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As one-term former U.S. President Joe Biden continues his ongoing treatment for prostate cancer, he is set to release a deeply candid memoir later this month, with a searing excerpt published by The Atlantic on Monday laying bare his unvarnished condemnation of sitting President Donald Trump’s actions surrounding the 6 January 2021 Capitol riots. Biden’s scathing critique frames the deadly insurrection, which unfolded as pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to block the certification of his 2020 election victory, as a moral transgression that ought to haunt Trump for the rest of his life. The former president takes specific issue with Trump’s mass pardon of more than 1,000 people convicted for their roles in the riot, issued shortly after Trump returned to the White House in 2024, alongside commuted sentences for a dozen leaders of far-right extremist groups the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. “The criminals who attacked law-enforcement officers that day didn’t deserve pardons. They deserved prison terms,” Biden writes in the memoir, arguing that Trump turned a deliberate blind eye to the brutal violence inflicted on Capitol police, including officers who were punched, speared, sprayed with chemical irritants and otherwise brutalized, while falsely framing himself as a champion of law enforcement. “What Trump did on January 6, 2021, should never be forgotten. It should follow him to his grave,” Biden states, adding that the Trump administration’s broader agenda was rooted in a deliberate effort to dismantle longstanding U.S. democratic institutions and stoke dangerous partisan hatred across the country. Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing related to the Capitol riot, and defended his mass pardons by claiming the hundreds of rioters had been unfairly “destroyed” by the U.S. justice system. In a sharp official response to Biden’s comments shared with the BBC on Monday, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis dismissed the former president as “the worst president in American history,” and went on to level a litany of counter-criticisms against the Biden administration, claiming it created the worst border crisis in U.S. history, pursued soft-on-crime policies that drove public safety declines, fueled the worst 40-year high inflation crisis of the modern era, and pushed “America-Last” policies that undermined U.S. global standing. The memoir excerpt also details a lengthy, unexpected private meeting between Biden and Trump shortly after Trump’s 2024 presidential election victory, where Biden says he was left completely stunned when Trump unprompted remarked, “if it weren’t for politics, I believe we’d be good friends.” According to Biden, Trump went on to praise his predecessor’s job creation record as “extraordinary” and noted he was relieved he did not have to run against Biden as an opponent in the 2024 race, leaving Biden confused as to why the sitting president was lavishing him with unanticipated flattery. The release of Biden’s memoir comes on the heels of a strong Democratic performance in last week’s U.S. midterm elections, though the former president has maintained a very low profile on the campaign trail in recent months as he prioritizes his prostate cancer treatment. In a Sunday social media update sharing an update on his health journey, Biden noted that his treatment schedule has forced him to scale back the planned promotional tour for his new book, adding, “Some days are better than others. It hasn’t stopped me. But sometimes it slows me down.”

A maverick outgoing Republican congressman is set to trigger a rare House procedural maneuver this week to force a formal impeachment vote against U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, leveling explosive allegations that the top Pentagon official has violated core tenets of the U.S. Constitution by waging unauthorised military operations in Iran. Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, who failed to win re-election earlier this year and has long been a vocal critic of unconstrained executive war powers, announced his push to bring the long-drafted impeachment articles to a full floor vote, arguing Hegseth has overstepped his legal authority by engaging in active hostilities against Iran for more than 90 consecutive days without explicit congressional sign-off. “Secretary Hegseth is operating in direct violation of federal law by conducting extended military operations in Iran that never received congressional authorization, and there must be tangible accountability for that breach,” Massie stated publicly. The uphill bid is widely projected to fall short in the current lame-duck Congress, where Republicans maintain narrow majorities in both chambers until the January swearing-in of newly elected Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. But Massie has framed his last-ditch push as a pre-emptive move to pressure President Donald Trump to dismiss Hegseth voluntarily before the incoming Democratic congressional majority takes power and launches its own high-profile impeachment proceedings against the defence secretary, which he warns will devolve into a sprawling, partisan public spectacle. Hegseth, who has not held a formal press briefing since last May, brushed off the impending impeachment resolution when approached by reporters on Monday, confirming he would convene a dedicated press conference on Tuesday morning to address Massie’s allegations directly. “We are not allocating any real concern to this effort,” Hegseth told journalists. Massie first tabled his articles of impeachment against Hegseth back in September, but held off on forcing a floor vote until last week’s midterm elections delivered a decisive sweep that handed Democrats full control of both chambers of Congress. The Kentucky congressman, one of the small cohort of anti-interventionist Republicans who have publicly broken with the Trump administration over the ongoing Iran conflict, argued his impeachment push is a far more restrained alternative to the aggressive, publicized hearings and full-blown impeachment trials Democrats are poised to launch once they take power in January. “My push to impeach Secretary Hegseth is a far gentler process than what the Democrats are planning to roll out the second they gavel into control next year,” Massie noted in a formal written statement. “President Trump still has the window right now to nominate a replacement who can be confirmed by the current Republican-held Senate, before Democrats take over and weaponize this process for political gain.” Impeaching a sitting U.S. cabinet secretary remains an extraordinarily rare historical event: only two cabinet members in the entire history of the House of Representatives have ever been formally impeached, and neither of those removals were ultimately upheld by the Senate. Under House procedural rules, once Massie formally tables his impeachment resolution, expected later on Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson is required to schedule floor consideration of the measure within 48 hours. Lawmakers will have three potential paths forward: hold an immediate direct up-or-down vote on the impeachment resolution, vote to refer the matter for further review to a standing congressional committee, or vote to table the motion entirely and dismiss it without further debate. While House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries confirmed on Sunday that his caucus will unanimously back the impeachment push, calling himself a “hard yes” on the measure, Massie still faces a steep challenge in persuading enough of his fellow Republican colleagues to cross party lines and support the resolution. This is not the first time Massie has broken with his party’s mainstream over the Iran conflict: he has previously voted in support of multiple War Powers Resolutions passed by the House this year that sought to block the Trump administration from launching additional unauthorised military strikes against Iranian targets. Massie added in his statement that his grievances against Hegseth extend far beyond the Iran war powers dispute, accusing the defence secretary of orchestrating intimidation campaigns against internal and external critics of the Trump administration, facilitating the unauthorized apprehension of foreign leaders, and repeatedly ignoring congressionally passed War Powers resolutions that limit his military operational authority.

