Texas Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett was offering government relations and lobbying services on her campaign-funded website, a move experts say tests the limits of congressional ethics – and possibly the law.

Crockett lost her Senate bid in March. By May this year, a solicitation appeared on the website for her merchandise, “The Clapback Collection,” allowing users to inquire about Crockett’s consulting services and more.

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“Political Consultant- Book Now,” a button on the bottom of the webpage read. Upon clicking the button, a selection of offerings appeared: campaign management and strategy; communications and public relations; government relations and lobbying; digital and social media; and political risk management.

The consulting and lobbying offering was removed from the website after Zeteo reached out to Crockett’s office for comment.

“This website is and has always been focused on selling campaign merchandise,” a Crockett spokesperson told Zeteo. “The Congresswoman has only advertised it for merchandise and did not build it,” they continued. “She never directed anyone to add the button you are inquiring about.”

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For decades, it has been the policy of the Justice Department to avoid seizing evidence or arresting people involved with election fraud during an election. That has now apparently changed, according to Democrats, who are warning that Donald Trump could use the Justice Department to seize ballots and arrest election officials on or immediately after Election Day in November.

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The warning comes in a lawsuit filed last month by the Democratic National Committee that seeks communications and records from the Justice Department about ballot seizures and arrests under the Freedom of Information Act. Democrats say that the Justice Department has done away with policy guidance advising against ballot seizures and arrests during an ongoing election – evidence that the agency is actively planning to seize ballots and arrest election officials.

Democrats also point to the administration’s own words and actions regarding the troubling and unprecedented scenario that Trump will seize ballots in November.

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In 1901, in a sleepy Northern California town called Livermore, a man named Dennis Bernal donated an Ohio-made light bulb to the local firehouse that is still burning today. You read that correctly: Bernal’s light bulb has been burning for over a century.

At the time the Livermore bulb found its forever home, the light bulb business was booming in the U.S. and around the world. New companies were jumping into the lighting game, competing to invent longer-and-longer-lasting bulbs. But monopolies quickly swallowed the competition.

These country-by-country monopolies were turning healthy profits – until 1923. Manufacturing wasn’t the problem – they had that down pat. They were running up against what we might call the Livermore problem: There simply weren’t enough repeat customers.

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They needed a plan to bring customers back, fast. So the president of German lightbulb monopoly Osram, William Meinhardt, did what all good executives do: He called a meeting. In late December 1924, Meinhardt brought his international competitors to snowy Geneva, Switzerland, for a clandestine confab to discuss their growing crisis. They hatched a simple plan: Short-circuit the lifespan of the light bulb.

It was elegantly sinister. If the bulbs burned out faster, customers would be back in stores more often. They called themselves the Phoebus Cartel, after the Greek god of light. With a little engineering and a lot of coordination, the Phoebus Cartel succeeded in doing what the Livermore bulb never would: burning out. Sales rose across the globe.

These days, CEOs don’t need to clink their scotch glasses in smoke-filled rooms or travel all the way to Geneva to hatch a deal to keep their prices high. They’ve got software for that! Across the economy, companies are deploying sophisticated algorithmic pricing tools to collect, analyze, and share troves of product and pricing information.

The promise of this software was that it would make markets more competitive by increasing price transparency. Comparison shopping would get easier, driving prices down. But these technologies haven’t lived up to their promise. Instead, they’ve served as a kind of duck call for gougers, helping them find each other faster. And once they do, these tools make it even easier for them to share information and coordinate strategies – not to compete, but to gang up on you. You are simply out-numbered. And as lawmakers have learned the hard way, gougers hide behind these arms-length technologies to evade price-fixing laws.

Have you ever wondered why your rent is so damn high? Ask any economist or housing expert and they’ll tell you the reason is simple: There’s not enough housing. There is some truth to this. We absolutely need more affordable housing, and where housing is scarce, prices do rise. But the simple supply-side story misses something crucial: corporate power.

