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Monday, October 12, 2026
Can one celebrate a New World explorer and commemorate the indigenous peoples he claimed to have “discovered”? I don’t think so, but the fact that even a federal holiday is mired in controversy says a lot about how we live now. Happy three-day weekend for those who observe, but for the rest of us, the weekend saw President Donald Trump siding with Vladimir Putin (shocker!), openly mocking his rally-goers, ostensibly calling them stupid to their face, and the Trump, Inc. grift model getting more attention than the White House wants, which may very well lead to Kimberly Guilfoyle’s ouster as Ambassador to Greece.
01. GOP Support for Trump Wanes Further After He Sides With Putin Against Ukraine
[Going Mainstream]. Friday, Trump bought Russian diesel. By Sunday, he wanted a new president in Kyiv, and four Republican senators told him to reverse course.
Trump’s deal has Russia shipping 300,000 tons of diesel now and another 500,000 in November, and to get it he lifted sanctions on Russian diesel four years after the Senate voted 100 to nothing to ban Russian oil. President Volodymyr Zelensky objected, so Saturday Trump told him he “better damn well stop” hitting Russian refineries and said “it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.” Sunday, Trump announced an “energy ceasefire” Zelensky said he hadn’t heard about.
Senator Thom Tillis told Meet the Press the president “may be” breaking the law, and Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John Curtis signed the reverse-course statement with him. On Fox & Friends Weekend, Brian Kilmeade called Putin “the modern Hitler of our generation.” Monday he was back on the weekday couch, where the deal got two minutes, Kilmeade asking KT McFarland whether she was “okay with that tradeoff” of diesel money that “is no doubt gonna be used to help kill innocent Ukrainians” and McFarland telling him to “just see where it goes.” The senators and the “new president” line never came up. They did on CNN, which also reported the administration has told Kyiv and the Europeans it will cut off intelligence sharing and European purchases of US weapons unless Ukraine stops hitting Russian energy sites.
Zelensky’s answer Monday, from a forum in Poland, was “We need American pressure on Russia, not sanctions relief.”
TAKEAWAY: The timing for Trump’s bailing out Russia, and siding with Putin over Ukraine, is not ideal for a GOP that finds itself in a very tough spot ahead of the midterms.
02. Trump’s Grift Problem Gets Its First Casualty as Trump and Rubio Weigh Firing Guilfoyle
[Gaining Traction]. Friday Trump said he knew little about Guilfoyle. Sunday, AP reported he and Rubio are furious and will decide her fate after the holiday.
Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are “extremely pissed off” at Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle, a senior US official told the AP Sunday, and will probably decide after the holiday whether to fire her. Rubio is the angrier of the two, per the AP, because she turned up at most of his Athens events last week and greeted him with a bear hug. The Journal’s Saturday story had her pushing governments “from Bulgaria to Albania” to do business with her associates, and the Daily Mail says the State Department inspector general is looking at her private planes, helicopters and gifts.
Asked Friday whether her job was safe, Trump said he had “just heard a little bit about it” and that “she was always very nice.” CNN led Monday with the past tense. Senator John Barrasso, the Republican whip, called the reports “very troubling” on Face the Nation and said Foreign Relations will have oversight. Asked if he favors anyone asking for money to pay off debt in exchange for favors from government officials, he said, “No, I’m not.”
Since one Special Report package Thursday, Fox News’s shows have left her alone. Ken LaCorte, who ran FoxNews.com for a decade, said on X Sunday that the site had run zero stories on the scandal and called it “journalistic malpractice.” A few hours later, the site ran its first one.
TAKEAWAY: Is anyone really surprised that someone so closely connected with the Trump family was looking for some financial windfall? What’s more surprising is that, in this instance at least, there appears to be some bipartisan backlash.
03. Trump Openly Mocking His Rally-Goers Feeds GOP Fears That His Campaigning Hurts More Than It Helps
[Gaining Traction]. Last week the question was whether his rallies help Republicans. Saturday he told his crowd he could say the stupidest things and they’d clap.
