Every bully I faced in forty years of trying cases believed the same thing: nobody would ever call them out on their lies. They thought they were above the law. They found out they weren’t.
I stood in front of a jury and laid out the facts and the evidence, one piece at a time, until they had nowhere left to hide. And time after time, it was a jury of everyday Americans, people exactly like you, who weighed that evidence and delivered justice.
On November 3, you’re in the jury box.
Power that never has to answer questions gets bolder by the day. In our government, Congress holds the job of asking those questions, and the Constitution armed it with the subpoena and the purse strings to do it. Since January 20, 2025, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate have refused to do that job, handing their gavels and their subpoenas to the man they were elected to check, and on the rare day they pushed back, he waved them off without consequence. You pay for their silence at the gas pump and the pharmacy counter.
Right now the jury takes orders from the defendant, and on November 3 you get to seat a new one.
That makes this the most consequential election of your lifetime. A midterm decides whether a president answers to anyone at all for his final two years. I could fill a book with the reasons every eligible American needs to vote this November, and the list runs into the hundreds, maybe even the thousands. I narrowed it to fifty, every one on the record and every one aimed at your family’s wallet and your freedom. Share this list with everyone you love, and make sure each of them is registered before your state’s deadline closes.
What Flipping Congress Puts in Your Hands
Flip the House and the rules change overnight. That’s the whole game. The Constitution places every federal dollar in the hands of Congress, and no spending bill becomes law without the House, so a Democratic House means no more blank checks for a war nobody authorized and no more taxpayer slush funds for the president’s friends. A Democratic House also gets subpoena authority, which means cabinet secretaries and Trump’s crypto business partners sit under oath on live television and answer for what they did with your money and your sons and daughters in uniform.
Take back the Senate too, and you lock the door behind him. The Senate confirms every federal judge and every cabinet secretary, so a Democratic Senate stops this president from packing the courts and his cabinet with unqualified loyalists. Win both chambers and Democrats run oversight from both ends of the Capitol and put bills on the president’s desk that help all Americans while also restoring the separation of powers the founders built on purpose. Flipping the House changes everything. Winning both finishes the job, and one man stops governing like a king with a rubber stamp waiting down Pennsylvania Avenue.
The War Nobody Voted For
Start with the fight you feel every time you fill your tank.
1. On February 28, 2026, Trump joined Israel in attacking Iran without a declaration of war or any authorization from Congress, and seven months later the fighting grinds on, with an April ceasefire and a June peace framework collapsing into renewed clashes and fresh American strikes on September 1. Eighteen American service members are dead, nearly 800 more are wounded, thousands of Iranians have been killed, and the war has spilled into Lebanon and across the Gulf. No vote ever authorized it.
2. In the war’s first week, Republican majorities voted down resolutions to stop it, and when both chambers finally passed one in June with a handful of Republicans joining Democrats, the White House brushed it off as having no significance and the strikes resumed anyway.
3. Gas prices have jumped about 50 percent nationwide since the first bombs fell. At least six states now average above $5 a gallon, with California above $6.
4. Diesel set an all time record above $6.50 a gallon, and diesel moves every truck carrying your groceries and your prescriptions.
5. Trump called the pain a small price to pay and brushed it off as a little glitch, the same man who promised you $2 gas on the campaign trail.
6. The average household has already paid more than $760 in extra fuel costs because of a war he once predicted would last four or five weeks.
7. He now says oil prices will start tumbling right after the election, which tells you he knows exactly what this war costs your family and exactly when he wants you to stop noticing.
8. Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz cut off roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and squeezed fertilizer supplies, so farmers took the hit first and your grocery bill took it second.
Every gallon you pump this fall carries a war tax that Congress never once voted to authorize.
Your Wallet Took the Second Hit
Next comes the tax you never approved. The Supreme Court noticed calling the tariffs illegal, and the refund checks went to importers, leaving you holding the receipt.
9. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the emergency law Trump used to impose his sweeping tariffs never gave him that authority at all, which means the man who campaigned on lowering your costs spent a year collecting a tax he never had the right to impose, because tariffs belong to Congress.
10. Refunds on the illegal tariffs, estimated as high as $175 billion, go to importers, not you, and the higher prices you paid at checkout are gone for good.
11. He replaced his illegal tariffs almost immediately with a new 10 percent global tariff and later swapped in other trade taxes to keep the fight rolling.
12. Today’s tariffs cost the typical household more than $1,000 a year, and inflation climbed from 2.4 percent in January to 3.4 percent in August.
13. In August he hit $20 billion in Canadian goods with new tariffs and announced plans to double levies on Canadian cars and auto parts, and Canada answered with retaliatory tariffs as high as 50 percent, which lands squarely on American workers who build and sell things north of the border.
14. Farmers lost their biggest soybean buyer when China stopped purchasing for most of 2025, and the administration answered with a $12 billion taxpayer bailout.
