Yesterday, Ohio’s MAGA Sen. Bernie Moreno made quite a show of attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci in a Senate hearing at which Republicans pushed conspiracies and smeared Fauci, who they accuse of all manner of idiotic things regarding the Covid pandemic.

Before we get too far, let me first remind you that Moreno, in 2024, was Donald Trump’s choice in the GOP primary, and suddenly found himself at the center of a gay sex scandal, as the Associated Press linked him to an online male-for-male sex ad, in a story that rocked the GOP. Let me also point out that he’d previously been pro-LGBTQ but completely reversed course as he became an ambitious MAGA warrior.

More on that further down. But let’s get back to yesterday.

Social media exploded with comments, pointing out that Moreno got more fired up about Fauci than he’s certainly been about the allegations from his own daughter, GOP operative Emily Moreno, who has accused her ex-husband, Ohio MAGA Rep. Max Miller, of physical abuse of both her and the couple’s 2-year-old daughter. Abby Vesoulis at Mother Jones, who I had on my SiriusXM program yesterday, did in-depth reporting on the case, which is well worth a read.

Miller has a string of abuse allegations in his past, including from Trump’s former press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who was his girlfriend.

Not shockingly, Miller worked as a senior White House aide for Donald Trump in his first term and has been lauded by Trump, who endorsed him for his run for Congress in 2022. Miller and Moreno married a few months before the election at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, in a MAGA fairy-tale wedding. But they divorced two years later amid the allegations of abuse.

Bernie Moreno has remained grotesquely silent about the allegations of domestic abuse against his own daughter and granddaughter.

Emily Moreno has accused Miller of scalding her chest and stomach by throwing boiling water at her. She said he held a gun to her head, shoved her against a wall and beat her, and fractured their daughter’s collarbone. Max Miller has demeaned her by calling her mentally ill and accusing her of being a liar, denying all, and filing a defamation suit against her in May.

Yesterday, as Bernie Moreno was tearing into Fauci, The New York Times reported all that Moreno could muster as a response regarding his daughter’s accusations of having a gun put to her head and being beaten up, all of it coming from his spokesperson, Reagan McCarthy:

“Senator Moreno’s top priority is the safety and well-being of his daughter and granddaughter.” The spokeswoman added: “While he will not litigate these matters in the media or respond to baseless public attacks, he will do whatever it takes to ensure a just outcome for his family.”

Seriously, you’re not believing your own daughter, not calling on this guy to resign, as Democrats rightly did regarding credible sexual assault allegations against Graham Platner, Eric Swalwell and others?

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Commentators have attributed this to the typical cowardly MAGA loyalty to the sex-offender-in chief, Donald Trump, and the GOP. Republicans are looking at big election losses in the mid-terms and the possible loss of Miller’s seat. According to the Times, the White House has seen “alarming” polling on the race, in which Democrat Brian Poindexter could flip a seat in a district Trump won by double digits.

I wouldn’t dismiss Moreno’s cultish devotion to MAGA even over his own daughter’s welfare. But there appears to be another factor which may be even greater regarding an explanation for his inaction.

According to the report in Mother Jones, court filings include an exhibit documenting a threat Miller made to Bernie Moreno in a text message:

“I’m sick of this, you know I never hurt our daughter. Take this however you want, everyone is going to get to know you better than your wife does,” Miller wrote to Bernie Moreno, according to an exhibit referenced in Emily Moreno’s motion for a restraining order. “Enjoy the ride brother, I wouldn’t have to do this if you could keep your lying daughter under control.”

That’s where the Associated Press bombshell story from 2024, linking Moreno to a gay sex ad on Adult Friend Finder, a story I reported on here as well, takes on relevance. From the AP:

There’s mounting anxiety inside the GOP that Bernie Moreno may emerge with the nomination. After vaulting into the top tier of contenders with a coveted endorsement from Donald Trump, Moreno — who has shifted from a public supporter of LGBTQ rights to a hardline opponent — is confronting questions about the existence of a 2008 profile seeking “Men for 1-on-1 sex” on a casual sexual encounters website called Adult Friend Finder.

“Hi, looking for young guys to have fun with while traveling,” reads a caption on a photo-less profile under the username “nardo19672,” according to an Associated Press review of records made public through a massive and well-publicized data breach of the website. Records also show the profile was last accessed about six hours after it was created.

The AP review confirmed that someone with access to Moreno’s email account created the profile, though the AP could not definitively confirm whether it was created by Moreno himself…

As the AP reported, the GOP was frantic that this could bring Moreno down should he get the nomination. You can only imagine the late-night strategizing and the Moreno campaign in crisis. Over a couples of days, the Moreno campaign came up with a ridiculous explanation, which nonetheless seemed to tamp down the story:

On Thursday evening, two days after the AP first asked Moreno’s campaign about the account, the candidate’s lawyer said a former intern created the account as a prank. The lawyer provided a statement from the intern, Dan Ricci, who said he created the account as “part of a juvenile prank.”

This was highly implausible. As I wrote at the time:

Ricci claims it was an “aborted prank that I pulled on my friend, and former boss, Bernie Moreno, nearly two decades ago.”

But what was the prank? How does it work? And wouldn’t the profile have been more elaborate and exaggerated if it were a prank? Why a simple solicitation for sex? And why would an intern prank their boss like this—it’s not a “prank,” after all, it’s sexual harassment—in a way that would surely get him fired, but instead he’s now a friend and campaign donor?

The geolocation data for the ad shows it was created in Fort Lauderdale—not Ohio, where Moreno’s business was located and where the intern would conceivably be working.

Fort Lauderdale is where Moreno’s parents live, a place he would conceivably have visited.

Gay men—and men who meet other men online for sex—weren’t buying it for a minute. And now we learn that Max Miller threatened to reveal something about Bernie Moreno—in a text to him—that would allow people to “get to know you better than your wife does” after Emily Moreno accused Miller, per court filings, of abuse against her and their daughter.

Perhaps Miller was simply jumping off of the AP story and making empty threats. But it’s also possible that he knows something about the senator who used to be a big supporter of LGBTQ rights, a car dealership owner who contributed to the cause, promoted marriage equality and defended his own gay son in years past.

That was all before Moreno became MAGA and threw his son under the bus, shifting all his positions on LGBTQ rights. And now he’s curiously—and revoltingly—thrown his daughter under that same bus, after the man she’s accused of assaulting her has threatened to reveal details about the Ohio senator.

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Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has been pressuring Mitch McConnell, who has missed 38 votes since he was hospitalized on June 14. That was over a month ago, and all Kentucky constituents have received are a few proof of life photos, in which McConnell appears stiff—no videos—and messages supposedly written by him. This week McConnell put out one of these statements claiming he’s still coming along. He’s apparently in a rehabilitation center and can’t be released yet.

Beshear is legally mandated to set the date for a special election to fill McConnell’s place if he is incapacitated, but Republicans may be covering up, trying to push the calendar out. At a certain point it will be too close to the November elections, when they want to install Rep. Andy Barr. They’re apparently worried a special election would cause chaos and help someone more MAGA or some have said they might even be worried Rep. Thomas Massie, a staunch Republican Trump foe, could be helped in getting the nomination in a chaotic special election.

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Beshear, like most governors, should have the right to appoint someone in McConnell’s place, but Kentucky Republicans in the legislature passed a law in 2024 banning him from doing so, with a veto-proof majority. Legal experts, however, say it’s unconstitutional, and Beshear has said he would challenge it in court.

Beshear has now upped the pressure, telling McConnell to speak or resign.

McConnell’s office had released another photo of MConnell with his wife during his absence. It wasn’t enough for Beshear who wrote McConnell a letter yesterday.

As Governor of the state you serve, I am calling on you to directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign.

Per our research, a vacancy in the Senate occurs when a senator dies, resigns, or is expelled by a vote of the Senate itself.

If you are unwilling to voluntarily show that you still have the capacity to serve, I will insist Leader Thune fully investigate your condition, report to the American people, and begin the process if warranted.

Does that mean Beshear is going to pull the trigger, appointing a replacement and challenging the law in court that bars him from doing so? He’s not exactly saying that, but calling on McConnell to resign or prove he’s not incapacitated seems to be coming close to a move.

