Supreme Court puppetmaster Leonard Leo has long been invested in the election of Republican attorneys general, who are well-positioned to challenge regulations and bring precedent-setting cases before his friends on the high court. Leo and his dark money network have taken a keen interest in the GOP primary for attorney general in Missouri, pouring millions into the race to replace a conservative appointee with a lawyer who calls Leo a mentor.
Leo’s favored candidate, Will Scharf, has served as former President Donald Trump’s lawyer, including in the presidential immunity case at the Supreme Court. The court ruled that the former president is entitled to immunity from prosecution for official acts committed as president, complicating and further delaying his criminal cases — while giving the executive a powerful shield to do crimes.
As Trump’s judicial adviser, Leo helped him select three Supreme Court justices and build a 6-3 conservative supermajority. Scharf, meanwhile, has worked for Leo’s network, his consulting firm, and in the Trump Justice Department. He worked to help confirm two of the Trump-Leo justices — Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
The New York Times reported last fall that Trump and Leo, who received a historic $1.6 billion donation to supercharge his conservative dark money network, were on the outs. You wouldn’t suspect that watching the pro-Scharf advertising Leo is funding paint Trump as an unfairly targeted hero — and lionize Scharf for representing him.
“When prosecutors lie, when judges put politics over justice, when the whole legal system is gunning for you, you need one heck of an attorney,” says an ad for the group Leo is funding. “You need Missouri’s own Will Scharf. President Trump relies on Will Scharf as one of his lawyers to defend him from legal persecution and election interference. Will Scharf is taking on the entire legal and media establishment to defend President Trump.”
The ad says succinctly, “Will Scharf: Trump’s attorney.”
A second ad from Defend Missouri says that Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey “went easy on a violent career felon,” who went on to “shoot two cops.” The Missouri Fraternal Order of Police called on Defend Missouri — a state Super PAC affiliated with the Washington-based Club for Growth — to take down the ad.
Leo and his Concord Fund have donated $7.4 million to Defend Missouri and the Club for Growth Action’s Missouri federal committee, the organizations backing Scharf. The Club for Growth committee received $2.1 million from billionaire hedge fund chief Paul Singer, a significant donor to Leo’s network. Since July 25, Leo’s network has donated $2.5 million to Defend Missouri, while Singer chipped in another $500,000.
State attorneys general are a key focus for Leo and his network, because they are well-positioned to bring lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In 2022, the court’s conservative supermajority overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated federal protections for abortion rights, in a case led by Mississippi’s Republican attorney general. Since 2014, Leo’s network has donated nearly $23 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association, according to a review of data compiled by ProPublica.
In Missouri, Leo and his network are boosting a lawyer who previously worked with him to paint the Supreme Court ruby red.
“Leonard Leo is a dear friend and mentor of mine, and I’m honored to have his support,” Scharf tells Rolling Stone. The candidate says he has known Leo — who co-chairs the Federalist Society, the national conservative lawyers network — since he was in law school.
If Scharf doesn’t win the AG race, he could have a solid plan B. Thanks to Scharf’s role in helping secure Trump a presidential immunity blanket at the Supreme Court, Scharf’s stock has shot up considerably among the MAGA political, legal, and policymaking elites in recent months. According to two sources familiar with the situation, a pair of Trump confidants — one an attorney, the other a media personality — have directly pitched the ex-president on the idea that Scharf would be a worthy choice for a senior Justice Department or White House role, if Trump wins in November.
Scharf was previously an aide to Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (R), who resigned in 2018, and went to work for Leo’s Judicial Crisis Network — now known as the Concord Fund, the Leo group boosting his AG bid. He reportedly focused on judicial nominations and confirmations, including Kavanaugh’s to the Supreme Court.
According to his LinkedIn, Scharf worked for several months at Leo’s consulting firm, CRC Advisors, in 2020, before joining the Trump Justice Department as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. In fall of 2020, Scharf worked as a nominations counsel, supporting Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation — which secured a 6-3 supermajority for conservatives.
After Missouri’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, won his Senate seat, Leo’s allies reportedly pressed Gov. Mike Parson to appoint Scharf. He chose Bailey instead — and Leo’s network soon started funding Defend Missouri, the pro-Scharf Super PAC.