Clean Air on the Chopping Block
This one outlives all of us. This administration treated the air your grandkids breathe like an enemy combatant, and Congress handed it the ammunition.
15. In February 2026 his EPA rescinded the 2009 finding that greenhouse gas pollution endangers public health, the legal backbone of federal climate rules, and wiped out tailpipe pollution standards for cars and trucks stretching back to model year 2012, a move the agency itself bragged was the largest deregulatory action in American history. Big Oil profited. You and your family lost.
16. On his first day back in office, he pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement for the second time.
17. The Republican budget law killed the electric vehicle tax credit and phased out credits for wind and solar, and his EPA then canceled the $7 billion Solar for All program meant to cut power bills for more than 900,000 lower income households, a termination a federal judge ruled illegal.
18. In December 2025 he ordered work stopped on five fully permitted offshore wind farms with roughly $28 billion already committed, and the courts threw out every one of those orders.
19. Republicans in Congress joined in, using a rarely invoked law to strip California of its authority to set cleaner car standards that other states had adopted.
Turning Friends Into Enemies
20. He keeps calling Canada the 51st state and the border an artificially drawn line, talking about our closest ally like a property he plans to flip.
21. In January 2026 he threatened eight NATO allies, including Denmark, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, with tariffs climbing from 10 to 25 percent until Denmark agreed to sell Greenland, and he refused to rule out force before backing down at Davos.
22. On January 3, 2026, he launched strikes across Venezuela and seized its president, Nicolás Maduro, without asking Congress for authorization.
23. Since September 2025 his administration has blown up boats at sea in the Caribbean and the Pacific, killing more than 200 people with no trial and no public evidence of what they carried.
Allies remember. Trust that took eighty years to build is draining out of every capital we used to call a friend.
When the Badge Turns on the Public
This part keeps me awake. I’m guessing you too.
24. On January 7, 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, an American citizen, age 37, in Minneapolis, during an enforcement surge that flooded the city with roughly 3,000 federal agents and turned ordinary neighborhoods into scenes from a country I don’t recognize.
25. Seventeen days later, federal agents killed Alex Pretti in the same city, an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA and an American citizen with a permit to carry and no criminal record.
26. At least 30 people died in ICE custody in 2025, the deadliest year in two decades, and six more died in January 2026 alone. Detention climbed to a record of about 69,000 people by early January, and in December roughly three out of four held had no criminal conviction of any kind.
27. He sent National Guard troops into Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and Washington, D.C., and federal judges all the way up to the Supreme Court had to rein him in.
28. His administration shipped Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a notorious Salvadoran prison through what its own lawyers admitted was an error, then dragged its feet for nearly two months after the Supreme Court ordered it to help bring him back.
When federal agents kill American citizens on American streets, silence from Congress becomes a choice.
Revenge Is the Only Policy He Never Changes
Trump promised retribution on the campaign trail. He kept that promise.
29. In November 2025, Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan, every one a veteran of the military or the intelligence community, recorded a video reminding troops that they must refuse illegal orders. That is the law. Trump called it seditious behavior punishable by death.
30. He reposted a message calling for them to be hanged. His defense secretary threatened to haul Kelly, a retired Navy captain and former astronaut, back to active duty for a possible court martial, then censured him in January and moved to strip his retired rank and pension. Just like he did when he flew combat missions and was launched into space, Kelly isn’t giving up. He’s suing.
31. A federal grand jury indicted former FBI Director James Comey in April 2026 on two counts of threatening the president, all over an Instagram photo of seashells on a North Carolina beach arranged into the numbers 86 47, and his trial is set for October 21. A photo of seashells on a beach became a federal indictment, and that should terrify anyone who has ever posted an opinion.
32. It was the second time this administration charged Comey; a judge threw out the first case, along with the case against New York Attorney General Letitia James, after finding the Trump administration prosecutor handling the case had been unlawfully appointed.
33. He publicly ordered his attorney general at the time to prosecute his named political enemies, on social media for the whole world to see.
34. His Justice Department served grand jury subpoenas on the Federal Reserve, Chair Jerome Powell said the real offense was refusing to set interest rates the way the president demanded, and a federal judge quashed the subpoenas.
35. He tried to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook over mortgage fraud claims that never produced a single charge, and the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that she keeps her seat while her case goes forward.
36. When a weak jobs report landed in August 2025, he fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the official whose job is counting the jobs.
37. He calls Democrats hardcore, godless communists and the greatest threat to the nation since its founding, and on Labor Day he sent holiday greetings to the Communists and all of the Democrats he claims want to destroy the country, which means he was talking about tens of millions of your neighbors. He ordered the federal government to recognize only two sexes and drove transgender service members out of the military, and his administration shut down the specialized suicide crisis line for LGBTQ young people, a group the law itself says is more than four times as likely to consider suicide. Equal protection under the law belongs to every American, and this administration decided some Americans don't qualify.
