Hi readers,

There’s a severe diarrhea parasite in your lettuce, and Donald Trump’s administration sure appears to be in cahoots with the company to which it was traced.

Taylor Farms, the company linked to the contaminated shredded lettuce causing a massive cyclosporiasis outbreak throughout the US and Mexico, donated $1 million to a MAGA superPAC in March 2025, according to an investigation by public health lawyer Matthew Cortland. That same week, the FDA announced that it was delaying implementation of its new "Food Traceability Rule”—which would have made tracing the parasite back to Taylor Farms much easier—by 30 months.

A year later, a cyclosporiasis outbreak has spread throughout 34 states, sickened thousands of people, and sent hundreds to the hospital. The Trump Administration first pointed the finger at Taco Bell shredded lettuce, which comes from the produce giant Taylor Farms. And the FDA finally revealed on Saturday—more than a month after the outbreak started—that Taylor Farms lettuce has tested positive for traces of the parasite, prompting a mass recall of their product from 27 states.

It seemed like the problem was finally on its way to being fixed. Then Taylor Farms CEO Bruce Taylor, a Trump donor himself, visited the White House this weekend. And just one day after the FDA had announced the positive test on Taylor Farms lettuce, they reversed the announcement, called it a “false positive,” and apologized to Taylor Farms.

The company has now claimed it’s exonerated and deleted posts about its own bagged lettuce making people sick.

Now, there’s a chance that this really was a false positive and we’re back to square one on pinning down the sources of the shitty lettuce. But Trump is running an openly pay-to-play administration. He literally sells pardons to white collar criminals; he’s rewarded donors to his ballroom with billions of dollars in federal contracts and other blatant policy favors. He’s not even trying to hide his corruption. So when a Trump donor makes a trip to the White House and his food company is suddenly absolved of spreading the explosive diarrhea parasite, the situation probably is exactly what it looks like.

Cortland says Taylor Foods is still implicated in the outbreak and that you should still avoid shredded lettuce, not that anyone was going to flock to the bagged salad aisle upon word from the Trump Administration that they made a mistake. I personally believe that humans have a right to uncontaminated food, and that right shouldn’t be for sale to any random MAGA donor who needs a favor. If we take any message home from this whole debacle, let it be that the Trump Administration is inextricably linked to thousands of people having explosive diarrhea and millions more being afraid to eat produce for the foreseeable, all because public health and food safety rank below money and loyalty on this president’s priority list.

In other news…

• A Fox News host “joked” about the U.S. military committing mass rapes after Hegseth treats the soldiers with testosterone

• We learned that the ICE agent who murdered a man in front of his 3-year-old in Maine this week once threw boiling water at his own wife and child

• Andrew Tate, arbiter of alpha masculinity, got arrested in capri pants

• Evangelical House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is fundraising for a Texas House candidate who calls children “cum trophies”

• The Odyssey had a monster opening weekend and rave reviews after months of Elon Musk meltdowns over a Black woman playing the fictional Helen of Troy, who was literally hatched from an egg in the poem

• Trump was brutally booed at the World Cup final, where his team lost

Hey guys, happy Sunday. Genocidal warmonger Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who was recently spotted holding a Little Mermaid bubble wand at Disney World after personally convincing Trump to bomb Iran, is dead. Theories about his death abound: The news says he had a heart attack; MAGA types are convinced that Putin poisoned Graham over his support for Ukraine and plan to sanction Russia; I’m convinced that the explosive diarrhea parasite got him in the end. Graham reportedly joked “I can’t die now” on the phone before his death Saturday night and refused to seek medical attention, despite feeling ill, because he was scheduled to appear on Meet the Press Sunday morning. (This would be the most Lindsey Graham way possible to go out, as he lived for those godawful Sunday shows.)

Whatever actually happened, it’s important to remember Graham as a spineless monster who never met a war he didn’t like, said Israel should use nuclear bombs on Palestinian babies and fought to strip abortion rights from American women. This was basically me this morning:

Donald Trump had the funniest possible reaction to the demise of his good friend Lindsey, with whom he apparently played golf “more than any other two folks in public office at any time I think in history,” firing off a flippant post that the senator “is dead!”

“So sad!”

Trump then called into Meet the Press, the show Graham supposedly died trying to go on, and claimed that Graham had used his final words to announce that he’d finally, miraculously gathered the votes to pass the SAVE America (voter suppression) Act.

This conversation didn’t happen. The SAVE America Act still does not remotely have the votes to pass the Senate, and Graham had just returned from a trip to Ukraine where he was not working on that bill at all.

So what happens to Graham’s senate seat? When he died, he was just three points ahead of his Democratic challenger, pediatrician Annie Andrews, in the polls. This is certainly a boost to her chances this November, depending on who steps up to run against her. South Carolina’s GOP governor, who was a member of a whites only country club until recently, gets to appoint Graham’s interim replacement, but I’m not seeing any options with remotely the name recognition and power that Graham had. Flipping that seat is a long shot, but far from impossible in a state slowly creeping to the left.

Speaking of states creeping to the left, over in Maine, Graham Platner was forced to drop out of his senate race this week after being accused of rape. I hate to say I warned y’all about him, in this very newsletter, back in October. The whole Nazi tattoo / Blackwater mercenary thing was enough of a red flag for me to want to drop Platner before his ex-girlfriends had to start publicly bearing their trauma, but the bar for white male senate candidates is apparently on the floor. At least the Dems remain a party that, for the most part, will push their own candidates out based on credible rape allegations, whereas Republicans will elect those men again and again.

As to Susan Collins’ seat, I believe it’s still winnable for Dems. Platner’s implosion was a huge setback but not a reason to abandon hope. We don’t know who the Democratic candidate will be quite yet, but I think the smart choice is logger and former Maine senate president Troy Jackson, who’s endorsed by DSA and apparently not a rapist with a Nazi tat.

In sum: Maine still winnable; South Carolina now at least more winnable than it was. A rapist out, a warmonger dead. And Mitch McConnell, who seeemed brain dead long before he was wheeled unconscious into the hospital a few months ago, is mysteriously missing. Republicans wouldn’t admit it if Mitch died before August 3, because doing so would trigger a special election for his seat, and GOP turnout during special elections in Kentucky is notoriously bad. But the speculation about McConnell’s death has reached such a fever pitch that if that man wasn’t at least medically brain dead, we’d be hearing recordings of his voice assuring us that he can still speak and form sentences; instead, we’ve got this photo today of McConnell touching a newspaper in the hospital like a hostage and looking very Weekend at Bernie’s. (The date of the paper is not clear, which might’ve helped their case.)

His full statement here insisting he’s alive. Either way, he’s not representing his constituents in the Senate and hasn’t shown up to work in months. Kentuckians deserve more than a smiling, propped-up corpse for a senator.

Everything feels like a metaphor lately, and I believe that terrible white dudes dropping like flies out of some of the most important senate seats and races in the country due to old age and heart attacks and rape allegations is trying to tell us something. Maybe that it’s time to replace all of these people with something vastly different.

Where do you think is the funniest possible place that Trump supporters at the Freedom 250 July 4th celebration would be forced to shelter in place due to severe weather?

After a week of Trump’s absolutely disastrous Great American State Fair that pointedly diminished the role Black people played in the nation’s history, extreme heat and lightning storms delayed the fireworks for hours and forced thousands of MAGA attendees to take shelter inside the Museum of African American History and Culture. The National Guard had to herd them off the mall and into the museum like cattle.

“Currently trying to evade the DC storm by staying in the African American Museum with 5,000 Trump supporters,” Liberal Currents writer Sami Gold posted on X. NBC reported that the museum hit full capacity with over 1,000 people still stuck outside, and people on the floor were singing “God Bless America.”

Virginia State Senator L. Louise Lucas, the Black woman who led Virginia’s redistricting push and was punished for it with a federal raid on her office, called it “God’s plan to educate them.”

This had to be the Trump Administration’s worst nightmare of a shelter location, considering that Trump has been locked in a standoff with the museum over its refusal to change its exhibits to sanitize slavery. Trump demanded in an executive order last year that the Smithsonian take action to ensure the museum does not “contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”

But the New York Times reports that when the feds tried to direct storm evacuees to shelter in the Department of Commerce yesterday, all the doors there remained locked as a Secret Service agent just shrugged at clumps of people trying to get in. So a Black history museum basically saved the day after a week of nightmares for the MAGA folk trying to view Trump’s white-centered version of history. Eleven people had been sent to the hospital the day before due to the extreme temperature, and then festivalgoers were made to stand in long lines in 100+ degree heat again just to get onto the mall yesterday, while the event offered them no shade or water.

