “vandalized badly.” One visitor complained to Newsweek that the new coating was too dark to reflect much of anything. A reflecting pool that doesn’t reflect is the right backdrop for a closing argument that doesn’t either.
Then there’s the set list voters will actually hear, at the pump. By today, the average price of a gallon of gasoline across Trump’s second term passes $3.46, the highest nominal average of any administration, according to a Financial Times analysis of federal data. Diesel, the fuel that runs the farms he spent Sunday courting, is up more than 70 percent, to $6.30 a gallon. The White House answered by switching to inflation-adjusted figures, by which prices were worse under Biden. Regular readers will recognize the maneuver from the Dictionary: Nominal Glory, the art of declaring records in raw figures and retreating to adjusted ones when the record turns unflattering. This time the raw record sits in the wrong column, so out comes the calculator. (In fairness, Biden’s single-day peak of $5.02 in 2022 still tops Sunday’s $4.17.)
Meanwhile Exxon and Chevron reported $25.3 billion in quarterly profits between them, and the president told a crowd in Georgia, “we’re making a freaking fortune.” Everything depends on who “we” includes. The relief he did arrange, Russian diesel under a sanctions waiver worked out with Vladimir Putin, arrives on three tankers, one of them blacklisted by our own government, a few days after the polls close. Help is on the way, from Putin, right after you vote.
Every family business needs a patron, and this one has the richest man on the planet. Elon Musk has put roughly $445 million into these midterms, more than any donor who wasn’t a candidate has ever spent on an election. In a post he pinned on October 29, he told Americans that the only thing that matters is electing 51 Republican senators to hold the line in 2029. “Other reasons are irrelevant compared to this one.” Prices, tariffs, a war with Iran: irrelevant. A report released Friday by the Democracy Defenders Fund found that Musk’s companies have won at least $10 billion in federal contracts and grants since he left DOGE, and that 25 federal agencies have taken actions benefiting or potentially benefiting his businesses. Some of those reasons may not be irrelevant to him.
This morning the boss offered the patron some insurance. Asked on a podcast about the investigations Democrats have promised, the president said he might issue preemptive pardons to Musk and some of his people: “we’ll have to protect them.” He cited Joe Biden’s last-day pardons as precedent, the same pardons he has repeatedly declared void. A pardon can’t stop a subpoena, of course. Musk, for his part, has already announced that anyone who investigates him should know he’ll find out “who is really pulling the strings and come for them.”
No family saga is complete without a feud among the courtiers, and this week supplied a doozy. Alina Habba Mildon, whom readers met in “Trumptithe: The Lord’s Cut,” accused Ric Grenell of diverting millions her new husband supposedly donated to the Kennedy Center. White House investigators reportedly traced the $17.6 million not to Turhan Mildon but to a government account in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The New York Times then discovered that the self-described 29-year-old billionaire is 25, according to his passport and visa. The Kennedy Center found no record of his supposed multimillion-dollar gift, though it did find an unpaid $270,000 pledge, which Mildon subsequently settled. Grenell denies wrongdoing; Mildon disputes the reporting. If this reads like the cast list of a cheap gangster novel, our Lords and Serfs Dictionary may need a companion volume. The trouble is that the money, the government contracts and the presidential powers are entirely real.
The Public Business
Here’s the flaw in treating the government as a family business: the family doesn’t own it. The shareholders get a vote, and from the look of things they intend to use it.
The final New York Times/Siena polls, released Sunday, show Democrats ahead in all seven Senate races likeliest to decide control of the chamber: Michigan by 11 points, Texas by 7, Maine by 6, Kansas and Ohio by 5, Alaska by 2, and Iowa by a single point. Only the Michigan and Texas leads clear the full margin of error, so the rest are statistical ties. But Texas? Kansas? Ted Cruz spent his Friday podcast pleading with his own voters: “We could lose Texas.” When Ted Cruz, who isn’t even on the ballot, starts sounding the alarm in Texas, somebody had better check the batteries.
