News

World leaders grant Trump two more years; his own party is already distancing itself.

By The LodgersThe Euro Desk · the morning edition, 6 November 2026

Today we are making a roast with its timer set in somebody else's kitchen, which is not a dish you can get over here. You will need one president with two years left on that timer, one approval rating of 32 percent recorded on 2 November, one day before the midterm elections, and a great many people elsewhere who have already done the sums on when it comes out of the oven. A midterm is the vote held two years into a four-year term; it cannot remove a president, only his majority.

CLIVE: Timer. I've been on a deadline since March and nobody has offered me so much as a word for it.

GARY: You've had the same deadline since March and drafted nothing but excuses. I'll have the toaster in pieces before you finish a stanza.

You will be looking for the vote that removes him early. There is no such vote; the midterms are not that, and nothing here says otherwise. What happened instead is quieter: Republicans began distancing themselves from the president after the midterms, and on American television Jimmy Fallon asked whether the only person left standing by him would turn out to be Melania.

KEITH: A toaster in pieces still sells for parts if you list it right. I'll have 'Distancing' tea towels off the line by Thursday, no faces, all profit.

CLIVE: Profit. You'd monetise a habit of criticizing if you could, Keith — and knowing you, the invoice is already drafted.

GARY: Drafted. Everything of his is 'drafted' and never finished, same as the invoice, same as the poem, same as the washing-up rota.

France 24 has the headline as 'Leaders all over the world understand that Trump is only there for two more years & then he's gone,' crediting the political scientist Ian Bremmer with calling the midterms 'the most consequential electoral reversal for a governing party in more than half a century.' The same week, the New York Times had Fallon's joke about Melania.

The party, taken by both ends and turned over, shows the same thing underneath: the New York Times has Republicans distancing themselves from the president since the midterms. On 26 October, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term in Brazil, defeating Flávio Bolsonaro, son of Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year sentence; American Democrats and world leaders congratulated a president who criticises this one.

By the same week, the promise called 'America First' had already gone back in the pan unfinished, and the discontent had reached past the usual opposition into his own coalition.

This serves the leaders who have done the arithmetic on who comes after him, and a party rearranging its own seating for that. The people still waiting on the promise pay for both, with two years left on a clock nobody in this kitchen set.

ROB: The boiler's been out since March as well, and we're still two years off anyone fixing that, same clock as everyone else's.

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ZERO CHARGES

Grand conspiracy probe has spent three lead prosecutors since September and filed zero charges

By LouOne More Question · the morning edition, 6 November 2026

My nephew is in his second year of law school, and this term they handed him an assignment: pick a live federal case, follow it all semester, turn in a file. He picked this one. He keeps the lawyers on a sheet of notebook paper at the front of the file, which I thought was a nice piece of bookkeeping, and the trouble he brought out to the porch Sunday is that he's running out of lines, because every few weeks he has to cross a name off and write a new one under it. He wanted to know from me whether that was normal. He takes my opinion seriously, God help him, so I said I'd go through what I had.

Here's what I had. Hold on. It's in here somewhere. Ah, here.

Fox News, the tenth of September: "Joseph diGenova resigned from his Justice Department role investigating the alleged 'Grand Conspiracy' surrounding the Trump-Russia investigations." Next morning CBS filled it in — diGenova had been "tapped by Attorney General Todd Blanche to supervise the 'grand conspiracy' investigation targeting Obama- and Biden-era officials," and he told CBS he had resigned. That's the first name my nephew crossed out. And here's the question he asked me, which I could not answer for him: if the supervisor is gone on the tenth, whose case is it on the eleventh?

Three days later — the fourteenth — CBS again: John Brennan, the former CIA director, "was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in Florida as part of the 'grand conspiracy' investigation into Obama- and Biden-era officials." A grand jury was seated. A date was set. Government paper went out to a man with a lawyer. My nephew asked whose signature goes on a subpoena like that. I wrote the question down and left the line blank.

The twenty-ninth of September, ABC News: "Another Trump loyalist tasked to help lead a controversial conspiracy probe targeting President Trump's political foes has resigned from the DOJ." Second name off the sheet, nineteen days after the first. Then Friday — that's yesterday — the Washington Examiner: "The top federal prosecutor in South Florida resigned Friday," Jason Reding Quiñones, "whose office oversaw the investigation into the origins and handling of Trump-Russia collusion allegations." The Attorney General announced it. ABC called that prosecutor "the U.S. attorney tasked with leading" the probe. Third name, and my nephew's sheet is now mostly cross-outs. Same Friday, Fox had John Eisenberg, who runs the National Security Division, stepping down as well, one day after Harmeet Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division said she'd be leaving.

