Fun With The October Surprise October 14, 2026 But first . . . WHO COULD NOT LOVE ELIZABETH WARREN’S DOG? Adorable (60 seconds). PLUTOCRACY Just 15 billionaire families have already contributed $962 million to influence this election. Their fortunes buy influence. Their influence protects their fortunes. See: Billionaires Buying Elections: Midterm Edition It’s time for a New Deal. SATURDAY! Where will YOU be? Click and scroll down to find a rally near you. And now . . . THE DREAD OCTOBER SURPRISE This is so fun. After reviewing the history of October surprises, former Republican operative Rick Wilson writes, in part: Which brings us to the Trump regime’s attempt to build several October Surprises, apparently from an Ikea kit missing half the parts and all the instructions. . . . The same day Trump was hawking Russian diesel, the Talarico smear imploded like a Trump casino, with roughly the same return for its investors: embarrassment, shame, legal exposure, and the mockery of everyone living in the real world. A smear that works needs three things: the seed of something real, a messenger people trust, and amplification. Lots of amplification. The Talarico rumor had none of the three. The story was gossamer-thin; its messengers were shifty liars with long track records of being both wrong and lying liars who lie, and their desperation could be smelled from Amarillo. It’s a pretty good window into the wider MAGA meltdown. It still might have caught fire, if not for Volodymyr Zelenskyy and those meddling Ukrainian kids blowing up Russian Yandex data centers and knocking Putin’s AI MAGA bot army offline. That’s the real October Surprise of 2026. The MAGA machine has lost its most powerful ally: Putin’s army of fake Americans who flood every social media zone with shit. For ten years, the online right ran on a hidden subsidy pumped straight out of the Russian agitprop enterprise. Ever since the St. Petersburg troll farms got into the business in 2016, a shadow chorus of fake patriots with bald eagle avatars and handles like “MAGA Nation” made every half-baked smear look like a grassroots uprising. Or did. When Twitter started showing account locations last fall, some of the loudest “American” voices on the right turned out to be posting from Russia, Eastern Europe, Nigeria, Thailand, and South Asia. A lot of Real Americans ™, it seems, have never been within 5,000 miles of the human world, much less the USA. Now, with Ukrainian drones turning Putin’s MAGA server farms into slag, the choir has lost many of its voices. (More will follow. RIP @SexyMAGAMilf69.) A rumor that would have trended for three days in 2020 now just sits there, a few thousand genuine lunatics talking to each other in a closed loop while normal voters never see it. The reset across Twitter, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has been remarkable. Tucker, Megyn, Scabby Steve Bannon, Jack Posobiec, and Elon Musk have all watched their reply-guy adoration and their audiences fall through the floor. Some of their most devoted fans, it appears, were a rack of servers outside Moscow. Without the fake crowd, the real crowd looks like what it always was: small, loud, and irredeemably, spectacularly stupid. . . . No one is worse off with the bots crippled and diminished, except MAGA. MAGA won’t be saved by one dramatic October moment. Increasingly, it looks like it can’t be saved at all. The reckoning is coming. It will arrive one ballot at a time, cast by millions of Americans who decided a long time ago that Trump and his enablers deserve the ass-kicking, curb-stomping, Waffle-House-parking-lot can of whupass the voters are about to deliver. Mother Jones suggests there may be more than a little wishful thinking in the account above. (Drone Strikes Didn’t Take Out a Russian Bot Farm, But We Were Primed to Believe It.) But they sure would make a welcome target. Ukraine — are you listening?