☕️ CONVOLUTIONS ☙ Tuesday, November 10, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump asks questions, media says "no evidence," the Times finds multiplication "convoluted," Pew can't explain its polling miss, and Bukele's troops flatten a Haitian gang boss's pool house, and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your roundup includes: Trump asks a few rhetorical questions and the media hears “no evidence” anyway; the Times calls one multiplication problem “convoluted” while Pew can’t explain why the polls missed Democrats by a mile; DataRepublican warns Republicans about a trap; and good news from the Worst Place On Earth™, as Salvadoran troops level a gang boss’s pool-equipped bunker and the UN’s thirty-year Haiti project gets an awkward comparison, plus more.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Saying we are living in unusual times is like saying communists got a little carried away in the Twentieth Century. Until this weekend, the President of the United States defied Democrats’ predictions, took the high road, and resisted reporters baiting him into questioning the election results. Welp. That phase is over. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported, “Trump casts doubt on Democrats’ historic midterm wins.” Even as I was uploading yesterday morning’s roundup, the President cracked open Pandora’s Box of Politics:

This was an extremely cleverly designed statement, even though it looks like ordinary Trump stream-of-consciousness. It sounds tough, but re-read the sentences one by one. He only asked rhetorical questions and made no literal claim that anyone could dispute or even call misleading. He never said “fraud,” “rigged,” “stolen,” or even named a state, a machine, or a number.

Politico called them “fact-free” claims. This made me laugh. Politico is a fact-free newspaper. Irony!

Media responded like wary weasels circling a rat trap, dashing in for cowardly bites in a series. CNBC sprang first at 10:15 AM, an astonishing eight minutes after Trump’s 10:07 AM post, with “Trump revives voting-machine conspiracy.” The rest of the media quickly began to sing off the same sheet of music.

Everyone who survived 2020’s stolen election knows the chorus: no evidence.

As the long day wore on, USA Today called Trump’s post “baseless” and “unsubstantiated.” TIME agreed (“unsubstantiated”). AFP deemed it “baseless… without evidence.” Al Jazeera said, “he provided no evidence of election fraud or wrongdoing.” BBC, oddly, was more delicate, perhaps still sore from the last Trump lawsuit. It used a slightly softer and more accurate construction: “without providing specific evidence.”

The difference between yesterday’s careful challenge and how Trump reacted in 2020 is worth considering. In 2020 he made flat, fact-checkable claims: “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!,” “a rigged election,” dead people voting, Dominion switching votes, and specific numbers in Georgia. Those statements could be fact-checked, and were, though most courts refused to test them.

Contrary to media’s overheated claims, Trump is not replaying 2020’s greatest hits. That is deeply interesting.

🗳️ To be fair, over the weekend President Trump reposted (without comment) some of the viral stolen-election memes that have been making the rounds. Like this chart, which Trump reposted on Saturday and shows a strange symmetry between Republican and Democrat votes in 2024 and 2026. The guy who made the chart called it “algorithmic.”

The chart seems to show that on Tuesday, Republicans got almost exactly 85% of Trump’s 2024 share in every single Senate race. The solid lines are Trump’s and Harris’s 2024 two-party shares. The gold dashed lines follow a simple formula: 85% of Trump’s 2024 share for the Republican, and Harris plus 15% of Trump’s share for the Democrat. The dotted lines are the actual 2026 results, and they hug the gold lines almost everywhere, albeit with minor variations.

The chart claims the result looks mechanical, not organic. Last Tuesday, Wyoming lost 15% of the 2024 count, Texas lost 15%, and Iowa lost 15%— a baffling consistency given very different states, issues, candidates, and races. In Texas, for instance, the Democrat Senatorial candidate had plumb vanished for several weeks. In Michigan, Democrats were defecting from the Muslim candidate. But they still followed the same basic formula.

Some folks argue this looks less like millions of separate choices and more like the same adjustment applied everywhere with a broad brush.

🗳️ By mid-afternoon, the Times chimed in, below the headline, “Trump Veers Back Into Claims of Rigged Election, Questioning Midterm Results.” It referenced the chart without naming it or printing it, but then dismissed it as convoluted: “On Saturday, he had shared several posts from others questioning the results with convoluted mathematical theories about election rigging.”

