The Constitution is not ambiguous about who controls the power of the purse, but for the second year in a row, the president is standing in the way. The president has announced that he is withholding $810 million in congressionally approved funding from various agencies, including a $567 million from programs that provide “services to refugees, asylees, and other non-citizens.”

Regardless of where the money is going, the president simply does not have the power that he is claiming here. Instead of working with Congress to change the budgeting priorities of the federal government, Trump is simply asserting that he alone can control how the tax money of every American is spent. That is not how our system of government is designed to work, and it’s up to Congress to reassert its authority over every aspect of the budget.

Todd Blanche is now the Attorney General of the United States.

Blanche has served as a willing agent of Trump’s retaliatory agenda, overseeing inquiries into Governor Gavin Newsom, Senator Adam Schiff, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, and former FBI Director James Comey. Blanche bragged about the DOJ purging lawyers who worked on January 6 prosecutions and personally signed off on the $1.8 billion dollar “anti-weaponization” fund as part of a settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS.

As The New York Times describes, Blanche’s confirmation “represented a powerful endorsement by Congress of the philosophy that has guided him under a meddling, demanding boss — that he has a constitutional obligation to execute every lawful White House order, even if it shatters longstanding policy and rule-of-law norms, or contradicts what he thinks is right.”

Blanche was a featured speaker at the Republican mid-term convention in Texas. If the Attorney General had any shred of apolitical status left, that speech is likely the end of it.

Under a new state law, Florida officials have designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), one of the most prominent Muslim advocacy organizations in the country, as a “domestic terrorist” organization. They are one of dozens of nonprofits now subject to this new law, but the inclusion of this organization is particularly revealing. Under the new law, five Florida executive officials now have the authority to designate certain nonprofits as terrorist organizations without any due process.

Once designated, it becomes virtually impossible for an organization to conduct legal activities in the state. The consequences of violating the prohibitions are severe, and can include up to lifetime imprisonment.

CAIR has already filed a lawsuit asserting that the law is unconstitutional, but the brazen attempt to undermine the Muslim community in the state is a clear signal that vulnerable communities are facing discriminatory attacks at both the state and federal level.

More than 2 million Americans have already cast their ballots, and tens of millions more have requested ballots. The midterms are happening right now, and the administration is turning the volume up on their interference machine.

Take the $20 million in taxpayer money the administration has spent running ads glorifying Trump himself labeled as public service announcements. This latest attempt at election interference paired with a promise of $5,000 checks if his party wins are examples of the kinds of abuses of power and authority you would expect from an authoritarian worried about losing power and facing accountability.

The single most important thing to understand about how successful the administration’s efforts is that it all depends on the vote total margins. Some developments are baked in and will happen regardless of how close the races are; others only come into play if specific contests are close enough that changing the outcome looks possible.

The good news is that these kinds of actions are not a surprise to those who have been getting ready for this movement. Here’s what else we’re preparing for in the weeks ahead:

• Claims about ineligible voters on the rolls, timed so officials can’t respond before in-person voting begins. Federal law bars states from completing systematic voter purges within 90 days of a federal election — a window that’s already open, so mass removals aren’t legal.
• Last-minute lawsuits seeking to change voting procedures this late in the game. These rarely succeed, but they generate noise, and that’s often the point.

Make a plan to vote by election day, and vote early if you can. Every ballot cast makes it harder to deny, delay, or dispute what voters actually decided.

President Trump has continued to escalate his war with the media, announcing in mid-September that he would be removing reporters from MSNow, Politico, and CNN from his press pools. Trump said that reporting from outlets he doesn’t like is “a threat to democracy.”

In response, all three outlets sued to maintain their access to the White House, and a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order ordering their credentials restored. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the White House has not yet fully complied, and has repeatedly barred the outlets in question from traveling with the president, in an attempt to test the limits of the court’s order.

Even as the media pushes back on these bans, the White House has yet to concede that it must allow these outlets to cover the president. This saga is now winding its way through the courts, even as the Department of Justice is now arguing that the outlets were banned because they “published stories that adversely affected national security.”

On Sept. 20, an ICE agent shot and wounded Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan man, in North Austin. His attorney has said that, following the shooting, Garces Perez was sent to a detention facility more than 100 miles away “with a bullet in his back without pain medication” and “slept overnight in a processing center without a bed.”

CNN has reported that ICE and CBP agents have shot at least 20 people, eight of them fatally, during this term. The presence of ICE in cities across the country has fomented this level of instability and violence. It might not be the stated goal of these deployments, but evidence suggests that, at least in the first two years of Trump’s term, this violence is an inevitable outcome of the mass deportations that were core to the president’s 2024 campaign. These ICE raids are stoking violence, and the president shows no signs of changing course.

Ahead of the midterm elections, the president is using taxpayer money to pay for a series of television commercials that are nearly indistinguishable from campaign ads.i In one, he can be heard warning of a “final battle” against “globalists” and “warmongers.” The ad is factually questionable, but even more jarringly, it’s coming from money that Congress appropriated for border security.

The White House has defended using taxpayer money on these advertisements, describing them as “public service announcements.” The reality, however, is that these ads are designed to promote the president and his administration, and are overtly political.

What’s more, there are dozens of ways that the administration, or the party in power more broadly, could use this as an opening salvo in a broader push to fund campaign ads with public funds. American taxpayers do not give their money to the government so that the government can promote themselves to the American people. It’s blatant propaganda, and it’s illegal.