Days after publicly committing to accept the official outcomes of the 2026 United States midterm elections, former President Donald Trump has publicly cast doubt on the integrity of the national vote, shortly after his Republican party suffered widespread, unexpected losses that handed full control of both the US House of Representatives and the Senate back to the Democratic Party. The former president, who has repeatedly amplified unsubstantiated election fraud claims in previous national cycles, made the remarks via a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday, posing the open question: “Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest?” The public statement marks a clear about-face from comments he made directly to the New York Times on election night, when he explicitly stated he was “absolutely willing” to certify and accept the final results of the nationwide midterm contests. Contrary to unsubstantiated allegations of widespread irregularities, state and local election administrators across nearly every US jurisdiction reported largely smooth, well-run voting processes, with minimal reported instances of administrative error or disruption. A small number of high-stakes races remain too close to officially call as of press time, including competitive US Senate contests in Alaska and Mississippi, where vote counting and verification procedures are still ongoing to confirm final totals.

Drawing a sharp parallel to the iconic *Fawlty Towers* gag where hotelier Basil Fawlty repeatedly breaks his own rule of avoiding any mention of World War II in front of German guests, the 2026 U.S. Republican midterm campaign unfolded as a self-defeating farce of deliberate evasion around the Trump administration’s ongoing war with Iran. For eight consecutive months, the White House, GOP campaign committees, and aligned conservative media operated under a strict unwritten policy: do not acknowledge the Iran conflict at all, assuming voters would not prioritize the issue ahead of polling day. That gamble collapsed spectacularly, as the electorate not only fixated on the war but delivered a historic rebuke that flipped both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate to Democratic control. The scale of voter sentiment leaves no room for ambiguity: NBC exit poll data shows 74% of respondents labeled the Iran war either a “crucial” or “major” factor shaping their congressional vote, with 63% of that group casting their ballots for Democratic candidates. An even larger 62% to 63% of all surveyed voters stated the initial decision to launch military action against Iran was a mistake. Democratic candidates secured upset wins in deep-red territories where a non-incumbent Democratic Senate victory would have once required a high-profile GOP scandal or unprecedented grassroots momentum: Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, Iowa, and North Carolina, alongside traditional swing states Michigan and Maine. In the immediate aftermath of the crushing defeat, Vice President JD Vance — a vocal public defender of the Iran war for months — posted on X that the party’s loss was directly attributable to the conflict, a judgment President Trump acknowledged was “largely true” before adding he would authorize the exact same military intervention all over again. The stunning turnaround stood in stark contrast to the confident projections issued by Washington’s mainstream foreign policy and political class in the months after the U.S. and Israel launched coordinated strikes on February 28 that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. House Speaker Mike Johnson infamously framed the conflict as a passing “blip” that would be “wrapped up soon” with no meaningful political fallout. Prominent conservative radio host and Trump confidant Mark Levin told listeners as late as September that the war was only a “4 percent issue” of negligible electoral weight, while other DC pundits predicted the conflict would amount to a forgotten footnote by November’s voting day. Instead, the supposed footnote consumed the entire election. Iran followed the exact defensive playbook the U.S. Pentagon had modeled in war games dating back to the 1980s: targeting the strategic Strait of Hormuz and critical Gulf energy infrastructure, driving global oil prices above $100 a barrel and pushing U.S. average gasoline costs over $4 a gallon for the first time since 2022. What was marketed to the American public as a swift, low-cost operation to restore U.S. credibility in the Middle East morphed into a regressive tax hitting every commuter in Ohio, every family farmer purchasing diesel and fertilizer in Iowa, and working households across the country. For decades, conventional Washington political wisdom held that foreign policy almost never decides U.S. midterm elections — but that rule breaks when foreign policy directly impacts every voter’s household budget at the gas pump. The official GOP campaign strategy amounted to collective denial: the party’s two national campaign committees sidelined any discussion of the war entirely, focusing their entire messaging on border security and federal government spending. Even GOP candidates running in tight competitive races tried to straddle the fence, calling for a “swift end” to the conflict while simultaneously pledging full trust in the president as commander in chief to use unlimited force to “finish the job” if required. Voters rejected that hollow posturing, seeing straight through the calculated ambiguity. The most striking electoral shifts played out not in suburban swing districts, but in the rural and small-town communities that formed the backbone of Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2024 “America First” coalition. Trump won over millions of working-class, mostly white rural voters in those two cycles in large part by promising to end the endless, “stupid wars” orchestrated by neoconservative factions and the bipartisan Washington foreign policy establishment that had sent generations of their family members to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those voters took that pledge at face value, only to discover in 2026 that the promise came with a hidden asterisk: no more unnecessary wars, except the one Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had spent two decades lobbying successive U.S. administrations to launch against Iran. That is why the antiwar, affordability-focused messaging deployed by Iowa’s Democratic