In recent years, corporate consolidation and algorithmic pricing tools have made those imbalances worse. Landlords no longer need to collude over backyard barbecues to fix prices – they can do it online, aided, by a new breed of real estate tech firms.

Let’s consider the story of one of the biggest algorithmic price-fixing scandals of the last four decades. In 2024, the Department of Justice filed a 115-page complaint alleging price coordination against the Texas-based tech company called RealPage. The lawsuit described how RealPage’s “pricing algorithm enables landlords to share confidential, competitively sensitive information and align their rents” – a practice that, according to the New York Times, impacted more than 3 million apartments across the country.

According to ProPublica, this software was so prolific among large landlords that as many as 70% of apartments in some neighborhoods were owned by companies using RealPage’s price-coordination algorithm.

In some cities, RealPage’s scheme may have driven up rents by as much as 25% in recent years. In Denver, for example, families in nearly half the city’s multifamily rental units saw RealPage’s recommendations add a new line to their budgets – pushing rents up by more than $130 a month, or over $1,600 a year.

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The FBI uncovered a trove of smoking guns on RealPage’s servers. Executives and landlords hadn’t been shy about touting their product – even the legally dubious parts. One exec praised the benefits of eliminating competition: “[T]here is greater good in everybody succeeding versus essentially trying to compete against one another in a way that actually keeps the entire industry down.” Translation: We all win when tenants lose.

Landlords were even more blunt. “I always liked this product because your algorithm uses proprietary data from other subscribers to suggest rents... That’s classic price fixing,” one wrote. What’s not to like?

You might be thinking: Isn’t this just business as usual? Landlords have been overcharging tenants and skimping on maintenance since the dawn of time. Rents have been too damn high for decades.

But here’s what’s new: Before RealPage, your landlord still had to compete. However imperfect, that competition put downward pressure on prices and gave tenants at least a fighting chance at finding a better deal.

RealPage changed the game. It allowed landlords – big and small – the ability to act like a cartel. A decade ago, a conspiracy among landlords would have been inconceivable. The rental market was too fragmented: too many owners, too many units, too many tenants. No one had enough control. But algorithms changed the math.

The Department of Justice’s complaint against RealPage offered a rare glimpse under the hood of its YieldStar algorithm, revealing how the system kept rents elevated – even in a down market. One of its key features was the market minimum effective rent, or what the DOJ called RealPage’s “hard floor.” YieldStar surveyed all leases for a particular floor plan and generated a pricing chart that included both a minimum and maximum rent based on the available data. But, according to the court filings, YieldStar was programmed never to recommend a rent below the minimum rent, effectively creating that “hard floor” for rent prices.

So what about the maximum rent? Was there a “hard ceiling” to match? Nope. YieldStar treated the maximum rent as a bar to clear. It was merely a “soft ceiling,” a suggestion – not a constraint. The algorithm recommended rent prices higher than the so-called maximum for a given floor plan.

RealPage had a plan for every scenario: a plan to take advantage of a tight market, a plan to raise prices quickly and drop them slowly, and a plan to ensure rents never fell below a “hard floor” But what about an economic downturn, when demand was low? Surely then the algorithm recommended rent reductions? Nope. RealPage had a plan for that too – and it was called “revenue protection mode,” which prioritized maintaining revenue by leasing fewer apartments at higher prices.

But couldn’t landlords override these recommendations if they wanted to fill units? In theory, yes. In practice, it wasn’t so easy. Its “auto-accept” feature defaulted many landlords into outsourcing their pricing decisions altogether. As one RealPage economist put it, they’re “trust[ing] the science.”

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RealPage’s scheme was bigger than the sum of either its human or algorithmic parts. The company’s sprawling portfolio, its system of “checks and balances,” and its data empire made it possible to coordinate price hikes on a scale never seen before. But the technology also gave landlords and property managers something equally valuable: cover. It gave them plausible deniability – the sense that they weren’t acting like greedy price-fixers, just doing what the smart software said.

