From the ex-loyalists to the reporters who covered him, everyone who saw Donald Trump up close has the same prediction for next month’s midterm elections: Maga will lose – and Trump will lose it.
In deep red Kansas, Maga diehards have started walking up to Stephanie Grisham in the grocery store to tell her that she was right.
Grisham was Donald Trump’s White House press secretary. Ever since she quit – saying she rejected our former boss’s voter fraud narrative – she’s been considered the town traitor. One man, in particular, has glared at her for years. A few weeks ago, he finally walked up to her, and she braced for the worst.
Snooker champion Graeme Dott jailed for child sex abuse
Former snooker world champion Graeme Dott has been found guilty of sexually abusing two primary school-age children.
In August, he was found guilty of two counts of lewd, indecent and libidinous behaviour and on Tuesday he was sentenced to seven years in prison.
What you need to know
The High Court in Edinburgh heard how Dott subjected a girl and a boy to multiple incidents of abuse, with the girl targeted between 1993 and 1996 and the boy between 2006 and 2010.
The jury heard Dott exposed himself in front of both children, touched them inappropriately and kissed them.
What did the victims say?
- One of Dott’s victims, now in her 40s, told the court Dott had sexually abused her on multiple occasions.
- The second victim, now in his late 20s, also said he was sexually abused on multiple occasions.
- Lord Harrower, the judge, told Dott he had “robbed the complainers of a significant part of their childhood”.
- He added the behaviour bore “the hallmarks of grooming”.
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Men feel happier than women about how they look, study finds
Researchers at the BI Norwegian Business School also found men overestimated their IQ, while British people generally rated themselves less attractive than other nationalities.
What did the study find?
- Men consistently gave themselves higher ratings for physical attractiveness than women.
- Participants scored themselves between 0 and 100.
- On average, men scored 6-8 per cent higher than women.
- How attractive the participants were considered by other people was not part of the study.
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A closer look at the study
The study also found that men and women with higher IQs tended to rate themselves as less attractive.
Britons generally rated themselves less attractive than their American, Australian, Canadian and South African counterparts. Researchers suggested this could be a symptom of British manners, with more emphasis on “modesty or understatement”.
What does this mean?
Professor Adrian Furnham, who led the study, noted men often overestimate their IQ, while women typically underestimate it.
He said the similar gap in attractiveness self-ratings could be another indication of “male hubris versus female humility”. He added that more intelligent people could be “more honest”.
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How the UK could rejoin the EU, step by step
Labour grandees have urged Andy Burnham to start preparing to reverse Brexit – but high hurdles would have to be overcome.
Why is it coming up now?
Sadiq Khan said he wants Britain to return to the customs union “almost straight away” and provision in the next Labour manifesto to reverse Brexit without a referendum.
However, experts are sceptical. Polls indicate a narrow majority of Britons support the idea of rejoining, but it may require more support before we could rejoin.
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What the process could look like
Experts warned it could also take five to 10 years to get back in.
Here’s how rejoining might look:
- A second vote is not technically necessary but leading experts think a referendum would likely be needed to provide a stable mandate to start negotiations with the EU.
- If the UK applied to rejoin, the EU would need to ensure the applicant met the 1993 Copenhagen Criteria.
- If talks then began, there would be a series of big issues to resolve.
- The EU could demand that Britain use the Euro and become part of the Schengen Area.
The expert analysis
Experts disagree on the likelihood the UK could be allowed to opt-out of either the Schengen Area or the Euro. Dr Thomas Sampson, economist and Brexit expert at LSE, suggested it is possible the EU would be willing to let Britain rejoin under the same deal.
But others suggested the EU would want to lock the UK into the Euro to “make it harder for [us] to ever leave”.
- The European Commission would need to approve any deal for the UK to rejoin. A majority of MEPs in the European Parliament would also have to vote in favour and all the bloc’s member states.
- Professor Catherine Barnard, an expert in EU law at the University of Cambridge, thinks negotiations and ratification could take as long as a decade.
- If talks did not start until after a Labour general election victory in 2029, it could be 2040 before Britain was back in the bloc.
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New treatment for ultra-rare ‘second skeleton’ disorder
Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP) is a “devastating, irreversible” genetic condition.
What is FOP?
- According to the charity FOP Friends, there are around 70 known people with FOP in the UK.
It is one of the rarest diseases in the world, affecting around one in a million people.
FOP is a genetic condition which leads to the body creating extra bones in locations where they should not form, including inside muscles, tendons and ligaments.
What is the treatment?
A new “disease modifying” treatment has been shown to reduce new bone growth by more than 90 per cent, reduce flare-ups and potentially offer hope for new surgical options in the future.
The drug garetosmab is an antibody that blocks a protein called activin A, which has been found to be critical in the development of new abnormal growth development in people with FOP.
63 adults were involved in the trial, which saw a massive reduction in flare-ups in the groups which received the treatment.
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Writing in , the authors said they expect the drug to enable “long term preservation of mobility and function”.
