Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
Washington | Voter perceptions of White House corruption have combined with cost-of-living concerns to damage the Republicans’ midterm election chances and could dog the party all the way to the 2028 presidential race, says a former chief of staff to Donald Trump.
Mick Mulvaney, a former Republican congressman and Trump’s top adviser from 2019 to 2020, says elections are usually about the state of the economy. However, voters are this week headed to the polls thinking Trump and his inner circle have abused their power while most of the country has been dealing with rising fuel and other basic costs.
Trump behind the teleprompter at a rally in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where the Senate race is surprisingly competitive. AP
“I never thought I’d see corruption be at the top of people’s minds in any election in my lifetime,” Mulvaney told The Australian Financial Review.
“Ordinarily, elections here are about economics, not about policy issues.
“What people are telling Republicans is, ‘we’re tired of Donald Trump and his folks getting rich while we are getting poor’.
So it is a corruption message, but it’s also an economic message. The two are tied together.”
Mulvaney concedes that “Americans have always suspected their government’s a little corrupt”. However, the issue has rocketed to the top of voters’ concerns in polls this month, even by Trump-friendly Fox News.
Corruption is also the number one concern among respondents to polling by Politico and CNBC following a raft of stories about conflicts of interest in the administration, Trump’s family and his inner circle.
Mick Mulvaney: “What people are telling Republicans is, ‘we’re tired of Donald Trump and his folks getting rich while we are getting poor’.” Bloomberg
“You combine that with the economic hardships created by inflation, and you get these polling results,” Mulvaney said. “They are real, and they are probably the most dangerous I’ve seen for any party in the last 20 years.”
The Democratic Party has a sizeable 8-percentage-point lead in congressional polling head of Tuesday’s (Wednesday AEDT) vote, which gives it a strong chance of winning the four seats it needs to seize control of the lower House of Congress.
The Senate remains a toss-up, with Democratic candidates holding only slim leads in target states that Trump won decisively over Kamala Harris in 2024, such as Ohio, Alaska and Texas.
Mulvaney does not expect the Democratic Party to prevail in the crucial Texas senate race, but sees it winning in Georgia and North Carolina. He still has Kansas, Ohio, Iowa, Alaska and Maine as too close to call, but at a push said he believed “swing states will go blue”. That would normally include Ohio, along with North Carolina, Georgia and Michigan.
Democratic Party candidates have pumped up the corruption narrative in targeted political advertising and cutting campaign speeches, especially from energised, younger candidates such as Georgia senator Jon Ossoff and Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed.
Damaging stories have included pressure on a donor by Kimberly Guilfoyle, the disgraced former ambassador to Greece, to pay off her credit card bill; a Russian oligarch bankrolling part of Donald Trump Jr’s wedding this; and the same son’s ownership of stakes in companies that have won State Department and Pentagon contracts.
Mulvaney said Democrats will keep pounding this “magic” message for the final two years of Trump’s term and parlay it into Congressional investigations and perhaps impeachment proceedings – as he would do if still in office.
The hard-right Republican from South Carolina spent six years in the House of Representatives until 2017, when he was appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s first term. He acted as chief of staff for 15 months following the messy departure of John Kelly and before Mark Meadows was formally appointed.
Should be a priority to improve affordability in the next two years* (agree %)
Americans
Republican
Democrat
Independent
Crack down on corruption in Washington
83
83
89
79
End foreign wars
77
66
91
73
Regulate data centres
73
68
84
66
Remove tariffs
68
47
91
67
Raise taxes on the wealthy
60
39
84
56
Reduce immigration
46
75
23
41
*Options edited from full question; Agree combines strongly and somewhat; n=2,000 in poll taken Oct 22 to 26. Margins of error ±2.6, Republicans ±4.1, Democrats ±4.2, Independents ±6.2 points
Source: Bondi Partners, YouGov
“Every single hearing I would do in the upcoming Congress would be focused on corruption and the economy, the economy and corruption, people getting rich while other people are getting poor,” he said. “I fully expect them to ride this horse as long as they possibly can because it’s a winning argument.”
A new poll from former treasurer Joe Hockey’s advisory firm Bondi Partners, where Mulvaney is a special adviser, showed the strategy of making corruption an economic issue has resonated with voters from both sides.
YouGov asked 2,000 Americans to rate their support for which policy areas should be a priority to help bring down prices over the next two years.
About 83 per cent agreed that “cracking down on corruption in Washington to lower the cost of living” should be a top priority, making it the most popular solution, including among the same number of Republicans.
