Trump and Vance rally for Republicans in final midterms push; Alaska’s Murkowski backs Democrat in governor’s race – live

Since he took office last year, Bill Essayli, southern California’s highest-ranking federal prosecutor, has wielded his office to help advance Trump’s policies, including on immigration and transgender rights.

Now, he’s using that same authority to try and block tens of thousands of California votes from being counted in the upcoming midterm elections. Specifically, Essayli has sued to make the state aside ballots from 20,000 voters who the Department of Justice has branded “likely noncitizens”.

Experts in constitutional law said that it was an extraordinary step for a nominally independent DoJ to seek to disqualify so many ballots in the name of fighting alleged noncitizen voter fraud that, despite Trump’s insistence, has proven vanishingly rare.

My colleague Sam Levin has the story here:

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, faced backlash on Wednesday for a “wildly racist tirade” during a campaign stop in Michigan in which he falsely asserted that Arabs never won major awards in science or literature.

Kennedy was speaking at the Monday night event in Grand Rapids in support of Mike Rogers, the Republican US Senate candidate trailing his Democratic midterms opponent Abdul El-Sayed, who is Muslim, in polling.

“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science, they don’t win the ⁠Nobel prize, they don’t win the Fields prize, they don’t win the Wolf prize, they don’t produce literature,” Kennedy said.

A factcheck published on Tuesday by the Associated Press showed that Arabs have won, or been shortlisted, for all those awards in recent years.

The ⁠Council on American-Islamic Relations called Kennedy’s Islamophobic remarks “a ⁠textbook display of ​unvarnished racism and bigotry”, and the US healthcare advocacy organization Protect Our Care condemned his “wildly racist tirade”.

Hillary Scholten, a Democratic congresswoman representing west Michigan, who declined to endorse El-Sayed this summer, said Kennedy’s comments were “disgraceful and have no place in public service”.

In a statement posted to her Facebook page late Tuesday, Scholten said: “As secretary of health and human services, he has a responsibility to serve all Americans, not use his position to demean entire communities with bigoted and demonstrably false claims”.”

She added: “The last I checked, Secretary Kennedy has neither a medical degree nor a Nobel peace prize, and his rhetoric has undermined public confidence in health science. Maybe he should sit this one out.”

Other Trump administration officials have tried to paint El-Sayed as a supporter of Islamic radicalism, including the president himself, who at a rally in Port Huron, Michigan, on Sunday called the Democrat “a jihadist” who was “on the side of the terrorists”.

Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of jailed former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro who recently lost the race for his father’s former office, has landed in Miami, apparently taking shelter under the aegis of the Trump administration after fleeing his home country.

The younger Bolsonaro had been ordered to turn over his passport following his election defeat in connection with a criminal investigation over money laundering. Instead, Reuters and other outlets have reported that the defeated candidate and his family fled to Argentina overland before flying to the US via Ecaudor.

He has so far refused to officially concede the race to the victorious left-wing incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Trump has said that Brazilian election appeared “rigged,” but gave little indication he would seek to get involved in disputing the results.

Though Trump did not outright endorse Flavio Bolsonaro, his father Jair was a close ideological ally of Trump’s in Latin America. After Brazil launched a criminal prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro for allegedly attempting a coup to restore him to power after his 2022 election loss, Trump slapped tariffs on the country in retaliation.

And there is little love between Trump and Lula, who has accused Trump of trying to meddle in Brazil’s election in Bolsonaro’s favor.

Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska, has broken with her party to endorse the Democrat in her state’s gubernatorial contest.

Murkowski, a moderate Republican who is no stranger to breaking with Trump, made her surprise endorsement to local news station KTUU. She told the outlet that she felt the three Republicans contesting Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins in the ranked-choice election lacked the bipartisanship needed for the job, calling them overly partisan.

She said that Kreiss-Tomkins, by contrast, is “a young Alaskan with a view and a perspective that I think Alaska needs right now, a freshness of energy”. She described him as a “a commonsense guy who has a known ability to be working together”.

Donald Trump will return to Ohio on Wednesday to campaign for Republicans in the state, as the GOP looks to hold onto the seat currently occupied by Senator Jon Husted. Husted’s opponent, Sherrod Brown, a former Democratic senator from the state, has a decent lead in the polls with less than a week remaining until election day.

Up until now, Trump has made a habit of praising Husted’s physique (his butt, especially) on the campaign trail. We’ll see if he keeps that up today.

JD Vance, perhaps Trump’s busiest surrogate on the campaign trial, will continue a cross-country air campaign by heading east to North Carolina, where he’ll back Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley, who is trailing in the polls to Democratic former governor Roy Cooper.

Former president Barack Obama will travel to Georgia tonight to campaign alongside top Democrats in the state, including incumbent senator Jon Ossoff and Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta now seeking the Georgia governor’s office.

Obama has been increasingly active on the campaign trail as the midterms race nears its climax. The former president recently joined rallies in Ohio and Michigan, two states where Democrats are looking to win out closely contested Senate races, before setting his sights on Georgia.

