👑 The Madness of King Donald

Mehdi's Monday morning roundup of an increasingly unhinged US president, a new pro-Palestine Irish president, the big Mamdani/AOC/Bernie rally in Queens, and Gavin Newsom's 2028 plans.

🐦 On this day in 2022, Elon Musk officially acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal. The platform, since horribly renamed as X, was last year worth nearly 80% less than its 2022 sticker price. Maybe Musk should’ve ended world hunger instead.

Good morning! Mehdi here. It’s Monday morning. I’m in the US, where Islamophobia is out of control as the New York mayoral election approaches, while Donald Trump is traveling around Asia, presenting US flags to cheering Muslim women in hijabs.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ isn’t it past time to 25th Amendment the president? Who did Trump call a “wimp”? How many people showed up for the Mamdani/Bernie/AOC rally in New York? And is Gavin Newsom the Democrats’ guy for 2028?

Currently, anyone can read ‘First Draft,’ but it won’t always be free or without a paywall. Subscribe today to ensure you always get ‘First Draft’ in your inbox, unpaywalled!, and if you’re already a paid subscriber, you can always support our journalism even further with a donation.

Time for the 25th Amendment?

Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One on Oct. 12, 2025. Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Who was the president of the United States in 2020? Donald Trump, right? Obviously. We all know that.

Except perhaps… Donald Trump himself. For years now, Trump and his supporters have bizarrely behaved as if the first Trump presidency ended in 2019. They like to brag about the amazing state of the economy in 2019, while ignoring the soaring unemployment they left behind at the end of 2020. They complain about the COVID lockdowns in 2020, as if the president behind the lockdowns wasn’t… Donald John Trump.

On Friday, Trump went one step further. In fact, the president took a full step right into Crazytown with this post on his Truth Social website:

Got that? The president of the United States thinks ex-Special Counsel Jack Smith and former Biden DOJ alums Merrick Garland and Lisa Monaco “cheated and rigged the 2020 Presidential Election.” Back in 2020, to be clear, Merrick Garland was an appeals court judge, Lisa Monaco was a lawyer in private practice, and Jack Smith was the chief prosecutor at a war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

How, then, did they “rig” the 2020 election when they weren’t in government? Or did they, upon joining the Biden administration in 2021 and 2022, take a time machine and travel back in time to November 2020?

I mean, how is this not completely and utterly deranged from Trump? How are we not in 25th Amendment territory? Nothing Joe Biden ever said, even in that car-crash 2024 televised presidential debate, comes close to this unhinged nonsense from the sitting president.

And, on Saturday, the mad king in the White House took a further step into Crazytown. He increased tariffs on Canada by 10% over current levels because – I kid you not – the Canadians hurt his feelings with a television ad. Yes, really!

“Canada was caught, red handed, putting up a fraudulent advertisement on Ronald Reagan’s Speech on Tariffs,” he declaimed on – where else? – Truth Social, adding: “The sole purpose of this FRAUD was Canada’s hope that the United States Supreme Court will come to their ‘rescue’ on Tariffs that they have used for years to hurt the United States.”

How is this not a parody? How is this even legal? Does this sound like a sufficient national security argument for Trump bypassing congressional authority on tariffs? American families will now have to pay even more in taxes – as that is what tariffs are! – because their president got really mad over a foreign television ad. An ad which, as the New York Times pointed out, “faithfully reproduces Reagan’s words” from 1987, in which the Gipper denounced tariffs.

On Sunday, the King of Crazytown continued his demented and dangerous all-caps ranting online, insisting pregnant women not take Tylenol unless “ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY” and telling parents to avoid the MMR shot.

None of this is remotely normal. There is a clear mental health crisis going on in the Oval Office right now. He is detached from reality. Every politician and pundit, every journalist in the White House press corps, knows this. It should be the biggest story in our media.

But, shamefully, it isn’t.

🗞️ What You Need to Know

• “You’ll go down as a wimp.” That’s what Trump reportedly told his then-vice president, Mike Pence, on Jan. 6, 2021, according to the forthcoming book Retribution from ABC political correspondent Jonathan Karl.

