Spotify playlist created by former Sen. Jon Husted aide Steve Woytek featuring music celebrating the defunct white-minority-ruled African country of Rhodesia

The GOP midterm convention was the disaster we thought it would be for the GOP, in which Trump was omnipresent. He implored voters to “pretend” he was on the ballot, actually called for Republican voters to “cheat like hell” and now infamously promised $5,000 to every American if voters help Republicans keep power. This blatant attempt to entice voters with cash—in essence a bribe—would cost more than a trillion dollars, and even some Republicans came out against it. The promise backfired big time, and Trump melted down, lunging at a reporter who dared to ask him about his promises to send checks to Americans previously—checks that never came…

Trump was furious when his D.C. U.S. attorney, Jeanine “box o’ wine” Pirro, formerly of Fox News, dropped the charges against former Olympian David Hearn, who was arrested for supposedly vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. She said the evidence showed it was a faulty installation. Trump raged and appeared ready to fire her. He still claimed vandals destroyed the lining with a knife. But now we have learned the contractor that installed the lining is admitting it was faulty construction, completely undercutting Trump’s claims…

And in yet another example of the GOP grappling with neo-Nazi imagery among young Republicans, embattled Republican Senator Jon Husted of Ohio just fired his young political director after he was exposed as having used Nazi iconography. What is most disturbing is that Husted praised the aide as a patriot, while accepting his explanation that the Nazi imagery was related to “historical reenactments,” even as Husted said the aide showed a complete lack of “judgment.”…

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Donald Trump has told stories for years about his own role in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack on 9/11 that could not be substantiated—and one can only conclude were lies—trying to weave himself more forcefully into that day.

Now he has added an extraordinary new level of detail to one of those tales, claiming in a speech at a 911/ tribute this week that he was near Ground Zero and in harm’s way as a building appeared to be coming down, with two firefighters grabbing him on both sides, lifting him up and running with him to safety.

This is completely deranged. Does Trump really believe this increasingly elaborate story, for which there is no known corroboration—and which surely would have been quite a story for the firefighters in question to tell?

If he does believe it, it raises serious questions about his cognitive state. And if he doesn’t believe it, well, it is yet another complete and knowing fabrication by Trump.

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If Joe Biden suddenly told a new, elaborate story about his role in the aftermath of 9/11, the media would surely be asking questions about either cognitive decline or outrageous lying.

But I could not believe The New York Times’ treatment of Trump’s claim—burying it on their homepage—including describing it as among the “questionable” and “provocative” things Trump has said about 9/11. “Questionable” and “provocative”? Again, is that how such an extraordinary, unsubstantiated autobiographical tale would be characterized if Biden—or any other president—told it?

Surely there would be attempts to find the firefighters in question and serious reporting aimed at corroborating the story. The White House has defended Trump since the story was challenged, but has offered no evidence identifying the firefighters or substantiating the specific episode he described. That leaves the central question unanswered: Was the president knowingly fabricating the story, or does he actually believe it happened?

Questions should be asked about his cognitive state—as we saw over and over with Biden, and often quite aggressively by The New York Times. And it’s not as if there hasn’t been reporting about Trump’s age and cognition. The Times itself has examined how Trump has changed as he’s aged, documenting increasingly long and unfocused speeches, confusion and memory lapses, while raising questions about what those changes might mean.

So it’s not like they’d be breaking new ground. And yet, the Times, like much of the rest of the media, didn’t see this 9/11 tale as possibly more evidence of Trump’s mental decline, and instead went back to the kind of reporting in which they grade Trump on a curve. They expect him to engage in lies, so they just sort of accept it. It’s almost as if they forget that they themselves have looked seriously at questions about his cognitive state.

And because Trump has long claimed that he brought more than 100 workers to Ground Zero in the days after the attack to help with the recovery—something that has never been substantiated, with a former FDNY battalion chief saying he knew of neither Trump nor such a crew—reporters seem to just graft this new story onto the larger collection of claims that keeps evolving.

But this story is not something small. It’s an extraordinary claim about something so dear to millions of Americans. If it’s not an example of cognitive impairment—if he doesn’t actually believe it and is simply fabricating the story—it’s a gargantuan lie. As one caller to my SiriusXM program put it, it’s “stolen valor”: an attempt to place himself among the heroes of 9/11, and now as someone whose own life was supposedly in jeopardy from a falling building.

And it’s being told by the current president of the United States. That makes the truth of it inherently consequential. Where are the firefighters? Where are the witnesses? What do New York officials and first responders who were there remember? And if the story cannot be corroborated, the obvious question remains: Is the president knowingly telling a false story, or does he believe this happened to him?

Instead, it’s put in the category of “provocative” claims—language that treats an extraordinary, unsubstantiated autobiographical claim by a sitting president as a another sideshow rather than something demanding an answer.

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For weeks we’ve heard of Donald Trump’s plans to import 300,000 tons of foreign beef, pausing tariffs on it and discounting it by 25%, trying to bring down the price of beef before the midterms. The move has enraged cattle ranchers, whose business has been affected by Trump administration actions, from tariffs to concerns about parasite control. Now we’re learning a bit more about where the beef is coming from, though it’s still sketchy as he declined to list all the places. Trump claims the beef is “very clean,” but there is a lot of concern, particularly since he’s cut a deal with a foreign billionaire meatpacker whose company has a history of corruption and whose business interests are connected to Trump donors.