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Beshear also wrote, “Important events are happening in our country right now during your absence.”

And then he went over the issues plaguing the country.

President Trump is stuck in a war of his own making and has greatly strengthened the very country he claims is a threat.

Prices continue to rise, crushing Americans who are working hard but not getting ahead. Americans’ voting rights are being eliminated by the Supreme Court and threatened by congressional action. All while you are absent and refuse to communicate clearly and directly to the people you serve.

Does McConnell even know any of those things are happening? Is he aware? We need more answers, and Beshear will hopefully make a move.

Trump taking the states to the Supreme Court to stop mail-in votes

Meanwhile, those threats Beshear points to from Trump are continuing, as Trump yesterday appealed a lower court ruling throwing out his executive order that demanded the U.S. Postal Service not deliver mail ballots to voters in states that have not shared their voter rolls with him and his stooges at the Department of Homeland Security.

Twenty-three states and the District of Colombia sued and won in federal court. An appeals court upheld the ruling at the end of the week. “Under the Constitution, state and local officials are responsible for administering federal elections,” the court said in a 2-1 decision, backing the lower court ruling that stated, “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.” The district court judge underlined the words “does not.”

The appeals court also stated the executive order “would sow confusion and threaten disenfranchisement of many eligible voters.”

But Trump’s Department of Justice quickly appealed this to the Supreme Court in an emergency application, 98 days before the election. Many people will be voting in less than 60 days, as early voting begins in some states as early as mid-September.

The Supreme Court has now asked for the 23 states and Washington, D.C., to file a response to the emergency application by August 3rd. I guess they could have decided not to hear the case at all, but, as with everything Trump, they take up what he demands, usually on the shadow docket, which is not transparent.

The court already has voted to allow mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberals in a 5-4 decision. And this case seems absurd.

But does any of us trust this Supreme Court enough to say for sure? I don’t think so.

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This week the White House announced a whole new set of tariffs that Trump has put in place, but the explanations for the continued radical action have been almost completely accepted in the press, as if tariffs are just the new normal when we’re still breaking from decades of trade policies. But the new tariffs rely on punishing countries for having bad labor practices. It’s something I’ve been discussing this week on my SiriusXM program. Since when did this administration care about labor practices, and why isn’t the media explaining what a sham this is—and explaining that many of the countries don’t have bad labor practices—instead of telling us these tariffs are on firmer legal ground and somehow “legitimate”? …

That gets to the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, which happened again last night, rescheduled after a shooter disrupted the dinner back in May. And it was as cringy as you might imagine, because too much of the press wants access; the press bows to Trump. It was also instructive regarding the state of Donald Trump’s health. He fell asleep several times on the dais while awards were given out to journalists who exposed his corruption and lies, while millions watched. When he finally spoke, he rambled, got names and places wrong, viciously attacked the media, and made racist comments. Even when he was trying to be funny, he bombed. The room was mostly silent. Why would journalists even go through this masochistic ritual?

Since the proof of life photos of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell that immediately became immersed in conspiracies, particularly within MAGA, there’s been not a peep. His staff has refused to give out further information, claims he’s working from the rehabilitation center he was moved to, and hasn’t responded to both Democratic and Republican politicians who’ve not only asked for details but also asked that he call into a radio station or speak publicly. If he’s incapacitated, the governor could appoint a replacement, and there are now some reporting that Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear is thinking about appointing a replacement before August 3rd, after which the seat would remain vacant until the election under state law. Will that really happen? …

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Sgt. Angel Rampersad was killed along with two other service members when an Iranian missile struck a U.S. base in Jordan. It was a base far away that clearly wasn’t protected adequately, struck by a country with which the U.S. began a war, a country we’ve been told doesn’t have any military capability—among the lies Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have told—because we’ve supposedly destroyed all of it.

A 28-year-old from Queens, New York, Sgt. Rampersad was an immigrant who came to the U.S. as a five-year-old child with her mother from Trinidad. She gave her life for this country—a country that is terrorizing immigrants every day. She was also married to a woman, a member of a minority group under siege in authoritarian America.

Sgt. Rampersad apparently had a love of the military from when she was very young, back when she was at Forest Hills High School and taught herself how to play the drums. She would have joined as soon as she was legally able.

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She enlisted when she was 21 rather than at 18, however, waiting a few years at her mother’s insistence until after she attended college at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. She then reenlisted last year and was serving at the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command in Ansbach, Germany, supporting overseas operations when Donald Trump began the reckless, unplanned war on Iran in February.

In the Army, Sgt. Rampersad “met the woman who would become her wife,” The New York Times reports. The couple adopted a black-and-white terrier named Rio, according to the Times, which quoted neighbors who were stunned by Rampersad’s death and were hanging flags and banners in her honor.

I was struck upon reading about Sgt. Rampersad. She was someone who was among those Trump and Pete Hegseth view as completely dispensable. Does any of us think they truly mourned her loss or had any guilt, let alone sorrow?

Not that Trump and Hegseth and all the rest in this wretched regime care all that much about the white straight male soldiers—they clearly have put all of their lives at risk with this senseless war. This regime is, however, rounding up immigrants on the streets of our cities—killing some and imprisoning others in concentration camps, people who’ve committed no crimes—and they are demonizing queer people, stripping our rights. When Trump and Hegseth look at immigrants, people of color, and queer people who were killed in the war, making the ultimate sacrifice, it’s hard to believe they think of them as deaths that actually count.

I guess I’m slightly comforted by the fact that Sgt. Rampersad’s wife was present along with her mother at the dignified transfer yesterday, even as Trump ludicrously claimed all the dead soldiers had wanted to make sure Iran didn’t have a nuclear weapon, as if he’d spoken with them. The last thing Trump wanted to do yesterday was to have to honor the body of a woman of color who was an immigrant. And the last thing Hegseth wanted to do was honor a woman, period, let alone have to meet her queer wife and extend his empty condolences.

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I finally got a chance to see the documentary released late last year about investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, “Cover Up,” directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. Hersh, who worked independently as well as for periods of time at The New York Times and the New Yorker, produced groundbreaking journalism over the past six decades. And he’s still doing it, at age 89, right here on Substack.

Hersh made some mistakes, including in some unpublished research on a book about JFK and in underestimating the brutality of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and the film doesn’t spare a focus on them. But some mistakes are bound to happen in a career spanning more than half a century.

Two groundbreaking, shocking—and all too accurate—stories Hersh uncovered had me thinking about the events of today, and how history repeats itself. They offer us a lesson about Trump and MAGA. There’s a tendency to believe we’d seen nothing like Trump and MAGA before in modern American history, and that’s because it’s partially true: There has never been a president so vulgar, so corrupt, so overtly racist, and so celebratory about his authoritarianism.

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But we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that Trump’s style of despotism means we’ve not had leaders who engaged in despotic actions, nor that there wasn’t a movement like MAGA that celebrated brutality and dictatorial actions, a segment of the population that has been an ugly part of the fabric of this country from the beginning.

In 1969, during the Vietnam War under Lyndon Johnson’s administration, Hersh broke the barbaric story of the My Lai massacre. U.S. troops were ordered to shoot and kill civilians in the village of My Lai. Between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were killed by U.S. Army soldiers, including elderly people, children and babies.

General William C. Westmoreland at the time was demanding higher numbers of casualties among the Viet Cong in order to justify the war. Hersh revealed details about Army Lt. William L. Calley Jr. and his execution of civilians in My Lai, but Calley was among others who committed such crimes (a few others were also charged) and, more importantly, was given orders from above. Calley took the fall for his superiors, who never faced any ramifications or even thorough investigation; he was eventually convicted of the murder of 22 civilians.

Not only should the war have ended there, but we should have seen arrests of people going right to the top of the military. Instead, the war ramped up. And the next president, Richard Nixon, and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, would engage in worse atrocities, using napalm in North Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia.