Now, I know what you're going to tell me: lawyers come and go, that's government. Fine. But I've got a car in the garage that has needed a fan belt since April, and here is what I have to show for it — three shops, three work orders, three diagnostic invoices, and a car that will not turn over. Last month my wife stood in the garage door and asked me a fair question. Which one of those pieces of paper, she said, is the repair. Not the estimate. Not the appointment. Which one is the car running. I couldn't hand her one. The pile got taller, the car stayed exactly where it was, and the pile and the car are two different kinds of paperwork.

So that's what I brought back to my nephew, and I'd put it to the Department in their own words off their own announcements. Since the tenth of September, we have three announcements about who is leaving. How many announcements are there about who has been charged?

Oh — I'm sorry, one more thing and then I'll let you get back to your afternoon. The grand jury. The one in Florida, the fourteenth of September, the one a former CIA director was subpoenaed to sit in front of. Whose office was that in? And of the names my nephew crossed out, which one ran that office until Friday?

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Trump's gilded remodel is now a national monument that still needs Congress's permission to be one

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the morning edition, 6 November 2026

Three rooms. Not one — three: the Oval Office, the Outer Oval Office, and the Cabinet Room, all of them a "national monument" by proclamation this week. You are thinking of cliffs and battlefields. Think of carpet. The designation protects no canyon; it protects a decorating scheme from substantial changes by whoever sits in the room next. Asked in October what he would miss most about the White House, he spoke about the office. Not the country. The office. Then came an order making the remodel permanent, and after it the proclamation making it a monument — and ABC reports he indicated the proclamation would have to be ratified by Congress. Ratified. A thing that declares itself permanent and then applies for permission ... and until the permission arrives, the gold stays up. That is the handsome part of the drafting. The encumbrance operates from the day of signature; the ratification is for later. Three rooms of the working executive, held in perpetuity against the people who come next. The gold stays.

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Newsom commutes 548 death sentences by invoking the clause that hands hundreds back to four judges

By LouOne More Question · the morning edition, 6 November 2026

My nephew Ronnie is in his second year of law school and I have learned to let him finish his sentences. He came by the porch Thursday night in the rain, and the dog put a wet paw on his good shoe, and he didn't even look down, because he had already seen the wire copy on the railing and he wanted to know why I was reading the speech instead of the document. A constitution isn't a speech, he says; it's a list of locks and a list of who holds which key. Then he made me go get the notebook.

So. Thursday, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, announced he is commuting every death sentence in the state — 548 of them — to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Hold on, I've got his words here somewhere, I had the page folded into the raincoat pocket, it's the only coat I own and everything lives in it — ah. Here. He said capital punishment is "morally wrong." Ronnie had no argument with that. I have no argument with that. Does anybody at this bar have an argument with that?

Here's where he slowed me down. Same wire page, a couple of inches under the governor's sentence: "The state Supreme Court will have the final say in hundreds of those cases." Ronnie had me read that out loud, twice, and then he explained the clause the way you'd explain it to a man holding a dog's leash: in California, for somebody convicted of a felony twice, a governor's clemency needs the state supreme court to recommend it, four of the seven justices concurring. That isn't Ronnie talking, that's the page he pulled up on his phone. And it wasn't only Ronnie — a district attorney told a paper the same day that the commutation faces a legal hurdle, and a criminal defense attorney went on television and said the move was impossible to view outside a political lens. The moral case and the sign-off are printed on the same day, in the same story, about the same 548 people. How does a man read both of those and know which one he signed?

I went through my own clippings after Ronnie left, because he says you date everything. In September an editorial page called the governor's deference to Kamala Harris "a masterstroke" — their word, not mine, I wrote it down because I had to look it up. On October 2, Tennessee halted all of its executions after Christa Pike was left in critical condition. On October 20, the governor of Alabama commuted one death row sentence. One. A name, a signature, and a sentence that was different the next morning.

Now the part I actually understand, because it's in my garage. The opener on the big door is mine. I bought it, I hung it, I pay for the current it draws. My wife's father, when he lived with us, ran a slide bolt through the track on the inside, because he didn't trust the opener, and he was right not to. So I stand in the driveway in the rain and press my own button, and the motor hums, the chain pulls, the door lifts an inch and a half and stops, because his bolt is in the track and the bolt doesn't know whose button it is. The door isn't up. It isn't down either. It has been announced. And if I tell you my car got out Friday morning, you'd be right to ask whether the door went up or whether I just heard the motor from the driveway.

Oh — excuse me, before you go. One thing and I'll leave you to your drink. The announcement says all 548. The page says the court decides hundreds of them. So Friday morning, in those hundreds, which sentence are those men serving — the one he announced, or the one they had on Wednesday? And how many people have to sign before that question has an answer?

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WAR CRIMINAL CLAIM

Accused of being a war criminal, Hegseth defends the Iran war instead and vows to stay

By ChipStaff Writer · the morning edition, 6 November 2026

Secretary Pete Hegseth has an answer, and it has not changed since September. He will not back down.