Michigan offered the weekend’s most instructive lesson in who owns what. On Sunday, Representative Haley Stevens, who narrowly lost the Democratic primary in August, endorsed the Republican, Mike Rogers, two days before the election. The president hailed her “bravery” from Iowa, in the same breath that he called the Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, a “jihadist” and a “Muslim Brotherhood guy.” Stevens’s own chief of staff of eight years resigned that morning, along with other members of her staff, and urged voters to back El-Sayed. Then the public weighed in. El-Sayed’s campaign says it raised $2.4 million on Sunday, its best day of the race, from donors who included more than 26,000 first-time contributors. Political endorsements can be valuable even to the candidate who doesn’t receive them. Twenty-six thousand people chipped in on a single Sunday. That’s the whole difference between a family business and a public one, in two numbers.
A small footnote for the “jihadist” crowd: El-Sayed was born in Michigan in 1984. He has been an American citizen longer than either Elon Musk, who naturalized in 2002, or Melania Trump, who naturalized in 2006.
The shareholders are showing up closer to home, too. By Friday afternoon, 43 percent of Coos County’s active voters had returned their ballots, five points ahead of the statewide rate and nearly five points ahead of the same point in 2022. By this morning, the county was approaching 44 percent. Coos Democrats had returned ballots at a higher rate than Republicans, roughly 62 percent to 56 percent, although Republicans still led in raw numbers. Party registration doesn’t tell us how anyone voted. But the largest stack of outstanding ballots belongs to voters who aren’t registered with either major party. About 15,000 nonaffiliated voters had yet to return theirs.
The Part That Isn’t Funny
Now for the cold water, two buckets of it.
The first is the polls themselves. The final New York Times/Siena battleground polls of 2024 showed Kamala Harris tied in Michigan and narrowly ahead in Wisconsin. She lost both. The Times describes this year’s numbers as outpacing even the Democratic waves of 2006 and 2008. That means we’re looking at either a historic wave or a historic miss, and nobody gets to know which until the counting is done.
The second bucket is the calendar, and it’s colder. Whatever happens tomorrow, the new Congress doesn’t take office until January 3. For two more months, Republicans retain their congressional majorities, and Trump retains all the powers of the presidency. The Wall Street Journal reports that Gulf governments have been warned to prepare for a possible short, intense new campaign against Iran after the election. Netanyahu has been pressing Trump to resume the bombing, although Trump now appears inclined to give negotiations more time. Brent crude closed Friday at $117.64 a barrel, its highest since April, before tumbling Monday on hopes of a diplomatic breakthrough. Nobody knows whether the next chapter brings negotiations or another round of missiles. Meanwhile, preemptive pardons are being discussed before the threatened investigations have even begun, and the president’s closing argument is a swimming pool. The voters may change the congressional locks tomorrow. The current occupants keep their keys until January.
The British broadcaster James O’Brien put it well this morning: this election isn’t really about Democrats winning, it’s about Republicans losing. He’s right, and Democrats should sit with that a little longer than they’ll want to. A majority built on the other side’s failures is a loan, not a gift. Democrats took the House in 2006 and again in 2018 largely as a verdict on the party in power, and in both cases voters soon began judging them on what they did with it. If the shareholders hand Democrats the gavels tomorrow, the bill comes due in 2028.
Whose Building Is It?
Tomorrow won’t undo the war, refund the diesel, or drain the pool. Nor will it remove the president from office. But it will determine who holds congressional gavels come January, who can demand records and testimony, and who negotiates the federal budget. Those are the tools of accountability. The Constitution puts them in Congress’s hands. The people must insist that Congress use them.
Here in Oregon, ballots must reach an official drop box by 8 p.m. Tuesday, or bear a valid Election Day postmark. At this point, a drop box is the safer choice.
Elvis, you may recall, eventually left the building. Trump won’t be leaving the White House tomorrow. But the voters get to decide whether his backup singers stay onstage.
“Once you scrape off the sequins, a pattern appears!” Thanks for letting us see the pattern! You are helping to save us, if that’s possible….
Haley Stevens is a turncoat no matter how you look at it. And she can never, ever be trusted. Not because she changed her mind ... it's how she did it and when she did it. She could have simply cast her vote for the Republican. I suspect she was paid. Well, what's done is done. Like Maya Angelou taught us, 'When they show us who they are, we need to believe them.' This is a woman lacking scruples and she decided to display that aspect of herself. I like Michigan's Democratic candidate ... so far. (I'm not very trusting anymore)