“In line for two hours for the fireworks on the mall,” posted right-wing commentator Glenn Beck. “It is 105 and we are all standing on the street, no shade. To say the mood is declining a bit might be an understatement. :)”

To make the metaphor more abundantly obvious, masked white dudes in the neo-Nazi group Patriot Front marched around D.C. with Confederate flags all day, terrorizing the residents. Here’s a future Pulitzer Prize-winning photo (by Cheney Orr of Reuters) depicting a Black woman surrounded by members of Patriot Front, who were too cowardly to show their faces in public, on Independence Day. (ICE must’ve had the day off in order to free these men up for a D.C. trip.)

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham was so embarrassed by the Patriot Front guys that she claimed it was a false flag operation by the left. “I call fake,” she posted on X. “Looks more like Antifa in costume. No one should be allowed to cover their faces.” (Republicans used to claim the “feds” were behind Nazi marches like the one in Charlottesville, but they can’t claim that anymore because the feds are on their team.)

Trump didn’t say a word about literal white supremacists descending on the mall for America’s 250th birthday, but he did wait out the storm watching a live Fox News feed of himself watching Fox News.

And when the president finally managed to give his speech at 11 pm, after his supporters were freed from the Black history museum, he badly misquoted the Declaration of Independence. "And as our Declaration of Independence tells us," Trump said, "we are all made in the image of one almighty god. And a communist will never say that."

Indeed, a communist would probably not say that because it does not appear anywhere in the document. The Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” But that’s the kind of principle more likely espoused by a place like the African American History Museum than the guy desperately trying to pass a voter suppression bill to stay in power.

Anyway, here’s what Mamdani’s New York looked like on Independence Day eve:

The Supreme Court did a lot of very bad things this week and then one decent thing: They reaffirmed that the 14th Amendment confers citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil, regardless of whether their parents are citizens. The Constitution states plainly that birthright citizenship must be extended to “every free-born person in this land,” so the fact that the Supreme Court accepted this case at all and that it wasn’t a 9-0 decision is a sign of how illegitimate this court has become.

Justices Barrett, Roberts, and Kavanaugh (kind of) joined the three liberals in striking down Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship in a decision that changes absolutely nothing about the way the country has been operating since 1868. This opinion simply upholds the law of the past century. But the way Republicans are melting down about it, you would think Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson personally showed up at their houses to confiscate their guns and tattoo the transgender pride flag onto their necks.

Here’s Matt Walsh, a right-wing podcaster with millions of followers, losing his goddamn mind because the status quo was maintained:

Nazi shadow president Stephen Miller, whose grandparents were immigrants, went on Fox News to say, “If your ruling requires you to SUICIDE your civilization, your reading of the Constitution is wrong….This is absolutely a deep knife wound in the heart of the American republic.”

J.D. Vance, whose wife Usha is only a citizen because of birthright citizenship, said the midterms are incredibly important because Republicans are only one SCOTUS seat away from ending it.

And Trump, who’s fathered kids with two immigrants and whose properties in Florida literally profit from pregnant Russian women paying to come stay there and give birth to US citizens, said the decision was a gift to…China?

Of course, as with all topics that make Republicans angry, the conversation quickly turned to punishing and policing and even sterilizing women’s bodies. The discourse started with a few right-wingers on Twitter before percolating up to primetime Fox News segments with actual policymakers.

I’m curious as to how this would work. Will ICE be performing ultrasounds and asking women to pee on sticks at the airport, or will they just try to eyeball women’s bodies for suspected pregnancies? Will they start doing mass genital inspections at LaGuardia the way they’re trying to do to little girl athletes? Will Mexican women have to get doctors’ notes confirming they haven’t been knocked up before being able to visit relatives in Arizona?

Some Republicans are taking it even further. Here’s the founder of The Federalist, a once respected conservative magazine, suggesting sterilizing foreigners and denying entry to all women:

It’s incredible to me that these same men who crow about the declining U.S. birth rate and fight to ban abortion, insisting they’d rather see women bleed out and die on hospital tables rather than lose a single precious fetus, will turn around threaten to ban pregnant people from giving birth in their country. It’s almost as if there’s a certain color of baby they don’t want on U.S. soil, and they’d go full Gilead to control which women have babies and where.

Birthright citizenship is as American as apple pie. Will this become yet another excuse to demonize women and treat us like cattle?

I thought there couldn’t be a stronger metaphor for the United States under Donald Trump than last week’s reflecting pool saga—until a 54-year-old MAGA influencer named Manny was arrested for jerking off in patriotic garb at an empty Great American State Fair.

The YouTuber known as Manny is Gian Rachtelli, a self-described “God fearing patriotic American” who livestreams from protests and political events. Per the Independent, he was caught masturbating and vaping to performances by the Cirque Mechanics while dressed as Uncle Sam at America’s 250th birthday party:

One witness told police they were standing behind Rachtelli while he vaped and filmed the female acrobats, before observing him place his hand inside his pants. A second witness reported seeing him return for a later show and repeat the behavior. A third witness stated that a member of the acrobatic team approached them to report that an older white male was making the performers uncomfortable by making lewd gestures in his pants while they were on stage.

Rachtelli’s arrest for lewd acts was somehow the most notable thing that happened at the Great American State Fair, which was supposed to be a massive, unifying celebration of the nation’s birthday, similar to the vibrant and successful Bicentennial celebrations in 1976. Instead, hardly anyone showed up, including the bands Trump’s team had booked. Nearly every artist except Vanilla Ice had backed out of the fair weeks ago after realizing that Trump intended to turn this supposedly nonpolitical event into a rally for himself. (Trump said in a speech at the fair, “I hate [Democrats]—I can’t stand them,” in case there were any lingering questions about that.) Hilariously, even Vanilla Ice’s performance ended up being canceled yesterday due to supposed “inclement weather” that never materialized.

More snippets from America’s birthday party: The ice cream melted due to power outages. North Carolina’s delegation was asked to remove the Confederate flag it was displaying in the state’s booth. A dozen states didn’t show up to their booths at all. The ferris wheel mostly sat idle. One guitar player’s sunglasses reflected that roughly six people were watching him play. And Dean Cain, the Superman actor who later became an honorary ICE officer, posted this photo of the deserted event from the ferris wheel, accidentally countering Trump’s claim that 45,000 people had attended:

Things that were better attended than the Great American State Fair this weekend include Minneapolis’ annual Cat Tour, Iran’s World Cup match in Seattle Friday night, and NYC’s Dyke March.

But at least Manny was at America’s party, with a hand in his pants and a vape in his mouth, epitomizing what “patriotism” has become under Trump: a masturbatory exercise in objectifying women, humiliating oneself, and alienating anyone who’s ever admired the country.

Trump will probably pardon him.

Listen—I have never been particularly invested in our national reflecting pool, much like I did not care about the Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philly before Giuliani accidentally held a press conference next to a porn shop. But much like with the Four Seasons disaster, the dumpster fire Trump has created for no reason with this reflecting pool “repair”—and some of the hard-to-believe characters and details that have surfaced from the drama—has turned out to be one of the most entertaining political own goals of this century. A TV writers’ room would balk.

It started when Trump demanded national attention on his reflecting pool renovation earlier this month, in the middle of the Iran war, by holding up this bizarre chart that showed its size compared to various skyscrapers. Reporters expected a serious press conference with national security updates on June 3, and instead, the president spent much of the time bragging about the length of a pool that someone else built in 1922.

Trump bragged about his plan to spend $14 million to paint the bottom of the pool, which had been a concrete grey color, “American flag blue” and posted dozens of times on Truth Social about how his reflecting pool would be better than Obama’s. In other words, he dreaded the ego blow of having to accept an Iran deal that’s objectively worse than Obama’s and needed to defeat Obama in some visual, demonstrable way, and one thing Trump should be better at than Obama is renovating pools, right? A guaranteed win.

Unfortunately, Trump has only ever dealt with swimming pools in his professional life and, being anti-science, failed to consult actual scientists about how to deal with a body of non-chlorinated standing water. The dark blue paint color he chose immediately warmed up the water and fueled an algae overgrowth that turned it murky and green. Embarrassed, he sent in National Park Service employees to dump containers of hydrogen peroxide into the pool to try and kill the algae quickly, which only caused an overgrowth of a new genus of green algae. Meanwhile, the peroxide caused the blue paint to peel off the bottom, creating an even more humiliating situation for him in which tourists flocked to collect peeling paint chunks at the reflecting pool as a relic of this ruined regime, much like people collected pieces of the crumbled Berlin Wall.

The situation escalated from there: Protesters wearing “Team Algae” shirts began to gather at the pool, some of them chanting, “Let’s go algae, let’s go (clap clap).” Right-wing reporters showed up to the pool to claim Democrats were lying about it being green, while CNN reporters collected samples of the nasty water live on camera. Random pool repair guys with mullets traveled from other states to gaze upon and diagnose this monumental pool failure in interviews with reporters.