On September 2, Senator Thom Tillis — a former member of the Senate Armed Services Committee — stood in front of cameras and asked President Trump to fire Hegseth over what Tillis called "inept management" of the military. The next day, Frank Kendall, who ran the Air Force until last year, told CNN the Pentagon under Hegseth had gone "dysfunctional." The Secretary did not answer either man. He had better things to do. Or — he had one thing to do, and it took him two months to get around to it.

That thing arrived on October 29, two months after Tillis asked for his job: Hegseth fired Brett Sylvia, the Joint Staff's top planner, over an alleged leak, with roughly a fifth of the senior officer corps slated to follow him out. This is called discipline. It is actually the Secretary deciding who gets removed before anyone else gets the chance to decide it for him.

Eight days before that firing, on October 21, current and former Pentagon officials were already telling The Telegraph they were prepared to "spill their guts" to whichever chamber Democrats were about to retake. They were right about the chamber. On Thursday, November 5, two days after the midterm losses France 24 called a "setback," Hegseth released a video message. He called the Iran war "courageous and historic" and vowed to fight any effort in Congress to impeach him.

The next day, Friday, carried two items the video had not addressed. Fox News reported that Representative Thomas Massie plans to reintroduce articles of impeachment next week, with the post-midterm math now working against the Secretary. And Wes Bryant, a senior Pentagon targeting adviser and policy analyst pushed out of his job last year, told The Intercept that the strikes Hegseth ordered in the Caribbean and the Pacific are "state terrorism," that Hegseth is "100% a war criminal," that he "needs to be prosecuted."

None of that required the Secretary to back down from anything. It only required him, once, to say what, exactly, he was refusing to back down from — and he picked the one war nobody on Friday was accusing him of a crime in.

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THE WARNINGS

Trump vowed 'zero chance' of firing Wiles three weeks ago, then installed the aide called 'terrifying' instead.

By The LodgersThe Euro Desk · the afternoon edition, 6 November 2026

Today we are making a reshuffle. At home a government can lose an election badly and still hand out a promotion within weeks; you will need two chambers of Congress, lost in a landslide, an outgoing chief of staff who was the first woman to hold the job, and the aide waiting to take it.

CLIVE: Promotion. I have had none here, and I am drafting the shortage into verse.

GARY: You've drafted that verse since the kettle went, still broken. Give me the wardrobe and a hammer instead.

Begin before the vote. On the 15th of October the president called reports of trouble 'TOTAL FAKE'; the next day he put the odds at 'zero chance,' saying she was 'going to be here for a long time.'

On the 19th a former deputy press secretary called replacing her with his policy deputy 'terrifying'; on the 30th a watchdog group found 'glaring inconsistencies' in that deputy's disclosures — Common Dreams' description of a man who, it says, wants immigrants deported over paperwork.

ROB: Hammer. That's your answer to most things, and the damp report's wanted one since the inspection, still under the boiler with the rest of this paperwork.

KEITH: Boiler or not, there's an angle — bottle the damp as British damp and sell it by Thursday. Beats arguing over whose paperwork that is.

Then came the vote: Republicans lost both the House and the Senate. Days later the president announced the change. 'I wanted to make a change,' he said, folding in what CBS News called 'the major staffing shakeup.' Susie Wiles, first woman to hold the job, was out, effective Monday; in her place, Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff for policy, who has worked with the president since his first campaign in 2016.

In January, ICE agents shot dead two protesters in Minneapolis; Miller faced criticism ahead of the promotion. Hakeem Jeffries called him 'a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist' who 'should be eradicated like a malignant tumor'; Robert Garcia's advice was shorter: 'lawyer up.'

GARY: Bottled damp by Thursday — is that the plan fixing this roof? I'll believe it when the stair bucket stays empty.

CLIVE: Empty bucket, full sonnet — I'll have 'eradicated like a malignant tumour' in by supper, if the rhyme behaves.

The Guardian, read here as plainly as any paper, calls him 'the architect of his sweeping immigration crackdown.' At home the same appointment is 'the major staffing shakeup,' CBS News's own phrase.

You will be looking for the vote that is supposed to follow a defeat this size. There is none in here: the president simply announced the change himself, and that was that.

A chief of staff with 'glaring inconsistencies' in his own disclosures is not about to go asking anyone else for theirs first.

Miller gets the West Wing; Wiles, after being first, gets the door. The bill, as ever, goes to whoever he decides next needs to produce their paperwork.

ROB: Supper's got a queue already — behind Keith's bottled damp, behind whoever's paperwork gets asked for next.

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Cornell votes no confidence in its president, then confidence, same afternoon.