RealPage both enabled price-fixing and sanitized it. It made participating feel less like a conspiracy and more like good business. If a competitor called me and said, “Hey, let’s collude to fix prices,” I’d probably tell him to get lost. But if that same competitor told me he was using new software that increased profits by 15%, I might ask where to sign up.

New algorithmic tools have quietly transformed how companies price nearly everything – and they are coming for every line item in your household budget. From rent, hotel rooms, and airline tickets, to meat and potatoes (yes, there’s even pricing software called PotatoTrac), corporate profiteers are using technology to squeeze consumers with ever more precision. It’s so incredibly lucrative, it’s almost too good to be true. Which explains why price-fixing is already illegal.

When a company supplies the hub, the data, and the enforcement, collusion – whether tacit or intentional – follows. Each of these examples, from the light bulb manufacturers to the landlords, demonstrates how companies can coordinate to choke off competition, bring supply and demand to heel, sanction defectors, degrade product quality, manufacture scarcity, and overcharge consumers.

The above excerpt is from Lindsay Owens’s Gouged: The End of a Fair Price – and What That Means for Your Wallet, out now from Viking.

Lindsay Owens is President and CEO of Groundwork Collaborative. She is the author of Gouged and the Gouged newsletter.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

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When President Donald Trump launched his failed, illegal war on Iran, Republicans quickly fell in line. Seven months later, the conflict seems primed to become the latest U.S. forever war.

The resulting spikes in the prices of diesel and gas have put enormous pressure on American families who are paying more for basic necessities. A CNN/SSRS poll from this month shows that 73% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war, underscoring how much of a political nightmare it has become for Republicans as the crucial midterm elections near.

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Coincidentally, several Republican politicians in tough races now want the war they once supported to end. Here’s what six of them said at the war’s start, and what they’re saying now:

1. Mike Rogers

THEN: The day the war on Iran began in late February, Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers declared, “Iran is an imminent threat to our country and must not have a nuclear weapon. May God bless our troops and our country on this mission for safety and justice.” The next day, he called it potentially “the biggest opportunity for peace in the Middle East that I’ve certainly seen in my lifetime.”

As the American public soured on the war, he scolded them. “It is maddening to me,” Rogers said in March. “We ought to stand up, shut up, stand up and say we want this thing to have a successful conclusion. Then you want to debate it later? Let’s do that,” he said. When asked in late July if Trump should have authorization from Congress to continue the war, he doubled down saying, “I don’t mind giving the president authority to continue. You can’t stop in mid-negotiation.”

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When you talk to people close to President Donald Trump, they will be quick to tell you that he’s mad at the TV again, and he’s mad about Republicans who don’t want to talk about him. And that’s why he’s now forcing the federal government to run another pro-Trump propaganda campaign that Americans are paying for with their tax dollars.

The first such TV ad features the deeply unpopular president railing against “communists,” over a song pleading “LOVE ME,” with a disclaimer that it’s being “paid for by the U.S. government.” Watchdogs and lawmakers say the ad violates federal laws that bar the use of federal money for propaganda purposes, and prohibit federal employees from using official resources for politics. Some elected Democrats are demanding answers from the White House. Trump’s running these ads with taxpayer dollars despite his political operation having an obscene amount of cash to burn.

Several longtime GOP operatives working on competitive 2026 races told Zeteo that they thought the “Love Me” ad campaign was a bad idea, with one consultant close to the Trump White House saying: “It was kind of pathetic.” Others in and close to the Trump administration weren’t thrilled about it, either.

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The White House wasn’t done, though. Trump’s administration is also planning to run an ad touting the president’s successful plot to kidnap Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, and it’s running a 60-second ad featuring Trump speaking at Mount Rushmore about how he’s brought about “the golden age of America.” The White House calls these taxpayer-funded propaganda ads “public service announcements,” and insists they are “very clearly not campaign ads.”

