A striking trait of the second Trump administration has been its knack for being embroiled in so many scandals that no single one can easily claim top billing.
Consider the latest chatter surrounding Alina Habba, once Trump’s personal defense attorney, who has just accepted a high-paying engagement with Julio Herrera Velutini, a banker from Venezuela. The New York Times reports Habba will pocket $50 million across five years for work described as undefined for a company that barely exists, while Herrera himself received a presidential pardon for a 2025 campaign-finance case.
That scenario exemplifies a routine day at the present White House, where the boundary between private interests and public duties has become commonplace. Some days spotlight the president allegedly diverting taxpayer money by suing the government he leads, or channeling billions of public funds to a foreign mining firm partly owned by his sons. Other days, it’s Trump marketing political access via cryptocurrency ventures, or aides getting snagged in naked pay-to-play schemes. If you’re finding it hard to keep every thread straight, you’re not alone. The scale of alleged wrongdoing runs so deep and wide that zoning in on one issue proves challenging.
Yet this cluster of alleged corruption might be starting to register with voters as the midterm elections draw nearer.
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A recent Fox News poll indicated that “government corruption” sits at the top of voters’ concerns, ahead of inflation and the price of gas. Conservatives are starting to pay attention.
“What they’re saying is, ‘Look, we’re fed up with you getting rich while we get poorer,’” commented former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney this week.
Tim Carney, senior columnist at the conservative Washington Examiner, also points to corruption—and other “avoidable mistakes” such as the Iran conflict and tariffs—as among the main reasons Republicans may prevail in the midterms:
Trump and his family have enriched themselves in this second term in ways more reminiscent of regimes from less-developed regions or Chicago politics than of any prior administration. He and his relatives run a financial outfit that has drawn substantial investments from the government of Qatar. He has sold influence by marketing cryptocurrency of little intrinsic value. The IRS he controls reached a settlement promising him $1.8 billion (a settlement later voided by a judge).
Trump isn’t on the ballot in November, of course. And many voters might not be able to recite the particulars of any single Trump scandal. Nevertheless, this could end up shaping the core narrative of the second Trump presidency, and there’s growing consensus that Republicans have allowed (or aided and abetted) his pattern of conduct, thereby justifying giving Democrats a chance to curb it.
The Trump corruption issue resembles the Biden cognitive-decline issue in one key respect: Everyone around the president, or even those who support him at a distance, should be questioned about it, and their evasions or claims of ignorance should be weighed like dumbbells.
— Matt Welch (@MattWelch) October 20, 2026
Vice President J.D. Vance told journalist Mark Halperin this week that he has “never seen any evidence that anyone is selling access to the president.” When Halperin pressed him, Vance added: “What I’d say is I don’t think there’s evidence that the Trump family has grown wealthier through politics,” the vice president asserted.
Thus either Vance isn’t noticing something, or he’s choosing to mislead. “Kudos to Vance for offering the best argument available to him,” writes Daniel Foster in National Review. “The trouble is it’s still pretty weak.”
The internet nearly collapsed on Wednesday as digital-security teams and site operators hurried to patch two flaws in the PHP language that underpins a large swath of the web.
“Since its birth in the 1990s, PHP has evolved into a core scripting language for the web and is used across countless sites and apps,” explains Wired. “From content-management systems like WordPress and Drupal to e-commerce platforms like Magento from Adobe, PHP remains foundational.”
With fears that hackers or AI-driven agents could exploit the vulnerability, numerous sites were temporarily taken offline. The National Security Agency and analogous agencies in the UK and the EU issued warnings. Even Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, urged site operators to treat the threat seriously.
The sort of advanced-AI capability that could weaponize such flaws makes these risks all the more serious. In this instance, the issue was also identified with assistance from AI.
“Ryan Austin, a researcher based in California, uncovered the defects with input from GPT-5.6 Sol, one of OpenAI’s most capable models, during an August audit of PHP’s source code,” reports The Wall Street Journal. Another expert had flagged the problem years earlier, but it remained unfixed because it was deemed “too difficult to exploit” by human attackers.
This may represent the future state of our digital world. OpenAI stated on Wednesday, “Given the severity and widespread use of PHP, this counts as one of the most consequential security issues in recent memory. It shows how AI can surface security gaps with internet-scale consequences, while these same capabilities can enable adversaries to quickly fashion new attacks and tools.”
(A nod to Reason‘s web development crew for keeping us online today and every day.)
“Fanciful fiction.” Media outlets also continue to confront non-digital threats stemming from articles and polls that irk the president.
The White House pressed Politico on Wednesday with unspecified “consequences” for running a series earlier this month about White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, accusing the pieces of peddling “fanciful fiction.” If the pieces aren’t withdrawn, it would trigger “an immediate review of Politico’s relationship with the White House, and, naturally, consideration of all other suitable and available legal remedies,” White House counsel William O. Scharf wrote to the publisher.
Meanwhile, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr issued hazy warnings to broadcasters who air what he called “Fake Polls” designed to “distort typical voter-turnout and enthusiasm patterns.”
Such threats affront the First Amendment, of course. Yet they arise from a deeper concern: the very existence of the FCC.
The real problem is obvious: the FCC is run by an authoritarian fool. But the bigger problem is that the agency has so many tools that an authoritarian fool could easily wield. https://t.co/Q4IJXntkOy
— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) October 21, 2026
QUICK HITS
- A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta (the company behind Facebook and Instagram) to pay $25 billion for deceiving users about data privacy. Last month, a jury found Meta in violation of the state’s consumer-protection laws 43 million times.
- Officials are attempting to blame Elon Musk for a Starlink slow-down that hampered Ukrainian missile defenses. Musk contends the decision rested with the U.S. military and Trump.
- Peter Thiel has joined most Americans in viewing Trump’s Iran War as a misstep. Nevertheless, the U.S. and Israel are reportedly preparing another round of strikes after the elections.
- The analyses backing California’s high-speed-rail project feature quirks like tallying bees “one by one” and assessing the train’s effects on waterfowl and shorebirds. That approach arguably consumed 16 years and $15 billion to accomplish relatively little.
- Clearly, a metaphor in need of a punchline.
A group dispatched by Hegseth’s crew in February tried to relocate the historic globe long associated with Eisenhower’s World War II leadership.
They removed it from a Pentagon Army office, then dropped it. pic.twitter.com/vTjWdYXn0k
— Dan Lamothe (@DanLamothe) October 22, 2026