candidates resonated so deeply with traditionally Republican voters, delivering an unexpected Democratic Senate pickup in a state Trump won handily just two years prior. Right-wing anti-interventionist “restrainer” voices had warned as early as March that the Iran war directly violated the core commitments the MAGA coalition was built on, but they were dismissed as fringe cranks by the party’s mainstream leadership. Now, they stand as the only faction on the right that accurately read voter sentiment. Neoconservative commentators, by contrast, have landed on the exact opposite takeaway, arguing the war was not a mistake — it was simply not prosecuted aggressively enough, repeating the same line of reasoning used to justify the 2007 Iraq “surge” and claim the 2021 collapse in Afghanistan could have been avoided with more unwavering military resolve. No military failure, for that camp, cannot be fixed by doubling down on the exact same policy choices that created the disaster. In the post-election blame game that has erupted across Washington, White House insiders have attempted to pin responsibility for the botched war on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, claiming he misrepresented timelines and achievable strategic goals, with widespread rumors circulating that Trump is considering replacing him. Antiwar Republican congressman Thomas Massie, who lost his May primary explicitly for opposing the Iran conflict, has even called for a House vote to impeach Hegseth. But those efforts dodge the central truth: Hegseth did not unilaterally decide to launch the war. That choice was made by President Trump, with the full cheerleading of a Republican-controlled Congress that never held a formal vote to authorize military action, and the full encouragement of Netanyahu’s government in Israel. Declassified campaign timeline details further reveal the cynical lengths the administration went to hide the war’s scope from voters: The Wall Street Journal reported in the final week of campaigning that Washington had advised its Gulf regional allies to brace for a new phase of “short, intense military operations” against Iran immediately after Election Day. Just 48 hours before polls opened, U.S. forces carried out a new strike targeting Qeshm Island, located directly adjacent to the Strait of Hormuz. The original plan, it appears, was to avoid all public discussion of the war until votes were fully counted, then escalate operations. Voters beat them to the punch. In a remarkable parallel, Netanyahu’s Likud party also lost its parliamentary majority in Israeli elections held just one week before the U.S. midterms, delivering a dual popular rebuke of pro-war leadership across two major Western democracies. The conflict, launched with the stated goal of weakening the Islamic Republic of Iran, has instead handed Tehran an enormous propaganda victory: Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf publicly celebrated the U.S. midterm results as proof “Americans said NO TO WAR,” and the regime’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has inherited a level of popular legitimacy rooted in his father’s status as a wartime martyr that his predecessor never enjoyed. Observers are now debating whether the Democratic Party will position itself as the new dominant antiwar force in U.S. politics, but historical precedent offers little assurance that will happen. After 2006, when voters similarly punished the Republican Party over the Iraq War by handing Democrats full congressional control, the new Democratic majority continued to fund the occupation, approved the Bush administration’s troop surge, and deferred all plans for a full withdrawal to the next presidential term. Most 2026 Democratic campaigns did not run as explicit antiwar campaigns: they ran as affordability campaigns that happened to highlight the inflationary pain driven by the war’s impact on energy prices. Most party leaders criticized the Trump administration for failing to define a clear path to “victory” in Iran, rather than arguing the war itself was an unwinnable, unjustified choice. That is the rhetoric of politicians who want to manage a conflict more competently, not end it permanently. There are notable exceptions: progressive Michigan candidate Abdul El-Sayed won his race even after pro-Israel advocacy groups spent over $40 million to defeat him in the primary and general election, and a small but growing faction of Democratic lawmakers are openly calling for cuts to U.S. military aid to Israel, a policy position that would have been unthinkable in the party just five years ago. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has vowed to use Congress’s constitutional power of the purse to end the Iran war, while House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has called on Trump to cease all military operations before the new, Democratic-controlled Congress is sworn in next January. But those efforts will only succeed if Democratic leaders can convince a critical mass of Senate Republicans — the same lawmakers who refused to even utter the word “Iran” on the campaign trail — to back resolutions that Trump has already promised to veto. The core lesson of the 2026 midterms is deliberately simple, which is exactly why Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy class will go to great lengths to avoid acknowledging it. The American public is not isolationist, nor is it uniformly pacifist. Voters simply reject costly, discretionary wars of choice in the Middle East that are sold to them as quick, low-cost victories, prioritize a foreign government’s geopolitical agenda over U.S. national interests, and end up raising costs for every working household at the gas pump. They punished the Republican Party for that exact dynamic in 2006 over the Iraq War, and they did it again in 2026 over the Iran War. That is no coincidence: it is a clear, repeated pattern of voter sentiment. The Washington establishment will no doubt try to explain away the midterm results by pointing to generic inflation, low GOP voter turnout, or poor quality of Republican candidates, just like Basil Fawlty desperately trying to distract his guests from the topic he swore he would never mention. But the war is impossible to ignore. The voters saw through the evasion, and unless U.S. policymakers start listening to the clear public mandate, the human and economic costs of the Iran conflict will keep making themselves impossible to avoid.