Bailey has been an ultra-conservative, partisan attorney general in his own right. He’s made a show out of suing to investigate the liberal watchdog group Media Matters in response to its reporting on X, formerly known as Twitter. The organization managed to block a similar investigative effort by Texas; that decision has been appealed.
And while the pro-Scharf Super PAC is accusing Bailey of being soft on crime, he’s attempted to block prisoners from being let out of jail after they were found innocent and exonerated, and judges ordered their release.
“You will not find someone harder on crime than me,” Scharf told The New York Times. “That having been said, actual innocence claims should be taken very seriously.”
Sign at a protest in Paris on Saturday, Oct. 24: “Expensive life and suffering schools. Same government, same misery.”
Donald Trump bangs a gavel after signing the "Big Beautiful Bill Act," on July 4, 2025.
100 Unhinged Things Trump Did That You May Have Forgotten
“Flood the zone with shit.”
That’s how Steve Bannon once described Donald Trump‘s attention-overload strategy. It’s designed to overwhelm your senses, so the latest outrage erases your ability to remember the avalanche of outrages past. The “shit” part matters as well — because the goal is to make politics seem so dirty and indecent that no sane person would ever get involved in the political arena. This cedes the civic ground to hyper-partisan sociopaths.
That’s exactly why combating the memory hole is essential as voters head to the polls. The 2026 midterm elections are the only structural opportunity to put guardrails on this runaway train of a president who seems hell bent on destroying our democratic norms, dividing the American people, and alienating our allies while emboldening our enemies. The result is a tsunami of sleaze: unprecedented corruption, rising costs, and governmental chaos.
But the voters who most need to remember are the ones most likely to forget.
Independents are the largest block of American voters, and they decide who wins elections. They’re fed up with both parties and tend to be fiscally responsible, socially tolerant-to-libertarian, and strong on national security. This election, their number-one issue is affordability. They voted for Trump in 2024 but now his approval rating among independents is a pathetic, record-low 22 percent.
Here’s the catch: independents are also the voters least likely to pay attention to politics on a regular basis. That’s why they are so susceptible to the trap set by the Trump team: sliding from healthy skepticism into the corrosive cynicism that says all parties and politicians are equally corrupt. While no party has a monopoly on virtue or vice, Donald Trump’s reign is in a heated feces class by itself.
Below is a reminder of Trump’s second term low-lights. You’ve probably forgotten most of these amid the doomscroll of our daily lives. But the damage doesn’t disappear because our attention drifts. Share it with your independent friends and neighbors who may have quietly voted for Trump in 2024. It’s a timely reminder that Trump’s billionaire cabinet and his democracy-deforming presidency is an insult to their wallet, their health, their government, their safety, and their values.
Your Wallet
Trump promised that “when I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One.” He promised gas below $2 a gallon. But, of course, prices did not come down. Instead, Trump now calls the affordability crisis a “hoax.”
Gas now averages $4.28 a gallon, up 38 percent since his inauguration, and diesel is $6.28, up 69 percent. The main cause is the $47 billion war with Iran he launched without offering the American people a reason or an exit strategy, let alone getting congressional approval. So much for no new wars.
Trump’s tariff obsession is costing American households more than $1,000 a year. And Trump has inexplicably aimed some of his harshest tariffs at America’s closest democratic allies and trading partners, including the European Union and Canada.
Health care costs are also spiking because of Trump’s actions. After the longest government shutdown in American history, enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits were allowed to expire in the Trump-Republican budget. As a result, in 2027, premium payments are expected to more than double, from $888 to $1,904 a year, and as many as 5 million people may drop coverage. The Congressional Budget Office projects that Trump’s budget will add roughly 10 million Americans to the uninsured over a decade.
Food aid for kids wasn’t spared in the GOP budget either. ProPublica found that more than 770,000 children in 12 states lost SNAP benefits.
But surely all these cuts will help get America’s debt and deficit under control, right? Wrong.
Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” adds an estimated $3.4 trillion to deficits. For all the chaos unleashed by the DOGE cuts that threw career civil servants and programs into the “wood chipper,” less than $1.5 billion in savings have been verified and government spending actually increased. This year’s $2 trillion deficit is the highest ever outside a war or recession. The U.S. national debt just hit a record $40 trillion. Moody’s downgraded America’s credit rating from its top AAA grade. As Trump assaults the independence of the Federal Reserve, America is careening toward a fiscal cliff.
