Harmeet Dhillon is not the most notable administration official to depart after Democrats’ enormous midterm victory—that title goes to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who President Trump announced today would be replaced by Stephen Miller. But Dhillon’s short tenure shows the immense influence that Trump has had on the federal government in less than two years in power.
The criminal trial of Russell Brand took less than four weeks, at the end of which the comedian turned spiritual influencer was found guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. (The jury in London declared him not guilty of three other charges, two of rape and one of attempted indecent assault.) The accounts detailed by Brand’s accusers were harrowing.
Introspection has never been one of Donald Trump’s more notable attributes. He never accepts blame or course-corrects; he only becomes a more distilled version of himself.
And so, faced with rejection at the ballot box on an overwhelming scale, the president responded by replacing his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, with Stephen Miller.
Technically speaking, Miller had been Wiles’s second in command, as deputy chief of staff.
Tuesday was a historic night for progressive Democrats and, in particular, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America. Six new DSA-endorsed candidates were elected to the House, and democratic socialists won mayoral races in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Providence.
“The Democratic Socialists of America had a phenomenal night, and this movement is only going to continue to grow,” says prominent leftist political commentator Hasan Piker.
The midterms saw a landslide of Latinos vote for Democrats. In Texas, California, Kansas and Colorado, Latinos who had voted for Republicans just two years ago voted for Democrats in large numbers, helping secure Democratic control of both the House and the Senate. Latino lawmakers will make up about a fifth of the Democratic majority in the House. And in an historic victory, the two most populous states in the country, California and Texas, will soon be led by Democratic Latino governors.
Mississippi’s race for the U.S. Senate remains too close to call: Democrat Scott Colom is narrowly leading Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by nearly 2,000 votes with 96% of votes counted as of Friday morning. Donald Trump carried Mississippi by 23 points in 2024. If elected, Colom would be the first Democrat to win the state in 40 years and the first African American since 1875, during the Reconstruction era.
Anthropic promises a blockbuster IPO with its revealing filing
We gave up what makes life meaningful in order to do it.
“No one seemed to be concerned about ‘heritage citizens.
A monopoly on mortgages is finally loosening. Homebuyers aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit.
What’s alarmist and what’s real about artificial intelligence. Plus, how lawmakers are dealing with a situation they don’t really understand.
Voters overwhelming backed pro-abortion rights ballot measures and candidates Tuesday night. The GOP remained largely silent on the issue.
The GOP has joined Democrats in blaming pharmacy conglomerates for high drug prices.
Pennsylvania is home to one of the worst measles outbreaks in decades.
Outward’s hosts sit down with the host and co-creator of When We All Get to Heaven.
The neighborhood changes, the church moves, people forget and remember “the AIDS years,” but AIDS isn’t over.
The AIDS cocktail opens new possibilities. And MCC San Francisco tries to use the experience of AIDS to make bigger social change.
The church’s minister gets sick and everyone knows it.
The church’s “it couple” faces AIDS, caregiving, and loss as part of a pair, part of families, and part of a community.
In a Canberra Playbook Podcast interview Jim Chalmers accused Liberals of wanting Australians to suffer, as their path back to power.
Jim Chalmers warns global pressures mean more domestic pain.
Black voters in Georgia on Tuesday said, “Not today, Satan,” according to professor Carol Anderson, professor of African American studies at Emory University. Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to disenfranchise Black voters in the South this election cycle and the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, she says there was “massive turnout” that propelled Democrats to victory.
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Democrats aren’t the only ones celebrating this week. Prediction markets—high-speed betting arenas where users can wager on the future of the republic—have been claiming a win of their own.
The platforms foresaw a Democratic sweep, and that’s what they got. “BREAKING: Polymarket was right,” one post on the company’s X account read yesterday morning.
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Outgoing Speaker of the House Mike Johnson made a statement earlier this year that captured his approach to the job: “I have no intention of getting in the way of President Trump and his administration.” He was answering a question about levying tariffs, a power the Constitution gives to Congress.
Among the many gifts that Donald Trump bequeathed to Democrats ahead of the midterms was allowing them the exclusive political use of the AI backlash. Now that Democrats have decisively won control of Congress, voters will expect them to follow through on their rhetoric. The problem is that Democrats don’t actually have a plan to regulate AI. In fact, they don’t even agree on what problems need to be solved in the first place.
At first, the image appears to be some kind of intergalactic photo op, something out of Star Wars. A figure hooded in black, his craggy face partly in shadow, greets a serene-looking man in a white robe. Think Emperor Palpatine shaking hands with Obi-Wan Kenobi, perhaps brokering a cease-fire in the Clone Wars. Closer inspection yields a picture that is no less weird: Bob Dylan is hanging with the pope.
James Talarico talked a lot during his campaign about the so-called wilderness—as in, the electoral wasteland and morale morass that Democrats had been languishing in since President Trump’s reelection, in 2024. In Texas, this felt like something of a permanent condition. Talarico preferred a more sanguine interpretation of wilderness, something I’ve thought about after he became the first Texas Democrat to win a Senate race since 1988.
Kennedy and the leader of his Make America Healthy Again movement have stood by the British actor.
Democrats regained control of both the House and the Senate in Tuesday’s historic midterm elections, a comeback fueled largely by voter anger over high prices and the war on Iran. But surveys also found that corruption was a major concern, with 76% of voters telling a Harris poll that elected officials care more about enriching themselves than improving the economy for ordinary people.
The Democratic Socialists of America made major gains in this year’s U.S. midterms, electing not just the largest-ever socialist bloc to Congress, but also winning dozens of races at the state, county and municipal levels. Democracy Now! spoke with Congressmember-elect Melat Kiros on election night following her victory in Denver, Colorado.