That was allowed to happen because they had the support of the base of the Republican Party—their own MAGA—even as the anti-war movement grew. That movement had risen up around Calley, much like the MAGA movement, with marches and protests and people hanging banners blazing “Free Calley!,” many of them in deep red states. This base within the GOP was ginned up on brutality and murder and believed it was perfectly okay to kill non-white civilians.

It’s true that many on the left who were part of the antiwar movement saw Calley as a scapegoat and defended him, but this was for far different reasons than those on the right, who supported Republican leaders in excusing, even promoting brutality.

Calley was sentenced to life in prison, but Nixon—prior to Trump, considered the most corrupt president in history—released Calley under house arrest after three days. Military authorities reduced his sentence to 20 years, then 10 years. Eventually he was released after only three years of house arrest. The GOP had shifted public opinion in favor of Calley, using racism and calls to patriotism and it was enough to keep Republicans in power, as the war continued. Nixon was reelected in 1972—the US didn’t pull out of the war until 1973—and Nixon wasn’t brought down until the Watergate scandal.

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The other story that Hersh exposed and which connects to Trump and MAGA was that of the brutality and torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which he revealed in April of 2004. It was little over a year into George W. Bush’s senseless war based on lies that cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Hersh uncovered graphic evidence of widespread torture of Iraqi prisoners—after learning CBS already had possession of the images and “60 Minutes” was refusing to air them, urged by the Bush administration to cover them up as a “national security” matter.

I know many of you will remember the horror of those photographs and their release, which you can see here, and how they jolted the entire globe, just as the My Lai massacre did, sending shock waves around the planet. Support for the war among the American people had begun to slowly wane after Bush’s empty “Mission Accomplished” photo-op within weeks of the war, claiming victory just as Trump did with the war in Iran, while hundreds of American soldiers continued to die over coming months.

But the majority still supported the war until the the Abu Ghraib photos caused support for the war to diminish further.

And yet, just as with Nixon and the GOP amid the aftermath of My Lai, the Republican base stuck with Bush, including those who rabidly defended Abu Ghraib. Some GOP lawmakers called the prisoners “terrorists” clearly opining that they were deserving of the torture.

Again, that event should have been the end of the war. But it would go on for years, backed by the GOP. Enough agreed with that sentiment about torture and brutality, and treating Muslims as less than human. Just eight months later, Bush was re-elected president in 2024 by a slim margin, like Trump, getting Republicans and just enough independents to put him over the line.

Both these events, happening decades apart, had the entire world gripped, as people saw the U.S. as a brutal, authoritarian place that had sunk to a terrible low—just like today. One might say that the fact that we came back from those events and gained much trust around was a good thing.

But now the world is watching the U.S. lead another illegal, unjust war and threatening to seize countries like Greenland while executing American citizens and immigrants in the streets, from Alex Pretti and Rene Good to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Guerrero—and many others, killed by ICE agents or dying in concentration camps.

You have to wonder how many passes the U.S. will get, and who could blame the world? The ICE executions are yet another manifestation of the brutality of the GOP and, more importantly, a part of the base that likes seeing them happen.

Democrats will beat back MAGA in the midterms, and, if people work hard enough, MAGA will be defeated in 2028—because, as always, there are more of us than them. But past events like My Lai and Abu Ghraib, as well as January 6th, should make us realize that—even if there is justice, and people at the top are sent to prison, which didn’t happen after these past events, including afterJanuary 6th—that isn’t enough when it comes to the hate that has been part of this country from its inception.

The real lesson is that we can never be complacent and think we’ve beaten back MAGA—or whatever name or manifestation it may take in the future—because it will not simply go away.

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Donald Trump’s prime-time speech on 2020 election fraud landed with a thud. Same old crap. Media across the political spectrum either panned it or ignored it, seeing it as Trump’s desperation heading into the 2026 midterms with dismal approval numbers. That doesn’t mean that Trump will not try to hijack the midterms nor that he doesn’t have plans to interfere. But he needed to present something more compelling in order for him to engage in the most harsh kinds of actions he’s been thinking about—and certainly ones that will get around the courts—and that just didn’t happen. The big question is how the White House is processing this disaster, and what support Trump has in MAGA…

Part of Trump’s effort was his handoff to the Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, who held a press conference the following day and made equally false claims. Mullin also threatened to jail state and local election officials who do not allow or cooperate with the federal government in its quest for voter rolls and determination to find non-citizens voting. He also threatened the administration would withhold funds for programs. But the letter DHS later sent to states didn’t square with what he said. And Democrats have won several major court battles against the administration on elections…

Amid the escalation in ICE executions against immigrants of the last few weeks, new reporting underscores how the Trump administration’s legal cases against ICE protesters and immigrants are falling apart, with the Justice Department abandoning hundreds of cases. That’s good news for the people affected, but it further reinforces the factual evidence regarding the recklessness of the administration and how the actions being taken are purely to intimidate and brutalize people…

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Rob in Oregon, who called in yesterday, certainly betrays the reason why: They can’t defend Trump when given what are simple facts that everyone knows and realize how pitiful they look.

At one point Rob became speechless, unable to respond to my swatting away his claims. But he did eventually go back into the grab bag and take out yet another empty defense.

I just had the end the pain, as he was just repeating his feeble talking points.

Take a watch and let me know your thoughts!

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And he will face Chris Gallant, who won the Democratic primary last month and is gearing up for the battle in November. A poll from earlier in the year had Gallant within three points of LaLota—and that was before Gallant won the primary in June.

Gallant joined the New York Army National Guard at 17 and deployed several times to Kuwait. He’s been a union leader and a volunteer firefighter, serving his community for years.

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Gallant is also gay—he and his fiancé both serve in the military—and has been vocal on civil rights for LGBTQ people at a time when the GOP has been passing horrendous bills. LaLota likes to speak as a moderate Republican on queer issues, but his scorecard with the Human Rights Campaign is typically zero, and he’s voted to strip LGBTQ people of healthcare funding.

He also opposed New York’s Proposition 1, a ballot measure that passed in 2024 and enshrined abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and other rights in the state constitution. LaLota sided with the “Coalition to Protect Kids,” specifically targeting transgender people.

Gallant spoke with me on my SiriusXM program about his campaign, the issues facing folks in his district, and why he believes he can beat LaLota. You can check out his campaign here.

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Lindsey Graham, who died suddenly on Sunday morning, was a role model for gay men and all queer people.

Not a good role model, of course, but rather a textbook example of what making a deal with the devil more often than not gets you in the end.

He sold his wretched, closeted self, both to the GOP, which has for decades pushed horrendous anti-LGBTQ policies, and to Donald Trump, whom Graham slobbered over, after first predicting that the GOP “will get destroyed” by Trump.

That 2016 tweet, which lives on—he never deleted it—is the one and only true thing Graham leaves behind, as Trump is sending the GOP into “political oblivion,” as one unnamed House member recently told Politico.

Graham lived for power, obsessed with being part of the “in” crowd in Washington, whatever it might be at any particular time. And I think that’s where his closeted homosexuality comes into play, his desperation for validation amid those who hate his kind. Graham, always described as a “bachelor,” voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, supported George W. Bush’s failed Federal Marriage Amendment, and voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, which passed in 2022 to protect against the Supreme Court possibly overturning the Obergefell marriage equality ruling.

All the while, stories swirled around Graham’s sexuality, which he didn’t even do much to hide by having a fake marriage to a woman, as reporters in DC knew the real deal, even though Graham denied it consistently. It came up in his political campaigns, including in 2014 when his Republican primary opponent called him “ambiguously gay.” In 2020, male escorts and porn stars speaking about what they claimed were their interactions with Graham had “Lady Graham” trending on Twitter. It spilled out into the media, including The Washington Post. I wrote all about his “queer predicament” right here at the time, and his story tracked with so many other closeted Republican politicians.

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Graham debased himself and, like many a closet case, went to great lengths to prove himself straight, with a “muscular” foreign policy and by identifying as a war “hawk.” Early on, in the pre-Trump GOP, that meant connecting himself to macho war heroes like Senator John McCain—also a homophobe—whom Graham called his best friend, and being part of a bipartisan center of gravity on foreign policy, which included a friendship with Joe Biden.

