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The White House is forecasting a rough November for congressional Republicans.In private briefings, attorneys at the White House Counsel’s Office are preparing executive branch staff for a blue wave in the 2026 elections, The Washington Post reported Monday.The 30-minute briefings feature a PowerPoint presentation detailing how congressional oversight works and best practices for handling it, reported the Post. Other components of the past-due education involve guidance on how to respond to congressional inquiries in a timely manner.“It’s obvious to everyone that it’s very likely,” one attending official told the Post. “It was a sober-eyed conversation.”A White House official said that the meetings were “nothing new” and that the counsel’s office has provided oversight guidance to relevant stakeholders since Donald Trump returned to office.Yet multiple sources that spoke with the Post explained that recent meetings with the office were acutely focused on the midterms and their fallout. Trump, who was once a golden ticket for the Republican Party at the ballot box, has in his second term cooked up a litany of issues, any one of which could be a death knell for conservatives come November.In the 15 months since he returned to America’s highest office, Trump has launched the U.S. into a war with Iran, sparking a global energy crisis that has raised the cost of living pretty much everywhere. He also invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its leader, Nicolás Maduro, axed thousands of staffers from the federal government and crippled some government agencies, and used his office to target his political opponents. He has hobbled America’s press, sowed doubt and distrust in the country’s democratic elections, undermined the judiciary system, pardoned hundreds of people who served his personal interests—such as those who attacked Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021—imposed nonsensical tariffs on U.S. trading partners, aggressed America’s international alliances, abused the purpose of executive orders, and endorsed violent immigration policies and detention centers that have been compared to concentration camps, among other issues.His lagging popularity has been reflected in nationwide polls: 62 percent of Americans disapprove of the president, according to an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll published Friday, a growth of two percentage points since the poll was previously conducted in February.Despite the cost of his own influence, the president has placed enormous pressure on his party to win, well aware of the consequences that await him if they don’t.“You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump said in January. “I’ll get impeached.”

Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post and, with his wife, Lauren Sanchez, he’s an honorary co-chair of Monday evening’s Met Gala. The Post cost Bezos a reported $100 million last year in losses, prompting him to lay off one-third of the newsroom. The Met Gala co-chairmanships set back Bezos a reported $10 to $20 million, plus ancillary costs like the $1 million per month that Sanchez reportedly spends on her wardrobe so she can get taken seriously by Anna Wintour (who runs the Gala and asked the Bezoses to bankroll it this year). Let’s call Bezos’s total Met Gala costs $30 million.Both the Post and the Gala might look to you and me like philanthropic ventures because, well, they are. Bezos, however, regards the two very differently. The Post holds governments accountable, both at home and abroad, as my stepdaughter Claire Parker, the Post’s Cairo bureau chief, explained eloquently in January—shortly before she was laid off, along with most of the Post’s foreign correspondents and local correspondents. Holding governments accountable is obviously a societal function of vital importance. But Bezos has said: “This is not a philanthropic endeavor. For me, I really believe, a healthy newspaper that has an independent newsroom should be self-sustaining.”The Met Gala funds the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, which houses 33,000 objects representing fashionable dress and accessories from the sixteenth century to the present, none of them on permanent public view because aging textiles don’t preserve well when exposed to the light. The Costume Institute doesn’t make the cut for my annual giving list, but to each their own. Bezos hasn’t commented publicly on whether the Costume Institute should be self-sustaining, but if it ceased to be a charity that would deprive Bezos of the opportunity to raise his and Sanchez’s status in the fashion world by giving money to it.The punch line is that while the Post is nowhere near self-sustaining, and never will be, the Costume Institute is already there. According to a May 1 report by Vanessa Friedman in The New York Times, the Costume Institute has since 2016 been putting Met Gala funds into an endowment that will allow it “to potentially support its own basic operations for the foreseeable future.” The gala raised $166.5 million over the past decade. Operating costs for the Costume Institute are a modest $5 million per year, or $50 million over 10 years, which should mean the endowment has $116 million already. The average annual draw on a museum endowment, the Times reports, is 5 percent, which in this case would throw off $5.8 million per year. The Times’ Friedman says the Costume Institute will need a couple more Met Galas to top off its endowment, but that strikes me as generous. The Met Gala is already unnecessary.To cancel the Met Gala, however, would be unthinkable. Demand for it among rich New Yorkers and Hollywood celebrities is way too high to contemplate so rash a move. I therefore propose to turn it into an annual fundraiser for The Washington Post, which has no endowment.Obviously Bezos no longer feels he acquires social cachet through bankrolling what, until recently, was one of America’s three remaining great newspapers. If he prefers instead to bankroll the Met Gala, then why not use its status value to shore up The Washington Post? Attendees could still dress up in expensive fashions, and the event could still be held in New York. There’s a precedent for that: Katharine Graham announced her elevation to Post publisher 60 years ago by letting Truman Capote throw her a Black and White ball in the Grand Ballroom of New York’s Plaza Hotel. People still talk about that party. In similar spirit, Bezos could host an annual charity ball to celebrate that he owns the Post. For legal reasons, he’d probably have to convert the Post into a nonprofit, but as we’ve seen, it isn’t contributing to charity that Bezos minds so much as not extracting social capital from the transaction.Of all the ways to show off how rich you are, Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), “admitted expenditure for display is more obviously present, and is, perhaps, more universally practiced, in the manner of dress than in any other line of consumption.” That extends well past the demonstration that you can afford to buy an expensive outfit. The manner of dress should also “make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor.” The elaborate Met Gala getups that women in particular display don’t stop at demonstrating that the wearer could never work in them. They also raise some questions about whether the wearer is too ethereal to go to the ladies’ room. The Washington Post’s Maura Judkis published a groundbreaking report on this question Monday, revealing that a class of assistants exists whose “path to rising up the fashion and celebrity ranks includes helping stars who are sewn into their own underpants onto and off of the toilet.”Would the beautiful people come to a dress-up ball in New York whose charity was The Washington Post? Of course they would. It’s doubtful many of these people ever gave a damn about the Costume Institute, and while some might resent this or that Post story about themselves, most would appreciate the free publicity. Politicians would have more reason to boycott the Post, but not many attend the Met Gala now (for instance, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a no-show this year), so that’s no great loss. A key to success would be to keep lowly Washington Post staffers away unless they were covering the event. They’ll just have to gratify their own status urges by attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, whose sartorial demands are more achievable. Anna Wintour could still run the gala if she wants, and perhaps the Met could be persuaded to host in exchange for a few free advertorials spotlighting travel-worthy exhibitions like its current Raphael blockbuster.Every Met Gala has a theme, and every year that theme is lame. This year, it’s “Fashion Is Art” (which it goddamned well better be if the Met spends $5 million per year on it). Last year it was “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” which was an attempt to suggest that fashion had something to do with racial justice, which it doesn’t. Think how much easier it would be to dream up Met Gala themes for annual balls that bankrolled The Washington Post. This year’s could be: “If We’re Going to War In the Middle East Let’s Have Bureaus There!” Next year it could be: “Bring Back Book Reviews!” or “Let’s Cover City Council!” Invitations could stipulate that attending the Met Gala incurs no obligation to read a newspaper or, indeed, to read anything. In fact, the fewer attendees there were who read newspapers, the easier it would be to glamorize newspapers into something exotic and mysterious and available only to an elect few. The business is halfway there already.A simpler solution, of course, would be for Bezos to stop looking for frivolous charities to waste money on and focus on the philanthropic concern that suffers daily from his stinginess. Yes, the Post is an expensive charity, but Bezos lost one-third as much money this year to the Costume Institute, which didn’t need a cent. Also, give me a break, the man is worth $277 billion. If he peeled off $3 billion to create a Post endowment and then walked away, that would throw off more than enough each year to run the Post properly for the rest of his life. When he died, Bezos could leave it more. He could still live like a pasha until then.