Got that? The Times called the chart’s math ‘convoluted.’ It did not say wrong. But I guess it is so convoluted that it is just one number multiplied by another, which apparently is too hard for the paper of record to follow. If the math were false, they’d have said false, because they love saying false. They even said ‘falsely’ about an Obama quip in the very same article.

If explaining the chart’s logic would have helped make the case, the Times would have given it a few paragraphs and quoted statistical experts mocking the whole idea. The truth is, the correlation is weird and raises serious questions, but is not clearly fraudulent.

Some online critics said the chart only proves what a nationalized “wave election” looks like. Maybe. And it’s still hard to imagine how a forced algorithm could even work. It’s a big country. States and counties use different voting machines. Some states, like Florida, perform random audits against their paper ballots.

🗳️ Democrats, who’ve been waiting for this very moment, pounced like starving pumas. “Donald Trump’s pathetic return to election denialism was inevitable,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, roared on social media. “He can whine all he wants, but nothing will stop this inescapable truth: For the last two years of his presidency, Trump will face the largest Democratic congressional majorities in decades, all because he has been an unprecedented failure.”

Former Fox commentator Megyn Kelly tweeted two words: “Just stop.”

Let’s turn to Trump’s rhetorical question, “How could the Polls be so wrong???” He was referring to even more weirdness.

🗳️ Since time immemorial, pollsters have almost always overestimated Democrats. This year, before the elections, nearly every platform ran stories predicting Democrat overperformance in the polls and complaining about how devilishly hard it is to get suspicious Republicans to answer polling questions. Everyone expected the Democrats would be over-sampled; the only question was to what degree.

But it went the other way.

The polls actually underestimated Democrat performance, for practically the first time in history since Columbus informed the men that he’d finished counting and the crew had voted by secret ballot to keep sailing west instead of going home.

The generic House ballot ended with polls predicting D+9.6. The actual vote is currently running about D+12 to +13. Some gaps were even more astonishing and prediction-defying. “God is Binary” Talarico, for instance, had only polled D+2.6 but somehow won in Texas by D+12. Another electoral miracle!

On Friday, mega-pollster PEW ran a story blandly headlined, “A First Look at Polling Performance in 2026.” The article quickly reported, in boldface, “Pre-election polls captured the direction of this year’s election while generally understating the size of Democrats’ advantage.” Democrats underpolled in survey after survey, regardless of pollster, across the board, in nearly every single instance. Not a little. A lot.

“It’s way too early to identify the source or sources of these errors,” PEW explained, as its reason for not explaining anything. “In the coming weeks and months, further analysis will help us better understand why the election unfolded the way it did,” PEW confidently predicted, “and hopefully reveal why polling understated the forces that brought Democrats back into power.”

Hopefully— meaning you can bet it will forever remain a mystery for the ages, like the Sphinx, perhaps, or how a leaky urinal produced the Atlanta State Farm Arena’s midnight water main break in 2020.

Trump only asked, “How could the polls be so wrong???” It’s a fair question. It’s literally the same question that PEW posed. But nobody called PEW a conspiracy theorist.

🗳️ I’m a big fan of DataRepublican, who, unlike me, is a data specialist and worked with Trump’s DOD. She disagrees with the algorithmic theory. She blames the NGOs.

Two days ago, she tweeted, “The problem isn’t that machines decided to flip 15% of Republican votes and stole the 2026 midterms from us.” Her suspect is the NGO turnout machine. She pointed to a “19M for 19M” campaign to turn out 19 million voters who sat out 2024. “That’s exactly what happened,” she said. She added that citizenship checks run on “an honor system” and “ballot harvesting is unenforced.”

DataRepublican fears we are falling for a trap.

Alert readers will recall that, on October 19th, DataRepublican released what she called the “Democracy Files”: recordings and documents from former USAID democracy officers discussing a midterm “election meltdown” as a “window of opportunity” and floating “extra constitutional” options for governors. Midpoint News reviewed the tapes and confirmed that: a secret coalition exists, the “meltdown” talk, the “going outside the Constitution” chatter, the “governor takeover” plan, the “progressive coded” red lines, and the invitation for foreign support— though it said it found ‘no evidence’ of a violent plot.