During his previous stop in Ohio, Obama made a jab at Trump for redecorating the White House to look like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory”. The remark appeared to get under Trump’s skin, prompting him to respond, and has somehow drawn the restaurant chain into the battle for control of Congress.

In Georgia, Ossoff, who is facing a Senate challenge from Republican House representative Mike Collins, holds a comfortable lead in the polls. Increasingly, the Gerogia Democrat has been seen as a potential contender for the Democrats’ nomination in the 2028 presidential election.

The race is much tighter for Bottoms, who is vying to flip Georgia’s governor’s office red.

Flávio Bolsonaro, the rightwing Brazilian presidential candidate who lost the country’s election to leftwing incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is expected to arrive in Miami on Wednesday after fleeing Brazil, Reuters reported.

According to the outlet, Bolsonaro and his family – after crossing by land into Argentina, and from there departing to Ecuador – took a flight bound for the US, where the Trump administration’s state department plans to grant them visas.

Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the Trump-allied former leader of Brazil who was arrested and handed a 27-year sentence for attempting a coup to overturn the result of his own 2022 election defeat to Lula. After his election defeat by Lula over the weekend, and before fleeing to the US, he had been ordered to turn over his passports in connection with a criminal investigation.

Trump did not outright endorse the younger Bolsonaro this time around. But he has publicly sparred with Lula frequently in his second term, including imposing tariffs on Brazil in response to its criminal prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro. And Trump has boasted about his role as an apparent kingmaker in Latin America, where Brazil is one of the few holdouts still controlled by leftwing governments as rightwing leaders are ascendent through the region.

Throughout his re-election campaign, Lula accused the Trump administration of trying to interfere with the vote, and of having colonial ambitions in Brazil.

The US Federal Reserve is expected to leave interest rates unchanged on Wednesday during its last rate-setting meeting before the midterm elections, keeping rates at one of the highest pre-election levels seen in over 20 years.

Last month, Fed officials raised rates for the first time since 2023, citing rising inflation. Inflation has hovered for years above the Fed’s target rate of 2%, and for most of this year, the annualized inflation rate has remained above 3%.

The move infuriated Donald Trump, who said that “interest rates in the United States should be 1% or less”.

Though inflation rose higher in September, going from 3.4% in August to 3.7%, a pause would signal the central bank is taking a wait-and-see approach ahead of the midterms next week.

Interest rates determine the cost of interest for loans, including for credit cards, mortgage and some savings accounts. During times of high inflation, raising rates can slow price increases.

Multiple Fed leaders have suggested in recent weeks that the central bank has room for a pause, even if most Fed economists are predicting one more rate hike before the end of the year.

“The hikes do not need to come at consecutive meetings, but they should be in place in an acceptable period of time,” Fed governor Christopher Waller said earlier this month.

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

A federal judge has ruled that Republican Bill Essayli is not legally serving as the top US prosecutor in Los Angeles.

Essayli was disqualified from overseeing two criminal prosecutions. The order, however, will not immediately go into effect, and the Department of Justice (DoJ) has said it intends to appeal.

The ruling was part of a long-running legal battle challenging the Trump administration’s maneuvers to keep Essayli in office despite not being confirmed by the US Senate.

Essayli, a former Republican state lawmaker and ally of Donald Trump, became an interim US attorney in April 2025, but he was not formally nominated by the president, which allowed him to lead the office without going through the standard confirmation process.

After Essayli’s “interim” appointment ended last July, the Trump administration gave him an “acting” title, then kept him on as a “first assistant” after a judge ruled he was unlawfully serving as US attorney.

But in August, a federal appellate court ruled against a Nevada justice department leader in a similar case, and the judge overseeing Essayli’s case cited that higher court’s ruling on Tuesday, issuing another order saying he was still acting unlawfully.

Michael Seabright, the federal judge, said Essayli was illegally serving, even with a “special attorney” and “first assistant” designation by the Trump administration, and the judge said he could no longer participate in or supervise two ongoing prosecutions where the attorneys had challenged his position.

“We respectfully disagree with the court’s order,” Essayli said in a statement on Tuesday. “The President and the Attorney General have every right to select supervisors within the Justice Department.”

Read the full story here:

In other developments:

• Faced with widespread voter discontent over the spike in oil prices since he attacked Iran, Donald Trump staged his rally in Corpus Christi, Texas, on Tuesday alongside a vast oil tanker, the Angerona, which the president said had just arrived from Venezuela bearing a personal gift for him: a million barrels of oil.

• A senior state department official told the Associated Press that the US will “will issue visas to Flávio Bolsonaro and his family and allow them entry into the United States”.

• In his remarks to supporters in Lubbock, Texas, Trump attacked James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate, for having shown compassion for transgender children who demonstrated for their rights at the Texas state capitol in 2023.

• Trump lied that “our gasoline prices are lower than when Barack Hussein Obama – our oil prices, gasoline, lower than they were with Obama”.