Democratic politicians and voters across Pennsylvania and the U.S. are expressing outrage after a Wall Street Journal investigation of Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman revealed a senator who appears deeply disengaged from much of the work of his office. Fetterman routinely blows off pre-planned meetings with constituents—from wheelchair-bound veterans to officials concerned about Medicaid cuts—and has skipped many hearings, while making Fox appearances to defend Israel. I read from the WSJ piece on my SiriusXM program yesterday, and I’m going to post a lot of it here so you all know the exact details. Some Democrats are now calling for him to resign, while a group claiming to be former staffers is threatening to release his private text messages.

It’s not shocking, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has fired a slew of officers he deemed insufficiently aligned with his leadership, is now overseeing a Pentagon where roughly 50 members of the Joint Staff have been subjected to lie-detector tests. The extraordinary investigation concerns leaks to the media about military operations and dwindling U.S. munitions stocks during the war in Iran. Military experts say mass polygraphs of senior members of the military are unprecedented in modern history.

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Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine has always played the game of posing as a “moderate,” while being a reliable vote for Senate Republican leadership and Donald Trump when they’ve needed her.

This has required her to often masquerade, saying one thing while doing another. But after her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018—after insisting his assurances about precedent convinced her he would not overturn Roe v. Wade—and her refusal even now to say she regrets the vote, more Maine voters started to see through her. The mask began slipping.

Now she is more embattled in her current bid for reelection than ever before, with poor approval numbers and competitive polls against Democrat Troy Jackson, after Graham Platner—who she had expected to face—saw his candidacy collapse amid multiple controversies.

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In a series of interviews this week, Collins has shown just how fearful she is, saying things that betray a ruthlessness rather than telegraphing that she’s the measured and level-headed one, as she has so often tried to do. In a Politico interview, when asked whether facts about Jackson’s personal life are relevant in this campaign, Collins responded:

Well, I’m not going to bring up the fact that the mother of his two children is his second cousin. I don’t know whether people know that or not.

This was so stunningly low—again, the mask slipping—that even Politico reporter Jonathan Martin could only respond, “I think you just mentioned it.”

This is also old news that’s come up in the past during campaigns regarding Jackson’s longtime partner, and it’s 2026—who cares? Martin himself didn’t need to go there and give Collins the opportunity—but we don’t expect any more of Politico. However, it was jarring to see Collins, who, again, tries to present herself as the cool-headed nice lady, grab for it in what can only be described as desperation. MAGA influencers and Fox were all over it, praising her on social media for going low with the nasty barb—a great owning-the-libs moment.

But those are not the voters Collins needs to persuade in Maine. (And if she wants to talk about significant others, there’s a lot to examine regarding her longtime lobbyist husband, whose work and business relationships have raised questions about potential conflicts involving her Senate career—an area that hasn’t gotten nearly as much scrutiny.)

There was something odd, too, about doing the interview at a lobster shack on the coast of Maine while she clumsily slurped up clam chowder. Food is always awkward during interviews, and in this case it just seemed like a metaphor for her lack of finesse. Collins has disclosed that she has essential tremor, a neurological condition that can cause involuntary shaking. She says it does not affect her cognitive abilities or her ability to do her job. Still, imagine what Republicans would do to an opposing candidate who appeared physically unsteady on camera, whether for health reasons or not.

In another exchange, Collins was asked about Liz Cheney, who stood up to Donald Trump, as Martin compared Cheney to Lindsey Graham, who became completely subservient to Trump, supposedly thinking that was the way to handle him. Collins was asked which road she thought was best in dealing with Trump. She claimed she was neither of them. It’s true that she voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment (not the first, in which she voted to acquit) and has criticized him at times and voted with Democrats, unlike Graham. But she has also been there when Trump and the GOP needed her, voting with them on many consequential issues.

But it was Collins’s comments about Cheney that were most odious. Responding to Cheney “standing on principle,” Collins said, “What influence does she have today? Really, none. Liz Cheney, it’s not just that she lost her seat, it’s that she has no impact, in my view.”

This was cold and disrespectful toward a politician whom many independents and even many Democrats have lauded for her courage—again, voters Collins needs in a state that Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris all won statewide in the last three presidential elections. More revealingly, it seemed to expose Collins’s own political calculus: What good is standing on principle, she appeared to be asking, if you lose power?

And, as I noted, it’s not as if Collins, by retaining her power, has always been able—or willing—to push back against Trump on the things that people in Maine and across the country care about when her opposition could make a difference. She has sided with Trump and her party on many critical votes while retaining her power for herself—and for the GOP.

In another interview, Collins was asked about Elon Musk funding a super PAC helping her get elected, after his disastrous DOGE effort and his “online behavior,” which includes the proliferation of white supremacist and extremist content on X—from Musk personally, as well as from extremists he allows on the platform—and controversies involving sexualized images generated by Grok. Collins professed ignorance of Musk’s PAC efforts and then defended aspects of DOGE, saying she had spoken with Musk in the past and essentially expressing gratitude for some of his efforts.

