Saturday, October 24, 2026 · Morning Edition

Today

By StaffNews Desk

Good morning. A gas venture that surfaced inside Donald Trump's Ukraine peace talks had a hidden backer. Polar LNG, a startup pitching to export natural gas from Alaska's North Slope, took secret funding from the Russian energy giant Novatek, and its chief executive quit to go public as a whistleblower.

The same machine reshaping those talks is rigging the ground beneath this year's vote. Trump [urged red states to redraw their maps to hand Republican candidates an edge, setting off a historic redistricting fight that has made the elections themselves a defining campaign issue](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/10/midterm-elections-free-fair-gerrymandering-voting-rights). His Justice Department has demanded more than a dozen California counties set aside ballots from voters it believes are not citizens and ordered some to verify ballots within 48 hours, while Trump pushes a DOJ lawsuit over the Alaska Senate race and has asked a court to block an election result if a Democratic candidate wins. [JD Vance is front and center in the party's midterms push, his visibility rising as Trump's popularity wanes, a day after suggesting Trump would endorse a Vance presidential bid](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/oct/24/jd-vance-trump-midterms-white-house); in Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy's brutal ad against his Democratic rival divided even Republicans.

The repression is not rhetorical. Greg Bovino, Trump's ex-border patrol chief and the public face of the contested immigration operation that hit Minneapolis earlier this year, told the BBC the city's withdrawal was a "surrender" — the state's own enforcers branding restraint as defeat. The Atlantic calls the [indictment of two former FBI officials suspicious, part of a pattern of DOJ cases built to score on right-wing social media rather than to punish real wrongdoing](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/10/fbi-indictments/689138).

Everything else sits in that shadow. Slate calls impeaching Trump a legal slam dunk but a bad idea, warning the process may be broken beyond use. Veterans with lifelong service-connected illnesses are left tracking when November's VA disability payments will land, the US fertility rate keeps declining, and white-collar workers are now bartering over office bidet access, one calling it "the superior way to live".