So, why does this TV ad campaign exist? Beyond the fact that the Trump-Vance administration is plowing an ungodly amount of public money and resources into myriad initiatives designed specifically to make President Trump feel good about himself, there is one major, 2026-related reason that you’re seeing the “LOVE ME” ad on your television.

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Elon Musk publicly endorsed “socialist” healthcare before he became the world’s richest man. Now, years later, he’s running super PAC ads decrying Democrats as “socialists” for supporting government-run healthcare.

In Maine, Musk’s America PAC is attacking Senate candidate Troy Jackson for wanting to “put the government in charge of your healthcare.” One ad, which ran on the streaming service Roku, says “the socialists know Jackson will rubber stamp their agenda,” featuring democratic socialists Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani in the background. America PAC has also sent door-knockers around Maine to hand out leaflets slamming Jackson for supporting Medicare for All, which would create a comprehensive, universal healthcare system.

Musk’s group has run other ads attacking former Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown as a supporter of “government-run healthcare,” and claiming former Virginia Congresswoman Elaine Luria will help socialists “ban our private health insurance.” (Neither Brown nor Luria back Medicare for All, though they have both supported public health insurance options in the past.)

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Yes, it is offensive that the world’s richest man, a major beneficiary of federal contracts and policy, would deploy his incomprehensible wealth to spend on U.S. elections – and, even more, that he would run ads mocking the idea of giving every American cheaper, improved healthcare coverage, along the lines of what people get in other wealthy, industrialized nations.

But there’s also always a tweet. Less than a decade ago, Musk openly touted the idea of government-run, “socialist” healthcare – saying it has majority support – on Twitter, the social media platform he now owns.

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After ProPublica reported that a Russian oligarch had financed wedding festivities for Donald Trump Jr., his bride confirmed the facts but not their obvious significance.

“It was an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend,” a statement on Bettina Trump’s Instagram said. Dismissing suggestions of any quid pro quo, the statement added: “Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda.”

President Donald Trump and his family typically explain their suspicious relations with Russia that way. To an astonishing degree, nothing to see here has worked. Indeed, in Trump’s long career as a con man, his hustle with Vladimir Putin stands alone.

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Their undeclared alliance has proven infinitely more consequential than Trump fleecing students of his “university,” stiffing creditors, or escaping the Vietnam draft. Reciprocal back-scratching has helped him gain wealth and power, corrupted his political party, and boosted an authoritarian adversary while weakening America and the free world.

The two men’s audacity begs the question: how did they pull this off?

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According to polling, the race is tied. Does Jackson have what it takes? He joins Zeteo’s John Harwood for a candid conversation about his campaign, live on Substack, where he took questions from Zeteo subscribers watching in real time.

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Watch the full video above to find out why Jackson believes this is a “change election” – and to hear him take on Collins over her anti-abortion track record, Medicare for All, and high gas prices. Jackson also answers questions about Joe Manchin’s endorsement of Collins, his past as a Republican, and just how much he aligns with Platner’s politics.

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This was a live conversation on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, where subscribers could ask questions. Be sure to subscribe to catch the next Substack Live.

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Hasan Piker, the leftist Twitch streamer and GOP 2026 midterms boogeyman, is being dragged again by bad-faith actors, based on a clip going around from his new sit-down interview with Axios. The misleading headline the outlet put on its story was perfectly calibrated to maximize outrage: “Hasan Piker on ‘The Axios Show’: America worse than al-Qaeda ‘pound for pound,’” it reads.

The reaction was swift. Scott Jennings, the right-wing CNN commentator and Donald Trump sycophant, quickly weighed in to try and mock the Democrats. Liberal anti-gun activist Shannon Watts, who has repeatedly condemned Piker, snarked that she was “Excited to find out if this was a joke, satire or hyperbole,” taken “out of context,” or the result of “bad faith clipping.”

