Friday, October 16, 2026 · Morning Edition

Today

By StaffNews Desk

Good morning. The administration is moving to deport Representative Ilhan Omar, more than just another persecution of the president's political enemies. It fits a pattern of seizing power from the public: the administration now claims that papers created in the White House belong to Donald Trump, not to the American people, a case that could end up at the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, even as judges keep dismissing his voter data lawsuits as devoid of any factual basis. The same administration is using its power to intimidate nonprofits and make their funders afraid.

Trump has subordinated the war in Ukraine to his party's electoral math, calling Kyiv's renewed strikes on Russian oil refineries a "disgrace" as he leans on the ally over rising gas prices that could cost Republicans in next month's midterms, and calling Zelenskyy more difficult to deal with than Putin after the energy ceasefire collapsed. But the war is a bipartisan electoral project: Democrats are, behind the scenes, making clear they would escalate the war against Russia should they win a majority.

For workers, the squeeze is sharper. The raises of the past two years have been nearly all eaten away by inflation. Allianz's Ludovic Subran expects the Fed to raise rates by as much as 75 basis points once the elections are over — "The US is running hot, and I think he cannot ignore that" — more pain for borrowers. Republicans, meanwhile, want to raise the H-1B salary exemption threshold from $60,000 to nearly $140,000.

In California, voters have three weeks to decide Proposition 40, a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of the state's 200-plus billionaires to offset an almost-trillion-dollar round of cuts, with Props 41 and 42 drafted to negate it. While the state asks its billionaires to pay, the world's richest man is pouring more than $150 million into Senate Republicans to help elect Ken Paxton. And in Hawaii, long after the fires, toxic metals still linger in Maui residents' bodies, in a community already harmed by plantation agriculture, development and colonialism.