As America’s collective fascination with the shade of the pool grew, some incredible new details emerged about some of the players involved. Trump had awarded a lucrative no-bid contract to one of his cronies, a crook with a rap sheet and a bribery scandal named John J. Cafaro, who somehow looks like this:

But it gets better. The name of Cafaro’s company that was hired to make the reflecting pool blue (and not green!!) is…. wait for it…

Greenwater Services. You can’t make this shit up.

Naturally, as media narratives around this whole saga turned unrelentingly bad for Trump, he came up with a plan to spin this as not his fault: Trump claimed, without evidence, that left-wing “vandals” were dumping algae and chemicals into the pool and slashing the paint to embarrass him, and he sent the National Guard to stand around the pool and arrest anyone who touched it. (They’ve already arrested a 67-year-old Olympian, David Hearn, for “destruction of government property,” which is ridiculous considering that Trump pardoned all the guys who smeared literal shit on the walls inside the U.S. Capitol.)

Trump now laments that he will have to drain the pool and start over—not because he flushed $14 million down the toilet in a failed attempt to beat Obama at something, but because the left is pro-algae and hates America. He even found a specific journalist to blame: “Lightweight ABC Reporter, Jonathan Karl, was seen sticking his hand into the Pool, and trying to rip the rubber off of the surface,” Trump wrote on Truth Social this weekend. Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the media “deranged” yesterday for focusing on the reflecting pool story over other things happening in the world—nevermind that it was Trump, himself, who literally forced us to change the subject from the Iran war to this dumb fucking pool.

It’s unclear to me, at this point, if there is any scandal that could turn off Trump’s core base. At least 30% of the country will buy his excuses about what happened with the pool because they’re in a cult, and the right-wing pundits are parroting Trump’s story about vandals and saboteurs. The rest of the Americans who see devastating images of dead ducklings floating in algae-plagued water will recognize this as a metaphor for Trump’s entire presidency: Claim something is broken because of a previous president, spend a fortune trying to fix it, make the problem exponentially worse, and blame others when things go south.

Last week, a reporter asked Trump at the White House if he’d been paying attention to the local mayoral race. “Here in Washington D.C., there's a Democratic primary for mayor,” the reporter said. “One of the two leading candidates, Janeese Lewis George, is running a Zohran Mamdani campaign focusing on socialist policies. How would you feel if she emerges victorious?”

"Maybe we take back Washington and run it on a federal basis,” Trump replied. “We won't put up with it. We’re not gonna lose our businesses. By the way, Washington now is a safe, beautiful place.”

In fact, Trump’s fascist deployment of the National Guard has had no measurable effect on violent crime in D.C., his reflecting pool “repairs” have left it green with algae and floating chunks of paint, his gaudy proposed arch would block the view of Arlington National Cemetery from the Lincoln Memorial, and he demolished the historic East Wing of the White House to build a taxpayer-funded ballroom for himself. These are only a few of the reasons why D.C. voters have overwhelmingly chosen democratic socialist Lewis George to replace outgoing neoliberal mayor Muriel Bowser, who is best known for capitulating to Trump at every turn.

Lewis George, a D.C. public school graduate and attorney, defeated establishment, “pro-business” candidate Kenyan McDuffie pretty handily—by 16+ points with 73% of the ballots counted—in the primary by running on affordability and better support for public school teachers. She won every ward in D.C. except Ward 3, the whitest and most affluent part of Upper Northwest. (She still technically has to compete in the general, but a Republican can’t win in D.C.)

“The history being made tonight is not being made by me,” Lewis George said on election night. “It’s being made by all of us. Over the past year, we assembled the most diverse coalition in this city’s history, united by a simple notion that government must put people first.”

Socialist democrats appear to be having a moment. Nithya Raman just defeated Spencer Pratt for a runoff spot in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. DSA member Mathewos Samson of Atlanta just became the second democratic socialist member of Georgia’s state legislature. Even the Trump-friendly betting market Kalshi is trying to piggyback on the popularity of socialism in New York by associating their brand with Zohran Mamdani in fake street videos.

Mamdani deserves all of credit for this. In addition to being one of the most talented and charismatic politicians this country has ever seen, he’s objectively been effective as mayor of New York. Violent crime is at record lows. He balanced the city’s budget, shrinking the deficit from $12 billion to zero. He’s filling potholes at warp speed. His pied-à-terre tax on ultrawealthy people’s vacant second homes in NYC is genius. And he’s riding this wave of Knicks-induced dopamine to new heights of likability just by enjoying the team like a regular fan, cheering them on from local dive bars, and live-streaming the games all over the city for free.

His speech today during the Knicks parade, for instance, charmed the pants off of everyone:

Republicans (and die-hard Israel supporters of both sides) were in hysterics when NYC elected Mamdani, warning that he would institute Sharia law throughout the city (lol) and that New York would immediately go to shit in his care. The very opposite has happened, and now D.C. and Los Angeles and even Atlanta are trying to get a piece of the Mamdani bliss for themselves. The seal is broken; no one can be afraid of the word “socialism” anymore.

It will be interesting to see D.C., in particular, house both a democratic socialist (Black woman) mayor and a fascist president who hates her at the same time. Trump claims he’ll “take back Washington and run it on a federal basis” when she wins, but he can’t even keep his own name on the Kennedy Center. If Janeese Lewis George produces even half the results for D.C. that Mamdani has for New York and stands up to Trump in a meaningful way, I think DSA candidates are really going to start to pop up across the country and pry working class voters back from a Republican Party that pretends to care about them.

I wanna start by saying, KNICKS IN FIVE!!! I’m incredibly happy for New York, for Timothée Chalamet, and for all of my friends who appeared to be having one of the greatest nights of their lives last night in a city that was absolutely vibrating. It will never not be funny that the one game the Knicks lost was the one Trump attended—an absolutely perfect example of everything he touches turning to shit.

It is also genuinely hilariously to me, personally, that the Knicks began winning the championship literally the day after I left the city, generating such headlines in my first week living abroad as “NYC IS PEAKING RIGHT NOW,” “THE VIBES ARE IMMACULATE,” “WE’VE NEVER BEEN MORE BACK,” and from Vanity Fair, “NEW YORK IS ALIVE”—the absolute funniest (dark, designed in a lab) possible things to read about a city you just left after nine years. Alanis Morissette could never.

Speaking of a sports team thriving the moment you leave, I also joked aloud last night, right before I elbowed through a crowd at a World Cup watch party in Rio, that Brazil—which was down at that point 0-1 against Morocco—was probably going to score a goal the second I sat on the toilet. And guys, I shit you not (no pun intended), the actual moment I sat on the toilet after standing in a ten-minute line to the bathroom, I heard thunderous cheers. Indeed, Brazil had scored its only goal of the game while I was in the john. (The men I was at the game with told me I had to go get back on the toilet for the remainder of the match if Brazil had any hope of winning. I didn’t, and they tied. Sorry.)

But enough about me, let’s get to Nightcap’s Schadenfreude Weekly:

DC’s weather gods are playing in Trump’s face

First, a double rainbow appeared on Friday evening as workers were about to chisel Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center. A crowd had formed to watch the letters come down, and they all started singing "God Bless America” in unison at the sight of the double rainbow appearing in that moment, which is so corny in a DC way but still kind of iconic.

A judge had ordered Trump’s name removed from the building, because you can’t just add your name to another man’s memorial. And the spectacle of men climbing on to scaffolds to physically rip the letters off was not only humiliating to the president, who demanded a white curtain go up behind the men to shield them from view, but also reminded the world of how shoddily Trump’s name had been added in the first place. They failed to remove the original “the” and got the typeface and spacing of the lettering slightly off, so it kinda gave the impression of

THe DonAlD tRuMp aNd

THE JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS

Absolute clown stuff.

Meanwhile, the weather for tonight’s ridiculous UFC event for Trump’s 80th birthday on the White House lawn is looking downright apocalyptic. Capital Weather and the Weather Channel are predicting scattered severe storms, damaging wind gusts, triple digit heat, possible hail and tornados, and massive gnat and mosquito swarms at the actual event, which is being touted by MAGA as a “return to masculinity.” (Note that an accused rapist and stalker is headlining.)

The White House melted down about the above weather prediction, quote tweeting it with the complaint, “This event is about celebrating America’s unmatched greatness after 250 years — which apparently doesn’t sit well with the friendless loser who wrote this bullshit clickbait headline. Rain or shine, we’re celebrating our great country no matter what.”

I’m going to be watching DC weather updates tonight as I would an Olympic sport, considering that these men fighting in a cage at the White House is so important to Trump that Rubio compared it to JFK putting a man on the moon. (Also, they invited the wrong Jon Favreau.)