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Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who campaigned with Piker during the primary and has faced repeated media questions about the streamer, clearly felt forced to distance himself from Piker’s latest comments, telling Axios, “I do not agree with this statement… nor do I give much weight to the statements made by a social media streamer.”

At the time of writing, Axios has only released partial clips of the interview, compiled into a 56-second preview. But when Piker agreed that America was worse, “pound for pound,” than al-Qaeda, he was not speaking generally, but specifically in terms of killing people.

“You once said that America is the top dog in terrorism,” Axios’s Alex Thompson said, to which Piker responded, “Yes.” Thompson then asked: “Do you think America then is worse than al-Qaeda?”

“Pound for pound, as far as the number of deaths, yes, we have caused tremendous terror all around the world,” Piker replied.

Piker’s comment, while obviously controversial, is objectively true. The U.S. war in Iraq, launched based on lies, resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The total death toll from America’s broader so-called “War on Terror” is staggering: Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that 432,000 civilians were “killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023.” Going beyond the so-called ‘war on terror,’ back to the dark days of the Cold War, the United States also killed at least 300,000 civilians in Vietnam, and up to 150,000 civilians in Laos, and helped the Indonesian military kill as many as 1 million people in anti-Communist massacres.

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Terror attacks by al-Qaeda have killed thousands of innocent people over the past three decades, but in terms of “the number of deaths” there is no real comparison to be made.

U.S. terror attacks have increased on Donald Trump’s watch. In the clips released by Axios, Piker also pointed to what the U.S. under Trump “did in Minab,” where the U.S. military is believed to be responsible for airstrikes on a school that killed 150 people, including more than 100 children, on the first day of the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. “If you’re killing 140 schoolgirls, that is an act of terror,” Piker said.

Piker’s Axios interview comes as the mainstream media, right-wingers, and pro-Israel Democrats lead an aggressive cancellation campaign against him, seeking to make the streamer the top campaign issue in the 2026 midterm elections – rather than, say, Trump’s failed, pointless, and absurdly costly war in Iran, which continues to send energy prices soaring and is threatening to wreck the global economy.

Unlike many media outlets obsessed with Piker, Axios, to its credit, actually interviewed him and let him defend himself. But the outlet clearly wanted to stoke the controversy around Piker further.

However, Piker’s comments aren’t so different from what President Donald Trump has said about the U.S.

In 2017, during Trump’s first term, Bill O’Reilly questioned him about his respect for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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When O’Reilly said, “Putin’s a killer,” Trump responded: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”

Yes, Trump lies all the time, but his point there was correct.

So was Piker’s.

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DALLAS — The Republican Party’s “Trump-a-palooza” midterm convention in Texas concluded on Thursday night with the president of the United States playing a meme video about how “God gave us” Donald Trump and then leading the crowd in swearing a loyalty pledge to him, adding that they’d “go to Hell” for violating it. The crowd absolutely gobbled up the cultish Dear Leader performance artistry, and the president basked in the glow of a two-day party he threw for himself to feed his mammoth ego, not to aid his party in the high-stakes 2026 midterm elections.

But by nightfall on Thursday, members of Team Trump started feeling the gnaw of reality, rather than the good vibes that Trump and his party were trying to present to the public. After Trump’s Thursday speech wrapped, several administration officials, Trump advisers, and other longtime associates of the president’s – including some who were in Dallas for the GOP convention – privately relayed to Zeteo their concerns that Trump’s Iran war was further spiraling out of control.

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Several of the sources said it was a terrible split-screen to have President Trump throwing a two-day, Trump-worshipping bash for himself in Dallas – where he defended launching his failed war in Iran, and dismissed voters’ complaints about higher gas prices – at the same time that the Iranian government and its allies were mounting a startling new level of attacks and operations in the regional war that Trump recklessly started.

“It looks bad, I am willing to admit it,” a Trump adviser told Zeteo late on Thursday.