This determination to be in that center, that in crowd, was part of his obsession with power, trying to prove he wasn’t gay but also feeling the deep inadequacy that self-loathing closet cases experience. And that’s why, after first attacking Trump like so many others from Marco Rubio to JD Vance, Graham became Trump’s biggest cheerleader in the Senate, once again moving with the in crowd and the center of power—and betraying his former friends like McCain and Biden, whom Trump viciously attacked over and over again.

Graham was humiliated by Trump many times, as Trump pointed to Graham’s subservience. But Graham didn’t fool MAGA, which hounded him in airports as a “traitor”after his brief distancing from Trump, condemning Trump after January 6th. Much of the base never trusted Graham again, even as he came crawling back to Trump on his hands and knees. He desperately needed Trump to win elections. In both his recent primacy and his previous one, he had to fight to get over 50%, as MAGA candidates vied for power. But because he slobbered over Trump, he had Trump’s backing to pull him over the line.

But what did it all get him in the end? If Graham was thinking that if he only held on to power past the Trump era, he could then run from Trump —which he briefly did after January 6th—and be part of some new GOP, he was sadly mistaken. Instead, he died—a lesson to Rubio, Vance, and all the rest that it can happen at any time—as a lonely, pathetic human being who accomplished nothing but helping an authoritarian take power.

Even before his body was cold, Trump humiliated him again, turning Graham’s death into something all about himself, bragging in an interview yesterday about how he’d vanquished Graham—how gutless Graham slithered back to Trump after first condemning Trump after January 6th—and then using Graham’s death to push the voter suppression bill, the Save Act, demanding it be passed. Trump claimed, in what seems like another self-promoting lie, that Graham’s last words in the hours before his death were that the Senate should get rid of the filibuster to pass it.

Like the expression goes, ”everything Trump touches dies.”

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Donald Trump is going all in on muzzling journalists for reporting on the security lapses in the new Quatar-gifted Air Force One jet. The corrupt gift apparently wasn’t retrofitted enough to secure the president, something critics warned about, even though it cost over $400 million to refurbish. When a threat against Trump surfaced from Iran, the Secret Service had him go back to the old Air Force One to fly from Turkey. The fact that it was reported by The New York Times enraged Trump, whose Justice Department had the reporters subpoenaed. How pathetic is it that the White House Correspondents Association has rescheduled their dinner with this authoritarian? …

There is a nationwide outbreak of a gastrointestinal illness causing painful cramps and explosive diarrhea as state health agencies grapple with the rapid spread of the parasite that causes it. And it will not shock you to know that the Centers for Disease Control under RFK Jr. stopped monitoring several foodborne pathogens, including this one, defunding the program that would have helped contain any outbreak…

As more comes out about the rise and fall of Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner after a credible allegation of rape was made against him, we’re learning of reports of misogyny from women on the campaign. And according to the one report, one of the outside consultants who recruited Platner had been barred from a Democratic congresswoman’s campaign he’d previously worked on after several complaints of sexual misconduct…

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There are many instructive lessons to be learned about the rise and fall of now-former Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, who dropped out of the race last night under enormous pressure after a credible rape allegation was made against him. One I want to focus on is how he was chosen, shaped and pruned by political operatives who bear a large portion of the responsibility for what happened here.

One of them at least, Dan Moraff, probably should not work in politics again. This guy allegedly actually tried a few years ago to get a journalist to delete quotes made by a candidate in an already published article because they were too critical of Donald Trump—more on that further down—as Moraff went about his usual behavior of molding candidates into something he thought would sell better to the electorate.

Let me be clear that I’m all for bringing in new and fresh candidates, and we surely need progressive fighters. That is not the issue here. The problem is that the progressive out-of-state consultants who encouraged Platner to run are just as bad as the people in the Democratic establishment who groom candidates with poll-tested talking points and political posturing. Policies and problem-solving for the people take a back seat to winning at any cost.

Last month, after so much had come out about Platner, Moraff told the Wall Street Journal in a video short accompanying a larger piece about him in the paper that he wasn’t worried about Platner’s Nazi tattoo or the vile Reddit posts that had come out at that time. (The meager vetting missed the tattoo but had some of the Reddit posts.)

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“Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats,” Moraff told the WSJ reporter, alluding to the Democratic establishment, which is risk averse and has been dismally choosing middle-of-the-road, unexciting candidates who are not right for our times. “They want people who are real human beings, and they want people who do not look and sound like the vat-grown people who’ve been leading this country off a cliff for the last century, and that was Graham.”

On the criticism of the Democratic establishment, we certainly agree. And at about the same time as the interview, I defended Platner from the ludicrous attacks coming from Republicans vilifying him as “immoral” while they embrace the rapist in chief, Donald Trump.

But Moraff is just as guilty of creating candidates “in a vat” as the people he’s criticized.

Platner political consultant Dan Moraff, Wall Street Journal video

As The New York Times today describes Platner’s rise, “Last July, in a small town in coastal Maine, a couple of progressive, self-styled recruiters of economic populists showed up at the blue-shingled house of Graham Platner, a little-known oyster farmer and Marine veteran who lived largely off government benefits.”

They had been looking around for a candidate who could take on Republican Susan Collins and were studying quite a few people, according to various reports. They apparently heard about Platner via local activists and had seen a video of him discussing oyster farming. They were taken by the working-class vibe (though Platner is from a wealthy family), the fact that he was a war veteran, his left-leaning politics, and his gruff demeanor. They’d decided they’d found their guy and made the case to Platner, who clearly was enthralled.

The initial headhunters, Dan Moraff and Leanne Fan, and then a third out-of-state operative they called up to Maine — Morris Katz — told Mr. Platner he was “the one,” a “hero of the movement,” “a historical figure” who could be “leading a revolution,” according to half a dozen people with knowledge of their conversations.

But a clutch of people who cared about Mr. Platner were telling him something else. They worried about his mental health, amid his ongoing efforts to heal from post-traumatic stress disorder after tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. They feared this trio of out-of-state operatives was a dangerous combination of inexperienced and overconfident. The worst-case scenario, they thought, wasn’t running for Senate and losing — it was destroying the life he worked hard to build.

Read the boldface text there. I don’t mean to make Platner into the victim here—he’s not, having credibly been accused of raping a woman and having hidden it from his advisers, Democratic leaders, and voters—but it’s clear that he was a very troubled individual who was sold something by a group of people who chose him right out of central casting, getting him all ginned up on the idea of winning a Senate race.

Moraff and his team didn’t do a full vetting, which would take weeks and cost $20,000 per month on retainer, opting for an expedited review that took a few days. They clearly missed a lot.

But this was something Moraff had done before, having come off a string of failures as a strategist. And it needs more attention. After working as a “super volunteer” on Bernie Sanders’ campaign in 2016, and then having an early victory in recruiting progressive activist Summer Lee to run for a state legislative seat in 2018 in Pennsylvania—she won, and then was successful in getting elected as a U.S. House member in 2022—Moraff ran into problems. Per the Wall Street Journal:

Moraff’s backers call him a brilliant disrupter with a fresh perspective who doesn’t mind rubbing people the wrong way to win. But his work for Platner fits a pattern of management of previous campaigns, according to more than a dozen people who have worked with him over the last decade. In particular, candidate vetting has been a frequent source of tension.

In Pittsburgh, the WSJ reports, Moraff “was involved in Turahn Jenkins’s 2018 campaign to take on the county’s district attorney, Stephen Zappala Jr. Less than a week into his campaign, progressive groups backed away from Jenkins when it emerged that he belonged to a church that held antigay views.”

Also in Pennsylvania, Moraff told local journalist Mike Elk that he was recruiting Bryan Pietzrak, a General Electric locomotive factory worker, to run for Congress in Erie in 2022. According to Elk in a piece he wrote this week, Moraff called him while he was out of the country working on a story in Brazil and urged him to remove anti-Trump quotes attributed to Pietzrak from a 2020 piece Elk had written.

​Moraff explained at length that Pietzrak’s quote against Trump could hurt his chances of appealing to Trump voters in Erie. I told him deleting a quote as a political favor would violate journalistic ethics. He insisted I do it even after I said no.

