Trump will hold a rally tonight in Alabama as part of his midterm elections blitz to 17 states.
More clashes are on the way for President Donald Trump as the Supreme Court weighs cases involving key parts of his agenda. Kevin Dietsch / Getty
Vice President JD Vance will head to Alaska on Monday to campaign ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The state features statewide races this cycle for governor, House and Senate, with the latter contest becoming more competitive than previously expected.
GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan is running against former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola. Peltola has previously won statewide — she was elected to the state’s lone House seat in 2022.
Further complicating the race is the presence of a third-party candidate on the ballot who also goes by the name Dan Sullivan. Republicans have accused Democrats of recruiting the latter Sullivan to run and confuse voters who may vote for him thinking they’re voting for the incumbent senator.
A statistically unproductive Congress has officially left town until after the midterm elections, punting a long list of tasks into the lame-duck session.
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The Republican-controlled Congress must:
And then, Republicans want to pass deregulation bills that are conservative priorities and, potentially, another Republican party-line spending bill — which may include an extension of the debt limit.
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For the first time in the nearly 50-year history of the event, the Kennedy Center Honors will not be held inside the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts this year, the center announced Friday.
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With the main building currently closed to the public, and safety assessments still underway, the center announced it plans to move the celebration of American performing arts to Capital One Arena in downtown Washington, D.C., which seats around 20,000 people compared to the 2,300 seats in the center’s Opera House, where the awards ceremony has traditionally been held.
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President Trump is expected to name Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as the White House’s artificial intelligence czar, according to a source familiar with the matter.
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The president teased the move this week and will most likely announce it on social media as early as Friday, the source said.
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio has waived a restriction on $320 million in military aid to Egypt that had been previously withheld over human rights concerns, citing Egypt’s help in dealing with Iran since the conflict began earlier this year.
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The State Department said Thursday that Rubio had signed off on the waiver “in the interest of U.S. national security.”
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Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with GOP Senate leadership, is pausing its ad spending in the North Carolina Senate race and launching a new ad effort in Kansas.
The spending moves, first reported by Semafor, were confirmed by two people familiar with the decision. One person said the group has not paused spending in the Georgia Senate race, where Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff has also been leading GOP Rep. Mike Collins.
In September, SLF spent more than $17 million on the North Carolina race, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact. The group has another $19 million in ads booked through the end of October.
But the decision to not to spend additional resources in the perennial battleground is a signal that the race between former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and former RNC Chairman Michael Whatley is drifting further out of reach for the GOP.
The shift to Kansas is also a sign that the race between GOP Sen. Roger Marshall and Democratic pastor Adam Hamilton is increasingly in play. Trump won Kansas by 16 points in 2024 and Democrats have not won a Senate race there since 1932.
In a secret meeting at the White House complex this summer, an aide to Stephen Miller laid out the plan: To make it easier for states to round up and institutionalize mentally ill homeless people, the Trump administration was pushing a drastic policy change that would weaken the rights of millions of disabled Americans.
Hugo Dwyer, one of those seated around the wooden conference table, couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
The strategy described by Miller’s aide, Daniel Wasserman, threatened to roll back decades of progress in the disability rights movement — all to serve the president’s demand to clear homeless encampments in U.S. cities.
“I really cannot support this,” Dwyer, an advocate for people with intellectual disabilities, recalled telling Wasserman. “You’re talking about forcing people into institutional settings.”
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Trump announced this morning South Korea that South Korea is investing $8.4 billion in an oil recovery project, though he didn’t provide additional details.
“I am thrilled to announce the Republic of Korea Deal keeps getting BETTER! 8.4 Billion Dollars for an enhanced Oil Recovery Project. Producing more Oil and Gas means American Energy Dominance and Energy Security in the World for the Future!” he wrote on Truth Social.
It comes after Trump announced a plan this week for South Korea to invest $54 billion to build a natural gas pipeline in Alaska, part of a broader South Korean investment of $200 billion as part of the U.S.-Korea trade and investment agreement announced last year.
Trump is set to hold a rally in Alabama tonight as part of his midterm elections blitz to 17 states.
The president will deliver remarks around 6 p.m. ET in Mobile, according to the White House. Alabama isn’t considered a battleground state, though there are a few notable matchups in the upcoming general election.
Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville is running for governor against Democratic former Sen. Doug Jones; and GOP Rep. Barry Moore is running for Senate against Democrat Everett Wess. NBC News rates both races as solid Republican.
The president is expected to travel to at least 17 states before the midterm elections. Last night, he held a rally in Oklahoma. Trump has acknowledged in recent days that Republicans face an uphill battle in keeping control of Congress, noting that the party in power has often lost historically in midterm elections.
After suffering massive voter registration losses in the wake of the last presidential election, Democrats have stemmed the bleeding in several key states heading into this year’s midterms, according to an NBC News Decision Desk analysis.
A polling location in Augusta, Maine, during a primary election in June. Graeme Sloan / Bloomberg via Getty
NBC News’ Decision Desk analyzed voter file data from TargetSmart, a progressive data firm, for seven of the states that were the closest in the 2024 election and which registered voters by party: Arizona, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. From late 2024 through late 2025, Republicans significantly improved their voter registration margin over Democrats in all seven states, including by roughly 100,000 in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
But from late 2025 through the middle of this year, Democrats managed to reverse, though not completely erase, those losses in five of them, adding more registrants on net than Republicans in Arizona, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And in New Hampshire and North Carolina, Democrats have slowed the decline.
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Trump’s harsh criticisms may still be ringing in the ears of Supreme Court justices when they return to the bench for a new nine-month term next week.
In the final months of its previous term and over its summer break, the conservative-majority court, which includes three Trump appointees, ruled against Trump on some of the issues he holds most dear.
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Vice President Vance acknowledged yesterday that Republicans face an “uphill climb” in next month’s midterm elections — and that the results may be a data point he reviews as he decides whether to run for president in 2028.
“Historically there’s always a bit of an uphill climb, and I think you definitely sense that,” Vance said in an interview with NBC News. “I also think you can sense a sense of cautious optimism, in the sense that, you know, people feel like the numbers are sort of moving, maybe in our direction.”
He added: “Politically, there’s just a recognition that it’s always going to be hard to win a midterm when you have the White House, the Senate and the House.”
Vance spoke aboard Air Force Two shortly after it landed on a return trip from Lakeland, Florida, where he campaigned for Sen. Ashley Moody and Rep. Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor. It was his latest headlining gig at a rally meant to boost support for the party’s candidates in what is expected to be a challenging year for the GOP.
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