All this has happened while the Trump administration has taken ownership stakes in some 30 private companies, from 10 percent of Intel to 15 percent of rare-earth miner MP Materials, a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, and a stake in a magnet maker backed by Don Jr.’s venture capital firm. Conservatives used to call that socialism or crony capitalism. Now it’s business as usual in the GOP.
Your Health
In 2024, many independent voters were swayed by independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of Trump as part of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
But once in office, the Trump administration that promised to take on pesticides actually sided with the company that makes Roundup at the Supreme Court against cancer lawsuits and won. Yep, that happened.
On Day One, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, while banning any mention of climate change from U.S. government websites — because ignoring a problem always makes it better.
That’s not all: the Trump’s administration rolled back limits on “forever chemicals” in drinking water and on mercury and arsenic from power plants. It also eliminated the Environmental Protection Agency’s research office. You can’t make America healthy while making our water and air dirtier.
During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy promised the Senate that he was not an anti-vaxxer, despite boatloads of evidence to the contrary. But he turned around and fired the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel and replaced it with hand-picked successors. Then he fired the new CDC director after just 29 days. She testified that she was ousted for refusing to preapprove the new panel’s vaccine recommendations without reviewing the evidence.
Kennedy’s founding MAHA report seemed to have been written with AI, and cited studies that do not exist. He then canceled nearly $500 million in mRNA vaccine research. Meanwhile, measles has come roaring back under his watch. Once considered an eradicated disease, the U.S. has recorded more than 4,400 confirmed cases so far this year, nearly double last year’s total — with 96 percent of this year’s cases among people who were unvaccinated.
Your Government
In his last inaugural address, Trump pledged to restore competence to the federal government.
That’s the punchline. The Trump administration has consistently chosen loyalty over expertise. In addition to an anti-vaxxer with no medical experience running the health department, we’ve got a self-styled Secretary of War who was a Fox News weekend host with no experience running a large organization who is now in charge of the world’s largest military. FBI Director Kash Patel is a conspiracy theorist who one senator credibly called the “least qualified and most partisan FBI director in our nation’s history.”
Personnel is policy and the pattern runs all the way down the ranks. At Homeland Security, the job of safeguarding elections went to Heather Honey, an activist whose faulty voter-data claims Trump cited in trying to overturn the 2020 results. The DHS terrorism-prevention hub went to Thomas Fugate, a 22-year-old Heritage Foundation intern a year out of college with no national security experience. FEMA put disaster response in the hands of Gregg Phillips, an election denier who claimed he had been teleported to a Waffle House 50 miles away. He was removed from the post only after months of embarrassing headlines. The White House hired “Stop the Steal” lawyer Kurt Olsen to reinvestigate the 2020 election, then ordered the nation’s spy agencies to share intelligence with him. Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia to run the office that protects federal whistleblowers until texts surfaced in which he admitted to “a Nazi streak.” When Republican senators sank the nomination, Trump simply moved him to the General Services Administration, where he is now acting general counsel overseeing more than 100 government lawyers. These are not “the very best people.”
The problem isn’t just incompetence, it’s corruption. On her first day in office, former Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the task force pursuing Russian oligarchs and told prosecutors to deprioritize foreign bribery cases. Five days later, Trump froze enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. By spring, the department slashed its Public Integrity Section, the unit created after Watergate to prosecute corrupt officials, and scrapped its crypto enforcement team.
This has unleashed a wave of corruption and presidential self-enrichment without precedent in U.S. history. His net worth has increased by billions this term, compounded by frenetic stock trading. The Trump family made at least $2.3 billion from crypto ventures while investors lost a combined $2.3 billion, in an industry his administration regulates. He pardoned the founder of Binance after a UAE fund used the family’s stablecoin to buy a $2 billion stake in that company.
Trump even tried to shake down $230 million in taxpayer dollars from his own Justice Department. The White House asked the Pentagon for a record $620 million loan to a company Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm had invested in three months earlier. Despite that windfall, a Putin-allied oligarch helped pay for Trump Jr.’s wedding celebrations. The administration accepted a luxury 747 from Qatar, with ownership slated to pass to Trump’s library. All this makes the case of Trump’s border czar, who was recorded in an FBI sting accepting $50,000 in cash in a takeout bag, seem like a sin of small ambition.