​Cajoling me, Moraff told me that, “No one would know that I deleted the quote.” I told him that wasn’t the issue, and that it was unethical, so I refused. He told me to forget the conversation and never mention it to anyone. It’s important to know Moraff asked me to lie for a candidate he was recruiting.

In New York, as reported by the WSJ, “Moraff worked as campaign manager for state Senate candidate Debbie Medina. Her 2016 admission that she beat her son as a child with a belt derailed her campaign. The revelation came after older testimony from the sentencing of her son in a murder trial surfaced.” Clearly, another bad vetting issue.

Moraff recruited a candidate in Iowa this year to run for the Senate, Nathan Sage, a veteran and former executive director of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce. Again, he didn’t do a full vetting, just an expedited one. In this case it appears Sage, who wasn’t getting traction, dropped out in part because Moraff seems to have abandoned him, turning his sights to Maine and Platner, a shiny new object. According to the WSJ:

Sage said Moraff, who showed up at his workplace unexpectedly and convinced him to run, shifted his attention almost entirely from Iowa to Maine once he found Platner. He would sporadically make calls and join meetings only to criticize the campaign’s strategy or offer ideas that didn’t align with Sage’s views and the electorate in Iowa.

Moraff apparently doesn’t delve into policy much, except to tell his candidates “to back Medicare for All and characterize the Israel-Hamas conflict as a genocide,” the WSJ reports, “but beyond that, doesn’t believe voters care about detailed proposals.” For Platner, he apparently crowdsourced policy proposals from activists on Discord, basically just seeing what would play to the crowd.

There’s no question that Chuck Schumer and Democrats in the DC establishment share the blame here, as they refused to draw upon the dynamic candidates in Maine who are now being looked at as Platner’s replacement. They went instead with Gov. Janet Mills, who just didn’t have the fight and wouldn’t bring in younger voters. Few elected officials in Maine then probably wanted to take on the sitting governor the establishment had coalesced around.

This encouraged the very situation we have, in which progressives from out of state came in, did a search, chose Platner, and built support around him. So yes, the Democratic establishment by far isn’t unscathed. But that doesn’t absolve Moraff and his team for the sloppy vetting and for what we would later learn was a disorganized campaign with little money on hand, as Susan Collins had bankrolled ten times more. That is all on them.

And it also shows that they were doing the same thing they accused the establishment of doing: molding a hand-picked candidate, feeding him policy mantras and stage-crafting a campaign.

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After a bombshell report yesterday alleging sexual assault, Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner is facing calls to drop out of the race to take on Susan Collins. Prominent Democratic supporters—from Congressman Ro Khanna to Senator Elizabeth Warren—have pulled their endorsements, and the DSCC has said it would not provide any funding for his campaign. Platner has put his campaign events on hold while he “reflects.”

This came about after a Maine woman, Jenny Racicot, told Politico and CNN that she had dated Platner on and off and that he entered her home one night in 2021 and sexually assaulted her while she was in bed. She said he was intoxicated and would not leave as she tried to push him off and told him to stop. She complied—which is not consent—for her safety.

This comes after many other allegations had surfaced in recent months, from the Nazi tattoo and the toxic, bigoted posts against gays and women on Reddit to reports from other girlfriends of abusive behavior, including one that said he locked her in a room. Supporters dismissed most of them as Platner, an Iraq war veteran, admitted he was struggling with PTSD and apologized. But this is the first actual rape allegation—and it is credible, with documentation from the time including Racicot telling friends and her therapist, and including emails—and it came after Platner had promised supporters nothing else was out there.

Platner denies the allegations outright but said in a video he understands the realities of the allegation’s impact and thus is pausing and reflecting on what to do. It’s hard to see how he continues, with all funding sources and endorsements drying up. What will happen now?

Joe Sudbay, who has been quietly predicting this outcome for some time, spoke with me about it and about how Democrats can still beat Susan Collins.

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As the Eastern U.S. broiled, I’ve been in Europe since the second of two scorching heatwaves, which caused thousands of deaths. It was intense and has been very instructive. Scientists warn more starkly than ever that it’s the impact of climate change. Paris would have never had a heatwave like the most recent ones, nor would New York. The U.S. is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and Donald Trump has propelled that. Now, Europe faces the dilemma of further relying on air conditioning and thus contributing to the problem or baking in the heat and experiencing economic chaos, suffering, and death.

MAGA is outraged at the Supreme Court birthright citizenship decision, even though four of the five justices on the court startlingly do not believe it is a constitutional right. The racists in Trump’s base did better than they could have expected, but it obviously wasn’t enough—for now—and they’re apoplectic. This should be a warning sign that they will turn it into a litmus test for Supreme Court justice nominees, just as they did with abortion. And we all saw what happened on that issue over a period of a few decades.

Trump celebrated the 250th anniversary of America by pardoning more of his criminal cronies and, on Friday, returning to Mount Rushmore, desperate to have his face carved in stone, while attacking Democrats as “communists” in a preview of his message for the midterms as he keeps sinking in the polls. It’s not going to work.

A holiday Weekend Report for you all to read up on the news and join the discussion if you like…

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The No Kings movement couldn’t be more prescient as we near the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding and its liberation from the British monarchy. Donald Trump has operated as a monarch, and has even amassed the colossal wealth of royalty, using his position to rake in over $2 billion in 2025 according to financial disclosures released this week.

The Supreme Court this term gave Trump more extraordinary powers—in addition to having made him immune from prosecution just two years ago—even if it didn’t give him everything he wanted right now. Remember, Project 2025 is an ongoing project. If they don’t get everything now, they’ll come back again and get more later.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts, and, to a lesser degree, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, didn’t have the stomach to rip up birthright citizenship. But it’s nonetheless startling how close it came, with four justices willing to give Trump his wish. Kavanaugh only concurred in part with the majority (thus the reports of a 6-3 loss for Trump when it’s more like a 5-4), still not believing birthright citizen is enshrined in the 14th amendment of the Constitution but rather that Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship was unlawful under a federal law.

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As Mark Joseph Stern of Slate explains, Kavanaugh actually offered a road map to ending birthright citizenship in the future:

Kavanaugh found that Donald Trump’s executive order violated a federal statute that, in his view, grants citizenship to immigrants’ offspring. At the same time, the justice all but invited Congress to “amend” that statute “or otherwise enact new legislation” that strips automatic citizenship from the children of “those unlawfully or temporarily in the country.”

While that issue might have given some of the extremist justices pause for now, none of the six conservative justices had any problem with handing Trump the ability to fire dozens of heads of executive branch independent agencies and commissions, in a ruling that will radically reshape our government, handing enormous power to the president.

These agencies had been mandated by Congress to have Congressional oversight rather than have the president decide their agenda by having the power to replace their leaders. This was affirmed by the Supreme Court 90 years ago in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. But the current Trump-packed Supreme Court overturned 90 years of precedent in Trump v. Slaughter this week.

Roberts and Kavanaugh, however, didn’t have the guts to hand Trump the power to reorder the leadership of the Federal Reserve and thus cause chaos for big business—and Republican mega donors—and for their own stock portfolios. So they joined the liberals, thus carving out an exception, refusing to allow Trump to fire Fed Board member Lisa Cook. Both Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Barrett, from opposite ends of the court’s political spectrum, pointed to the pure opportunism and hypocrisy here.

It was great that the court denied Trump’s appeal of a lower ruling that affirmed he has to pay E. Jean Carroll, who sued him for defamation and sexual assault. But the court’s ruling on transgender women in sports—upholding laws in states that ban them from competing against cisgender women—was another ignorant act of bigotry—and yet another fulfillment of Project 2025. I’m glad for the forceful dissent by the three liberal justices.

We all should be relieved that it wasn’t worse this week—winning on birthright citizenship, even if narrowly, is surely better than losing—and, as I’ve stated several times, the Supreme Court has now given a lot of power to the next Democratic president as well. I expect that that Democratic president will fire all the agency heads Trump put in place—and we had all better demand it. But remember: the extremists are not done. They’ll come back for more, and this court will have no problem reining in a Democratic president even if it’s completely transparent that it’s a political move.