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DALLAS – The 2026 midterms are going so well for the Republican Party that halfway through their so-called “Trump-a-palooza” in Dallas, Texas, the president of the United States resorted to bribery.

“Here is my promise: If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them… I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” Donald Trump triumphantly announced at the American Airlines Center during the first night of the highly unusual midterm convention that the president has forced a largely reluctant GOP to put on Wednesday and Thursday.

That pledge came after Trump claimed, “This has been the most successful two years financially and every other way in the history of the presidency,” and just minutes after he awkwardly dismissed Americans’ financial pain as a result of his illegal Iran war for the umpteenth time: “It happens to me all the time – guys come up, ‘You know, I wish you didn’t do the war in Iran. Gasoline’s up’ – ba, ba, ba.”

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Even though his advisers and aligned lawmakers on Capitol Hill will never publicly concede this, Trump made clear Wednesday why so many Republican candidates and officials absolutely did not want to be at his big, beautiful, Trump-adulation party: He is a giant, self-centered reminder to the electorate of everything they hate about his presidency and policies. And Trump is not only refusing to give vulnerable Republicans space to create some mild distance from his flailing agenda; he’s making the party envelope itself around him, to the point that he declared in Dallas: “Pretend that I’m on the ballot!”

Ever since Trump was sworn back into the White House in January 2025, he has repeatedly promised Americans that he’d send them some sort of new check in the mail. It hasn’t happened, and this latest vow – which comes as Americans fend with higher gas prices and rising inflation – almost certainly will never happen, even if Republicans manage to hold the House and Senate.

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Talarico strategist Chuck Rocha joins Zeteo’s John Harwood to unpack the forces shaping one of 2026’s most surprising, pivotal Senate races – including data centers, Paxton’s unlikability, Talarico’s Christian faith, Latino voters, and gas and grocery prices.

Watch the full conversation above for Rocha’s inside take on what he calls a “perfect storm” for Talarico and what the Democrat needs to do over the coming weeks to win.

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But Pappas is not yet the nominee. He’s running against Karishma Manzur, an outsider who’s spent decades working as a scientist, focused on illnesses like epilepsy and depression. Manzur joined Prem in a barn-burning conversation about how U.S.-funded violence in Bangladesh shaped her foreign policy views, how Trump is using the Iran War to make massive amounts of cash and avoid scrutiny on the Epstein files, and how the people in charge are “willing to burn down the planet” for their own greed.

“If we didn’t change the course of our planet, in the next 50 years, we’re looking at an average increase in 3 degrees temperature across this world, which means that the polar ice caps will melt, and places like Miami will be inundated, places like Phoenix, Arizona will be unlivable, and the beautiful spruce and fir trees of the White Mountains will be gone,” Manzur said – pointing out that doesn’t even include emissions from the mass spread of data centers, or the genocide in Gaza.

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She noted: “The amount of carbon emission that was cut down by the Inflation Reduction Act actually was dwarfed by the amount of carbon emission that was emitted by the war in Gaza. You cannot tell us to buy EVs and put up solar panels while you’re bombing 2.1 million people and their residents to hell.”

Manzur also said whether she would support Chuck Schumer for Senate leader, hammered the Democratic establishment on who should and shouldn’t be allowed in the “big tent,” and slammed the push in Washington to fuse the U.S.-Israeli militaries.

Watch the interview above to hear from Manzur in the final days before the September 8 election.

This video is being shared without a paywall. If you want to support the work that we do at Zeteo, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you’re already a paid subscriber, you can always support our work further with a donation.

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However bad you think things must be in Springfield, Ohio, today, the reality on the ground is worse.

Even if you are looking on, as a distant observer, in disgust at recent headlines (including about the suicide of 20-year-old student Pierre Damas Bel), it is difficult to grasp the scale of what is happening in and around this small Midwest city, and to its Haitian population, their friends, and neighbors.