• ICE detains a Brit: UK citizen and Muslim journalist Sami Hamdi was detained by ICE agents at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday, apparently at the urging of pro-Israel, anti-Muslim extremists Laura Loomer and Amy Mek.

• No food for you: As the government shutdown continues, the Trump Department of Agriculture has announced that federal food benefits will not be issued on Nov. 1, falsely claiming Senate Democrats are at fault for this decision.

• Newsom 2028?: California Governor Gavin Newsom teased a potential presidential run in 2028 and said he would consider announcing his candidacy after next year’s midterms.

• US-China deal on the horizon: The US and China are inching closer to a solidified trade deal to handle tariffs and other economic tensions, with a framework for a deal already in place. Trump and President Xi Jinping are set to meet later this week to discuss the deal.

🧠 Pop Quiz!

Who was the last president to invoke Section 3 of the 25th Amendment, which allows a sitting president to voluntarily transfer presidential authority to their vice president?

Keep your eyes out for the answer below!

A Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim Walk Into a… Stadium

On Sunday night, at the Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, an astonishing 13,000 people turned out to back Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral bid, with the election itself now just days away.

But they didn’t just turn out for Mamdani. He was joined on stage for the ‘New York is Not for Sale’ rally by Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As Politico’s Jeff Holton reported from the packed stadium: “This was their first rally all together … a new troika, the three socialists leading the left flank of the Democratic Party. A Jew, a Christian and a Muslim, but all New Yorkers.”

Can any establishment Democrats fill out a stadium with 13,000 people for a non-national election? Isn’t this the kind of energy and enthusiasm that national Democrats and the DNC should be harnessing? And don’t joy-filled public events like this represent a flicker of light in all the current darkness?

As Patrick Gaspard, an informal adviser to Mamdani and former Obama administration alum, tweeted: “I’ve organized everywhere in America and have never experienced Presidential sized crowds for a mayor’s race!”

💬 Quote Unquote

“Possibly.”

Kamala Harris’s response when asked by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg whether she might run for president again.

🌏 Anywhere But America

Irish president-elect Catherine Connolly addresses the audience at the official declaration at Dublin Castle on Oct. 25, 2025. Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

• 🇮🇪 Ireland elected left-wing independent Catherine Connolly for president in a landslide victory over the weekend. Connolly is an outspoken critic of Israel.

• 🇬🇧 Reform MP Sarah Pochin was accused of racism and forced to apologize after she said watching TV ads full of Black and Asian people “drives her mad.”

• 🇦🇷 Argentina’s far-right President Javier Milei led his party to a major victory in this weekend’s legislative elections, which were widely seen as a referendum on the Trump-backed leader’s two years in office and his massive “chainsaw” spending cuts. In the lead-up to the country’s midterm elections, Trump had appeared to condition his promised bailout, which could total up to $40 billion, on Milei’s success at the polls.

• 🇸🇩 Sudanese paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, said it seized a key army headquarters in the starving city of El Fasher in north Darfur, potentially granting them control over all of western Sudan.

• 🇦🇫🇵🇰 Afghanistan has killed five Pakistani soldiers and 25 fighters around the border. This comes as the two countries negotiate a peace deal in Istanbul.

• 🌀 Hurricane Melissa intensified into a Category 5 storm as it approached Jamaica, with landfall expected late Monday into Tuesday.

🚨 Don’t Miss It!

In our acclaimed documentary ‘Who Killed Shireen?’, which investigated the murder of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the occupied West Bank in 2022, an anonymous source from inside the Biden administration was seen in the shadows revealing key details about the US-Israeli cover-up of Shireen’s killing by an Israeli sniper. Later today, you can watch that former US Army officer and member of the Biden administration come out of the shadows and do his first on-camera, on-the-record interview with me for Zeteo. Keep an eye on your inboxes!

☕ What’s the Tea?

