https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-25-2026

Letters from an American
October 25, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson

And so, here we are in the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign.

As the political winds fill Democrats’ sails and they are picking up momentum, MAGA is doubling down on what has worked in the past: a false narrative undergirded by cruelty. But that false narrative is now so out of sync with reality that it does not seem to be attracting voters.

Trump and his allies keep saying they are digging the United States economy out of a hole dug by former president Joe Biden, but on October 19, 2024, The Economist called the U.S. economy “The Envy of the World.” Trump disagreed, insisting that Biden’s economy was horrible.

He promised the new tariffs he intended to impose would create an economic miracle. Just hours after his second inauguration, he said that tariffs were “the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary,” because “tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. It’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us.”

Now Republicans are studiously avoiding the word “tariffs” except when someone like Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), who is facing a strong challenge to her reelection from Democrat Troy Jackson, tries to attract voters by announcing she persuaded Trump to take off some of the tariffs he had placed just two months ago on goods from Canada. In Michigan, Republican Mike Rogers, struggling to pull out a win against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in a race for the U.S. Senate, ran an ad holding a Canadian beer and saying “end this tariff war now.”

On Friday, Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted that while Republicans spent more than $2.2 million in 2024 on ads promoting tariffs, in 2026 they have spent zero.

At rallies and in appearances before the media—including calling in to the Fox News Channel—Trump insists the economy is booming. One of his main examples, though, is that the country is making trillions of dollars because his war on Iran has created oil shortages. At a rally yesterday, he told the audience: “We’re making a freaking fortune.”

But “we” is doing a lot of work in that statement. Oil companies and their investors—like Trump—are indeed making a fortune, but the rest of the country is suffering under climbing gasoline prices and record high diesel costs, which have driven up the prices of food and anything that travels by train or truck. At a rally today, Trump said the great things he and the Republicans have done will “kick in later.”

Trump insisted tariffs and his war on Iran were his policies and his alone, intended to take credit for the prosperity he believed they would usher in. Having claimed the policies for his own, he now cannot deflect blame for the crises they have caused. So MAGA candidates are trying to attract votes by warning that Democrats will be even worse, and doubling down on culture wars.

Although Trump has embraced the Muslims from Qatar who gave him the luxury plane he now uses as Air Force One, as well as Muslim leaders from Saudi Arabia, and appointed Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is Muslim, to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, he and his allies have tried to attract voters by attacking Muslim Democrats El-Sayed, a medical doctor like Oz, and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) as dangerous radicals.

Early in the morning of October 12, as many as 25 agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided the home of Representative Omar, searching it for four to five hours in what Jake Tapper of CNN reported is an attempt to prove that her late father lied about her age in the family’s citizenship papers.

Ted Hesson, Jeremy Roebuck, Perry Stein, and Salvador Rizzo of the Washington Post reported that political appointees in the first Trump administration had tried to find something on Omar in 2019, but had not been able to find any issues with her immigration paperwork.

After Omar talked to Chris Hayes of MS NOW, Allison Detzel reported that Omar had said the agents left with her phone, two old phones, “her husband’s notebooks and a camera he had received from his uncle,” and “a Somali phrase book for children, which her husband was using to learn the language.”

“To walk away with 17 items, of, like, 10 that were just notebooks and like old phones, was such a bizarre, bizarre thing,” Omar said, and suggested the raid was simply fodder for right-wing media. It has also revealed where she lived, forcing her and her family to move for their safety.

After the raid, Trump demanded first that Omar resign, and then on Friday told a rally that she had “conceded” her congressional seat.

Trump is also trying to demonize Dr. El-Sayed, posting today that the doctor, who was born in the United States and thus is a natural-born citizen, is “a Jihadist Member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” an organization founded in Egypt in 1928. Under Trump, the U.S. government has designated some of the branches of the movement as terrorist organizations. Trump appears to believe the words are frightening and wants to tie them to the Democrat as his popularity surges against Rogers in Michigan.

That attempt hasn’t gone well. When a man challenged him at a town hall to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, El-Sayed answered, “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” and then suggested “Tommy,” as the man identified himself, was accusing El-Sayed of dual loyalties, likening those accusations to those John F. Kennedy faced during his 1960 presidential campaign.

El-Sayed reminded the man that the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and then turned the tables, asking the man if he would disavow the attempt to push religion into American law. Tommy said he would not disavow that effort. El-Sayed then told Tommy that he, not El-Sayed, was the man who needed to understand the Constitution. Tommy left the room, and days later Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket reported that Tommy was Thomas Teepell, a Republican operative with ties to Christian nationalists.

Today, in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Mike Rogers tried again to tie El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, only to have host Kristen Welker point out that he, Rogers, had called for talks with the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012. Rogers appeared flustered, trying to turn the conversation back to what he insisted was El-Sayed’s radicalism.

And then there is Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring Democratic candidate Amy Acton’s homeless biological mother, who called Acton a liar for saying she had lived in a tent as a child. The ad didn’t tell the full story: officials removed 12-year-old Acton and her younger brother from their mother after a grand jury indicted her stepfather for raping her. Court records bear out both that story and that they lived in a tent.