As I’ve written before in Rolling Stone, presidential pardons are being sold. A nursing-home owner whose collapsed chain left grieving families with tens of millions in unpaid judgments spent more than $1 million on lobbyists and then received a full pardon. This month, The New York Times reported that a billionaire banker’s family hired Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba under a contract worth more than $50 million. Trump pardoned him weeks after she started. The dizzying full list includes pardons of corrupt partisan cronies and several violent drug dealers.
The one promise Trump kept was “I will be your retribution.” The January 6 pardons were just the start. A Pulitzer Prize-winning Reuters analysis documented at least 470 targets of retribution in Trump’s first 10 months alone.
Your Safety
In his inaugural address, Trump said his success would be measured by the wars America ends and, most importantly, the ones it never gets into. But the president who petulantly demands a Nobel Peace Prize has ordered military strikes on at least seven countries in his second term, including Venezuela, Yemen, and Iran. He even threatened to seize Greenland from our ally Denmark at a NATO conference.
At the same time, Pete Hegseth is purging the U.S. military leadership with a political agenda, boasting to troops that he had fired 10 percent of the military’s generals and admirals, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the top uniformed officers of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Five weeks into the war with Iran, he fired the Army’s chief of staff. Defenestrating decades of military expertise during a war does not make America safer.
While Trump bragged that he could end Russia’s war on Ukraine in a day, he has not only failed to deliver peace but seems intent on rewarding the aggressor. The United States shamefully voted with Russia and North Korea against a UN resolution condemning the Russian invasion. Then Trump and JD Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, and days later the administration paused all military aid. Putin got a blood red-carpet welcome in Alaska, while Trump keeps on insisting that it is “time for Ukraine to get a new president.”
While Russia has been struggling on the battlefront, this month Trump threw Putin a lifeline by listing sanctions on the sale of diesel which The Economist described as “scandalous” and “shameful for America,” explaining: “Putin terrorises his own people, kills Ukrainian civilians, and is helping Iran fight America. Mr Trump’s repeated acts of indulgence towards him, supposedly in pursuit of peace, undermine deterrence, hastening further crimes.” Six Republican senators, including Mitch McConnell, joined six Democrats in calling it “a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our allies.” Trump responded by waiving every Russian provision of a new sanctions law named for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, finding a way to betray an ally beyond the grave.
Trump’s team often sold his softness on Russia with a promise to be tough on China in return. But the long-promised toughness never arrived. He also announced that he would ignore the bipartisan law banning the CCP-controlled TikTok that the Supreme Court had unanimously upheld. Trump cut sanctions put in place to punish China for the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. and suspended Radio Free Asia, which for decades brought uncensored news to Chinese audiences. China has benefitted economically from Trump’s tariff wars with U.S. allies, and despite arguing that the AI race requires no guardrails on development as a way to block China’s advances, Trump let Nvidia and AMD sell advanced AI chips to China in exchange for a 15 percent cut of the revenue. The administration blocked Taiwan’s president from a New York stopover after Beijing objected and Trump called a pending $14 billion arms package for Taiwan “a very good negotiating chip.” And amid increasing cyber-attacks, especially from China, Trump has inexplicably cut America’s cyber-defenses when we need to be ramping them up.
At home, “law and order” has too often meant order without law. Trump sent National Guard troops into American cities, and the courts repeatedly blocked him. The government deported a Maryland man to a Salvadoran prison in violation of a court order, called it an “administrative error,” and then resisted a Supreme Court order to facilitate his return. In Minneapolis this January, federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in 17 days: Renee Good, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, an intensive-care nurse at the Minneapolis VA. When federal prosecutors in Minnesota began investigating the killings, Washington told them to stop and the Trump Justice Department cut off access to the evidence.
But perhaps the most dangerous violation of basic safety occurred on day one of this term, when Trump legitimized political violence by pardoning roughly 1,500 of his followers charged in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, including some convicted of assaulting police officers.
Your Values
Character is the single most important quality in a president. But Trump’s contempt for the truth, evidenced in his singular impulse to lie all the time, has translated into a sustained assault on the basic values of our democracy.