Over the weekend, Zeteo’s Prem Thakker sent me the latest tea from inside Bari Weiss’s takeover of CBS News.

“Just a month into her tenure as editor-in-chief of CBS News and as layoffs are set to upend the newsroom she’s supposed to be overseeing, Bari Weiss will be hosting a debate on the 2nd Amendment between Alan Dershowitz – a lawyer who has defended Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Jeffrey Epstein – and Dana Loesch, a radio host and former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association, on November.

VIP ticket holders will get access to an exclusive after-party, where they can mingle with Weiss, staff from Weiss’s The Free Press, and the debaters.”

Dershowitz vs Loesch? Seriously? Ugh. I’m reminded of Henry Kissinger’s line about the Iran-Iraq war: “It’s a pity both sides can’t lose.”

---

🧠 Trivia answer: Joe Biden, on the morning of Nov. 19, 2021, as he underwent a colonoscopy. For 1 hour and 25 minutes, a woman held the powers and duties of the presidency for the first time in American history.

Strange Bedfellows

Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky appeared alongside Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, on Fox of all places!, to condemn Trump’s “extrajudicial killings” in the Caribbean. More of this, please!

📺 Sunday Show Roundup

• On ABC’s ‘This Week’, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed to feel the “pain” that his fellow American soybean farmers are experiencing as a result of China refusing to buy US soybeans during this trade war. This is the same guy estimated to have a net worth of over $500 million.

• On the Bari Weiss-run CBS ‘Face the Nation,’ host Margaret Brennan seemed to press Hakeem Jeffries with some 'gotcha’ questions, suggesting the House minority leader’s use of the term “rigged elections” when discussing the 2026 midterms was akin to Trump’s 2020 election denialism and incitement of insurrection. Jeffries responded, saying he uses the term to describe Trump’s “unprecedented effort” to gerrymander districts in favor of Republicans.

• Also on ‘Face the Nation,’ and in a shock to absolutely nobody, GOP Senator Lindsey Graham said he supports the “potential expanding” of military actions against Venezuela and the Maduro government, “from the sea to the land.” Graham has never met a regime change war he couldn’t get behind.

• But over on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press,’ Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego called out the Trump administration’s decision to strike boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, saying that these strikes are “murder.”

• On CNN’s ‘State of the Union,’ Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said Trump likes the government shutdown because it allows him to “exercise king-like powers” and he is trying to “transition our government from a democracy to something much closer to a totalitarian state.”

🗓️ MARK YOUR CALENDARS

• Monday, Oct. 27: Trump is set to meet with the new far-right, ultra-nationalist Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, as part of his tour of Asia.

• Tuesday, Oct. 28: Missouri Republican Senator Eric Schmitt will hold a hearing focused on politically motivated violence.

• Wednesday, Oct. 29: The suspect in the killing of Charlie Kirk is scheduled to appear in court in Utah. Separately, Trump is scheduled to meet with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and address business leaders at the annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.

• Thursday, Oct. 30: Trump is expected to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, on the final stop of his visit to Asia. Separately, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions will meet to consider “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) wellness influencer Dr. Casey Means’s nomination for US Surgeon General. Plus, the first estimate of the 2025 third-quarter GDP figures is scheduled for release.

• Friday, Oct. 31: A status conference in Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal is expected. The suit is in response to the paper’s reporting on Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein and is part of a broader effort by Trump’s team to intimidate mainstream media outlets.

ICYMI From Zeteo

‘It’s a Hatchet Job!’: Watch Our Heated Debate on Whether Senate Candidate Graham Platner Should Step Down

Trump, Vance, and Hegseth Are Childish Bullies

Why Is Trump’s ‘Peace Plan’ Focused on Deradicalizing Palestinians, Not Israelis?

Zeteo’s Melanie Riehl and Akshay Gokul contributed to this newsletter.

Still want to get Zeteo content, but not this newsletter? You can unsubscribe directly from ‘First Draft’ by going to ‘manage subscription’ in Substack, scrolling down, and toggling the button for ‘First Draft’ off.