Over three quarters of respondents supported “ending foreign wars to bring down fuel prices,” including 66 per cent of Republicans. Only “reducing immigration to make housing more affordable” failed to achieve majority overall support, but among Republicans 75 per cent agreed it should be a priority.
The questions were formulated to tie every statement to the cost of living – a well-recognised concern – as a measure of which campaign messages were landing.
Mulvaney said the “trap” for the Democratic Party in the next Congress would be if the pursuit of corruption focused too heavily on impeachment proceedings and exhausted voters.
“The moment oversight turns into partisan politics or a third impeachment, it stops looking like cleaning up Washington and starts looking like the same old swamp – and that will be the moment the Republicans in that eighty-three per cent walk away.”
Jessica Gardner is The Australian Financial Review’s United States correspondent. She was previously deputy editor - news. Connect with Jessica on Twitter. Email Jessica at jgardner@afr.com
Is Trump some kind of triple trojka money laundering agent for Russians and China and Saudi ⁉️
At least it was possible to disguise Joe Biden’s senescence. The old boy could be wheeled out to smile and read a few stumbling lines while the decisions were apparently made by his wife, his staff and a coterie of senior Democrats.
Donald Trump is another story. He seems determined to broadcast his instability as widely as possible, using his own social media platform – and thereby, incidentally, boosting his private income. Far from being controlled by others, he has an uncanny ability to make previously decent and respectable politicians jump to his command.
President Donald Trump speaks at a Halloween party at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida on Saturday, October 31.AP
Have American voters finally had enough of his antics? I think so. Travelling through the US Midwest last week, I came across a sense of weary exasperation, not only about Trump’s tariff policies, which badly impact the states along the Canadian border, but over the grotesque freakshow behind them.
There is still a MAGA base, but I am struck by how much smaller it has become. The president is down to his credulous core. At a recent rally in Tennessee, he told the crowd: “I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap.” Sure enough, the audience clapped.
Commentators often underestimate the extent to which Trump’s vote was a protest against his unelectable opponents. Yes, having made their choice, albeit in a hesitant way, his voters tried to justify it to themselves, talking up his achievements (which are real enough, especially on border control) and averting their eyes from his flaws.
There comes a point, though, when those flaws become impossible to ignore. The cruelty and stupidity of Trump’s online posts, the chaos of his trade policy, the brutish way he acts like a Russian ally, his apparent inability to distinguish between private interests and public role; the general sleaziness.
Voters are set to give Trump’s candidates a whacking in the midterm elections on Tuesday; and I am afraid that the Democrats will draw the worst possible lesson, and will double down on the far-left posturing that played such a large role in enabling Trump in the first place.
Let’s start with online evidence of the president’s growing erraticism. We might ignore the AI-generated images. He has posted pictures of himself riding a lion, having his features added to Mount Rushmore and as a Jesus-like figure.
We might set aside his threats against opposition politicians. “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” he announced when several Democrats reminded military personnel that they were not required to obey illegal orders. “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOUR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” another post said. “Punishable by DEATH!”
When he pronounces on foreign policy, though, that is not mere knockabout. It has real-world consequences – of which the most immediate is to cheapen the American republic.
Trump’s apocalyptic threats against Iran (“A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again”), would be bad enough had he actually been winning the war. Set alongside his inability to force the straits, they made America look petty and vindictive.
His rage at not getting the Nobel Peace Prize persuaded the sycophants around him not to deal with the leader of the Venezuelan democratic opposition, who had won it instead. He even threatened to start a war over Greenland apparently because he was upset at the Nobel Prize Committee.
Armies of sophists are on hand to explain, to reinterpret, to justify. Still, there comes a point where the president’s craziness becomes impossible to ignore. My sense is that we have reached that point. According to Pew Research, Trump’s approval ratings are down to around 30 per cent.
What has brought voters to this point? The failure of Trump’s policies in their own terms. His tariffs have neither raised significant revenue nor led to any major reshoring of industry. Nor, indeed, did they deliver what Trump was bizarrely and ignorantly obsessed with, namely narrowing the trade deficit.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with trade deficits. America has been running them without a break since 1975, and has outgrown the rest of us over that period. By definition, a trade deficit must be matched by an investment surplus and vice versa. When Trump demands both more investment in the US and a trade surplus – indeed, simultaneous surpluses with every other nation – he disqualifies himself from the conversation.
