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With the midterms less than a week away, the closing stretch of the campaign is full of bad omens for MAGA abroad and peak weirdness at home. In Serbia and Brazil, Trump allies suffered stinging and surprising defeats driven in part by energized voter turnout. An anti-corruption youth movement spearheaded the surge in Serbia, while Brazil saw a dramatic comeback for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who defeated staunch Trump ally Flávio Bolsonaro.
“Both of the losing candidates, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Vučić in Serbia, wrapped themselves around Donald Trump,” co-host David Corn says on this episode of Stress Test. “So we see in Serbia and Hungary authoritarian figures who try to emulate and ride the Trump wave being tossed out of office. And in [South America], where we've seen a right-wing tide… they beat it back” in Brazil.
There’s a growing sense that voters worldwide are fed up with government grift. As David puts it: “Corruption seems to be the point of the spear.” Meanwhile, the Israeli election—where the final results are still uncertain—also was something of a referendum on Trump, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempting to retain power by promoting his close ties to Trump.
Back home, former President Barack Obama and Trump were each on the campaign trail in closing sprints. Obama is getting spicy, hitting Trump on his tacky taste and alleged corruption. Trump, meanwhile, has been obsessively commenting on physical anatomy—specifically “asses”—in one of the stranger closing arguments in modern American political history. “This has to be like the definition of being off message,” co-host Garrison Hayes observes. “Like, definitionally off message.”
Trump’s fixation on rear-ends extended to rapper Nicki Minaj, who appeared at a rally, where Trump asked her to stand and extolled her derriere, fueling the silly rumor she might be named press secretary after the brief tenure of Katie “Half a Scaramucci” Zacharia.“It reminds me of what happened in 2016 when Trump was campaigning and he would say, ‘Hey, where’s my Black friend?’” David recalls. For Garrison, the gambit is all-too familiar: “Here we are in the closing moments of this midterm election, and the way that the Trump administration has decided to utilize a Black person in order to, I imagine, appeal to Black voters is offensive. It’s almost a caricature of the kind of racism that has become emblematic of this administration.”
All of this unfolds against an unprecedented deluge of generative AI “slop” and grotesque attack ads. David and Garrison run through the best and worst of the midterms’ campaign ads, , They also unpack how the White House has weaponized viral memes for crude attacks—including altering footage from Charlie Wilson’s NPR Tiny Desk performance of the 1982 Gap Band hit “Outstanding” to include top Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero—a callback to a racist tropeTrump’s crew hasdeployed before. “This feels like the slop election in some ways, right?” Garrison says. “Incoherent is the name of the game.”
Other ads have been total cringe, notably an ad from California Republican gubernatorial hopeful Steve Hilton that bizarrely equates voting GOP with experimenting with lesbian sex. (Yes, you read that right.) “Creepy, creepy, weird,” David says. What else can one say?
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Producer: HyoJung Kim
Assistant producer: Sonel Cutler
Executive editor: James West
Senior editor: David Ritsher
Hosts: David Corn, Garrison Hayes
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