It would have been better if the reporter in this case had pushed further on the extremism on Musk’s platform and the controversies surrounding Grok. But it did show Collins unwilling to criticize a man whose platform has repeatedly faced criticism for amplifying violent misogyny and racism, while Grok has faced investigations and condemnation for generating sexualized images, including of children—and whose super PAC is now spending money to help elect her. And again, that complicates the moderate image she needs to maintain with Maine voters.

In the past, Collins might have finessed these situations better. But she was also more confident of her standing, without the kind of difficult approval numbers and larger national political climate she finds herself in now. She’s always “concerned,” as we know, but now she seems desperately so—about her own career.

She is taking risks, going for the jugular, making cold statements and accepting political help from—and even praising aspects of the work of—a deeply controversial figure like Musk. Whatever the calculation behind each individual move, taken together they reveal a senator under enormous political pressure.

In one other area, Collins is very much following the Trump playbook. For years, she portrayed herself as a reliable ally to the LGBTQ community. In 2014, the Human Rights Campaign endorsed Collins, even though she had declined to take a position on Maine’s 2009 and 2012 marriage-equality ballot measures. The endorsement was criticized by many in the LGBTQ community, who believed Collins hadn’t done enough to earn it. And like Trump, about whom The New York Times wrote a 2016 puff piece highlighting his supposedly “more accepting views on gay issues” than other Republicans, it helped her keep the moderate mask on.

But Collins, like Trump, has since taken a stark turn on transgender rights. After Collins voted to confirm Kavanaugh, the Human Rights Campaign—which had endorsed her three times—broke with her and endorsed her Democratic opponent in 2020. Other LGBTQ groups also lined up against her. Whatever political benefit Collins once got from cultivating a reputation as a Republican ally of the LGBTQ community ended, and now she’s willing to embrace anti-LGBTQ politics.

Last year, despite having declined to take public positions on Maine’s marriage-equality ballot measures, Collins was one of the early signatures on an anti-trans petition. Fortunately, the measure didn’t make the ballot. But now, a super PAC supporting Collins is spending $1.1 million on ads attacking Jackson over transgender issues.

As the mask slips, we’re seeing the truer Susan Collins—and we’re seeing just how concerned she really is.

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Laura Loomer is a social media crackpot, a racist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, vile human being.

She is also, for all practical purposes, an influential adviser to Donald Trump.

We’ve got to get away from calling people like this “Trump whisperers” or people who have “the ear of Trump.” They are advisers and aides, even if they’re not paid or spending a lot of time in the White House.

Loomer traveled with Trump during the 2024 campaign, to the point where it alarmed official campaign aides. She’s pressed Trump on many issues since he took office in his second term, and he’s shared her grotesque posts.

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She met with Trump in the White House in early 2025, just before he fired top National Security Council officials. She then bragged about getting the officials fired, though Trump denied she had any role. But media reports indicated she did have a role, and Semafor quoted a source during the 2024 campaign saying Trump aides were “100%” concerned about her proximity to Trump, noting, “Regardless of any guardrails the Trump campaign has put on her, I don’t think it’s working.”

Over the weekend, Loomer took credit for getting the far-right extremist Milo Yiannopoulos—whom she was close with until a viciously bitter falling out, and who later turned Trump critic—deported from the U.S. after the United Kingdom national overstayed his visa. The so-called border czar, Tom Homan, didn’t deny her role, saying she “probably was” among those who tipped off ICE.

Whatever we think of Yiannopoulos—and I wrote about the satisfaction many of us took in seeing this cretin who called for mass deportations get deported himself—someone as extreme as Loomer having that kind of influence is exceedingly dangerous. She is certainly someone the news media should be covering closely when she engages in attacks on prominent people or people perceived by Trump as enemies.

Much of the media reported on Loomer’s boasting regarding Yiannopoulos’ deportation, but they didn’t report on what she did right afterward: calling for Rep. Ilhan Omar to be next, and then saying that Omar, as well as Florida Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon, Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, are “all ghetto, entitled, race-obsessed, destructive black BITCHES who are completely unfit for the power they hold.”

Nixon hit back hard, referring to the time last year when Loomer ate dog food live on her podcast while hawking for an advertiser, and they got into a back-and-forth.

Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s spewed bigoted crap herself but also has had a running feud with Loomer, spoke out:

I’m not a Democrat and I’m not supporting Angie Nixon, but the Republican Party and President Trump owns Laura Loomer and her nonstop vitriol,” Greene wrote. This hateful, racists, and demeaning rhetoric should not be tolerated. Ever. But they allow it and keep her in the inner circle.

Loomer's words aren't news merely because they're offensive; they're news because of who is saying them and her demonstrated access to presidential power. And surely the back-and-forth with a Senate candidate of a major party—and a former MAGA star whose every word had been scrutinized as she hit back at Trump—should have made this a story.

But the same media that has been reporting ad nauseam on streamer Hasan Piker’s seven-year-old comments that “America deserved 9/11”—which he quickly walked back—and the fact that he endorsed and campaigned earlier in the year with Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, hasn’t given anything approaching the same attention to Loomer’s racist outburst. Loomer is far more powerful than Piker, with direct access to the president of the United States and a record of seeing actions she has promoted carried out.