By LouOne More Question · the afternoon edition, 6 November 2026

My nephew is in his second year of law school, and when he comes home he likes to use words the rest of us only borrow. Saturday he was helping me get the fan belt loose in the garage, and I made the mistake of asking him what a "vote of no confidence" actually does, since Cornell's faculty senate had just cast one, 75 to 50, on Friday, November 6th, after the kind of case nobody wants to explain to a nephew.

I should be straightforward about what the case is, because the vote doesn't make sense without it. No criminal charges came out of it. Students around the country held a day of action over it on October 9th. A labor history professor named Paul Ortiz drafted the no-confidence resolution back on October 6th; the faculty senate debated it on October 14th, debated it again on October 28th, and voted on it, finally, this Friday. Seventy-five in favor, fifty against, five abstaining, five not voting at all, according to the email the senate sent its own members that afternoon. That's the number I keep coming back to just this once — seventy-five to fifty — because it's the only number in this whole thing anybody actually counted out loud.

My nephew said the vote is "symbolic," which is the word every outlet used for it, and symbolic, he explained, means it does not remove anybody from a job. It expresses an opinion. I asked him whose opinion changes anything, and he said that's not a legal question, that's a different major.

What I wanted him to explain, and what I'm not sure he could, was this: the same day, the Cornell board of trustees backed President Michael Kotlikoff. Not next week. Not after a review. The same Friday the faculty said no confidence, the body that actually employs the man said the opposite — confidence — about the same administration, over the same case, in the same building, more or less. Is a word still doing its job when two different rooms down the hall from each other use it to mean the opposite thing on the same afternoon?

My nephew didn't have an answer for that one either, which I respected him for, because I didn't have one either. I just had the belt, and the wrench, and the fact that the same wrench loosens a bolt turned one way and tightens it turned the other, and nobody would call that wrench broken for doing both. Is "confidence" more like that wrench, or is it more like the belt — a thing that's either on there holding the engine together or it isn't, with nothing in between?

The dog wanted out around then, so we stepped onto the porch for a minute. When we came back to the garage, I asked him one more thing, because I'd almost let it go without asking. On October 4th, before any of the votes, before the lawsuit had even finished causing its first round of outrage, Kotlikoff told the Guardian he'd take "a serious look" at fraternities on campus. That was more than a month before his own board sat down and voted him their confidence.

So — excuse me, one more question before you head out — did that serious look ever finish? Because I went back through what's in front of me, and I don't see where anybody reported that it did. If a review hasn't come back yet, what exactly did the board have in front of it when it decided, on the same day the faculty said no, to say yes?

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New York Post credits socialist wave for historic Democratic win, calls same win proof voters reject socialism.

By LouOne More Question · the afternoon edition, 6 November 2026

My nephew is in his second year of law school, and when he called this week about his car — the transmission again, that car hates him specifically — he ended up telling me about something called judicial estoppel. I wrote the word down twice because I wasn't sure I had it right. He said it's what happens when somebody takes one position in one room and a different position in another room, about the same facts. He said courts tend to notice. I asked him what happens when nobody's under oath, just two pieces in the same newspaper. He said that's not really his class yet.

I had those two pieces open on the table. Both from the same paper, both dated the same day. I wrote them down because I wanted to look at them next to each other. The first says the Democratic Socialists of America "notched historic victories" on Tuesday and sent "a new wave of left-wing lawmakers to Congress." I read that part twice. The second piece, same paper, same page of my notes, says that very election is proof that voters want "moderation, not socialism." I've been sitting with those two sentences for a couple of days now, and I still don't know which one the paper means for me to believe when I turn the page.

Is a wave of new lawmakers also, somehow, the proof that voters didn't want new lawmakers? That's the part I keep bringing to my nephew, and he keeps telling me to ask a different kind of lawyer.

I called the bank this week about my own statement, which I never love looking at, and the woman on the phone told me the number was thin. I stood in line a few days later behind a man refinancing something, and the loan officer looked at a number not so different from mine and told him it was a strong number for a man his age. Same bank. Same kind of number on the page. I'm not saying either one of them was wrong. I'm asking which window you'd rather be standing at when the number comes up.

I went back further, because my nephew says you check the earlier filing before you argue the one in front of you. On October 3rd, a different outlet wrote that the DSA has a believability problem with older Black voters, while younger voters, in their words, want to take more risks. That's a month before the election, one newsroom describing a party splitting down an age line — not a wave, not a rejection, just a split, in October, before anybody had a result to argue about.

I'm not a lawyer, and I want that on the record before my nephew reads this, because he's going to be one, and he'd tell me a fact can sit in two different filings and still be the same fact underneath. He didn't say that about this story. I never told him about this story. He didn't have to.

Oh — before you go. The piece that called the count historic and the piece that called the same count a rejection of what made it historic ran in the same paper, on the same day. I know I already brought this up once, and I'm sorry to come back to it. But I never found the part that says a newsroom can file the wave and file against the wave and still only be reading one number. Did they file against the same count they'd just called historic?

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