For years, Donald Trump and his party have waged a protracted campaign of racist lies, fear, and demagoguery on Springfield. This summer, that campaign culminated in the Trump administration’s ICE clampdown in the city, following President Trump’s destruction of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that once shielded the Haitian community. The crackdown – blessed by the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority that this president cemented – is unlike anything else occurring now in Trump and JD Vance’s America.

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The president and his allies are orchestrating horror and degradation all over the country. But in Springfield, the heightened level of fear is so widespread, and the state-imposed terror against a vulnerable minority so constant, that it is impossible to see this as anything but the Trump administration’s proof of concept for the president’s militarized vision of what America should be – a place where everyday people are afraid to go outside, in a republic of “law and order” that the federal government meticulously and arbitrarily constructs. It is the latest front in Trump and his party’s mission to codify MAGA’s brand of American racism and sadistic cruelty into law.

Trump and his allies “test out their strategies here because they think people elsewhere aren’t watching,” says Katie Kersh, a Dayton-based immigration lawyer with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, who has Haitian clients and has conducted legal clinics in Springfield. “They will bring them to your state eventually. People really need to care about this more.”

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Brown is putting up a fight, challenging Husted on his support for data center expansion, and promising to serve the working class. He joins Zeteo’s John Harwood in a Substack live conversation, where Zeteo subscribers could tune in in real time.

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Watch the full video above to hear Harwood and Brown discuss how Democrats can regain the trust of working-class voters, whether they can compete with Trump’s “wrecking ball” policies, and more.

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For days, Donald Trump’s administration has been on a media blitz to lie to reporters, the public, and the markets about how the president’s illegal war on Iran is going really well, actually. In reality, very few in the U.S. government are buying their own propaganda.

“We aren’t winning,” one senior U.S. government official tells Zeteo this week. “Why are you asking me if I think we’re winning? What a stupid question.”

According to four U.S. officials and one Trump adviser, it remains a widespread belief across the federal government, including within the Pentagon, that the Trump administration is still losing the Iran war, and that the White House’s renewed propaganda push to paint a rosier portrait of the conflict is little more than a public relations effort meant to boost Trump’s party in the lead-up to the midterm elections.

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Two of these officials say one reason they are talking to Zeteo and other media outlets about how poorly the war is going for the American side is that they’re appalled at the ongoing attempt by Team Trump to, in the words of one of the officials, push “nothing but lies and distortions” about this phase of the president’s grossly unpopular conflict with Iran.

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Here’s a frightening thought experiment: How much more damage could the infamous 1950s demagogue Joseph McCarthy have done if he’d sat in the Oval Office?

Donald Trump’s deadly crusade against immigrants, “hardcore, godless Communists” and “left-wing political violence” gives us an idea.

In January, his deportation goons in Minnesota killed anti-ICE protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti in broad daylight. Administration officials since then, as the New York Times recently documented, have investigated whether groups supporting protests provided “domestic terrorist financing” to “violent opportunists and agitators.”

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Instead of charging the killers of Good and Pretti, the Justice Department has accused 15 alleged members of “antifa” of “organized lawless behavior” in Minneapolis. Trump can deploy federal prosecutors with abandon because he scares fellow Republicans who control Congress.

Senator Joe McCarthy intimidated President Dwight Eisenhower, too. But in his post-World War II anti-communist rampage, the Wisconsin Republican never controlled the government’s law enforcement and national security machinery.

Even without that power, McCarthy and the political arsonists he inspired burned America badly. I recently learned how my own family got singed in an episode that resembles Trump’s depredations today.

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As the midterm elections near, Democratic lawmakers have been laser-focused on… condemning leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.

This week of craziness saw at least 13 Democrats falsely smear Piker as an antisemite who encourages violence against Jews, distorting his words after Piker expressed the not-controversial opinion that it’s “dangerous” for Zionists to make it seem like “Jews are monolithic” in their support for Israel, its genocide in Gaza, and broader project of apartheid.