Elephant pisses on Texas GOP convention

Republicans paraded an elephant through a convention of the worst people in the world on Friday, which is straight-up animal abuse. But I very much appreciate this elephant peeing all over the floor inside of that arena and stinking it up for them. Team elephant, always.

Great Knicks tweets throughout the week

Massive inflatable shirtless Elon Musk goes up in Times Square

The day SpaceX’s IPO made him the world’s first trillionaire, New York exposed Elon’s nipples and accused him of making AI child porn. (He does.) And since no amount of money can fill the hole in his heart that so desperately craves love and admiration, you know this thing is driving Elon insane.

Lee Raymond, known as the “Darth Vader of global warming,” is dead

The Exxon executive oversaw the biggest corporate merger in the history of the oil industry and fueled America’s climate doubt. Bye.

That’s all for today, folks. xx

There’s no logical explanation for deliberately fumbling the World Cup, which is supposed to provide a massively lucrative tourism boost for the countries that host it. But to no one’s surprise this year, hotel bookings are badly lagging in the U.S. compared to Mexico and Canada ahead of the tournament, with 80% of hotels in U.S. host cities reporting that the rooms they blocked off in anticipation of the travel boom are remaining empty. The U.S. tourism industry already saw a 5.5% decline last year due to the Trump administration’s cruel immigration “crackdown,” which translated to a loss of about $8 billion in revenue. And now the U.S. is going out of its way to squander the potential financial boom, reputational goodwill and unifying moment this tournament should have brought, apparently deciding that shutting out Iranians and Somalians and even random Scottish fans is more important than allowing anyone to feel joy.

Iran’s World Cup team touched down in Tijuana this week wearing gold pins featuring the number “168” on their jackets in honor of the 168 schoolgirls the U.S. bombed on day two of its senseless war. The gesture is being amplified by the fact that Iran says the U.S. is denying visas to key team staff members just days before the games, putting them at a disadvantage in the tournament out of pure vindictiveness. “By extending your whimsical hostilities against the Iranian nation into the realm of sport, the U.S. government in practice is depriving Iran’s national team of its right to play in the World Cup under normal conditions and without undue pressure and stress,” the Iranian embassy in Turkey wrote on X. (“Whimsical hostilities” is a perfect way to put it.)

The State Department said in reply that it “will not allow the Iranian team to abuse this system to sneak terrorists into the United States under false pretenses,” which frankly should be a disqualifying attitude for a host country to have toward participating teams.

Even more disqualifying is the fact that the Trump administration has now denied entry to the World Cup’s first Somalian referee, crushing his life dream as part of its propaganda campaign against alleged daycare fraud in Minnesota’s Somali community.

“I’m just simply a referee who’s trying to live his dream, the biggest dream of my life, to come to the World Cup,” Omar Artan told the New York Times after the U.S. denied his entry. “I had the right papers and everything. I had the right visa.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection cited vague “vetting concerns” in the petty rejection of Artan, which comes after Trump terminated the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for Somalia earlier this year and decided only to allow white “refugees” into the country going forward. Trump has been openly, viciously racist against Somalis in his crusade against the community. “Can you believe that? Somalia, they turned out to be higher-IQ than we thought,” Trump said in January, pretending to care about “fraud” while committing it himself on a massive scale. “I always say these are low-IQ people. How do they go into Minnesota and steal all that money?”

Again—that statement alone should have disqualified the United States from hosting a World Cup.

To put this into perspective, most autocratic nations will loosen their restrictions around big tournaments like the World Cup and the Olympics in order to pretend to the rest of the world like everything’s dandy there. Qatar, for instance, relaxed its public drinking laws and dress codes and punishments for minor offenses for the 2022 World Cup (which it also should not have been allowed to host). Even Hitler performatively allowed Black and Jewish people to compete in Germany’s 1936 Summer Olympics, including Jesse Owens, a Black American athlete who took home four gold medals. But Trump, for all his narcissism and image-consciousness and greed, appears hell bent on destroying any remaining goodwill the United States has with the rest of the world by going full North Korea during his turn to host and leaving New York hotels half empty for the games.

I’ll be down here rooting for Brazil and squeezing whatever joy can be squeezed out of a tournament so marred this year by the gutless xenophobia of my home country, but please let this be considered an embarrassing low point for both the United States and the FIFA World Cup in history books going forward. I refuse to accept that this is who we are.

But first: We catch up on the week in news and the best of the internet.

Hunter Biden disarming MAGA with his god-tier posting

Former President Joe Biden’s prodigal son came crashing back into public life this week when he joined X and started posting rather frankly about his former crack addiction (he’s 7 years in recovery) and his laptop scandal in a way that seems to be low-key charming even the worst MAGA trolls.

It’s funny because Hunter Biden is the ultimate symbol of corruption of degeneracy for Republicans, but they really seem kinda caught off guard when he engages with them and owns up to his issues in an honest and endearing way.

The Hunter Biden “scandal,” if you can even call it that—(he earned $11 million over 5 years from jobs he got because of who his dad was, basically)—looks like peanuts compared to the Trump family enriching itself to the tune of billions of dollars from this presidency. And Hunter is really neutering the whole “what about Hunter Biden” retort that MAGA uses every time they’re confronted with Trump’s corruption by throwing into stark relief how utterly incomparable the two situations are. No one can insult Hunter harder than he’s willing to insult himself, but this is not a man making billion-dollar deals with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

Don Jr., by contrast, will never be admitting his own coke addiction, which is equally as obvious.

Trump had to cancel his birthday concert after all the artists dropped out

Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, Millie Vanilli, The Commodores, Young MC, and two other random bands dropped out of Trump’s “Great American State Fair” this summer, meant to celebrate America’s 250th birthday (as well as Trump’s), because they weren’t told when they initially agreed to it that it was going to be all about Donald Trump rather than a nonpartisan event. And the MAGA brand has become career-ruining toxic.

Trump initially responded by canceling the concert in a longwinded rant saying he was going to be the featured performer instead—perhaps not realizing how pathetic it is for a president to position himself a second string backup attraction to replace Milli Vanilli, a 90s band best known for its lip syncing scandal.

But Trump’s tantrum about the humiliation has raged on, and today he announced that he’s hired a tenor to perform “Nessun Dorma,” an opera song popularized by Pavarotti, at the concert in lieu of sole remaining performer Vanilla Ice. Yes, the president has chosen an Italian song that Pavarotti’s family has demanded multiple times he stop using as the entertainment for America’s 250th birthday celebration. Incredible.

Speaking of Trump being a queen—

He posted this on Truth Social, perhaps thinking it would make him look tough and popular, at the beginning of Pride Month ?

Queerbaiting? Oiled up dudes with pompoms? I really don’t know what’s going on here.

Marco Rubio denied that he’s wearing clown shoes to please the president

He’s lying. They’re too big.

A Pennsylvania mayor flipped out about a Love Island contestant, an actual cop who calls himself “Officer Sexy Pants,” leaving his job to join the show

I beg this man to get a grip.

Taylor and Travis getting married at…Madison Square Garden?

Please tell me this isn’t real. I genuinely can’t think of a less romantic venue.

…

In less funny news, Bari Weiss’s newly-tapped boss of “60 Minutes” has fired correspondent Scott Pelley for calling out her bullshit in front of the staff. Pelley then blew the whistle about Weiss in a statement, claiming he’s been instructed “to inject falsehoods and bias” and unverified assertions into his reporting since she took over at CBS News. Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

An update from Brazil…

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Please excuse this brief pause in our regular scheduled politics programming—I’m in the middle of an international move and need to share how I accidentally ended up at the last place that I would ever willingly spend my last night in the United States.

First, it is really fucking stressful trying to get a dog to Brazil. You have to spend over a thousand dollars just to get the necessary health paperwork signed by a pet travel specialist and then endorsed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture within 10 days of your flight. Government departments are notoriously backed up and unreliable, so they still might just not get you the certificate in time. Also, you can only bring a dog on the plane as an in-cabin pet if you’re flying on both a Latin American airline and aircraft—not, say, a Colombian airline that partners with Delta. I have heard too many stories about dogs getting hypothermia or even dying when people put them in cargo on a long flight. I’d rather row a canoe to Brazil myself and risk getting bombed by my own military for being a “drug boat” on the way than put my 20-pound dog under the plane. All of this severely limited my flight options.

So the unhinged travel route I had to book required us to fly to Miami, spend 1.5 nights in a hotel, and then take a 3 am flight to Rio that connects in Bogotá. I decided I was going to use this full layover day in Miami to find the best dog beach in the city and really wear Pedro out in the sun and sand before he has to travel in a bag for 12 hours. The best dog beach I could find in Miami was in Haulover Park, on North Beach, so I aimed to stay near there. But the nice hotels around the beach are really expensive—and especially unaffordable amid the Miami Swim Week festivities, where every reality TV influencer apparently walked the runway this year. Some of the 2-star and 3-star hotels I found in area looked fine to me, but I got spooked by reviews warning of things like rooms smelling like bleach or sewage and the constant sound and view of construction outside the windows. It being my last day in the country, I really wanted to have a relaxing and nice time. So I went on Hotwire.

