Friday, October 2, 2026 · Evening Edition

Today

By StaffNews Desk

Good morning. Donald Trump is preparing to flood the airwaves with "many more" taxpayer-funded ads, CNN's Arlette Saenz reported Friday, as the administration scrambles to steady Republican nerves a month out from the midterms. Public money, repurposed to prop up the party that controls it. The anxiety is real: the Senate map is shifting, [even Texas has become a top battleground, its Senate race in play, with Trump heading back Wednesday to keep the state red](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/10/02/trump-heads-back-texas-wednesday-gop-fights-keep-state-red), and in Washington Democratic lawmakers, veterans and residents gathered in Memorial Circle to protest the arch Trump wants built there, pinning their hopes on a lawsuit and the ballot.

The justice department declined to reopen its criminal investigation into former Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell over cost overruns on the central bank's renovation — the pretext that shadowed his replacement by Kevin Warsh. The machinery of monetary power grinds on regardless of who sits atop it: from Nixon's wage controls to today's interest rate hikes, the fight against inflation has targeted labor, not capital.

In Texas, a federal court temporarily blocked the administration from building a border wall through the Big Bend region — a reprieve won in court, not conceded by power. The same administration bends public rule-making to private gain: after the justice department declined to enforce the ban on handgun sales to 18-to-20-year-olds, a new gun rule now stands to enrich the president's own son. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has turned militarization into spectacle, inviting states to compete for a brand-new military installation.

At Cornell, Governor Kathy Hochul appointed Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor to take over a rape case the victim's lawyer, Thomas Giuffra, says the university buried, accusing officials of a "cover-up" more concerned with the school's reputation than accountability. And the US is sending another aircraft carrier to the Middle East as Trump weighs further action against Iran — the war footing this administration never fully leaves.