Rather than painting Acton as a liar, the ad reveals both Ramaswamy and those who supported the ad—including Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and MAGA influencers—as men willing to weaponize the rape of a child if it helps them win power. Donations to Acton surged in the wake of the ad as members of both parties condemned it.

American Catholics have slid away from their support for Trump, especially since Pope Leo XIV, the first pope born in the United States, has pointedly criticized the administration’s cruelty to immigrants. And so, allies of the White House arranged for a photo op of Catholic leaders praying over Trump in the Oval Office.

Today Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee issued a public apology for participating in the prayer event, and said the White House had publicized it “without the consent of the participants.” He insisted that praying for the president “was in no way an endorsement of the president, his policies, or his party.

Grob said he went to the White House with fellow bishops to discuss “immigration enforcement, religious worker visas, and human dignity.” “We were told the meeting was to be a private discussion, that several Catholic members of the cabinet might make an appearance, and that there could be an opportunity to pray privately with the president.”

After the private meeting with domestic policy advisors, they were ushered into the Oval Office, where Trump gave them commemorative tokens. He explained: “We were then directed to stand behind him and pray. After which several photos were taken and we were ushered out. Unbeknownst to the group of bishops a video was also taken. But permission for the public distribution or posting of either the video or photos was not given by the bishops.”

The White House immediately released the video and photos, Grob said, and he began to receive “messages of serious concern over the possibility that I had inadvertently participated in a political event less than two weeks before a national election” and communications from those hurt by the president’s policies.

“I feel a heavy sadness, not only over the pain I caused, but also for the fact that something so sacred to a group of religious leaders, prayer to our Heavenly Father, would be manipulated in that way. We came in good faith…, not to pose for a political photo opportunity,” he wrote. “We should never have been put in that position by the White House. I did not go without reservations. I wish I had heeded them.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior is not helping as he makes the Republicans’ closing argument. After repeated and detailed praise of Ohio Republican senator Jon Husted’s “*ss,” to boost his chances against Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Trump assured a rally today that rapper Nikki Minaj also has a “one hell of a beautiful *ss,” and urged her to stand up and show it off to the crowd.

Punning off President Kennedy’s famous statement in his 1961 Inaugural Address, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” conservative lawyer George Conway commented: “*ss not what you can do for your country—*ss what you can do for [Donald Trump].”

It’s quite a closing message for the last days of the 2026 midterm campaign.

In Serbia today, longtime nationalist strongman Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat after nearly two years of street protests led by students led to an election that ousted his party from power. A former diplomat from neighboring Montenegro noted that Vučić perfected a system divided between friends and enemies and in which “every criticism of power is treason.”

An opposition candidate told Andrew Higgins and Alisa Dogramadzieva of the New York Times, “No force can forever overpower a people who have decided to take their destiny into their own hands.” A 24-year-old engineering student celebrated the change in government: “For the first time in my adult life, I’m seeing a change of government. After so many years under the same leadership, I’m happy that I’ll finally get to live in a free, normal country.”

In Brazil, leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term in a runoff election with right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro. Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who in 2022 tried to stop the transfer of power to Lula and consolidate his power over the government and is now under house arrest. The younger Bolsonaro says he will not accept the results of the election.

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Notes:

https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2024-10-19

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/09/nx-s1-5355661/tariffs-history-meaning

https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/how-tariffs-became-the-most-hated-word-in-politics-eeed7932

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/09/trump-oil-gas-holdings-iran-war.html

https://abcnews.com/Politics/dr-oz-make-history-muslim-senator-faith-big/story?id=90541966

https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/20/politics/investigators-interview-ilhan-omar-sister

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/10/15/trump-officials-scrutinized-omar-2019-they-didnt-find-citizenship-issues/

https://www.ms.now/news/ilhan-omar-raid-interview-trump

https://people.com/ilhan-omar-says-she-has-to-move-because-of-death-threats-after-federal-agents-raided-her-home-seized-17-personal-items-12188812

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-claims-ilhan-omars-seat-conceded-by-democrats-12616349

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/19/abdul-el-sayed-heckler-tommy

https://www.ms.now/opinion/abdul-el-sayed-mchigan-tommy-election

https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/tommy-teepell-abdul-el-sayed-viral-video-town-hall-josh-hawley

https://www.newsweek.com/mike-rogers-scrutinized-over-muslim-brotherhood-amid-el-sayed-attacks-12616180

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/10/23/1978-court-documents-shed-light-explosive-ohio-political-ad/

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/6166387-ohio-acton-democrats-donations-ramaswamy-ad/

https://www.archmil.org/posts/a-public-apology-archbishop-jeffrey-grob

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/world/europe/serbia-vucic-election-defeat.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cmgelnrd4r3jt?post=asset%3A10277195-0669-46f4-879e-7290eff9237a

X:

Acyn/status/2114153893248803088

gtconway3d/status/2114465037322772553

AbdulElSayed/status/2107851013826752558?s=20

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/42718

Bluesky:

ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3myp6pziyps2s

richard.wickedproblems.earth/post/3mypjplw4nc2b

abdulelsayed.bsky.social/post/3my4gocauzs2x

atrupar.com/post/3myq2hf24s725

atrupar.com/post/3myq3kfappz2u

atrupar.com/post/3mypebtwc322e