Episode Details

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were watching the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders take My Chemical Romance to court for dressing like them in a fake dictatorship, the real one had a busy week.

This week, Trump's Justice Department sues to stop a Senate race from being counted if the Republican loses, the Pentagon hides what Iran did to our bases, the Trump administration opens a donut bar for bears in Alaska's national preserves so hunters can shoot them, the State Department asks diplomats who they voted for, and ICE hits a guy and tells him to stop acting. Let's get into it.

Trump's DOJ Wants Alaska's Votes Counted Only If Sullivan Wins

Donald Trump's Justice Department sued to stop Alaska from certifying its Senate race if Republican Dan Sullivan loses. The trigger isn't fraud. It's losing. And Trump bragged about it: "I'm the one that said do it."

The excuse is a second guy on the ballot with the same name, Daniel J. Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher from Petersburg, Alaska. Republicans say Democrats planted him to confuse voters, and Trump calls him an "imposter." Democrats deny it, and a state judge found the evidence didn't show he was trying to confuse anybody. So DOJ wants certification frozen "pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan." Translation: anyone who voted for the other guy must have meant to vote for theirs.

Ballots are secret. How do you investigate what a voter meant? Knock on doors? Hold a séance? Ask the ballot how it's feeling?

And it wouldn't even save him. In the August primary, Democrat Mary Peltola beat Senator Sullivan by more than 8,000 votes, and the other Sullivan got 3,610. Pretend every one of those was a mistake, hand them all to the senator, and he still loses by more than 4,500. DOJ filed it hours after Attorney General Todd Blanche said it had no plans to block certifications, and a Notre Dame election law professor called the legal argument "one of the worst ones I've ever seen."

Alaska isn't the only place DOJ is trying to keep votes from counting. In California, it's suing to make the state set aside 20,000 ballots from a list of people it calls "likely noncitizens." Los Angeles County checked 200 of those names. Nearly 40% indicate they were born in the United States, and more than 70% had never voted at all. A top DOJ official admitted, "There may be some names on there who it turns out ultimately are citizens." Very chill attitude for a guy trying to throw out your ballot.

They're building the machine to toss votes before they're even counted. If it works in Alaska and California, it works in your state.

Iran Blew Up Our Bases, Hegseth Classified the Receipt

Iran's strikes damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings at American bases and dozens of American aircraft, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's Pentagon is keeping the bill classified.

Those numbers come from the Pentagon's own internal watchdog: bases in eight countries, 18 service members killed, 417 wounded. Back in March, Trump said Iran had "no navy." Turns out you don't need one when you've got missiles and drones. The acting Navy secretary says Iran "blew the hell out of" our Navy base in Bahrain.

When Hegseth put a price on this war, $37.5 billion, he left the base damage out completely. So what will it cost to rebuild? Nobody's allowed to know. Five senators got the number in a classified briefing and want it made public by November 2nd. That's the day before the election, so I'm sure it'll be ready on the 4th.

Military families are paying too. The Navy evacuated 1,300 sailors' family members from Bahrain, and some have spent tens of thousands of dollars of their own money, one family nearly $40,000. The admiral in charge told them, "We literally have been making this up as we go." Troops and spouses told MeidasTouch the Pent