For the uninitiated, the deal with Hotwire is that you can get big discounts by booking a hotel blind, meaning you don’t know exactly which hotel you’re booking. Hotels put their empty rooms on Hotwire at low prices they don’t want to be associated with by name online, because then they’d have trouble selling their other rooms for the standard price. You can search for particular areas of a city and amenities and numbers of stars, and you can see very general reviews of the place, but you can’t know the name of the hotel until after you book it. Unfortunately, the “area” search tool is quite broad and encompasses multiple neighborhoods, so it’s not that easy to narrow down for yourself exactly where you want to be. But I found a 4.5-star hotel on there that was pet friendly, in the general region of Haulover Beach, had good reviews, and was about $300 off the regular room price. A “hot rate,” they called it. So I booked a “bay view” room and carelessly waived the $30 fee that lets you cancel once you find out the name of the hotel. I didn’t consider that the Trump International Beach Resort was even one of the options, because I’d missed it on the map.

Of course, the big reveal happened and that’s the one I had booked for two nights. It was non-refundable. I arrived at midnight in a thunderstorm. Here’s the tacky marble and bronze lobby.

The place looks and feels like it’s stuck in the 80s. It smells too strongly of a floral perfume. There’s Trump merch everywhere, including Trump hats and Trump wine and Trump-branded water bottles in the room. Walking past this cabinet on the way to find my room was when I started to want to die.

My room had faux alligator-skin walls and a view of a strip mall, a parking lot, and, sure, the bay. Pedro immediately vomited and had diarrhea on the carpet, which I swear I did not intentionally allow to happen (I tried to clean it myself and gonna leave a massive tip for housekeeping!) but was darkly funny.

There’s a creepy sanitary arcade on the second floor that looks like it’s never been used, playing late-80s techno music inside of a room with no people in it. It would almost be cool if it didn’t feel like a horror movie about clowns in there.

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Barely a week after Donald Trump stole $1.8 billion from taxpayers to create a slush fund, called the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” that will compensate supposed victims of Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, Trump has weaponized his own DOJ against columnist E. Jean Carroll as revenge for her accusing him of rape.

Three years after she beat him in court twice over claims of rape and then defamation, Trump’s DOJ has opened a criminal investigation into whether Carroll committed perjury in 2022. Prosecutors are trying to prove that she lied in a deposition for her civil rape case against Trump when she said that she was receiving no outside funding for her legal fees, when six months later her team disclosed that she was now receiving some legal financial assistance from billionaire Reid Hoffman. Of course, it’s fully possible that Carroll was not receiving the funds when she gave the deposition and only later accepted the help from Hoffman, considering that Trump’s lawyer at the time—now acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (lol)—never brought up this supposed perjury by the plaintiff while the case was underway.

What’s clear is that Trump despises E. Jean Carroll, perhaps more than anyone else on the planet, because she publicly labeled him a rapist and won $88 million in damages. He keeps trying to appeal the damages that he’s supposed to pay her, which the Supreme Court has deferred now 12 times, claiming he couldn’t have raped her because she’s “not my type.” He called her a liar 26 times in unhinged social media rants after a jury had found him liable for rape, which only led to him having to pay her exponentially more money. And when Carroll won her defamation case against him, she called the verdict “a great victory for every woman who stands up when she’s been knocked down, and a huge defeat for every bully who has tried to keep a woman down.” That set her up as the final boss of Trump’s ultimate revenge tour against women.

I wrote a column for The Cut back when Trump was assembling the rape-iest possible cabinet late in 2024 that his second term appeared to be revenge for the whole Me Too movement. Trump pointedly nominated multiple people—Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz, RFK Jr., and Linda McMahon among them—who also either faced rape and sexual abuse allegations themselves or were accused of enabling the sexual abuse of kids. Trump has now pushed out four cabinet members, all of them women, to replace them with men—including Pam Bondi, whom he believed wasn’t weaponizing the DOJ effectively enough against his enemies. But Hegseth, Kennedy, and McMahon are still up there running the country, and the lawyer with the biggest personal vendetta against E. Jean Carroll is now running the Justice Department.

We’ve become almost desensitized to the casual misogyny of this administration and its followers, because there are so many battles to fight right now. But the headlines should all be shocking on their own: The Students for Trump cofounder was just arrested for punching a woman in the face; Hegseth is methodically purging women from the military and from military history; Trump yelled “quiet piggy” at a female reporter and is still trying to disenfranchise married women; red state doctors are letting women die from miscarriages because they’ve been told to prioritize the fetus. And now Trump is using the full weight of the DOJ to punish the woman he raped for daring to open her mouth about it.

What the president perhaps doesn’t realize is that all he’s accomplishing with this transparently bogus “criminal probe” is putting E. Jean Carroll back into national headlines a few months before the midterms. He’s reminding voters for absolutely no reason at all, with his poll numbers already circling the drain, that there’s a woman out there who accused him of rape and won. He’s making his “anti-weaponization fund” look even more hypocritical and ridiculous in process. And when this investigation comes up empty, I fear he’s going to implode.

Today I’m introducing a new feature of Nightcap that will drop weekly in addition to my deeper dives (and Brazil dispatches when I have them). When I originally conceived of this newsletter, it was supposed to be more of a round-up of politics news and the best of the internet, and then I just kept finding myself wanting to go long. But who says we can’t do both? The news is so overwhelmingly dark right now that I think it’s important to pluck out moments of humor and levity and maybe a little satisfaction from the wasteland—even if it’s a laugh-while-you-cry situation. So here’s what amused me from the news cycle this week:

Trump skipping his son’s wedding

Trump famously does not give a shit about any of his kids except for Ivanka, whom he thinks is hot. He forgets Tiffany exists; all he knows about Barron is that he’s tall and that Melania takes care of him. And when he was asked yesterday whether he was attending his son Don Jr.’s wedding to socialite Bettina Anderson, Trump said, “The timing is not good for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things.”

Trump officially RSVP’d no to his son’s wedding in a Truth Social post today, citing “circumstances pertaining to the Government” and “my love for the United States of America” as his reasons for skipping. The president's public schedule shows he’ll be at his New Jersey golf club this weekend.

A MAGA House candidate who calls himself a 'proud family man’ ruined his best friend’s life by introducing to swinging

A Trump-endorsed candidate running for Congress in Arizona, former Pinal County sheriff Mark Lamb, is accused of “ruining his best friend’s life by introducing him to the swinger lifestyle” and sending women photos of his penis, which one woman sent to investigators at their church.

Per the Daily Beast:

Lamb is accused of roping his pal Matt Hilsabeck into a years-long affair with his wife without permission from Hilsabeck’s spouse, which not only led to his friend’s divorce, but also a probe by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an investigation by the Arizona Republic has revealed.

Jillian Stannard, Hilsabeck’s ex-wife, said Lamb “got in her face” when she sent sexual material, including a photo of Lamb’s penis, to church officials as part of their probe. The Republic writes that he then “threatened her, telling her there would be consequences.”

He’ll probably still win.

“toothless misogynist Jack Hughes”

I don’t know what the account Pop Flop is, but I can’t stop laughing at this tweet about an Olympic hockey player:

The Senate abruptly left town without funding ICE or Trump’s ballroom

Republicans are furious with Trump and desperate to avoid having to vote on his toxic billion-dollar ballroom or slush fund for insurrectionists, so they just kinda quiet quit their jobs. Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reports that as many as 25 GOP senators spoke in opposition to Trump’s slush fund in a private meeting with Attorney General Todd Blanche this week; they believe Trump is fucking their party ahead of the midterms by being openly corrupt and attacking some of their own members (John Cornyn, Bill Cassidy, Thomas Massie) in primary elections.

Britney Spears’ DUI statement

Driving under the influence is not funny!!! But Britney Spears did say this to the officers who pulled her over this month: “I could probably drink four bottles of wine and take care of you. I’m an angel.”

She also told the cops, “You can come to my house — I’ll make you food or lasagna or whatever you want. I have a pool.”

Honestly—period. (Hope she gets all the help she needs.)

Kilmar Abrego Garcia beats the Trump administration AGAIN

The Maryland dad whom the Trump administration “mistakenly” sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador has been through absolute hell in the year since being released back home—DHS has been desperately trying to re-deport him to Africa, where he’s never even lived, in retaliation for making them look bad by becoming a symbol of their immigration failures and cruelty. And today, a federal judge finally dismissed the bogus criminal case against Garcia, calling it a “vindictive” effort by the DOJ. A humiliating blow to the Trump administration, which I will count as “funny.”