But, as I say, he has a weird ability to make clever people behave stupidly, and no one around him dares point out that his approach is based on a misunderstanding.
In any case, even by his own test, the tariffs have failed. A sharp drop in imports from China has been offset by a rise in imports from Mexico, Vietnam, Taiwan and elsewhere. The US goods deficit in September was $US134.9 billion ($192 billion), the widest since March 2025, when companies were rushing to beat Liberation Day.
The US is the world’s largest economy, and trade is a commensurately small share of its GDP. A terrible trade policy can be offset by sensible policies on deregulation and energy abundance. To have turned trade policy into an electoral liability in such a vast country is an astonishing achievement.
The same is true of foreign policy. American voters are often said to be uninterested in the rest of the world. Still, there is a belated awareness of how Trump’s behaviour over Ukraine, Greenland and Canada burned through decades of accumulated goodwill, forcing even the strongest American allies to pursue different arrangements among themselves. Not everyone is as indifferent to the collapse of American moral leadership as the president.
Voters seem to have had enough of what I can only call Trump’s Third World vibe. His territorial claims on neighbours and his petty insistence on renaming lakes and oceans, his obsession with building monstrous triumphal arches, his apparent refusal to understand the difference between the Nobel Prize Committee and the Norwegian state (“a s---house country”), his demands that political opponents be locked up; and, now, his overt electoral bribery, his offer to send a $US5000 cheque to every American if the Republicans hold Congress.
Nowhere is the Third Worldery more visible than in the way the president’s coterie has grown rich in office. The gifts from overseas, the digital currency racket – this would, until an eye-blink ago, have been unthinkable in the US. A handy test of whether you are in a tinpot autocracy is that the richest people are not entrepreneurs but presidential cronies.
I have never bought the theory that Trump has a magical connection to the electorate. He benefited from facing dreadful opponents – and twice managed to lose the popular vote even to them. Much the same could be said this time.
I was in Michigan, where the incumbent senator, Mike Rogers, until now a reliable MAGA cultist, is desperately calling for an end to the tariffs on Canada that have caused such chaos to local businesses. His Democrat opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, is a far-left anti-Israel activist. Polls nonetheless show Sayed nosing ahead. If the Democrats win in places like Michigan, I am afraid they will select many more socialists.
Invisible to most observers is the mass of Americans voters who long for boring candidates in suits – even if they are, as PJ O’Rourke said of Hillary Clinton, “wrong within the normal parameters” of wrong. That is the real silent majority. On Tuesday, it will remain silent.
Daniel Hannan is a former Conservative member of the European Parliament and is president of Britain’s free-market Institute of Economic Affairs. He sits in the House of Lords as an independent peer.
No one is ready for what Elon Musk’s platform could look like on Tuesday.
By Will Oremus Last weekend, Chaya Raichik, the popular right-wing influencer who goes by Libs of TikTok, made an ominous claim to her nearly 5 million followers on X. “In Minnesota, the USPS offices are inside mosques,” she wrote. “The people who handle mail-in ballots.. What are we doing America.” She reshared a 28-minute-long video of a man circling a brick building in Plymouth, Minnesota, and accosting postal workers inside. “It’s the Islamification of the United States,” the man says. “And we have to stop it.” Almost everything about Raichik’s post is misleading. The post office is not “inside” a mosque; they are housed in different sections of the same building. And there’s no reason to believe that the shared real estate has anything to do with the integrity of elections. In situations like this, X’s crowdsourced fact-checking feature, called “Community Notes,” is supposed to help correct the record. Users propose disclaimers for popular posts they believe are inaccurate, and if other users agree, the disclaimer gets attached to the post. Sure enough, the day after Raichik’s post, someone suggested slapping the post with a Community Note to clarify the facts, citing and linking to articles by The Minnesota Star Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio. But the note was never publicly shown on X. As of yesterday, the video had more than 1.7 million views. (Raichik did not respond to a request for comment.)
Since Elon Musk bought X four years ago, the platform has been a petri dish for rumors and propaganda. Now, having weathered a liberal exodus to other platforms, X could play a central role in the midterm elections—especially if Republicans fare poorly. X has become the go-to place for MAGA supporters to hunt for examples of voter fraud, which could be used to cast doubt on results that don’t go Republicans’ way. President Trump has endorsed this crusade—he recently announced a $1 million bounty for voter-fraud tips that lead to a conviction.