38. He sued The New York Times for $15 billion, and the parent company of CBS paid him $16 million to settle his lawsuit over a 60 Minutes interview while it waited on his administration to approve its merger. Three days after Stephen Colbert called that settlement a big fat bribe on the air, CBS canceled The Late Show, ending its run in May 2026 and silencing the most watched late night critic of this president. His FCC chairman leaned on ABC until Jimmy Kimmel was temporarily pulled off the air.
39. He fought for months to keep the Epstein files sealed until his own party forced his hand, and his Justice Department then blew the legal deadline by six weeks and blacked out page after page. Today, his DOJ is still sitting on 3 million records that he could order released tomorrow morning, if he wanted to.
Follow the Money
Every fraud case I’ve ever handled starts with the same instruction. Follow the money.
40. World Liberty Financial, the crypto company Trump launched with his sons during the 2024 campaign, delivered at least $1.2 billion in cash to the Trump family in its first 16 months, matching what his entire real estate empire produced over eight years, and his own disclosure shows at least $1.4 billion in crypto income for 2025, making crypto his biggest moneymaker.
41. A firm tied to the national security adviser of the United Arab Emirates bought 49 percent of World Liberty for $500 million, and $187 million went straight to Trump family entities.
42. He and Melania sold meme coins stamped with their own name and rewarded the biggest buyers with a private dinner at his golf club. Unless you were an insider, a majority of wallets owned by everyday Americans lost everything.
43. He pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, whose exchange had promoted a World Liberty stablecoin, and then said in a television interview that he didn’t believe he’d ever met the man.
44. His Justice Department settled his own $10 billion lawsuit against his own IRS by creating a $1.776 billion fund, paid with your tax dollars, for allies who claim they were targeted, with people charged over January 6 in line for payouts. The same deal dropped the existing tax audits of Trump and his family and handed him a formal apology from the United States government.
45. On his first day back in office, he pardoned roughly 1,500 people charged in the January 6 attack, including people convicted of assaulting police officers. He was pardoning the crowd he urged to march on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, after telling them to fight like hell, and the House impeached him for inciting an insurrection, with 57 senators, seven of them Republicans, voting to convict. A federal grand jury later indicted him for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, and another indicted him on dozens of felony counts for keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, including secrets about our nuclear programs and military weaknesses, and for obstructing the government’s efforts to get them back. Neither case ever reached a jury. A judge he appointed threw out the documents case, and the election case ended once he won back the White House.
46. He accepted a luxury jet from Qatar worth around $400 million and bulldozed the East Wing of the White House for a ballroom bankrolled by corporate donors with business in front of his government.
Public office exists for public service, and this family turned the presidency into a cash register with a flag on it.
Your Health Care and Your Ballot
These last four hit home.
47. The budget law Trump signed on July 4, 2025, cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and food assistance over ten years, and the same Republican majority refused to extend the subsidies that kept marketplace insurance affordable, so premium payments jumped an average of 58 percent this year and roughly 16 million more Americans are on track to be uninsured by 2034. The same law cut off Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood for birth control and cancer screenings for most of a year, and nearly 30 of its clinics closed, all on top of the decision by the three justices he appointed to overturn Roe and strip millions of women of the right to make their own reproductive health care decisions.
48. Republican leaders refused to deal on those health subsidies through a 43 day government shutdown in the fall of 2025, the longest in American history, and food aid for millions of families fell into chaos.
49. He pushed Texas to redraw its congressional map in the middle of the decade to grab as many as five more Republican seats before a single vote was cast, and the Supreme Court let the map stand.
50. In March he ordered the government to build lists of approved voters and told the Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on those lists, all to fight a kind of imaginary fraud that shows up about four times in every 10 million mail ballots. A federal judge has blocked the new mail rules for November, and his lawyers have now run to the Supreme Court three times to revive them.
Do This Before Your Deadline Passes
Fifty reasons. One Tuesday in November.
Here is what I’m asking you to do tonight, before you scroll past this and get pulled into the next headline. Confirm your voter registration in under five minutes, because many states close registration about 30 days before Election Day, which puts those deadlines in early October, days from now, and a missed deadline silences you as surely as any executive order. Do it today. Then pull up your contacts and pick ten people, your adult kids, your neighbors, your old college roommate, the guy from the gym, and make sure every one of them is registered.
If you vote by mail, request your ballot now and send it back early, because this administration spent the year trying to make mail voting harder and you should give the system zero excuses to lose your voice. On Election Day, drive someone to the polls who otherwise stays home. Congress is the jury the founders wrote into the Constitution, and in November you decide who sits in the box.
Our kids and grandkids will inherit whatever country we hand them, and I refuse to hand them one where a president starts wars without a vote and prosecutes critics over seashells, so get yourself and ten friends registered and vote on November 3 like their future depends on it, because it does.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
Nice work, sir!
I'll be voting early very soon. I'm still dismayed how so many still support the cheeto-dusted bloviator despite all that you have listed.