Trump continues to swoon over young dudes

Did I miss anything? See you next week.

It’s been five years since a mob of MAGA thugs smeared poop on the walls inside the U.S. Capitol and murdered a police officer because Trump told them to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden. Roughly 1,500 of those people were charged with federal crimes under Biden, and Trump pardoned nearly all of them or commuted their sentences when he returned to office last year. Dozens of those rioters went on to commit new crimes, including child sexual abuse, reckless homicide by drunk driving, strangulation, burglary, and possession of child pornography. And now $1.8 billion of our taxpayer money is being funneled into a “slush fund” to pay these people for their (past and future) loyalty to Trump—without Congress having approved a dime of it.

One insurrectionist who was recently convicted of child sexual assault, a Florida handyman named Andrew Paul Johnson, appeared to know this money was coming. According to a police report from February, he tried to bribe one of his young victims into silence with the millions he expected to receive as restitution for his Jan. 6 prosecution. “Andrew also told [child] that since he was pardoned for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and he was being awarded $10,000,000 as a result of being a ‘jan 6’er,’” the report reads. “Andrew did tell [child] that he would be putting him in his ‘will’ to take any money he had left over.”

The police must have assumed that Johnson was lying about the money coming from Trump just to keep the kid quiet. But no—the molester’s prediction has come to pass! Because Trump has now actually reached a “settlement” with his own DOJ and IRS—just a transfer of taxpayer money to himself, really—to create a $1.776 billion slush fund for his allies that he believes were wrongly targeted by Biden’s DOJ. (Note the 1776 number they came up with for the slush fund, referencing the Revolutionary War.) Trump had originally sued the IRS for $10 billion over his leaked tax returns, and this was part of the deal his own agencies came up with for him to drop that lawsuit: essentially, reparations for white people.

When confronted over whether this money could go to literal child molesters at a Senate hearing today, Attorney General Todd Blanche refused to say no or even acknowledge that such men exist. And when Sen. Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced an amendment to an unrelated bill that would block this money from going to “convicted child predators,” Republicans killed it.

Meanwhile, the IRS has also quietly agreed to drop all current and future claims against Trump, his family, and his companies for unpaid taxes, which feels just as newsworthy as anything else about the slush fund. The Trumps are now just eternally shielded from any kind of financial scrutiny, as they profit off of Donald’s second term through brazen corruption, tax evasion, and insider trading. “In a sweeping one-page addendum to Monday’s settlement agreement…Blanche agreed that the U.S. is ‘FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims,’ including ‘monetary relief,’ that ‘have been or could have been’ asserted by the IRS against Trump, his family or his businesses,” per NBC News.

The slush fund and immunity deal are so nakedly corrupt that even Republicans are queasy about it. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he’s “not a fan” of it, and his caucus already appears to be looking for a way out of having to deal with it (along with $1 billion ballroom) ahead of a midterm election they are expected to lose, badly. “I’ve got more questions than I’ve heard answers for, and … I didn’t hear anything that gave me certainty in terms of how this all comes together,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), after attending the hearing with Blanche. “Can the president just say $1.87 billion? … I don’t know enough about it to feel comfortable.”

House Democrats, meanwhile, appear to have located their spines and are planning use a discharge petition to force Republicans to take a vote on whether to re-assert Congress’ power of the purse and block this unhinged slush fund. “We need to put Republicans on the spot as to whether or not they are going to endorse this rank corruption, or whether they are going to stand up for basic constitutional values,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told The New Republic.

At this point, Trump is just playing in our faces. Reaching a deal with your own government to use it like a piggy bank and move billions of taxpayer dollars to the people who smeared literal shit on the Capitol walls is so absurd that a TV writers’ room would reject it. Make every Republican take a vote on whether they like that this is happening in their names.

I happened to start watching The Testaments on Hulu last night, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, after weeks of avoiding it. I’ve found it harder this time to mentally psych myself up for another show set in Gilead after a long day of the bleakest possible news about our real-life dystopia, but it turned out to be a really excellent and well-acted show. It’s less torture-porny than the original (praise be), and I binged a full four episodes last night before bed.

I only bring this up to say that with the world of Gilead still fresh on my mind today, I had an especially out-of-body experience watching Trump’s extremely bizarre press conference about why (white) women aren’t having more babies. The event was so unserious that it could’ve been an SNL skit, and at the same time it epitomized the whole pathology of this administration—which, to be fair, certainly might be affecting people’s will to reproduce.

‘Father of Fertility’

Trump opened the presser in front of a row of smiling zombie women led by Sen. Katie Britt, the Alabama Republican infamous for delivering that strange State of the Union rebuttal in whispers from her kitchen. Its purpose was to propose a new rule aimed at making it easier for employers to choose to offer some IVF coverage among other health insurance benefits, which falls well short of Trump’s campaign promise to make IVF free for all.

Looking bored and agitated at his desk, Trump declared himself “father of fertility”—a topic he says he learned about in “three to four minutes”—and then told the women behind him to make it quick because he had other things to do. “You’ll speak not too long because I am being waited on by a large group of generals,” he said. “That’s also important. Having to do with the absolutely country of ‘I-run.’ That’s the way they pronounce it.” Britt had to interrupt him to get the presser back on topic, and as she glazed him about his leadership, he winked and raised his eyebrows at onlookers and occasionally appeared to doze off.

‘Under-babied’ women

On Dr. Oz’s turn to speak (he’s somehow in charge of Medicare), he lamented that one in three Americans are “under-babied.”

“What does under-babied mean?” Oz explained. “It means that either you don’t have any children or you have less children than you would normally want to have. And to Katie’s point, we have a crisis that’s causing our fertility rate to drop below 1.5. The replacement rate is 2.1, so we’re way below what we need just to replace the people we have in America.”

The numbers Oz chose to cite here are telling, as June Sternbach noted, because they only refer to the white replacement rate in America. The overall U.S. replacement rate in 2025 was 1.79, and the rate for just white people was 1.5. He’s basically echoing neo-Nazi Elon Musk, who tweets constantly about the “Great Replacement” theory, or the fear that the white race is being replaced by Black and brown immigrants. (FWIW, in the Margaret Atwood novel, low fertility rates are offered as the justification for why Gilead was created in the first place, and Atwood’s Gilead was explicitly white supremacist.)

Oz added that the goal of this fertility initiative is “more Trump babies.”

RFK Jr. on teen boy sperm count

We also learned that Health Secretary Bobby Kennedy is taking a break from slicing off raccoon penises and chugging raw milk to turn his attention to the sperm count of young boys. “In 1970, men had twice the sperm count that our teenage boys have today,” he lamented.

You’ll be surprised to learn that that statistic is kinda bullshit and based on some cherry-picked scientific studies that can’t be applied very broadly. But, to the extent that men’s sperm count and quality are declining in specific geographical areas, we know they are caused by environmental factors that the Trump Administration is actively making worse by destroying the Environmental Protection Agency: air and water pollution, pesticides, microplastics, global warming, BPA. Toxins plus climate harms are likely hurting both men’s and women’s fertility, and the MAHA movement was a hypocritical scam that only enabled Trump to further sacrifice our environment and natural resources to corporate greed.

Other reasons women might be less inclined to have a baby right now:

• Women are quite literally dying of miscarriages under the Trump administration because doctors in states with harsh abortion laws won’t treat them even in the worst health emergencies if their fetus still has a heartbeat.

• Major American companies are cutting paid family leave and reducing support for working parents because the job market is so bad that there’s less competition for employees.

• The cost of groceries and gas right now is insane and getting worse, and we’re facing a global recession on top of that.

• Every day we’re hit with a new terrifying headline about the Atlantic ocean current collapsing within the century, or New Orleans being underwater within decades, or the world running out of fresh water and people having to duke it out for basic resources—and the current administration’s answer to that is to deny that any of it is happening and implement policies that only speed up the damage.

• Instead of listening to women about anything that we actually want, men are inflating their balls with Surgilube and saline injections to try to make themselves more sexually attractive.

• Some women just don’t want them, and that’s fine!

• Republicans are trying to ban sending abortion pills by mail while legalizing sending handguns by mail, despite guns being the leading cause of death of children in the US.

• The women trying to pressure other women to procreate, like Stephen Miller’s wife, literally had to have sex with a white supremacist vampire to do this???

Most women don’t want to be farmed like livestock, and today’s press conference started to make me feel a little bit like a goat. If this administration wants more babies, they should really start by giving a shit whether women live or die, and then maybe work up to understanding what kind of world people might want to bring a child into.