And even if the court doesn’t do so, this is not the way the system is supposed to work. The court has caused much damage to our democracy and how it will function. More and more, it will cease being a democracy in which Congress, representing the people, is a co-equal branch of government, and will rather be a form of government in which the president is authoritarian and the courts rubber-stamp his wishes.

That means that after we do everything we can to stop the bleeding, winning back Congress and ultimately the presidency, we must, as so many of us have said many times, reform the Supreme Court. That may seem difficult, but expanding the court and putting in place other reforms must be the goal if we’d like to see our democracy last 250 years—or even 25 years—more.

In the meantime, don’t let Trump and MAGA steal the 250th birthday and July 4th. Celebrate everything we’ve accomplished as a nation over these two and a half centuries—what they’re doing is in fact a reaction to the enormous success we’ve had at winning freedom and equality—and vow to fight to protect Americans’ rights in the future. Happy Fourth of July to everyone.

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Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission told the Justice Department in a report that the separation of church and state has always been an “error” and that the supposed true meaning of the Constitution should be “restored.” Lest anyone think this is one of those reports that was meant only to placate the base and won’t go anywhere, the report was unveiled by its chair, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, in the Oval Office with Trump, flanked by Ben Carson and Dr. Phil, and the Justice Department is ready to follow its guidlines.

The criminal thinking of the Trump regime was on display in JD Vance’s talk this week in California, in which he said if Watergate happened today, it would be a blip of a story. He claimed former president Richard Nixon was set up by the “deep state,” which took him down in the way Trump’s supposed enemies are trying to take him down. It’s a breathtaking, though not-so-shocking take that both underscores that JD Vance isn’t very smart (if he intends to run for president on that platform) and is in fact as dangerous as we thought.

Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg was targeted in what is clearly a MAGA-inspired, vile, homophobic incident of pure terrorism. Children’s Protective Services was notified, in a false report, that he was abusing his and his husband Chasten’s twin four-year-olds. A police officer showed up with CPS and separated Buttigieg from his children overnight while they were questioned. The allegations were deemed a fake report—which is a crime—but the trauma and terror were the point. Buttigieg spoke out about this latest form of swatting, threatening a lawsuit against those responsible...

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Since Tuesday night much of the media has focused on the influence of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who backed Democratic socialist candidates who won Democratic House primaries in New York, two of whom beat incumbent Democrats. That’s big stuff in politics—and endorsing candidates to oust incumbents is bold—and surely it’s a boon for Mamdani in his efforts to help shape the future of the Democratic Party.

But there’s been a lot read into what happened when this is actually a case in which the details matter less than the larger message. Democratic voters are demanding fighters on issues they feel strongly about. They’re electing Democrats who are seeing the urgency of the moment and who bring that to the fight.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who did what he could to defend the losing incumbents—Rep. Dan Goldman, who was defeated by Brad Lander, and Rep. Adrian Espaillat, who was defeated by Darializa Avila Chevalier—tried to dismiss the win by Democratic socialists, saying that a few members aren’t going to sway the direction of the party.

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Some centrist Democrats clutched their pearls, worried about the midterms. “Instead of us making sure we put all of our resources to fight Republicans and to fight Donald Trump, we’re using it to fight each other,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York to CNN. “It just doesn’t make common sense to me.”

And veteran Democratic strategist James Carville had a full-blown bonkers meltdown, saying on a podcast that “these people are not Democrats” and that Democrats need to “negotiate the terms of a schism” with democratic socialists in the party.

The bedwetters are actually letting the GOP turn what is another win for Democratic voters into a negative—promoting an idiotic idea that Democratic voters are split. Some Democratic leaders think the party should move to the center. But the voters know what they want. And they are all that matters.

Much of what happened has also been blown out of proportion. As big a night as it was for Mamdani, he was very shrewd and didn’t endorse in every race. He focused on the races in which he knew he could help make a difference and didn’t squander his endorsements. Democratic socialists lost in several races, and conventional Democrats—including those who support arming Israel—won. So there was a lot of churning and frothing by the media. But hey, good for Mamdani. He’s a savvy politician and is using his influence.

Secondly, to emphasize the details—or some of the past social media posts of some of the candidates Mamdani backed, for example—is to buy into the GOP’s boogyman strategy, which they’ll no doubt employ for the midterms. They are going to focus on Avila Chevalier’s support for prison abolitionism and her since-deleted tweets cursing at Kamala Harris. And they’ll, of course, attempt to demonize Democratic socialists on the ballot—both Seattle and Washington, DC, have now elected Democratic socialist mayors as well—just as they did in trying to take down Mamdani.

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That strategy didn’t work for them with Mamdani, and Democrats by now should know why: People don’t care about the label of Democratic socialism. They care about candidates who are standing up to injustice—in America and in foreign wars—as well as speaking out about corruption while focusing on affordability.

That’s the message Democratic leaders should take from Tuesday. We’ve actually seen Democrats get more backbone in recent months after first being very tepid in their response to Trump—as the base of the party expressed its anger and frustration. Finally, leaders began to get the message and began being more forceful. They refused to give their votes to reopen ICE and Customs and Border Patrol. They forced Republicans to own that, as well as Trump’s ballroom and his slush fund—and they saw Republicans actually run for cover on those issues.

So, regarding Tuesday’s election, they should not take the media’s or the GOP’s bait in demonizing democratic socialists and should instead lean into the issues these candidates have focused on. They should make sure all Democrats, in every district, are the fighters the base is demanding they be, no matter what label those Democrats use for themselves.

Rather than let others use these elections to divide Democrats—a “schism” as Carville melodramatically put it—they should see it as something uniting Democrats. Because, as with so many elections we’ve seen since Trump came back to office, Tuesday showed Democratic voters, no matter what Democratic leaders think, are unified behind fighters.

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When JD Vance hasn’t been failing in peace talks to end the Iran war, he’s been spending his time going on talk shows to promote his book, “Communion,” all about his conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism.

How he has time to write a book as vice president—and how appropriate that is, considering vice presidents have rarely done so—is another story. This is a book that, like all aspiring presidential candidates, is about setting Vance up to win the highest office in the land, a pretty scary prospect.

On the book itself, I leave it to the scholar Anthea Butler, a professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who teaches about religion and theology and notes, “Vance’s new book ranks among the worst things I’ve read.”

As has been reported, there’s a United Methodist Church on the cover of this book about converting to Catholicism, and that choice of illustration serves as a metaphor for the ignorance and inauthenticity found within…

Vance appears to be bringing some of his evangelical upbringing and theology to his Catholic faith…That’s why, despite his conversion to Catholicism, Vance still comes across like an evangelical. His willingness to argue Catholic theology, despite his limited knowledge, speaks to his Protestant upbringing..

What I’m going to address more specifically is Vance’s discussion about the book with Ross Douthat, the right-wing New York Times opinion columnist. Douthat, like Vance, converted to Catholicism from Protestantism and has similarly criticized the pope and Vatican teaching. So these are two odd peas in a precarious pod.

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Douthat, to his credit, does sometimes ask Vance about contradictions in his writing and thinking when it comes to his conversion to Catholicism. But he too easily lets Vance off the hook when the vice president offers a completely unacceptable answer.

A duplicity on ‘culture wars’

Vance claims in the book, and to Douthat in the interview, for example, that the seeds of his conversion to Catholicism began as he saw conservative Christians focused on the Terri Schiavo case, the woman who, in 1990, was in a vegetative state after cardiac arrest and whose parents battled her husband against taking his wife off of a feeding tube. It was a non-stop media story and a battle between Christian nationalists (including evangelicals and conservative Catholics) and the rest of us.

Vance said this overblown “culture war” issue, like others that are often used by religious fundamentalists to gin up the base and raise money, didn’t speak to him and his life experience as a young man who enlisted in the Marines straight out of high school and was a combat correspondent, a military journalist:

I was about to leave for Iraq. My entire family was terrified that something bad was going to happen to me. My mom was struggling with the worst throes of her addiction problem. My grandmother had just died.