Chris Bedford-Gay, FOP Friends founder, said the community “has desperately waited for a way to stop FOP in its tracks”. He added this “is the moment a life-changing treatment comes that bit closer”.
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More than half of international students are influenced by British fictional characters when deciding to study at universities here.
2,500 UK-based students from the US, China, India, Pakistan and Nigeria were surveyed for the British Council.
What are the key findings?
- It found that 83 per cent of international students said British culture was an important reason why they decided to study here.
- 59 per cent said fictional British characters were a draw, with 19 per cent citing Peppa Pig and 21 per cent Mr Bean as examples.
- British cultural icons like Princess Diana and David Beckham were also a major influence.
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Importance of soft power
A majority (62 per cent) of respondents said the UK music scene had been a major or strong influence on their decision to study here.
Among those who cited music, Ed Sheeran was the top named artist with 18 per cent, followed by Dua Lipa, Coldplay and Harry Styles.
What does this mean?
Catriona McCarthy, the British Council’s interim director for education, said the results tell us it is “crucial” that Britain remains “culturally vibrant” in order to retain its status as a global leader in higher education and attract the best students from around the world.
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How AI could help screen for type 2 diabetes
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology could be used to analyse speech to screen people for the disease, a study suggests.
What you need to know
- The tool was trained using more than 63,000 voice samples from more than 21,000 people in the UK and US.
- It was trained to detect changes in speech which have been linked to type 2 diabetes, such as increased hoarseness and an inability to control breath.
- The study found that the speech model gave a higher risk score to those who reported having type 2 diabetes 80 per cent of the time.
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How effective is it?
Giedre Cepukaityte, research scientist at tech company thymia, said the technology “opens a new route to screening for diabetes”. But she emphasised it is “not a replacement for a blood test”.
The technology performed well across different ages and genders, but its performance was lower on Black patients.
It also wasn’t as effective with recordings from people with heart disease, high blood pressure or obesity.
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AI gets a cautious welcome
Dr Lucy Chambers, head of research impact and communications at Diabetes UK, said: “AI-based technologies could help identify more people who may benefit from diagnostic blood tests, but it’s crucial that they are rigorously designed and tested to make sure no-one slips through the net.”
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How quickly triple lock could end – and possible replacement
The future of the triple lock has been thrown into question after reports Andy Burnham is being told to scrap the scheme to fund his social care plans.
Experts say that at some point, the policy will have to be replaced with a way of increasing the state pension that is “more sustainable”.
A ‘double lock’
- A double lock linked to either earnings growth or inflation has been suggested as a possible alternative.
- Tom Selby, director of public policy at AJ Bell, said the starting point for this would determine what a “reasonable value” for the state pension should be, most likely as a percentage of median earnings.
- After deciding that figure, Selby said, you put in place “a sensible plan to reach that level”.
Link to earnings
Maike Currie, vice president of personal finance at PensionBee, said the simplest replacement would be an earnings-only link. This would mean the state pension broadly maintains its value relative to working people’s incomes.
But the Institute for Fiscal Studies has previously recommended introducing the “smoothed” earnings link, which means pensioners receive inflation protection if inflation exceeds earnings.
Simple link to inflation
- Former pensions minister, Steve Webb, said another approach could link the state pension to inflation.
- This approach would create “big savings”, he said.
- But it would also substantially weaken the state pension at a time when millions of retirees are coming up to state pension age with very modest private savings.
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Who will be the most affected?
Currie said the triple lock being scrapped would impact people of all ages.
“For someone close to retirement, scrapping it could have a more immediate impact on their expected income,” she said.
As for younger generations, “the effect could potentially be greater over the long term, as smaller annual increases compound over decades”.
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“Trump’s an idiot,” he said. “I’ll give you that.” Then he walked away.
In the same month, two more of her neighbours (who’d voted for Trump three times), told her it was time for him to go. This is a state where a Democrat has not flipped a Senate seat in nearly 100 years, yet this year, polls show that it might happen because people are so fed up with the President and his party.
I’ve spent years warning about Donald Trump. But this week I’m not going to ask you to read my forecasts. Instead, I want you to read what other people are saying, including a hyper-loyalist who stood by his side, reporters who sat in the front row and asked him questions to his face and a lawyer whose job it was to tell him “no”.
I had put questions to these folks amid reports that the midterms look grim for Republicans and that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has a supposed plan to turn the election around.
Analysts think the GOP will lose its majority in the House of Representatives and will be lucky to hold the Senate. What the people who know him best will tell you is that Wiles may have a plan, but Trump doesn’t. He’s already moved on to something else: the havoc he’s going to wreak in the aftermath.
I want to go back to Grisham, because nobody can say she wasn’t a true believer. She was there from the first campaign, rose to become press secretary and stayed until the day after January 6th. She attacked me when I quit the first Trump administration in protest and spoke out against the President, calling me a “coward” who was peddling “nothing but lies”. Later, she recanted and described the danger that she felt Trump posed to the nation if he returned to the presidency.
When I asked her whether the President understands what he’s doing to Republican candidates this autumn, she didn’t hesitate. “He doesn’t care,” she told me. “If the House or the Senate flip, or both, he gets to spend the next two years playing the victim. He does not care if we win the midterms.”