Three people on a cruise out of Southern Argentina last month have died from a deadly hantavirus outbreak onboard, and five more infections and possible infections are being traced throughout more than a dozen countries. A British man is in intensive care in South Africa with the respiratory disease, and three people are reporting symptoms in Europe, according to the World Health Organization (which Trump pulled us out of in January, incidentally). The variant of the virus that jumped onto this cruise, called the Andes variant, can be contracted from rat urine or droppings and spread from human to human. Argentine officials suspect that a Dutch couple, two of the three people who died on the cruise, contracted the virus during a bird-watching excursion at an Argentine landfill and brought it aboard the ship.

People are freaking out about a potential hantavirus pandemic, understandably, because we’re all still traumatized by the Covid pandemic and how it also started as just a few deadly cases very far away. And there were American passengers on the cruise, at least six of whom have returned their to their home states by now. But the hantavirus is very unlikely to become a pandemic, infectious disease experts say, because it’s difficult for it to transmit between people unless you’ve been in close quarters with an infected person for a long period of time. “There’s really no risk to anyone who is not on that ship,” Dr. Bryce Warner, an expert on the virus, told the New York Times.

Still, the hantapanic has yielded something productive, which is a renewed scrutiny on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s (and DOGE’s) reckless mass firings across U.S. federal health agencies—including, specifically, the guys who were hired to inspect cruise ships for health and sanitation and investigate outbreaks. CBS News reports that Kennedy fired all of the full-time employees in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Vessel Sanitation Program as part of its sweeping, indiscriminate layoffs when Trump took office. Notably, these guys’ salaries were paid by the cruise companies, not by taxpayers, so getting rid of them saved the federal government zero dollars while enabling massive ships full of vacationers to be floating petri dishes of infectious disease. Per the story:

The steep cuts to the program’s inspectors baffled CDC officials since the small team’s staff is not paid for by taxpayer dollars. Fees from cruise ships companies pay for the program, which is supposed to inspect large vessels at least twice a year.

The epidemiologist tasked with leading the agency’s outbreak response on cruise ships was included in the layoffs, multiple CDC officials said.

…

At least a dozen outbreaks have been documented so far this year on cruise ships, mostly from norovirus. Some of those outbreaks have made headlines for sickening dozens or even hundreds of people. There were 18 total outbreaks listed for all of last year.

Agency staff were in the middle of responding to two outbreaks when they were let go, an official said.

Keep in mind that if Bari Weiss’ CBS News, which now skews quite friendly toward the Trump Administration, is reporting and publishing a piece this damning, it’s an extremely bad look for Trump and Kennedy. And many of the biggest viral news and left-leaning influencer accounts on X and Instagram, including the former Kamala Harris campaign’s Headquarters, jumped on the story today to make sure everybody is clear about what terrifyingly stupid leadership looks like.

RFK Jr. knows he shouldn’t have fired those people. He had said a year ago after DOGE randomly took a chainsaw to the CDC that "20% of those thousands of firings had likely been “mistakes” and that he was going to try and hire some of them back. "Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut. We're reinstating them. And that was always the plan. Part of the — at DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning, is we're going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we'll make mistakes," Kennedy told reporters in April 2025. He then rescinded hundreds of CDC termination notices, which made him look incompetent in the first place, and also apparently missed quite a few important ones.

With that said, RFK Jr. has also made it clear that he is a eugenicist who wants people dead. He has replaced experienced doctors and health officials with anti-vax quacks, leading to a massive surge in child measles cases across the U.S. (including a new case in Manhattan). Babies are bleeding to death from vitamin K deficiency because MAHA moms are rejecting the vitamin shot their infants are supposed to get at birth. The FDA blocked the publication of new research confirming that the Covid and shingles vaccines are safe and flipped the food pyramid upside down, because truth and facts and science tend to upset Trump’s base. Meanwhile, Kennedy himself is out here slicing off raccoon penises, decapitating whales, and “rescuing” a bird at the airport that looks like it’s about to find itself still alive inside the secretary’s mouth, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence during multinational outbreaks.

If there’s three things to know about MAGA voters, one is that they lack basic empathy and relish in seeing bad things happen to people who disagree with them. The second is that they are driven by fear—of immigrants, trans people, cities, women, public transportation, the unknown. And the third is that they fucking love cruises. Republicans love to get on a big eyesore of a boat and then just be on that boat, passing by other countries from a distance with a piña colada in hand and never having to get out and interact with anyone in those countries. It’s baked into the party platform. So Trump voters can’t love seeing the news that his administration fired all the guys who were supposed to keep them from dying of rat-borne disease outbreaks on vacation.

I was 8 years old in 1991 when my mom explained to me that Louisiana’s race for governor that year was between “a crook and a Klansman.” David Duke, the Republican candidate, had been a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan before running for president and then governor of our state. Democrat Edwin Edwards, who was later convicted on federal racketeering, extortion, and fraud charges related to rigging riverboat casino licenses, ultimately won the election thanks to 80% of Black voters turning out and voting unanimously for the guy who wasn’t in the KKK. But a clear majority of low-income white people in the state had cast their vote for the Klansman. Per the archived NYT story:

Mr. Duke’s strongest support came from low- and middle-income whites. He got 56 percent of the vote of whites with family incomes under $15,000, 63 percent of those making from $15,000 to $29,999, and 60 percent of those making from $30,000 to 49,999.

But 51 percent of whites with family incomes from $50,000 to $74,999 voted for Mr. Edwards, and 66 percent of those with incomes $75,000 and over supported him.

To reiterate, this was 1991.

Twenty-five years later, six unelected, lifetime-appointed Klansmen on the Supreme Court have gutted the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act that protected minority voting representation in the South, declaring that it’s not necessary anymore because racism is over. Things “have changed dramatically’” in the South “in the decades since the passage of the Voting Rights Act,” Justice Alito wrote in his majority opinion. When the VRA was passed, “the Nation had faced nearly a century of ‘entrenched racial discrimination in voting,’” but “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate.” (The example he uses is the 2008 election, when Obama was on the ballot, which was of course an anomaly.) In fact, Alito writes, allowing for the existence of any majority-Black districts in a state like Louisiana—where a third of the population is Black—actually discriminates against Republicans, because Black voters generally vote for Dems.

In other words, you can draw up districts in the shape of bearded dragons to squeeze out extra seats for Republicans, but you can’t draw the districts in such a way that ensures racial minorities have any representative voting power in their state—even though Congress passed a law mandating exactly that after Black people were literally murdered for trying to vote.

What this decision means, in effect, is that Deep South states including Louisiana, where the case originated, are free to carve up majority-Black areas like New Orleans in a way that fully dilutes their voting power and hands representation of the state entirely over to white Republicans. And right on cue, Gov. Jeff Landry (R) suspended Louisiana’s primary elections—in which people had already begun casting votes—to redraw the state’s congressional maps to eliminate both majority-Black districts.

This comes two days after Ron DeSantis redrew Florida’s map to look like this:

Now if we’re going to talk purely about numbers ahead of the midterms, blue states can play this game too. California and Virginia have redrawn their maps in response to Texas starting all of this (with the caveat that California and Virginia put the redistricting referendum to statewide vote, rather than just having the governor cram the new maps down people’s throats). So before Louisiana’s latest move, the nationwide redistricting games were set to net roughly seven House seats for Republicans:

Even with Louisiana’s new gerrymander, Democrats are still quite likely to take the House in the midterms. The road is a bit bumpier, and it’s more imperative than ever this year that people get off their asses and vote, but Democrats very much can still take the House and even the Senate in 2026. The Senate polling right now in Texas gives a sense of how dark the situation is for Republicans, even in the reddest of red states, where Democrat James Talarico is showing a comfortable lead over both Republicans:

The important thing for Democrats to start thinking about is what they can do with the small window of power the people give them this year, if they manage to win it. Without radical change, democracy is lost—and Black and brown people disenfranchised—for a generation. They need to expand the Supreme Court to dilute the power of Trump and Bush’s appointees, who are ruling the country by shadow docket and casually rewriting federal laws. They need do something about gerrymandering, be it forcing all states to redraw fair districts via independent commissions or some better idea above my pay grade. They need to pass that stronger, more ironclad update to the Voting Rights Act that former Joe Manchin somehow had the power to tank by himself in 2022. They need to write their own version of Project 2025, which bulldozes through red tape to protect the country from future Donald Trumps and Stephen Millers and actually improve people’s lives, should they win the presidency in 2028. Have a plan. Be a party worth voting for. Otherwise, we’re barreling toward a system of all-red states vs. all-blue states that will feel very much like the Union vs. the Confederacy, and it probably will lead to a second Civil War.

I will never be one of those people saying “blue states should just secede” or “the South should just secede,” because I love Louisiana and a whole lot of the people there there despite its insidious leadership, and I believe Louisiana belongs in this country and deserves better than freefalling back into the Jim Crow era. With that said: Everybody down there better be screaming about this shit from the rooftops from now until November.