Our economic situation in our family had been bad for a long time. Now it seemed to somehow get worse. And I’m sending money back home to my family and thinking to myself: This Christianity has nothing to say about the struggles in my life.

Vance goes on to say that “it’s important for Christian churches to recognize that there are a lot of kids—whether they’re at college or they’re in the workforce—they’re living the normal struggles of life,” adding that they’re “dealing with heartbreak, they’re dealing with addiction in their family, maybe they’re struggling to find a job.”

Where to begin with this?

First off, why didn’t Douthat ask him why, then, do he and Trump and the religious conservatives of the MAGA base focus obsessively on transgender issues, for example, another “culture war” issue that is completely divorced from the experience of most Americans—including young men struggling with addiction or going into the military—who really couldn’t give a damn about the focus on the issue, which serves to harm a minority group while it gins up the religious right base and raises funds for it?

Secondly, if that was the reason for his conversion, why is he pining for a pope who is more actively involved in such “culture war” issues, seeming to believe Pope Francis was too liberal and that Leo is following in his footsteps?

What about MAGA’s love of immorality?

Douthat at one point gets Vance to admit that, in Douthat’s words about the book, “you’re offering [religious life] as an alternative to a kind of male nihilism.”

“Sure,” replies Vance. So Douthat goes in for what could be the kill.

“You talk about when you were in your 20s, that was the culture of pickup artists, and ‘The Game,’” Douthat says. “But now I think you could say it’s kind of metastasized into a culture of male influencers who have big doses of misogyny, sometimes racism and antisemitism, a whole spectrum from Andrew Tate to Nick Fuentes. What is the best response to that culture? Do you want to proselytize to young men in those worlds about the path that you took?”

A perfect setup, right? I mean, how on earth do Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes, both embraced by MAGA to one degree or another—Tate having been helped by the Trump administration to evade a Romanian travel ban after he’d been arrested in that country for human trafficking and the white supremacist Holocaust denier Fuentes having dined with Trump—embody the morality of Catholicism?

Vance replies, “No. I’ve never thought of myself as proselytizing to really anybody.” Douthat gingerly says, “but you’ve written a book that’s offering a model.”

But then Douthat lets Vance change the subject to his wife, Usha, and their marriage, rather than stating what I just did above about Tate, Fuentes, Catholic morality, and the MAGA agenda Vance embraces.

Mass deportations as God’s work

On immigration and mass deportations, as well as humanitarian aid around the world, Vance is absurdly allowed by Douthat to claim the administration’s policy is very Christian and is rooted in Catholic theology after Douthat suggests the MAGA “tone” is not Christian.

“The administration has been more hostile than any prior Republican administration, to say nothing of Democrats in the last 20 years, to the way we do humanitarian aid,” Douthat says.

Vance claims that on foreign aid and immigration, however, the administration is thinking about the Americans who are supposedly hurt by our spending money on foreign aid and by our not keeping out immigrants.

The pope—whom Vance unconvincingly tries to claim he has a good relationship with, even though he’s lectured Leo on theology—and the Catholic Church do not pick and choose between different humans when talking about helping those in need. So this is just a bonkers argument. Humanity is humanity as far as the pope goes.

“Take a classic example,” Vance says. “The Biden administration had a very humane way of talking about immigration, about illegal immigration. It was very charitable in some of the words that it offered to people who were coming into our country. I would say that it was not particularly charitable to the people who were living with the consequences of mass migration into our country.”

Pure rubbish and completely fraudulent. Need I point out that the major “consequences” of immigration have been a boon to the economy, workers doing jobs Americans don’t want to do, more money in Social Security (which immigrants don’t receive back), billions in tax revenue from workers, and much more?

Douthat lets Vance get away with it. I could go on regarding these kinds of claims on Trump policy and Vance lecturing the pope on theology. But one other issue Vance brought up that galled me and which Douthat didn’t challenge in the slightest was the idea that people brought up with religion are somehow more well-adjusted.

Making kids “take” to religion

Vance noted that he takes his children to church—his three children whose mother, Usha Vance, by the way, is Hindu, but he never explains this—and has a “fear” that it “won’t take.” Then he says:

I think the evidence is quite clear that people and families that are raised with some sort of institutionalized faith are happier and healthier and more well-adjusted.

This again is a wild claim, and Douthat clearly agrees and lets it go. For any study that can show the benefits of religion in upbringing, one can produce a slew that show the opposite. One 2015 study found children raised in religious families are meaner, “less kind and more punitive than those from non-religious households.”

I know that most of us who are queer and grew within faiths that have condemned homosexuality—which are the majority of denominations in the U.S. over the last century—suffered psychological abuse. And while Catholic theology—the Vatican’s doctrine—has a long way to go, both Pope Francis and Pope Leo have now recognized this, having reached out to the LGBTQ community, having called for less of a focus on sexual morality, having allowed for the blessing of gay unions, and having reshaped the American church with more inclusive leaders.

Neither Douthat nor Vance got into any of this, nor did they discuss how Vance is following tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who groomed him, funded him, and placed him where he is after Vance worked for him as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Thiel bankrolled Vance’s campaign for the Senate, brought him to national prominence, and lobbied Trump to choose him as his running mate.

As Anthea Butler notes of Vance’s writings in his book, “It’s the Catholicism of Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and Republican megadonor who has recently been lecturing on the antichrist, that appears to attract [Vance] most. ‘Possibly the smartest person I’d ever met,’ Vance writes of Thiel; ‘he openly identified as a Christian. He defied the simple social template I had constructed—that dumb people were religious and smart people were atheists.’”

Some observers have noted that Thiel (who actually hasn’t converted to Catholicism though he draws upon it) is not really interested in Catholicism or religion. He’s interested in politics and power. He knows that the Christian right will be a force in the GOP for many years, won’t trust anyone who doesn’t profess faith and is obsessed with the idea of the antichrist. Many see Thiel’s secret, off-the-record lectures on the antichrist as a tool to connect the high-tech world, a science-based, libertarian one that has not traditionally been immersed in religious faith, with religious fundamentalists, all for the sake of politics.

In other words, it’s a fraudulent Catholicism used as a tool to gain power, just like that of his puppet, JD Vance.

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Iran says the U.S. violated the hugely promoted ceasefire, and thus the war is not over. Once again Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, which many said would now be the weapon Iran has and would use again. Iran is bringing the U.S. to its knees over and over again.

Trump is mortified by the green, algae-blooming reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial, where the $14 million paint job is coming off. And now he’s, of course, blaming his enemies—ever the victim—claiming without evidence that it’s because of vandalism when it was likely the chemicals used to kill the algae bloom.

The Italian prime minister—whose party goes back to Mussolini’s fascists—had another break with Trump after he apparently made up a crazy story about her begging for a photo with him. He’s now pushed away his only friend in the EU, after Victor Orban’s loss.

A Weekend Report for you all to read up on the news and join the discussion if you like.

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Happy Juneteenth, a day to celebrate freedom and equality. It takes on increased urgency this year after we saw the Supreme Court eviscerating the Voting Rights Act in several steps, the latter of which came on the shadow docket and represented a green light to Republicans to create racist maps.

We’ve witnessed the bigoted attacks on President Obama and Michelle Obama this year, including at the groteseque UFC circus at the White House. And we saw that vile meme Donald Trump, a racist to the core, shared about the former president and first lady.

Watching the coverage of the dedication to the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago yesterday, however, was uplifting. It reminded us of a lot, and it seemed to wash all that slime away, at least for a day. We got a glimpse of the normal world. I enjoyed playing some of the clips on my Sirius XM show, opening with something positive and inspiring, rather than the usual attacks on democracy and massive corruption.

Trump wasn’t in Chicago—where former presidents, foreign dignitaries and many celebrities gathered—and his absence is what made it an event that reminded me of what the world was before and what it could be. Michelle Obama hit on so many things that Barack Obama has represented, and it was everything Trump is not—including a Nobel Prize winner.

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It was a burn of Trump without mentioning his name or even alluding to him in any overt way. I wish Obama himself would punch hard, but that’s not who he is. He’s got his flaws but again reminded us of a far better time—and of what’s ahead as we work toward November.