Every patriot ought to flinch when confronted with the photos of a wrecking ball being taken to the East Wing of the White House. Trump did the demolition without the independent reviews, congressional approval and public comment required for even minor changes to historic buildings in Washington. He does not believe that rules apply to him.
But that was just the start: His administration gutted the U.S. Institute of Peace, fired its board and seized its building, bolting Trump’s name onto the facade while the legal fight was still underway. Trump purged the Kennedy Center board and his lackeys voted to rename it the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” attaching his name to a living memorial to a slain president. Blocked by the courts, now he is threatening to tear the Kennedy Center down.
The narcissistic impulse extends to Trump putting his face on our money as well. One-dollar coins bearing his likeness are now in circulation, and the Treasury has prepared a $250 bill with his portrait. Nearly every country that isn’t a monarchy declines to put its sitting leader on its money. The U.S. is in the ugly company of a rogue’s gallery of regimes including Marcos, Assad, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and Mobutu.
Speaking of ugly company, let’s talk about Trump’s longtime friend, Jeffrey Epstein. Trump promised to release the Epstein files as a candidate. But as president, he spent months fighting it. His team even summoned a Republican congresswoman to the White House Situation Room to pressure her to drop her support for releasing the files. The Trump Justice Department then withheld or redacted some 200,000 pages, which a federal judge found likely violated the law. Once Trump had the power to deliver the truth to the victims of a convicted child sex trafficker he used to pal around with, he tried to bury it.
That tracks with his promise to “bring back free speech to America.” Out of the gate, the White House barred the Associated Press from the Oval Office for refusing to say “Gulf of America.” It kept the ban in place after a federal judge called it unconstitutional retaliation. He has since tried to ban CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House, while repeatedly suggesting negative coverage of him and his administration should be illegal.
At the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth demanded that reporters pledge not to publish even unclassified information without approval, and nearly the entire press corps, Fox News included, walked out rather than sign. In just one chapter of Trump’s war on media, hours after Trump’s hyper-partisan FCC chairman warned ABC that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Jimmy Kimmel was briefly pulled off the air. Even Ted Cruz called it “dangerous as hell.” Trump sued The New York Times for $15 billion, and a Bush-appointed judge threw it out. He issued executive orders punishing law firms that had represented his opponents, and three federal judges struck them down as unconstitutional. The United States has now fallen to a record-low 64th in the World Press Freedom Index.
But perhaps the weirdest window into Trump’s twisted psyche comes in the form of the 80-year old’s unhinged late night social media revenge benders, where he posted 2,249 times in the first four months of this year. One night, he posted more than 160 times, including a post branding Sen. Mark Kelly, a Navy combat veteran and astronaut, a “traitor” who deserved death. His account also shared a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Amid a feud with Pope Leo, he posted AI images of himself as a Christ-like figure. Finally, after millions of Americans joined peaceful “No Kings” protests, he posted an AI video of himself in a crown, flying a jet labeled “King Trump” and dumping feces on the marchers.
If an aged family member behaved this way, you’d schedule an intervention. If a CEO did, the board would remove them. The presidency deserves to be held to at least the standard of conduct we expect in daily life, and patriots of every party should insist on it.
The Choice
This is nowhere near a complete list of Trump’s assaults on American democracy. This election has provided a constant stream of insults to the integrity of the office, from Trump’s call for red states to do a mid-decade redistricting so Republicans could hold onto Congress, to his endorsement of buffoonishly corrupt Texas AG Ken Paxton over conservative incumbent Jon Cornyn, to using $22 million taxpayer dollars for campaign ads, to his absurdly propagandistic videos at rallies about how “God Made Trump,” to ogling “asses” on the campaign trail to his latest gambit of offering a bribe of $5,000 for each vote — are all just signs of how deep the rot has gotten a decade into the Trump era. This year’s midterms are the only chance we have to restore some basic guardrails on this unhinged president and redeem our country’s once-respected leadership in the free world. The question for independent voters is whether you will now hold Trump to the same standard you’d apply to any other president, regardless of party. You don’t have to join a team. You just have to remember the damage Trump has done over the past two years back in office and vote. Don’t let the memory hole win.