Community Notes, which even some of Musk’s critics have praised as a worthwhile program, would seem to offer a bulwark against bogus claims of vote-rigging. It’s built around a clever idea: Each proposed note gets rated “helpful” or “not helpful” by users who have disagreed about related past notes. X publishes only the notes on which the users have reached a consensus. Yet even though X has expanded the feature, bringing in AI note writers to work alongside the human volunteers, it’s proving stubbornly incapable of addressing most election-related falsehoods. If Tuesday and the days afterward bring widespread claims of rigged results, expect many of them to originate on X.
Since Musk embraced Community Notes on X, crowdsourced fact-checks have gone from a niche experiment to the default on social media. After Trump’s reelection, Meta ditched its partnerships with professional fact-checking organizations in the U.S. in favor of its own version of Community Notes. (Meta still uses professional fact-checks in other countries.) YouTube and TikTok have adopted similar features. But X’s version is the most established, and it has served as the industry’s model. In some respects, it works quite well: The system routinely corrects misleading posts about topics such as sports, pop culture, and advertising.
The problem is that it’s rare for liberals and conservatives to agree on notes that touch on the most polarizing topics—meaning that fact-checks about politics and elections rarely get approved. That has had predictable effects on the motivation of the program’s volunteers, Mike Doris, a longtime contributor to Community Notes, told me. A group chat where active members share information and sources has become a “ghost town,” Doris said. Some have given up; he is close to doing the same.
While humans might get discouraged, bots do not. To scale up the program, X has opened fact-checking to AI, creating a purpose-built agent powered by Grok and inviting outside researchers to build AI fact-checking tools of their own. It might seem ironic that the same technology that can generate falsehoods at scale is now being used to catch them. Yet the bots are more prolific, and X says that notes proposed by AI are also more likely to win approval from the masses, perhaps because they’re trained to use neutral language and cite reputable sources. What started as an experiment last year has quickly become the norm: In May, an analysis by The Indicator’s Alexios Mantzarlis found that half of all Community Notes shown on X are now written by just eight bot accounts. This month, the Georgetown University social-media researcher Renée DiResta analyzed X’s public research and found that six of those eight are controlled by the platform itself.
This has led to a Cambrian explosion in the total number of Community Notes on X. But when it comes to politics, bots haven’t fixed the fundamental problem: Users on the left and the right just can’t find common ground. The proposed note for Raichik’s post about the post office attached to the mosque was, in fact, written by an AI agent, though not one of X’s. NewsGuard, a company that tracks misinformation, foundthat 93 percent of false claims about the midterms on X failed to receive a Community Note. (DiResta’s own AI fact-checking bot, she told me, has proposed 81 Community Notes; only one has been approved.)
In the weeks before the election, many of these unchecked posts have involved false claims about candidates. Fake videos targeting at least three Democratic Senate candidates have been linked to Russian disinformation campaigns. One starts with a shot of a real Cleveland local-news reporter, then cuts to fabricated footage describing nonexistent claims of sexual misconduct against the Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown by women who used to work for him. Darren Linvill, a Clemson University professor who researches foreign-interference campaigns, told me that X has taken down some of the accounts behind the posts, but the same group of influencers on the platform keeps amplifying new ones. Of the 37 viral false claims about the midterms identified by NewsGuard’s ongoing tracker, 22 started as X posts, and many of them spread to larger platforms from there. Not all of them target Democratic candidates: One debunked post claims that the Texas Republican Ken Paxton paid for a billboard that read, pedos ain’t that bad.
Fact-checks were never a cure-all for social-media lies. Many conservatives distrusted mainstream fact-checking organizations, and some research has shown that Community Notes are more broadly believed. A spokesperson for X told me that the addition of AI note writers has roughly doubled the number of Community Notes published in the past year. X, Meta, and other social-media companies also have rules against certain types of election misinformation, which they enforce through other means. For instance, X said earlier this month that it suspended more than 13,000 accounts linked to foreign-influence campaigns, and at least one viral post showing the satirical Paxton billboard now carries a “manipulated media” label.
Still, the limits of crowdsourced fact-checking might become obvious in the days to come. AI bots in particular are likely to struggle to counter fast-flying fraud claims on Election Day, DiResta pointed out. “The AI does not know what is happening on the ground unless a human has written it somewhere retrievable,” she said. In 2020, the last national election when Trump was in the White House, the president’s claims that the election had been stolen gained traction on social media and helped fuel the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021. Back then, Twitter applied numerous fact-checks and warning labels to posts by Trump and his allies making unsupported claims that the vote had been rigged. It’s hard to envision the platform doing that this time around.