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And what she said was far worse than Piker’s comments, and she hasn’t taken it back. In fact, she doubled down.

CNN, rather than do a news report, only had a discussion about it on one of its bombastic roundtables. The New York Times had no news story, leaving it to a discussion by opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg—in a column focused on Piker and El-Sayed. Nothing in The Washington Post or any of the major television networks.

Loomer's racist rhetoric isn't occurring in a vacuum. It's coming as the administration she influences is imposing increasingly punitive measures on Black immigrants.

Law-abiding Black immigrants are being electronically shackled by the government in a throwback to slavery: In Springfield, Ohio, some Haitian immigrants among the hundreds of thousands who lost Temporary Protected Status have had electronic monitors clamped onto their ankles. This is the same Springfield, Ohio, where hardworking Haitian immigrants were outlandishly accused of eating dogs and cats by Trump during the election, a disgustingly bigoted claim backed up by J.D. Vance even though there was no evidence for it.

Those being monitored face restrictions on their movement and government surveillance while they await the outcome of their immigration cases, with many facing the threat of deportation, which for all we know may happen en masse after the mid-term elections.

In one brutally tragic story out of Springfield, a 20-year-old JROTC cadet, Pierre Damas Bel, became deeply distraught after being clamped with the heavy ankle monitor—unable to play soccer, bullied by classmates and, according to his father, denied his JROTC uniform. On Monday, he was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer after walking into traffic, in what his family believes was a suicide.

“I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” Bel wrote on Instagram in late July. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

The Washington Post reports Bel left his home on Monday and made a video call to his father:

“‘I’m not feeling okay,’” Pierres Ronal Bel recalled his son stating. “I told him to come so that we can talk.”

Hours later, he said police officers arrived at his door to report that his son “threw himself under a truck.”

This is what is happening in America today. Pure evil, the kind promoted and applauded by Laura Loomer. This isn’t some fringe internet troll. This is a person with access to the president, helping normalize the racism that undergirds what his government is doing right now. And our corporate media still largely treats her as if she’s a sideshow.

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The hard-right extremist, neo-Nazi supporter and “ex-gay” Milo Yiannopoulos, who championed mass deportations, has been detained by ICE and sits in detention in Louisiana. He had a removal order to the UK, where he is from, having overstayed his visa. But this is not just a case of a hater getting his just desserts; he was targeted by still-loyal MAGA after he’d joined up with Marjorie Taylor Greene in criticizing Donald Trump.

After the abduction of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and the installation of a still-repressive puppet government, Trump thought he’d just grab all the oil—which I believe was truly the point of the entire operation, in Venezuela and in Iran. But oil companies were still not biting, concerned about security and also seeing dilapidated infrastructure that would cost billions to rebuild. Trump has now found a new way to push them: He says he’s secured a deal giving the U.S. effective control of 55% of a new venture involving vast Venezuelan oil reserves, which could require U.S. taxpayers to spend billions to modernize the infrastructure and coax oil companies to join. I think this is called socialism, by the way, as well as outright theft too.

Six months into the war in Iran, its leaders are more hard-core and claiming they can withstand the pressure as Trump has backed away from a major military offensive for now, relying on economic sanctions to loosen the regime’s grip, something that hasn’t worked in the decades sanctions have been in place. And Iranian leaders are threatening that if the economic war continues, not a single drop of oil will be exported from the Persian Gulf—and that if the U.S. replenishes its munitions and begins a major military attack again, they will hit back with ferocity.

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Just months into Donald Trump’s second term, after he’d declared war on transgender people on day one, more than 100 intelligence officers had been fired over conversations on an internal government chat system that included discussions of transgender issues and other LGBTQ-related topics. The administration claimed, rather dubiously, that the chats were “sexually explicit.”

And Julia Curlee was pushed out of her White House assignment. Last week she wrote about her experience in The Atlantic and also gave several media interviews in which she warned the White House is putting the country in danger by undermining U.S. intelligence.

She was a trusted, high-level CIA officer who’d spent almost two decades briefing presidents and top officials and traveling the world, including to war zones. She is also transgender, and in Trump’s second term, she says, that ultimately made her unacceptable, no matter how valuable she might be.

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She could see it coming as the environment changed around her. “Every year since my first day as Julia, I’d sent a Pride Month email to my colleagues,” she wrote, referring to when she’d transitioned, in 2013. “But by June 2025, they’d banned the CIA’s LGBTQ group. Pride flags that had flown for decades were suddenly gone.”

And then Curlee, who’d been open about her gender identity for years, became the target of Laura Loomer and other MAGA extremists. Soon thereafter, she was told her White House tour had ended, with no explanation given.

Never mind that she had been there during Trump’s first term and was immensely trusted by the White House.

As she explained, during Trump’s first term she was Vice President Mike Pence’s daily briefer. And everyone knew she was trans.

“The White House had needed me,” Curlee wrote. “Trump officials had known I was trans from day one.”

Some transgender people have criticized Curlee for working for Trump—and Pence—at all. I’ll leave that debate to trans people themselves. But it’s worth remembering that Curlee was a career intelligence officer who served through Republican and Democratic administrations. And there are many career professionals throughout the intelligence agencies and the federal government who stayed in their jobs under presidents whose policies they may abhor, including Trump’s both terms, precisely because they believed their job is to serve the country, protect its institutions and do what they can from within.