We’re seeing MAGA, the Trump regime, the GOP, and the orange menace himself melting down every day. This week we saw the stunning disaster of the Iran war in full, Trump’s complete surrender, which even his own MAGA base sees and from which he won’t recover. Republicans in the House and Senate are divided on that and other things and are beginning to resist Trump heading into the mid-terms.

The outrageous situation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, as many have now said, is a metaphor for this entire administration. A swampy green mess, it’s now belching up the brand-new blue coating Trump had spent 14 million dollars on—using no-bid contracts—as it just peels away and floats to the top. Waste. Fraud. Abuse. Incompetence. Failure.

The regime also backed off—at least partially—from its plan to put thousands of migrants in concentration camps, selling warehouses it bought for $700 million for that reason, as communities and local governments pushed back. As the New York Times reports, “in a major turnabout, the agency is planning to offload seven warehouses purchased for more than $700 million by either giving them to other federal agencies or selling them outright.” It doesn’t mean mass deportations are over by any stretch. But it does show we can put them on the defensive and spare at least some of the thousands from being imprisoned in terrible conditions.

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And the GOP may be seeing that the gerrymandering of maps is creating a backlash that could take a massive bite out of it. In Georgia, after the governor called a special session, the Republican leaders in the legislature decided not to redistrict for 2028, clearly worried about energizing the Black vote—which is going to be energized anyway, because it’s way to late for the GOP.

Those of you who listen to my show know that the MAGA callers have almost gone silent. They used to call every day to defend Trump. But except for delusional John from Arizona recently, who defended Trump, saying, “I love inflation,” they’ve been running for cover. I think that shows they’re depressed, if not irked and angry about Trump, and many won’t be marching out enthusiastically to vote for the GOP. MAGA doesn’t ever die—and I’ll write about that in a future post and why we can’t ever let our guard down—but it does get fractured and eat itself up now and then, and that gives us opportunities.

So I’m looking forward to the fall.

For now, I’m traveling, off from my SiriusXM show (Joe Sudbay and Nayyera Haq will be guest-hosting the next couple of weeks), headed to Madrid and then on to Paris.

Before some of you tell me not to work or post here, understand I’ll be working, interviewing people about how the world is seeing us and also how, particularly on LGBTQ rights, Spain is light years ahead.

And of course I’ll also be covering all the other news here, even while getting some downtime too. I loved going to Medellín last year and writing here and covering the news with the perspective of being someplace else. It’s really the best way to work sometimes, and with Substack, including Substack Live, we have the technology to do it. Thanks to all of you for being part of it. And have a good Juneteenth weekend.

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Donald Trump claimed an Iran deal was coming—for literally the 40th time—on the weekend of his 80th birthday as he turned the White House lawn into a circus of rage and vulgarity all backed with ads for crypto companies and Trump coins.

He hoped the UFC fights would overshadow how bad the so-called deal was, as he was heading to Europe to claim a victory over Iran while not having an actual copy of anything with details of it. He would just tell the G7 leaders at the summit how great it is—as if they’re going to believe him after all he’s put them through from tariffs to Greenland—while the written details conveniently wouldn’t be ready until the end of the week.

But those details of the “memorandum of understanding” (hardly a deal) have been coming out, and it’s pretty simple: Trump settled for getting the Strait of Hormuz possibly opened in return for Iran getting 300 billion dollars. On my SiriusXM program, retired U.S. Army General Randy Manner told me this was an “unconditional surrender” and will go down in history as a terrible military defeat.

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Trump tried to kick the details down the road, hoping against all hope that people will forget. There’s nothing concrete being stated about the nuclear material being secured and Trump is already preparing for that, actually pondering at the G7 summit, “Why even bother” to get it?” His reasoning is that his bombing of the nuclear facility last year has so buried the material that it’s not usable.

Then why did we need to go to war and cost lives?

Trump says the strait will be “permanently toll-free,” but Iran says it will have “fees.”

There is a technical, legal difference, which Trump is trying to hide behind, but there’s no tangible difference between the two. Iran’s foreign ministry said that Iran was “not seeking to levy transit tolls; however, fees will be charged in exchange for the services that are provided.”

In other words, Trump is getting snookered.

Trump and JD Vance have also been adamant that the $300 billion to rebuild Iran is not coming from U.S. dollars but from a fund set up by the Gulf states—the very nations Iran attacked throughout the war.

But, as retired general Jack Keane said on Fox, “The $300 billion is real. Who cares where it comes from? The Iranians are still in charge. They’re going to take that money and recover everything.”

Keane compared it to allowing Nazi Germany access to billions for reconstruction while the Nazis were still in charge, no matter who’s giving them the money.

And with the Gulf states themselves looking for bailouts from the US for the damage they incurred—and the Trump administration indicated back in April that it was open to it—it’s not clear to me that US dollars are not going to Iran.

It’s also been reported, however, that the money won’t come from governments of the Gulf states but from “investors,” and not just from the Gulf.

Reuters reports:

“The new fund is a private investment vehicle, not a reconstruction or reparations program and will not include any ⁠government money or grants, the source said, adding that companies based in the U.S., the Gulf Arab states, Asia, South America and Africa have agreed to commit financing.” Investments ​pledged span energy, logistics, manufacturing and transport, the source said.

So this looks like another way for global corporations and real estate development companies—including those owned by the Trump family and their buddies—to make a lot of money. You better believe Trump is getting the oil companies all revved up, as he tried to do with Venezuela.

Plus, the U.S. will be unfreezing $24 billion in Iranian assets. This is the same crowd that criticized President Obama for unfreezing far less and getting far more in the Iran deal he negotiated. At least it was clear under Obama’s deal there would be—and were—inspections. But that’s not clear in anything Trump has said. And if he doesn’t get a way, way better deal than Obama did, why were the lives of American soldiers and thousands of civilians in Iran and throughout the region sacrificed?

Let’s not forget that this began as “regime change,” in which Trump spent weeks telling the protesters in Iran he was going to save them—then told them to come out and take power after the bombing began. When that delusional plan—cooked up by Benjamin Netenyahu and sold to a gullible Trump even as people in the White House thought it was not going to happen—fell apart, Trump claimed the war was about getting the nuclear material.

But now he’s saying that’s a goal down the road, if even that, because “Why bother?”

Iran is declaring full victory. And though it has suffered terrible losses of its military infrastructure and leadership, it has won in terms of the geopolitics of this war, simply by surviving and now having a huge weapon. It controls the strait and can get ransom for it. Iran is blaring on state media that it is victorious. Acknowledging Iran’s loses, the Financial Times puts it in context:

Within the highest ranks of the Islamic republic, nobody would deny Iran is nursing devastating losses. US and Israeli strikes destroyed crucial infrastructure, took the lives of about 3,500 civilians, and killed supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several senior military commanders.

But regime insiders, Iranian analysts and western diplomats in Tehran agree on one thing: the war failed to bring the radical transformation sought by Iran’s enemies. In fact, the regime, which at the start of the year appeared to be at its most vulnerable, seems more confident than before the war began in February.

“The US made a big mistake. It awakened the sleeping dragon,” said a regime insider. “We paid a huge price, but we activated capacities that we had previously hesitated to use.”

The extremist religious leaders in Tehran are feeling omnipotent, and they will repress the Iranian people even further. Prominent Republicans are already speaking out, and more will follow once the details are public.

Marc Thiessen, the odious former George W. Bush aide who reportedly advised Trump, warned on Fox News that this deal was “no better” than Obama’s.

After Vance confirmed the $300 billion payout, Thiessen called the deal a “disaster.”

The far-right Wall Street Journal editorial page states, “There’s no denying that Mr. Trump is retreating from his main goals as political pressure has built at home, and finishing the job requires greater military risk.”

“The deal also includes no Iranian commitments on its missiles and terror proxies,” the WSJ stated. “These will be put off to ‘regional discussions’ from which no one expects much.”

In other words, Trump caused thousands of deaths, including those of American service members; cost U.S. taxpayers billions; depleted munitions; and sent gas prices soaring, which in turn had inflation on all other goods surging. And in the end he completely caved to the Iranian regime.

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