Trump went to Clarksville Saturday night for Senator Bill Hagerty and Senator Marsha Blackburn, who is running for governor, and at one point asked the crowd, “What am I doing in Tennessee?” Then, on how easy these rooms are for him, “It’s just like the love. I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap,” and they clapped. The same speech had Lake Ontario becoming “Lake America,” the Atlantic or the Pacific becoming “Trump Ocean,” and Iran likely to “do a little bit extra before the election, thinking it’s going to hurt us.”
Morning Joe led with the video of the rally. Richard Haass called the rallies “a revival tent” and said 25 or 30 percent of the country will go along with renaming oceans and the other 70 won’t, “and that’s his problem.” Mediaite’s roundup of the reaction ran under the headline “Cult!”
Playbook’s reporting Monday is that MAGA Inc. is narrowing in on Ohio, Alaska and Iowa, pulling out of Michigan’s 8th District by midweek and cutting other House races after that. Its senior Republican official says “the money held the line” in September and the rest is “up to the candidates, not the outside groups.” CNN called Monday “triage” and quoted a House Republican saying “Trump is dragging the party down.” Trump is in Youngstown tonight, Alaska tomorrow, Arizona and Montana later in the week.
TAKEAWAY: Cut to the famous New Yorker cartoon of a political billboard featuring a wolf campaigning with a line that reads “I AM GOING TO EAT YOU” and sheep grazing next to it, with the caption depicting a sheep telling another in praise “He tells it like it is.”
“The United States should not provide Putin with a financial lifeline.”
Senator Susan Collins of Maine signed this statement Sunday with three other Republicans (Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis) and three Democrats calling on Trump to “immediately reverse course” on allowing Russian diesel into the US. The letter insists this “runs directly counter to” the ban on Russian energy Congress passed in 2022. Collins is just 22 days from a midterm election, and she's trailing. (Politico)
Today I’m rolling out a new feature called Open Market. It’s a daily check on whether the news coverage and the prediction markets agree on the narratives. A comparison of how the media is covering stories with what the prediction markets think will happen. No, this is not betting advice, but it’s worth knowing when those two don’t line up. Think “Wisdom of Crowds” vs. “Mob Rule.”
Odds: Kalshi, as of 6 am ET. The newsletter holds no position in any market listed. Not betting advice.
BREAKING: Federal Agents Raid Ilhan Omar’s House.
Federal agents raided Representative Ilhan Omar’s house around 6 am this morning. Fox News Digital broke the story exclusively with reporter Peter D’Abrosca posting video of the raid on X earlier Monday morning. Fox News cites two sources saying the warrant is tied to a criminal fraud investigation into her immigration paperwork, which her father filled out when she was a kid. DOJ isn’t saying much, just that HSI “executed a judicially authorized search warrant” as “part of an ongoing federal investigation.” Tom Homan told everyone back in September that she was under investigation and Omar said that was news to her.
Sometimes the raw data tells the better story.
The Last Time the TV Pool Said No to a President
The Obama White House found itself in the middle of a public campaign against Fox News in October 2009. While arranging a pool interview with its pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, it left Fox News off the list. Washington bureau chiefs of the five pool networks held a conference call and told Treasury that none of them would do the interview unless Fox News was included. The White House quickly backed down, called it a mistake, and said Fox News had never asked. But emails released two years later showed a White House aide had in fact written to Treasury, “we’d prefer if you skip Fox please.” History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
Based on transcripts from the 6 and 7 a.m. hours of Fox & Friends, CNN This Morning, News Central, and Morning Joe.
The midterms arrive three weeks and a day from today, and while prediction markets and polls are all suggesting a big day for Democrats, the margins for taking the Senate remain remarkably slim. If, in fact, the Senate stays Republican, which is still very much possible, there is likely to be outrage from the left suddenly embracing the very election denialism that they’ve forever mocked Trump over. The sad truth is that trust in electoral institutions has eroded dramatically, in large part due to the president’s constant narrative that elections cannot be trusted.
The Morning Frame tracks which political stories are spreading, which are stalling, and how you can tell the difference. Powered by Narrative Prism.