That actually makes what happened to Curlee more significant: She wasn’t a Trump political appointee who suddenly found herself on the wrong side of MAGA. She was a career professional who’d been valued for her expertise across Democratic and Republican administrations—until her identity became unacceptable to the current regime.

And that brings us back to Mike Pence.

Curlee, who is also gay and married to a woman, discussed in The Atlantic how she and Pence obviously had vastly different views on transgender rights, marriage equality and sexual orientation, but that he treated her with respect and dignity.

He also needed her: She was a valuable CIA briefer who gave him vital information. On her last day assigned to him, Pence invited her to the White House along with her wife and her mother, who’d initially had a difficult time accepting her transgender daughter. Pence took her mother by the hand and said, “You must be very proud of your daughter.”

Pence is no doubt an ardent religious conservative with a long history of zealously opposing LGBTQ rights, including as governor of Indiana, when he signed the odious Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and before that as a member of Congress. He’s someone to whom none of us should ever entrust our rights. But there is a difference between what Curlee experienced with Pence and what she experienced in Trump’s second term.

Pence was asked about Curlee and her article in The Atlantic during an appearance on CNN this week. He spoke well of her, even as he was clearly uncomfortable with the topic, and eventually he said:

My conservative values are fairly well-known, but maybe some people didn’t quite know that among our Christian values is, my wife and I believe in treating others the way that we’d like to be treated, with decency and respect.

Let me be clear: On one level, that’s a lot of bullshit, as Pence and other religiously bigoted politicians have always said things like that while using their power to oppose LGBTQ rights—as Pence did as governor.

But there’s a distinction between the religious-right politics represented by Pence and former President George W. Bush—politics that were very hostile to LGBTQ rights—and what we’re seeing from Trump today: the obsessive demonization of transgender people and a broader effort to erase LGBTQ people and identities from government and the larger society altogether.

Bush, an evangelical who pushed for a federal marriage amendment, saw fighting same-sex marriage—which was opposed by most Americans in 2004 and would not be recognized nationwide until 2015—as a political opportunity. His poll numbers were sinking, and it was an issue on which his party’s conservative base was intensely focused.

But Bush did not rescind the executive order his predecessor President Bill Clinton had signed protecting federal employees from discrimination based on sexual orientation. President Obama would later add protections for transgender federal employees as well.

Trump went in the opposite direction in his second term. Upon taking office he revoked Obama’s executive order and other LGBTQ nondiscrimination policies, part of the broader effort to erase LGBTQ people—and particularly trans people—from the federal government.

And we know that Pence not only didn’t object to Curlee briefing him; he believed she was valuable despite knowing she was transgender. He even asked her to extend her assignment.

If Pence had ever become president, would he have supported LGBTQ rights? Certainly not, based on his political record. He opposed marriage equality and other LGBTQ protections throughout his career. But Curlee’s experience with him demonstrates something notable: A politician with deeply conservative religious beliefs and a hostile record of opposing LGBTQ equality could nonetheless recognize a transgender woman as a woman, treat her with respect and value her professional expertise.

That makes what is happening now all the more disturbing.

There’s something about Trump’s vicious demonization of transgender people—and the broader erasure of LGBTQ identities from government—that goes beyond the religious-right politics we’ve seen before. More than in his first term, he does what the most virulent and extreme elements of his base demand.

Julia Curlee’s story makes that contrast impossible to miss. Mike Pence opposed her rights. But he also looked her mother in the eye and told her she should be proud of her daughter.

And years later, Donald Trump’s second administration purged that same daughter—no matter how valuable she was.

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I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw that Donald Trump has a new idea for the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, posting an AI image of his face in the pool. You of course can’t get closer to the story of Narcissus, the hunter in Greek mythology who saw his image in a still pool and fell madly in love with himself. Trump thinks everyone else is in love with him too, even as polls show him in the toilet. Stumping in South Carolina on Friday as the midterms approach, he implored voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot!” This is exactly what Democrats could hope for—and what Republicans are surely freaking out about…

Now that the bombing has stopped and the U.S. is low on munitions and Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz—while Trump is focused on the reflecting pool and his ballroom—Iran’s leaders are stating they have officially won the war. The leadership states that the “entire world” recognizes that they won and that the “U.S. is hated” around the world. It’s hard to disagree…

I read White House aide Natalie Harp’s intimate letters to Trump on my SiriusXM program yesterday. Reading them out loud, they sound even more deranged. This woman is deeply immersed in a cult of Trump, spilling her guts and seeming to portray an abusive relationship, writing, “You are all that matters to me,” and “I don’t want to ever let you down,” as she apologized for bothering Trump and for walking on the grass at a golf course. She reads like the obsessive outsider who somehow became an insider.…

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Heather and I discussed the news of the of the week, from Trump scrambling dangerously over Iran and North Korea and Tucker Carlson’s goal of creating a new political party to the Natalie Harp scandal and RFK Jr. trying to kill us all.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

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Both the White House and Republicans it brought in to circle the wagons erupted with fury over Senator Jon Ossoff’s reference in a speech to Trump’s “travel with Natalie.”