The Washington Post airily dismissed the clips as patriotic preparations against Trump if he claimed that the election was stolen.

The trap DataRepublican fears Republicans are falling into is contesting the results. If they do, she says, they’ll hand the Democrats the planned-for legitimacy crisis, while ignoring the real problem, which in her view is the NGO turnout operation, ballot harvesting, and large numbers of noncitizens voting. She had four suggestions: (1) Do not refuse to certify the election. (2) Invest in turnout organizations instead of Facebook campaigns. (3) Quickly pass election integrity laws now, before Democrats take over. (4) Audit all the close races.

🗳️ So where are we? All of this is enough to give us a migraine the size of a well-equipped AMC Gremlin. But we needn’t panic. Take a deep breath. Let things play out. Watch and wait. Stay optimistic. Drink coffee. There’s a lot happening in front of and behind the scenes.

I’ll leave you with this. Our timeline was knocked off the tracks by 9/11, and burst into flames when the pandemic arrived. Nothing feels normal because it isn’t ‘normal,’ if by ‘normal’ we mean the exceptionally long period of stable, peaceful American existence before the Millennium. This is something new and different for our generation, but not for human history.

Our grandparents would recognize it; they just didn’t experience it in real time on a scrolling feed.

In fact, our grandparents, who lived through the Depression, two world wars, polio, and the draft, would probably say this is nothing and ask what on Earth we are whining about. Buckle up, buttercup. Stiffen that upper lip. And for Heaven’s sake, let’s not be snowflakes.

We shall navigate the next two years together with grit, stoic determination, and espresso. It’ll be fine. And if recent history is any guide, it’ll probably be better than fine. We already beat back the globalists during the pandemic. Davos is drowning. Miraculous turnarounds are practically the norm.

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How about a little better news before we finish? The week’s most underreported story must be all the great stuff happening in the Worst Place On Earth™: Haiti. Yesterday, the Miami Herald quietly reported, “Haiti police, Salvadoran troops destroy house of 400 Mawozo gang leader.”

As a reminder, three weeks ago, four Salvadoran aviation technicians serving with the UN-authorized Gang Suppression Force were ambushed in Croix-des-Bouquets and haven’t been heard from since. El Salvador’s gang-busting president Nayib Bukele spoke with Trump on October 27th, and Trump told him, “You have to do what you have to do.” Bukele then sent about 2,500 special forces troops, some delivered on American planes, and mostly outside UN command. (The UN says only about 200 Salvadorans fall under its mandate.)

By all accounts outside of corporate media, the Salvadorans are kicking the Haitian gangs’ voodoo butts. Progressive groups are becoming very concerned.

Displaced residents say armed men and illegal checkpoints have nearly disappeared in Santo and Croix-des-Missions. A Haitian women’s rights leader told France 24, “since the arrival of the Salvadoran forces, the gangs seem panicked.” And one of the biggest and bloodiest gangs in Haiti, called ‘400 Mawozo,’ suddenly wants talks. Its leader, Wilson Joseph, whose nickname translates to “death comes at any time,” sent a letter yesterday to the UN, and copied to the Associated Press begging for mediators and proposing disarmament talks starting next week, while insisting that “dialogue is not a capitulation.”

It’s funny how a few armed helicopters and some special forces guys can help sharpen the peacemaking instinct.

The reason for Joseph’s letter to the UN is simple. (How brutal Haitian gang leaders acquired connections to the international media and the UN Secretary-General are questions I will leave for readers.) At about 2:30 AM Sunday, police and soldiers used explosive drones to level Joseph’s fortified bunker, which the Herald euphemistically called “his house.”

Ground teams went in while four helicopters gave cover, two of them Salvadoran. Joseph escaped. Two Miami Herald sources said as many as 20 of his gunmen may have been killed. The AP reported that Haitian police and Salvadoran soldiers completely destroyed the ‘home,’ which was built in the past year and featured both indoor and outdoor swimming pools.

