The Evidence
Continuing Reasons why the 25th Amendment is still center stage in a failing presidency.
In a single year, the federal government lost more than 10,000 of its most highly trained scientists, engineers and health experts. The administration calls it efficiency. The data call it a brain drain — one that leaves Americans less safe, less healthy and less competitive, while the White House cuts deals with the Kremlin for fuel.
ProPublica has obtained the 18-page agreement President Trump sold to Americans as a historic energy win. The text reveals a corporate firewall meant to bind future presidents, investors hidden behind a Caribbean shell company, and a wide gulf between what the White House promised and what the contract actually guarantees.
Eleven days before Election Day, the Trump administration quietly carved Maine’s farm supplies out of its 50% tariffs on Canada — an admission, written in a proclamation, that the president’s trade war is hurting the people who pay for it. But the relief goes to one swing state, the refunds went to corporations, and the bill keeps landing on American households.
American troops and diplomats are slipping out of Gulf posts. Moscow's nuclear engineers are reportedly boarding cargo jets home. Oil is back above $115. Every signal points to an attack after Election Day — launched by a president who rejected a ceasefire roadmap, denies the talks his own mediators confirm, and is running down the very arsenals and oil reserves that would cushion Americans from the fallout.
Eleven days before the election, the administration asked a federal court to stop Alaska from certifying its U.S. Senate race if the Republican incumbent loses narrowly. The president says he ordered it. It is the sharpest edge yet of a year-long campaign to put federal hands on the machinery of state elections, and it arrives as Democrats lead nationally and billionaire money floods in to save the GOP majority.
Eight months after U.S. Tomahawk missiles destroyed an elementary school in southern Iran, the Pentagon's investigation is reportedly finished. According to Bloomberg, Secretary Pete Hegseth's advisers intend to keep it from the public until after Election Day. That is one item on a growing list of things this administration has decided Americans should learn only after they vote.
The administration is reportedly preparing to turn private debt collectors, wage garnishment and benefit seizures loose on Americans in default on their federal student loans — but not until the ballots are counted. In a year of war-driven gas prices and tariff-driven costs, the timing tells you exactly whom this White House is working for.
Two weeks before the midterms, the President of the United States has told California's election officials they face prison if they count ballots from a federal list that is already falling apart. The target is not fraud. The target is the quiet, nonpartisan machinery of American democracy, and every voter who depends on it.
Thirteen days out, record lines in Texas and a lopsided Democratic surge in North Carolina match what polls and prediction markets have been saying for weeks. Republicans are betting on Election Day. The administration, meanwhile, is suing states, demanding voter rolls and refusing to rule out federal agents at the polls.
A convicted defense contractor told the FBI he bought federal money from some of the most powerful people in Congress — Republicans and Democrats alike. Agents were building the case when Donald Trump returned to office and dismantled the very teams that investigate bribery. The probes are dead, the contracts kept flowing, and the president who promised to clean up Washington has spent his second term getting richer than ever.
Diesel has nearly doubled, fertilizer spiked, export markets cratered and farm bankruptcies hit a six-year high. Two weeks before the midterms, the president announced another bailout from a campaign stage — one whose payment rates won't even be set until after the votes are counted. The question for rural America is not whether the money sounds big. It's whether it ever arrives, and whether anyone in Washington will fix what made it necessary.
New reporting from ProPublica reveals that Trump's political appointees at Homeland Security asked the nation's election-security agency to quietly buy a voting machine, break into it, keep the vendor in the dark, and hand the results to the White House. The request went nowhere — partly because the experts who could have done it had already been fired. Fifteen days before the midterms, that is the whole story in miniature: an administration that wants ammunition against elections, not protection for them.
As Tehran trains civilians to repel a ground attack, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu — both facing voters within a week of each other — are openly weighing a new round of strikes, up to and including the largest non-nuclear bomb in America's arsenal. Eight months in, the war has cost the nation tens of billions of dollars, at least 21 American lives, a third of our cruise missiles, and roughly $2,000 per household. The question is no longer whether this war serves America. It is whom it serves.
At the height of the largest early-vote mobilization the movement has ever attempted, Meta switched off the No Kings coalition's Instagram account — then kept organizers locked out for hours. Meta calls it a robot's mistake. But in an America where a handful of Trump-friendly billionaires now own the microphones, an "error" that silences the opposition weeks before a midterm is not a glitch. It is a warning.
As intelligence chiefs from Warsaw to Prague warn that a Russian strike on NATO soil could come within months, the White House is waiving sanctions, buying Kremlin diesel, and now pressing Ukraine to reopen the very pipelines that once financed Moscow's war machine. Europe is stockpiling water and readying hospitals. Washington is negotiating Russia's paycheck.