He was referring to Trump’s 35-year-old executive assistant, Natalie Harp, who is with him everywhere—including in the catering cart used to sneak him onto another plane, on which she accompanied him, after a specific assassination threat against Trump surfaced during his trip to Turkey last month.

Ossoff’s point was that Trump is living in a bubble, as he explained in interviews after the clip went viral, soothed by White House aides who are his security blankets as he focuses on his ballroom and his palace in the sky, gifted to him by Qatar. Ossoff torched Trump over the war in Iran and his massive corruption, while the president focuses on his pet projects and the American people are hurt by inflation and high gas prices.

It’s something Ossoff has been doing for months, in a very calibrated way: connecting Trump enriching himself and spending Americans’ money on wasteful projects to the issue of affordability among American voters. And Ossoff is leading Republican Mike Collins in recent polls.

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The White House and Republicans in general are clearly worried about Ossoff, as he’s leading in a race in Georgia that they had hoped to flip while also giving other Democrats running in the midterms a blueprint for how to campaign. Likely for that reason, they’ve stayed mostly silent rather than elevate him.

But they took the “travel with Natalie” bait—a brilliant move on Ossoff’s part. The GOP response caused Trump and Harp’s relationship—and Ossoff’s overall criticism of Trump’s negligence and corruption—to break through big time in the media.

White House communications director Steven Cheung had a meltdown, calling Ossoff the “biggest cuck loser in politics,” while another aide called him a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama.” (Comparing Ossoff to Obama—the most popular living former president—doesn’t seem like a great strategy.) Trump responded by lamely labeling Ossoff “Pee-wee Herman.” Various other GOP politicians said it was wrong and “below the belt” to go after an aide.

Some among the pundits saw the response as a way for Republicans to finally turn things on Ossoff, portraying him as attacking a poor, defenseless, loyal aide—and insinuating that there’s a sexual relationship between her and Trump. And that may be part of the GOP strategy in its response, though, to be clear, Ossoff wasn’t trying to portray the relationship as sexual but as exemplary of the cocoon Trump is living in.

That gets closer to why the White House seems so intent on tamping down the discussion. Looking at what the White House in particular is saying in these enraged and bombastic attacks, and looking at Harp’s background and what’s previously been reported—but has largely stayed under the radar—it’s pretty clear they are deeply uncomfortable with this story.

And there’s a reason for that: The relationship exposes Trump’s narcissism and his need for unquestioning adoration, while also exposing the cultishness of the people who surround and enable him.

CNN reports that in 2023 Harp was intent on attending one of Trump’s court appearances and was stopped by security at Trump Tower:

A screaming match in the lobby ensued, with Harp insisting that Trump had personally asked her to attend the court appearance, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Denied a seat but determined not to be left behind, Harp jumped into an SUV trunk, according to the two sources and confirmed by a photo obtained by CNN.

Now Harp’s own brother, talking about this on CNN last night, called that “sad” and “an unhealthy obsession.”

Harp has no real expertise on anything. She’s a former right-wing television host—on OAN— who began working for Trump after stating that he saved her life. Harp is described as the bridge between Trump and the world outside his bubble. She passes messages to him from other Republicans, writes out Truth Social posts he dictates and gives him articles that praise him. She is glued to his side all day long.

“[Trump] likes the attention and the fact that she is 100% committed and loyal,” one White House adviser told CNN. “She doesn’t second guess, doesn’t question.”

This has caused enormous tension inside the White House. They can’t control the relationship or Trump’s interactions with Harp, and apparently Harp has brushed off other aides, saying she reports only to Trump himself.

The ubiquity sometimes ruffles feathers within the White House, especially for some Trump advisers who at times have wanted to meet privately with the president — only to find Harp sitting in on the meeting as well, one of the sources familiar with the dynamic told CNN. The 35-year-old is also territorial about Trump and has told others that she only reports to him, irritating other staffers who work within the White House’s chain of command, another source said.

And this is where the story becomes about much more than an unusual relationship between a president and an aide. It’s not only about the cultishness surrounding Trump and his own narcissism. Harp is one of the people helping determine what Trump sees—and what the rest of us see coming from Trump.

And that includes the hate that spews from his Truth Social account. Harp is apparently the aide who shared the horrendous racist post on Trump’s Truth Social account depicting the Obamas as apes.

All of this—from the content Harp shares to the relationship itself—is not what the White House wants above the radar. And the irony is that the White House itself helped put it there.

They clearly have little control over the relationship and can’t stop it, even as they’ve tried. So when Jon Ossoff went viral with three words—“travel with Natalie”—it caused chaos around something they can’t manage. Their only recourse has been to portray Ossoff as picking on an aide and insinuating a sexual relationship.

But so far, that strategy has done something else entirely: It has made a lot more people ask who Natalie Harp is, why she has such extraordinary access to the president—and why the White House is so desperate to stop people from talking about it.

