10.31 Hours before millions of Americans lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits because of a government shutdown, Trump hosts a “Great Gatsby” Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago. The event’s theme, “A little party never killed nobody,” referenced a song from the 2013 film adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.
10.30 Andrew, the younger brother of King Charles III, will be stripped of his title as prince, Buckingham Palace, an extraordinary move that caps his fall from grace over his ties to the convicted sexual predator, Jeffrey Epstein. In a statement, the palace said, “Prince Andrew will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.” The palace also said Andrew would be evicted from his residence, Royal Lodge. Rosa Prince on Bloomberg: “According to his own accounts of his sometime friendship with Epstein, Donald Trump has nothing to fear from a full release of the files. [Virginia] Giuffre said the president didn’t abuse or mistreat her, and she never saw him at Epstein’s properties. The legislative and executive branches of the US government should take their cue from the UK’s non-executive chairman, King Charles. This scandal won’t go away until the rot has been removed.”
10.29 Billie Eilish, accepting the Wall Street Journal Magazine’s Music Innovator of the Year award: “We’re in a time right now when the world is really, really bad and really dark. People need empathy and help more than, kind of, ever, especially in our country. I’d say if you have money, it would be great to use it for good things and maybe give it to some people that need it. . . Love you all, but there’s a few people in here who have a lot more money than me. If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, but yeah, give your money away.”
10.27 The Dodgers beat the Blue Jays 6-5 in 18 innings, on a Freddie Freeman walk off home run. Freeman becomes the only player with two walk off homers in World Series history. Shohei Ohtani reaches base on all nine of his plate apperances: two home runs, two doubles, and five walks. The Dodgers lead 2 games to 1.
10.27 Lis Smith in an interview with New York magazine: “The biggest mistake we [Democrats] made in 2024 was not leading every single conversation by talking about the economy. When people feel like they are one accident, one incident, one layoff away from financial collapse, they do not want to hear us starting conversations by saying, “The most existential issue you should care about is democracy.” Or abortion rights. Those are very important issues, don’t get me wrong. But we were not listening to voters, and we were not meeting them where they were. I think this is part of a trend among Democrats in recent years, where we stopped treating voters like adults. When they would say “Prices are killing me,” we would say, “Actually, inflation is higher in Sweden. When they would say, “Crime is out of control,” we’d respond, “Actually, it’s lower than it was 40 years ago.” And when they said, “Hey, shouldn’t we maybe do something about the border?,” we said, “Turn off Fox News. That’s a right-wing talking point.” Voters noticed that. They thought we weren’t listening to them. And that is why they were willing to go vote for someone like Donald Trump. Say what you will about him — he at least was speaking a language of grievance, talking about taking on the status quo that was driving a lot of these problems. And to a lot of people that was more appealing than people who were talking down to them or not even listening to them.”
10.25 Nick Mangold dies at 41.
10.23 June Lockhart dies at 100.
10.22 Rick Wilson: “[Trump] walked into a cathedral with a bullhorn, spray paint and faux gold leaf. He saw a place designed for civic honor, official tenderness and historical respect and wondered why it didn’t look more like a casino atrium, a glittery Liberace dreamscape.”
10.22 Franklin Foer in The Atlantic: “On The Apprentice, which debuted in 2004, Trump was the embodiment of a culture just beginning to blur the line between what was real and what merely looked like it was. In his second term as president, Trump—now with the help of artificial intelligence—is completing the revolution that made him. Over the weekend, he posted a video of himself piloting a fighter jet that dumps excrement on protesters. The clip was cartoonish, meant to amuse his followers and outrage his adversaries. This might seem like an ephemeral bit of trollish fun, but it is an example of an alarming pattern. Trump is provoking an epistemic collapse—cultivating the sense that every shard of once-dependable evidence is suspect. He is ushering in an era of distrust and confusion, in which the president molds perception to serve his own interests.”
10.21 Trump asks the Justice Department to pay him about $230 million in compensation for past federal investigations into him, including the Russia probe and Mar-a-Lago search. The decision rests with senior DOJ officials, some of whom are his former lawyers.