Indoor pools are especially helpful on days when the heavy precipitation is made of lead with steel jackets.

🔥 Meanwhile, ordinary Haitians are holding spontaneous parades. The Haitian Times reported ebullient pro-Bukele rallies three days ago in Port-au-Prince, Belladère and Jérémie, with cheering crowds chanting “Debloke peyi a,” which either means “Unlock the country” or “More Diet Pepsi.” One woman gushed, “We have reached our breaking point with these gangs. Long live Nayib Bukele.” Another said, “Give us back our country so we can return home.”

I’ve previously argued this is a bigger operation than merely rescuing four kidnapped air techs. Corporate media stubbornly refuses to connect these dots. But on my birthday two years ago, Bukele offered to do exactly what he is doing right now. The March 10, 2024 headline from the Jamaica Observer:

I think Trump accepted his offer.

🔥 Many folks are pointing out that the UN has been trying to ‘fix’ tiny Haiti for thirty years. It’s spent billions and billions, caused cholera outbreaks, and flown rainbow flags, with the result that the country has been plunged deeper and deeper into chaos and violence, and has become a failed state without a functional government. Think California, except maybe not quite as bad.

US Ambassador Mike Waltz quipped about murderous Wilson Joseph’s plaintive letter for media sympathy and his begging for help from —who else?— the United Nations, which organized the same Gang Suppression Force that Joseph has supposedly been warring with. I guess he doesn’t hold any hard feelings. He forgives, and forgets. He’s a broad-minded gang leader. (Portlanders: That’s sarcasm.)

Regular X users noticed the United Nations’ consistent success at failing and incompetence.

Geopolitical experts are making the same observation, if more delicately. French analyst Guillaume Herblot tweeted that the Haitian problem was never “too complex to solve.” It was always just progressives, who love the criminals more than their victims.

Progressives are starting to panic. The Guardian ran a hand-wringing headline on Saturday:

The Guardian’s article quoted an ‘organized crime expert’ who called this the wrong approach. “If you think that by waging war against the gangs, you will eradicate them,” the expert opined, “you’re absolutely wrong.” This was a very strange thing to say, since Bukele absolutely eradicated the gangs in El Salvador by waging war against them.

Also on Saturday, progressive geopolitical journal Responsible Statecraft insisted, after 30 years of UN occupation, that “Haiti should be for and by Haitians.” Leave them to themselves. The World Socialist news website called the Salvadoran operation “a Gestapo for the Americas.”

But possibly my favorite was yesterday’s Economist, rightfully mocked by President Bukele himself, which unironically cited complaints from a Haitian gang leader nicknamed, and I am not making this up, General Barbecue. “Violence isn’t always the answer,” said the violent gang leader, while complaining about President Bukele over-reaching.

Behold, the peak, or apogee, of corporate media malpractice: Quoting a murderous gang leader complaining about police brutality. (Note: it’s possible this is a meme and the Barbecue quote isn’t real. The Economist has a very tight paywall, and I ran out of time to track it down. But it was too delicious to omit, and Bukele reposted it. So.)

But more to our point, The Economist almost connected the dots. I did confirm that its article noted that, “Two years ago Mr Bukele boasted that he could sort the mess out,” and said, “Few believe that finding lost comrades is his sole aim, given what he has said about Haiti before, and the number of men he has sent.”

Here’s what seems obvious to me. Earlier this year, Trump founded the Shield of the Americas, a ‘Monroe Doctrine’ group including both El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s next-door neighbor— but not Haiti (or Cuba, for that matter). We are witnessing the muscular ascension of a conservative Western Hemisphere.

We are being sorely tempted to feel sorry for ourselves by whatever happened a week ago at the polls. We must resist that dark temptation. There is even more good stuff happening and it’s going to continue. We’ll be here to cover it all.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Your roundup arrived early today thanks to a judge; I’m off to what promises to be a fiesty hearing with loads of lawyers. Come back tomorrow for more essential news and caffeinated commentary. And let me know in the comments whether you want me to keep reporting election anomalies or give it a rest.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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