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Reports surfaced this week of terrible conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln, on which sailors have been deployed for months in the Iran war. Rotting meat, no fruit, no milk, bad sanitation—all of it had families of service members speaking out amid reports of several sailors having attempted to go overboard. Now Donald Trump has been asked about it and dismissed the reports, even as evidence surfaced that the conditions tie directly to unprotected bases in the region that were attacked by Iran and were ill-prepared by the U.S…

As thousands more people become ill from the foodborne parasite cyclospora, more evidence suggests that the outbreak became so widespread because of cuts at the Health and Human Services Department under the control of RFK Jr., who has been both reckless and incompetent…

Amid continued fear of Trump’s interference in the midterms, many have been worried about the response. A new report shows how states, along with legal groups, are prepared and ready for the challenges that will ultimately come…

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Bill in Indiana called my show and tried to appear as if he was a centrist Democrat, arguing that democratic socialism only works on the coasts.

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He then tried to deflect to other stories that were actually fabrications—“conjecture,” as he put it—and I had to bring him back to the discussion. Then I had to explain Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Social Security, Lyndon Johnson, Medicare and Medicaid, and how those were democratic socialist programs.

Bill then asked, “Are you comparing the situation we’re in now to the Great Depression?” seeming to admit those programs are good but that we don’t need them now. I had to laugh because the point is that we don’t want another depression.

He then tried to change the subject again, of course.

Listen in and let me know your thoughts!

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Now we know why Donald Trump was completely obsessed with The New York Times reporting that he had to swap out planes in Turkey last month due to security concerns, to the point where he had Kash Patel pursue an FBI investigation and the Justice Department soon issued subpoenas to reporters in an apparent attempt to intimidate them.

Those subpoenas were eventually withdrawn, but we now know there was much more to the story: Trump was secretly whisked away in an airport catering truck and taken to a smaller military plane to fly out of Turkey, after U.S. intelligence identified a credible assassination threat from Iran.

It was like when Trump tried to hide the fact that he got a colonoscopy at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center during his first term. Or, more appropriately, like when he went to the underground bunker at the White House amid the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and was infuriated when word got out.

To Trump, all of this is weakness for a strongman who claims to defy threats, and you better believe being secretly whisked away in a catering truck is, for him, the ultimate humiliation.

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He also used reporters—whom he misled and who flew on the legacy Air Force One—as decoys while he flew safely on a different plane, along with Pete Hegseth. (They apparently left Marco Rubio on the other plane with the reporters). And unlike other times in history when something remotely like this happened—such as when George W. Bush was flown to secure locations after the 9/11 attacks—we were apparently never going to be told about this. If not for a leak to The Washington Post, Trump might have kept it hidden, even after misleading the media and the American public.

Just to recap what happened: Trump was so intent on using his controversial gift—the palace-in-the-sky jet from Qatar—that it was rushed into service without all of the defensive capabilities of the existing presidential aircraft. It reportedly lacked an antimissile defense system, even after extensive upgrades that cost several hundred million dollars.

Trump flew on the jet to the NATO summit in Turkey in July. But on the way back, stopping first in the U.K. before coming to the U.S., he switched, we were told, to the legacy Air Force One, which he hates. He told reporters it was for “old time’s sake.”

But The New York Times reported the real reason he couldn’t fly the Qatari jet. Trump had recently made another threat of military attacks against Iran, and American intelligence had identified a credible Iranian threat against him or his aircraft. The Secret Service determined that the Qatari plane should not be used for his departure from Turkey.

But Trump did not actually leave Turkey on the legacy Air Force One, which carried the White House traveling press corps and some White House staffers. We’ve now learned that he and his security team engaged in an elaborate ruse.

Trump went up the stairs and entered the plane. He then secretly left the aircraft and was moved in an airport catering truck positioned at the rear of the plane, as if it were servicing the aircraft. He was then taken to a smaller military plane, a C-32A, which flew him out of Turkey.

Reporters had been instructed to pull down their window shades beforehand. When they later asked Trump in Britain why they were told to do that, he reportedly told them, “You’re probably on a dangerous flight because of the sleazebags that we have to deal with.”

The press corps later reported that Trump never visited them during the flight. And, of course, that’s because he wasn’t on the plane.

And somehow, before his eventual arrival in the United Kingdom, Trump rejoined the legacy Air Force One, allowing him to descend its stairs as though nothing unusual had happened.

Then Trump and the White House kept silent about it—something the American people should have fully known. And the traveling press corps, there to report to the American people, was not only fooled and used as a decoy—with Trump even acknowledging they are probably on a dangerous flight—but apparently would never have been told the truth.

It’s all so wild that it’s already inspiring a million memes. But don’t let the absurdity of Trump hiding in a catering container obscure the seriousness of what happened: This was yet another cover-up by an administration that lies every day to the American people.

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It was a 50-49 vote in the wee hours of the morning, as if the Senate GOP’s enablers wanted to hide all their dirty work. But Todd Blanche, who has expedited Donald Trump’s unconstitutional and corrupt actions, is now the Attorney General. The enablers, after first putting up resistance, gave feeble reasons for supporting Blanche, but in the end this was about loyalty to the GOP and the enablers worried about their futures and even possible threats…

We are finally seeing Trump bleeding MAGA voters, particularly among a core part of his base: non-college-educated whites. The anecdotal evidence has been clear, as they’re literally crying on television about prices—and I’ve been playing those clips on my SiriusXM program—but the numbers also show it’s clear, and it’s disastrous for Republicans heading into the midterms…

Trump also saw his $10 billion lawsuit against the BBC backfire this week, as he suddenly withdrew the heart of his claims after the state-owned UK broadcaster demanded his financials. The backpedaling is pretty hilarious, as the BBC is saying Trump must show proof his businesses were hurt by a documentary, while Trump’s lawyers are claiming that they now only want money for “reputational” damages, not actual losses, as they filed an emergency motion to stop the financials from being disclosed…

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Last Thursday Ohio’s Republican Senator Bernie Moreno was silent about allegations that go back two years made by his daughter—allegations that she and her two-year-old daughter were physically abused by her ex-husband, Ohio MAGA GOP Rep. Max Miller.