10.21 Paul Krugmam on Substack: “Trump’s disconnect from reality is uniquely destructive. No previous president has tried to overturn an election, sought to use the military against U.S. citizens, or sought to use the Justice Department as his own personal vendetta machine. The difference is that he’s the first president to live in an autocratic bubble, surrounded by a cult of personality within which nobody dares to criticize him, tell him uncomfortable truths or refuse to engage in blatantly illegal acts. Furthermore, Trump is clearly getting worse, growing even more out of touch with each passing week. Regardless of whether it’s advancing age or growing frustration, even Trump, I think, realizes that his efforts to suppress all opposition are running into serious resistance. Putting out an AI video of himself dumping shit on protestors suggests panic, not strength. But his claims about what’s happening in America and the world keep getting stranger and wilder. And Trump’s denial of reality is already having devastating consequences for America, with more to come.”
10.20 The Blue Jays win the American League championship.
10.20 Carolyn Silverman and Timothy L. O’Brien on Bloomberg: “Trump rarely follows up on most of the stuff he churns out daily. We turned to prediction markets to test that assertion, and the data supports us. In fact, it pays to bet on Trump doing … absolutely nothing. You would have made a $12 net profit for every $100 you spent if you had followed that path. We examined over 300 markets on Polymarket pertaining to actions directly initiated by Trump this year, between Inauguration Day and Sept. 30th. That analysis included everything from tariffs to whether he’d fire a Cabinet official to what executive orders he’d sign. Bettors even wagered on his golf game and the duration of Elon Musk’s White House tenure. On the day each market opened, bettors assigned an average probability of 34% to those events occurring within a specified timeframe. But only 28% actually happened. While a sophisticated forecaster could have devised a complex betting scheme to exploit this miscalibration, a simple rule would’ve also made you money: Always bet “no.” Betting against Trump taking any action would’ve translated to a 12% return — similar to the S&P 500 index’s gain over the same period. Consistently betting “yes” would have cost you 20% of your money.
10.20 Construction crews started demolishing part of the East Wing of the White House as part of Trump’s project to build a ballroom. Sen. Chris Murphy: “We are not living in a functional democracy any longer. It’s not too late to save it, but it is just important to acknowledge that we aren’t on the precipice of losing our democracy. We are losing it every single day. We are not a functional nation with a rule of law any longer, and those toppled walls in the East Wing are a pretty stark reminder of that.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren: “This is Trump’s presidency in a single photo.”
10.19 Using a vehicle-mounted mechanical lift to access a balcony, a gang of thieves broke into the Galerie
d’Apollon in the Louvre, broke display cases, and stole eight items were taken, including diadems, necklaces, ear-rings and brooches, all from the 19th century, all once the possessions of French royalty or imperial rulers. The stolen items included a tiara and brooch belonging to Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III; an emerald necklace and a pair of emerald earrings from Empress Marie Louise; a tiara, necklace and single earring from the sapphire set that belonged to Queen Marie-Amelie and Queen Hortense; and a brooch known as the “reliquary brooch.” The thieves were in the building for four minutes, and escaped on waiting motor scooters.
10.18 Timothy Snyder in conversation with William Kristol: I’ve been thinking about the mechanization of lying. So if you think about Pam Bondi giving testimony or Kash Patel, the way that they don’t prepare for the actual substance of the conversation at all anymore. And also—and this is going to sound very old-fashioned and conservative of me—but also the way that they completely disrespect human ideas of social contract or even ideas about speaking truth, because maybe you’re under oath or you have some obligation to do so. That all of those human or even beyond human ideas are gone and they’re speaking to the machine. All they’re trying to do is produce clips for the internet, that’s it. So the humans don’t matter, it’s all clips for the internet. And the second thing, which is related to or consistent with that is the giant fantasies, like the fantasy of Antifa, the Stephen Miller terror memo about how there’s this giant Antifa conspiracy, and therefore we have to have, effectively, a state of emergency. And the whole government has to be turned against the liberals and the Democrats and everybody who tries to organize themselves in the United States. That’s another thing which is happening is that we’re in—I mean, you can see resonances of this with Stalinism if you want, or with fascism if you want—but certainly a kind of authoritarian totalitarian politics where you imagine this enemy that has no face and is invisible, and therefore because they’re invisible, you are allowed to go after them with whatever means necessary and so to speak, produce the facts about them, not just by making them up, but by the violence itself. So you send ICE or you send troops into cities, and naturally things happen. And then when things happen, you say, “Oh, this proves that there was a conspiracy in the first place.” Or as Miller is clearly fantasizing about in his memo, you get a lot of people under interrogation and then you generate, so to speak, the facts that prove that it was all true to start out with.”