The party is fighting for its life, and its leader is already trying to weaponise the loss. For him, a hostile Congress is an excuse to let it rip, and Trump has never met an excuse he didn’t like, especially if it gives him licence to cause chaos.
This month, commercials began airing touting the President’s toughness on cable television only weeks before the election, ending with a disclaimer: paid for by the US government. Every federal employee – including me, in every job I held in government –gets a day-one briefing on what’s called the Hatch Act. It’s the law that makes it illegal to use government resources or taxpayer money for political purposes. Richard Painter, the former White House ethics lawyer, said the ads were a potentially impeachable offence.
A White House official said the ads were “clearly not political. The President is not on the ballot, and the ads don’t have a call to action”, with a spokesperson pointing to past examples of ads released by former administrations, including George W Bush’s Department of Health and Human Services and Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, and Joe Biden’s administration (to encourage Covid-19 vaccination).
A White House spokesman added: “These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad. The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic. We should be proud of our country.”
Grisham’s seen this movie before. In the first term, the White House counsel’s office told her to take down a tweet, because it broke the Hatch Act. Trump overruled them. “You know who the boss of the Hatch Act is?” he told her. “It’s me.”
There’s something else striking about these adverts. They’re not about Republican candidates. They’re about him. “You are struggling to buy groceries and gas,” Grisham told me, “and he’s using your taxpayer money to put ads up that make him look good.” A man actually fighting for his party to win would be touting his candidates, she said, but a man trying to distance himself ahead of their expected losses (and trying to secure his own legacy) spends the ad dollars on himself.
The biggest change, she says, is who is left in the room. “He’s got no one around him telling him no.” In the first term, people would at least push back; he would get angry, say fine, and the next morning we’d find that he’d done the ill-advised thing anyway. Then would begin the hard work of walking it back. Now nobody bothers with the first step. Indeed, the recent White House ban on CNN, MSNOW and went into place while gatekeeper Susie Wiles was on holiday.
I also queried several reporters who’ve covered Trump up close for years about what they’re expecting. Brian Karem has reported from every White House since Ronald Reagan, including Trump. (He’s currently suing to get his White House press pass back.) “I’m not convinced Donald Trump reads anything, much less a playbook,” he told me when I asked him whether the President’s recent moves showed he was becoming more despotic. “Call him authoritarian, call him a spoiled brat, call him a bully. That’s who Donald Trump is.” Karem sees the man becoming more unhinged if he loses control of either chamber of Congress.
Jim Acosta shares a similar view. He also had his credentials pulled by this president in 2018 for asking tough questions and won them back in court. He’s covered Trump for a decade, and he’s blunter still. “We’re in the throes… of a wannabe dictator who cannot handle negative coverage,” he said. Like the others, he predicts an even more unpredictable Trump, partly because of a staff who won’t stop him. “They’re just placating him and letting him do these things without any pushback. It’s a signal that he will do just about anything at this point.”
Acosta says this about the run-up to the vote: “The next 45 days, and probably the 45 days after that, are going to be pure hell in this country.”
Which brings me to Ty Cobb. He was a White House lawyer in the first term, a careful conservative whose job was to keep the President inside the lines. With a grey handlebar mustache and a visage that evokes another time, he’s not given to hyperbole, which is why his words were the most jarring of the people I spoke with.
“The Constitution was simply not written for somebody as evil as Trump,” he said. “The founders never contemplated that America would elect a convicted felon to be their president. But we did.”
Cobb’s worry is not so much the election itself. It’s what a man with no restraint does when the election goes against him. “All he knows is what he wants, and he grabs it. And he’s got people who facilitate that.” He points to the new White House counsel, Will Scharf, who spent his 2024 run for attorney general in Missouri calling the 2020 election stolen. Until Democrats take the House and use the power of the purse, Cobb expects “atrocity after atrocity”.
Grisham concurs. “I really think he’s going to do things like, ‘Hey, guy in a tractor, go to the Kennedy Center and knock it down. And don’t worry, I’ll pardon you,’” she said, referencing Trump’s ongoing fury at the refusal of the courts to let him plaster his name on the performing arts centre in DC named after a deceased president. She explained why Trump is barely phoning it in for GOP candidates: “He doesn’t need anyone’s votes. He’s going to try to be like an emperor.”
So here’s the strange part. Each of these people is frightened about what comes next, yet every one of them is more hopeful than they’ve been in years. Not because of the Democrats. Because of people like the man in the grocery store.
In the past month, Republicans have scrubbed Trump’s name from their websites. Senators have called for an investigation into his son. The Vice President has been dispatched to defend candidates in states the party never expected to worry about. And Trump’s approval rating is hovering in the twenties, which is almost unprecedented.
Grisham’s bet is that when the losses come, it will be Republicans, not just Democrats, who finally take votes to rein in the President. “The next two years will be bad. He’ll act crazy. But I think he will be stopped. I really do believe we’re about to be on the downside of this horrible mountain.”