But on Sunday, Moreno completely reversed, calling Miller “dangerous,” and in need of “psychological help.” He stated that Miller should “not serve” in Congress.

So what changed in 72 hours?

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After Mother Jones had last week reported on hundreds of court filings it obtained in the case, followed by The New York Times and other publications, I focused on an aspect of the story that was getting little attention early on in the media. According to one court filling, Miller had sent a text to Bernie Moreno, threatening him with exposure of private information:

“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.”

I wrote a piece connecting that text to an Associated Press report from 2024 about the male-for-male sex ad linked to Moreno’s email account about which Moreno offered a laughably implausible explanation—and the story took off. The AP had also focused at the time on how Moreno was previously a supporter of LGBTQ rights, having stood by his own gay son, but completely reversed on the issue when he went from Ohio businessman to MAGA politician.

Miller took to X on Sunday and announced in a video he would not be stepping down and repeated his denials and claims that Emily Moreno is lying. That’s when Bernie Moreno suddenly broke his two-year silence and responded with his forceful post on X, finally condemning Miller. He also spoke out publicly to reporters the following day about the fear his daughter has experienced, saying the whole experience has been “brutal” and that Miller doesn’t “meet the standard” to serve in Congress.

Miller, responding to Moreno’s post, seemed to zero in on the story of the sex ad that had blown up again. He claimed Moreno, in speaking out, was now trying to distract from his own “media circus.”

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Did Moreno in fact decide he had to finally say something because he couldn’t appear vulnerable to that kind of blackmail threat? Or was it the public outrage? Or pressure from Republicans?

It doesn’t look like Republican pressure. Donald Trump didn’t back Moreno’s condemnation, stating when asked that “so far, it’s accusations,” and later saying, “I’m going to let the families figure it out.” Other Republicans didn’t rally behind Moreno either.

I think Moreno realized he could no longer appear to be under Miller’s thumb. Once that threatening text became part of the public conversation, staying silent became more damaging than speaking out. And saying that Miller needed “psychological help” was perhaps an attempt to undercut his credibility regarding any allegations about Moreno.

But speaking out was not without risk either: Miller yesterday appeared to make the threat again and also alleged that Moreno remained silent all this time because he was indeed afraid of revelations about him becoming public if he spoke out. On CNN, Miller said of Moreno:

He’s taken two years to publicly acknowledge me to resign from my seat. Why is that? If he truly believes—like, I’m a father to a two and half year old daughter…What I can tell you is, that if my daughter came to me, and she said, “My ex-husband did x, y and z,” and then I waited, because I was nervous that a political livestream was going to expose a deeply and personal embarrassing matter to the senator—for him to take that action, sadly this has nothing to do with my daughter…

That’s Miller’s allegation, of course, and he’s alleged lots of things and offered ludicrous answers under questioning on CNN in a train wreck of an interview as he tries to defend himself against credible accusations.

But there’s a lesson here: Bernie Moreno didn’t just change his politics in 2024. He reinvented himself—from pro-LGBTQ ally to MAGA culture warrior. And whenever a politician builds a career on denying or burying part of who they were—or who they are—they create vulnerabilities that can have real political consequences.

This is another reminder that the political closet has never just been about sexuality. It’s about secrecy, vulnerability, and the dangerous combination of secrecy and power.

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It was mind-boggling to see Jeanine Pirro, the former Judge “Winebox” Jeanine on Fox News and currently the US attorney in DC, dropping charges against a former Olympian she claimed vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Not only has Donald Trump accused vandals of destroying the pool’s lining, but Pirro said she had the evidence. But yesterday the charges were dropped with an actual admission that the liner ripped because, as experts have stated for months, it was a “botched” job, as she shifted blame to the Interior Department…

In yet another Truth Social screed this morning, Trump vowed to “push hard” for the terrorist slush fund—the so-called anti-weaponization fund he created from his bogus lawsuit against the IRS—and keep Todd Blanche as Acting Attorney General if two Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee continue to block his confirmation as attorney general. This is yet another patent admission that Blanche was lying when he said the fund was dead and “moot”—though he wouldn’t put it in writing—and underscores how Trump undermines himself. Of course we all knew it was a lie, and now he’s admitted it…

Republicans have been hiding amid the credible and ugly allegations of domestic abuse by the ex-wife of Ohio MAGA Rep. Max Miller. Even her own father, MAGA senator Bernie Moreno, has been mum. Now comes news of a new restraining order request against Miller on Thursday, in which Emily Moreno accuses Miller of physically attacking one of her attorneys—during a court hearing earlier this week! And Republicans are still silent…

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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 hot 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 as 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 turned 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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