In a series of contradictory public remarks over a 24-hour span, US President Donald Trump clarified to assembled reporters on Sunday that his widely shared Saturday announcement on his Truth Social platform offering Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) CEO Dana White the vacant White House Press Secretary position was not a formal job offer, but a lighthearted, offhand joke.

The bizarre chain of events kicked off Saturday morning, when Trump posted to his 80+ million Truth Social followers that he was “pleased to announce” White had been extended the official press secretary role, adding that he had encouraged White to bring a cohort of active and retired mixed martial arts fighters on board as his core team of assistants. The post went on to argue that these high-profile combat sports personalities would be uniquely equipped to “defend us against the Lunatic Left,” before closing with a playful plea for White to accept the position. The president even went as far as to claim in the post that “Dana will be a Press Secretary like none other.”

Shortly after the post went viral, White addressed reporters at a scheduled public appearance, confirming he already had a pre-planned Monday meeting with the president on his calendar, but refused to confirm or deny if he was considering accepting the press secretary post. The UFC head noted he already oversees a sprawling portfolio of professional ventures: in addition to leading the global MMA powerhouse UFC, he runs PowerSlap, a regulated professional slap-fighting league, recently launched Zuffa Boxing as a new combat sports promotion, and serves as a formal board member at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. White has also been a vocal, high-profile Trump ally for nearly a decade, speaking at the Republican National Conventions in 2016, 2020 and 2024, joining the president on stage for his 2024 election victory speech, and overseeing a special UFC cage match event hosted on the White House lawn earlier this summer.

By Sunday, however, Trump walked back the entire public job announcement, telling reporters that White’s upcoming Monday trip to Washington was scheduled for unrelated, pre-existing commitments, and that the entire press secretary offer had been nothing more than a casual joke. “I will tell you, I was only kidding. But Dana loves the idea. And there’s only one Dana. He’s great,” Trump told the press pack, before reaffirming “it was just a little fun.”

The vacant press secretary position has been unfilled since early October, when Katie Zacharia resigned from the role after serving for less than five full days. Zacharia had stepped into the role as a last-minute replacement for Karoline Leavitt, the youngest White House Press Secretary in US history, who had held the post from the very first day of Trump’s second presidential term. The unorthodox public job trial balloon came just days after the Republican Party suffered a decisive defeat in the 2025 midterm elections, losing its narrow majority in both the US House of Representatives and the Senate, a result that has put significant new pressure on the Trump administration to restructure its communications strategy.