From Poland and Hungary to Brazil and the US, journalist Daniel Trilling dives into what we can learn about fighting fascism in his new book, 'If We Tolerate This.'

President Donald Trump derailed his own speech Monday to insist how mentally healthy he is, following new poll data showing that a record high of Americans think he’s lost his mind. “I feel the same as I felt 50 years ago, I don’t know,” Trump told the audience at a small-business summit at the White House.“I’ll say, ‘I’m not feeling well’—well, someday, I might say that to you, and you’ll be the first to know. Actually I won’t have to say it, because you’ll be able to see it, just like you did in the last administration,” Trump said. Trump: I took three cognitive tests. They are hard. Many people in this room couldn’t ace them. The first question is you have a lion, a bear, an alligator, and a what's another good, a squirrel, OK? Which is the squirrel? pic.twitter.com/8GusHR4vy0— Acyn (@Acyn) May 4, 2026Americans have already been seeing Trump’s apparent cognitive decline: A recent poll found that 59 percent of Americans don’t think Trump has the mental acuity to serve as president, and 55 percent think he is not in physical shape to do so.Trump continued ranting about his pitch to require candidates for office to take cognitive tests. “No president has ever taken one except me, and I’ve taken three of them. And I’ve aced each one,” he said. Trump went on to describe the test, which sounds a lot like the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a 10-minute assessment designed to identify signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s. It is not a test for intelligence. “You know the first question is very easy. They always show the first question, it’s: You have a lion, a bear, an alligator, and a—what’s another good—a squirrel, OK? Which is the squirrel?” Trump said, claiming the questions got increasingly complex.He then veered into a tirade against California Governor Gavin Newsom before resuming his point. “I think everyone in this room is brilliant, but nobody’s gonna get all 30 questions correct. Nobody. ’Cause when you get to those last questions they’re pretty hard, you got to be pretty sharp.“One doctor said, ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone get all questions right.’ That’s a doctor, who does this stuff for a living. And I did it three times. So, I don’t know. I think I’m done with those days, I’m tired of taking those tests,” Trump said. Trump segued again, insisting on the importance of picking an intelligent leader during times of war. He went on to claim that his military campaign in Iran only lasted six weeks, though the Strait of Hormuz has been closed for more than two months; that the Vietnam War lasted 19 years, even though the U.S. was only really involved for eight; and that the war in Iraq was 10 or 12 years long, when, again, it was really only eight.

A court had previously blocked an FDA rule allowing telehealth prescriptions for the abortion drug.

A federal judge on Monday apologized to Cole Allen, the alleged White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter, for what his lawyers described as “excessive restrictions on his liberty that serve no justifiable purpose.”Cole Allen, who stormed into the Washington Hilton last month, was placed on temporary suicide watch upon arriving in jail in Washington, D.C.—even as he did not appear to be suicidal. He was also placed in a “safe cell,” a padded enclosure extremely similar to solitary confinement, made to wear a restrictive vest, and was only allowed out of his cell to speak to lawyers or receive medical attention.His treatment in jail has been worse than that of the January 6 rioters, warned Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui, who oversaw many of their cases.“The Jan. 6 defendants all were moved to the [Central Treatment Facility],” Faruqui said. “Pardons may erase convictions but they do not erase history.… He’s being treated differently than anyone I’ve ever observed.“He can be both kept safe and treated with dignity. Right now, it’s not working. I think it’s legally deficient and ultimately if the DOC can’t do it, I’ll speak to the U.S. attorney’s office,” Faruqui continued. “I know they have other facilities they can contract with. If you all cannot handle it, we’re going to have to reassess that with the marshals and the Department of Justice.”

Tehran indicated it viewed US efforts to escort boats out of the Strait of Hormuz as a “violation of the ceasefire.”