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As one Democrat, Illinois Rep. Brad Schneider, put it, “Democrats risk losing our credibility to condemn those on the right who traffic in bigotry, antisemitism, and hate when our own members of Congress & candidates are celebrating or, worse yet, platforming those who espouse hate of any kind.” Schneider criticized Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed for having “so-far refused to condemn the words of Hasan Piker, his friend and frequent campaign surrogate.”

Schneider’s comments made us wonder: Have he and these other Piker-slamming Democrats condemned Laura Loomer, Donald Trump’s close ally, after she called for the deportation of “every Muslim in America” in May, and the use of “military force to round them up” earlier this month? Have they condemned far-right extremists like Jan. 6 rioter Jake Lang and pastor Lorenzo Sewell for leading an openly anti-Muslim march in Dearborn, Michigan, this month? Have they condemned El-Sayed’s GOP opponent Mike Rogers for including Sewell in his campaign’s faith coalition leadership team since last year?

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The story below is from investigative reporter and documentarian Lauren Windsor. It’s the culmination of over a year’s worth of reporting, and breaks open a world of staggering corruption on the right you’ve likely never heard of. Please give it your time, and support our ability to do more original, in-depth reporting at Zeteo by becoming a paid subscriber or making a donation.

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Ballrooms, slush funds, jumbo jets. Worship services in the Pentagon, electioneering in churches, the Ten Commandments in schools. Conflicts of interest and Christian nationalism have been hallmarks of Donald Trump’s second presidency. The epic flood of corruption swamping Washington isn’t just overwhelming American politics – it’s also obscuring the grift occurring in red states across the country, as officials work to put public investment funds under the control of their friends at Christian finance firms.

A major conduit for that corruption is the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a small but powerful nonprofit that convenes Republican state treasurers and auditors, right-wing activists, and Christian finance executives to strategize over how to defeat liberals and weaponize state treasuries against allegedly woke corporations, while steering state treasury money to their ideological allies. Much of their “War on Woke” consists of boosting the fossil fuel industry and crushing efforts to mitigate climate change, under the notion that corporate safeguards are bad business.

That theory is convenient for conservatives’ fossil fuel funders – as well as for SFOF’s longtime top executive, who’s moving to cash in.

Derek Kreifels was the CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation for more than a decade. He resigned from this role in the fall of 2024, but he remains an SFOF board member, and his wife serves as one of its top executives. Now, Kreifels is lobbying SFOF treasurers to put public retirees’ savings and other funds they oversee into faith-aligned financial products and services offered by his firm, Prospr Aligned, and its affiliates in the Christian finance industry.

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Kreifels’s firm has already won business from the Kentucky auditor’s office, which is led by a member of the State Financial Officers Foundation’s leadership team, as I can report for the first time. Another state Kreifels has targeted heavily is Alaska, where he has friends in former Revenue Commissioner and ex-SFOF Vice Chair Adam Crum and Alaska Permanent Fund Chair Jason Brune.

In an interview with me in Anchorage last fall, Brune defended Crum and his collaboration with Kreifels as efforts to promote resource extraction in the Arctic – arguing that he and Crum, as members of the governor’s cabinet, “are pimping for the state.”

Over the last year, I attended public board meetings in Alaska; staked out an SFOF conference in DC; and obtained records, photos, audio, and video documenting Crum’s efforts to direct public resources to his friend’s nonprofit and for-profit ventures during his tenure as revenue commissioner. Crum’s efforts are on the verge of paying off for Kreifels: A major state agency will soon decide whether to put money into Prospr’s Alaskan-themed investment fund.

The State Financial Officers Foundation has also helped support Kreifels’s private business ventures. According to state travel disclosures, SFOF paid for at least one treasurer’s travel to the New York Stock Exchange launch party for Prospr’s Alaska investment fund. Seven other state financial officials were in attendance. SFOF also arranged for a special speaker: longtime ally Paul Atkins, who as chairman of the Trump Securities and Exchange Commission regulates the Prospr fund.

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