Before I judge anyone who attended this year’s White House Correspondents’ dinner, I want to say that that I used to be one of them. During the Obama years, my HuffPost colleagues and I always looked forward to that weekend in April when we got to put on formalwear and rub elbows with celebs at all the Vanity Fair before and after parties, because it was the one weekend a year that politics reporters got to feel like we were in LA instead of DC, maybe writing about the Oscars instead of infrastructure week. We savored that annual crumb of glamour, however embarrassing it is to say now, more than anyone really worried about the implications or optics of political journalists throwing back champagne and sliders next to the administration we we were supposed to be covering.

I stopped attending any WHCD festivities after 2016, in part because I moved to New York and in part because it became clear how gross and unbearable the event looked once we had a president who was openly attacking the free press. I’m a little surprised that ten years later, amid a full-on constitutional crisis, many people who consider themselves serious journalists are still showing up to this banquet that sane-washes a POTUS who yelled “Quiet piggy” at a female reporter on his plane recently and brags about the ideological capture of CBS News. Ironically, hundreds of those journalists ended up having front-row seats at what appeared to be the third assassination attempt on Trump, which the White House is now using to further erode the First Amendment, get Jimmy Kimmel fired for a joke and pull the broadcasting licenses of eight local ABC News stations.

The “shooting” itself has unfolded so strangely—and the White House capitalized on it so quickly to twist it in Trump’s political favor—that half the country appears to believe he staged it himself. A 31-year-old California man named Cole Tomas Allen was able to rush past security at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night armed with guns and knives—toward a room filled with Trump and his Vice President and nearly every member of his cabinet—before being tackled and arrested. A gunshot was heard, which we’ve been led to believe was fired by Allen, though the Department of Justice has yet to find the bullet or confirm that Allen used any weapon. The only person hurt was a Secret Service agent, who may have been accidentally shot by a fellow Secret Service agent in friendly fire rather than by the suspect.

In that scenario, Trump’s security team not only let a man with guns and knives blow through the checkpoint towards the president—you can see from the security footage Trump posted that night that Allen got quite far into the hotel before being tackled—but the agents managed to shoot each other in the process. The Washington Post reported that the Trump Administration had provided an unusually low level of security for an event featuring this many important people, which could suggest either that this administration is incompetent or that they weren’t trying very hard to deter an incident like this. “Hypothetically, If I had hidden an explosive in my shoe or my jacket, I would have had no problem getting into one of those ballrooms,” one Fox News reporter posted on X about the notable lack of security at the event.

Allen never got anywhere near the president, but because that room was full of journalists with cell phones, we’ve been treated to unlimited content from the aftermath of the gunshot ringing out. Stephen Miller grabbed his pregnant wife’s boob and used her as a human shield as Trump watched them evacuate from behind the curtain. (Trump later said in interviews that he delayed his own evacuation by the Secret Service on purpose, because he felt calm about the incident and preferred to watch everything unfold.) RFK Jr. ditched his wife entirely to flee the room. Kash Patel’s girlfriend was found holding hands with another man. One guy continued to eat his salad amid the chaos; a Free Press writer recorded a video of herself taking deep breaths and posted it to the grid.

And it seemed like almost immediately, the incident was being spun to push an agenda. Before Trump had even released a statement and before any of the facts had come out, a swarm of paid MAGA influencers all posted some version of the same coordinated message on X: This means we have to give Trump his ballroom!

There’s no chance that Republican influencers suddenly felt inspired to post about Trump’s ballroom, considering that it has absolutely nothing to do with the Correspondents’ Dinner. The dinner would never be hosted at the White House because it’s thrown for and by the journalists and to raise money for the WHCA; the entire point is for it to appear independent of the White House, even if the president invited to it to be roasted by a comedian every year.

But Trump has become obsessed with this ballroom, which will include a massive underground bunker for himself to ride out the next insurrection in, likely because the public absolutely hates the project and a judge recently halted it. So it’s worth noting how swiftly the White House was able to capitalize on this incident with a coordinated campaign to make the ballroom sound indispensable. Like clockwork, MAGA influencers posted in unison about it; Trump himself then came out and said this is why we need the ballroom; and then elected Republicans (even “libertarian” Rand Paul) fell in line the next day behind a bill appropriating $400 million in taxpayer money for this narcissistic monstrosity that Trump claimed was going to be fully funded by outside donors. “The sooner we get the ballroom built, the better it is for the country,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said yesterday.

The White House also wasted no time using the alleged assassination attempt to crack down on free speech, much like they did in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Melania posted a self-serious tweet demanding that Disney/ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel over a joke about her being an “expectant widow” (which was about their age difference, not assassination); Trump’s FCC is threatening to pull eight of ABC News’ local broadcasting licenses in retaliation for the same joke; and Trump’s DOJ has absurdly re-indicted James Comey over an old tweet featuring a picture of seashells that were in the shape of 8645 (meaning get rid of the 45th president). So what did journalists get for inviting Trump to their First Amendment party again? Escalating attacks on the First Amendment.

Meanwhile, as Trump was using the actions of a random guy who busted through his weak security setup to make the case for a gawdy ballroom and accelerate his revenge tour, legacy media outlets are covering the situation like this:

“Trump calls for unity and bipartisan healing,” wrote PBS. CNN’s Dana Bash had Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.) on her show and asked him if the Democratic' party’s “heated rhetoric” is the problem.

In fact, every single American president has had assassination plots against him. There were at least 11 against Obama. The reason nobody remembers the attempts on Obama’s life is that his Secret Service and intelligence teams caught and stopped them before a man was able to get a clear shot at his head or bum rush his banquet, whereas Trump’s security team straight-up let a sniper climb onto the roof of a nearby building during an open-air rally. What FBI Director Kash Patel calls a “tragedy” about Saturday night is actually a security failure of such stunning proportions that half the country thinks Trump staged the attempt on himself to revive his sinking poll numbers.

Trump is going to milk this incident for all it’s worth, but we don’t actually have to play along with any of it. We don’t need to talk about the “inflammatory rhetoric” on the left. I don’t need to read Allen’s manifesto about rapists and pedos to try and understand his motivations. Trump doesn’t need a $400 million ballroom for security now any more than he did last week. We don’t need to hand-wring about jokes on late night cable. The only thing anyone needs to talk about in the wake of Cole Tomas Allen casually jogging past Secret Service packed with weapons is why an administration that guts social programs to spend trillions of dollars on the Department of Defense doesn’t seem the least bit interested in defending the president’s head in public, ever.

Scandal-ridden Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned from Trump’s cabinet today amid an investigation into allegations that she drinks heavily on the job, slept with a subordinate, and that both her husband and her father have been sexually harassing and inappropriately texting young staff at the Labor Department. Her husband, an anesthesiologist, was actually barred from entering the department headquarters in February after two female staffers accused him of sexually assaulting them, which was caught on camera. But Chavez-DeRemer’s attorney insists that her resignation “is not the result of legal wrongdoings” but rather a “personal decision” to leave the administration for a job in the private sector. (Sure, Jan.)

Chavez-DeRemer is the third cabinet secretary to “resign” or be fired during Trump’s second term, and notably, all three have been women. Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March due to “a culmination of her many unfortunate leadership failures including the fallout in Minnesota, the ad campaign, the allegations of infidelity, the mismanagement of her staff, and her constant feuding with the heads of other agencies, including CBP and ICE,” an administration official told NBC News. A month later, Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi—despite her reportedly begging him not to—because he was frustrated with her mishandling of the Epstein files and failure to prosecute his political enemies.

In reality, while these women were objectively terrible cabinet secretaries, they weren’t any worse than some of the men in the Trump’s cabinet who still have jobs—Trump just found them to be useful scapegoats on which to pin all of the failures of his administration. The drinking allegation against Ms. Chavez-DeRemer is particularly funny to consider in this regard:

The original complaint to the inspector general accused Ms. Chavez-DeRemer and her aides of drinking on the job and keeping a stash of liquor at the office, according to The New York Post, which first reported the complaint in January.

In one text message, Ms. Chavez-DeRemer asked a staff member to bring rosé to her hotel room.

“Do they sell by the bottle,” she asked. The staff member responded that they did, but were out of rosé. Ms. Chavez-DeRemer responded with another selection: “How about the josh sauvi B.”

I’ll admit that it’s a little amusing to read about this woman’s request for josh sauvi B1 amid the list of scandals forcing her departure, considering that some of Trump’s male appointees are so notoriously hammered at all times that social media has taken to nicknaming his cabinet the “Liquor Cabinet.” Pete Hegseth is such a wreckless alcoholic that he had to promise the Senate he would stop drinking if they gave him the Department of Defense. (He’s also been credibly accused of rape and was confirmed to Trump’s cabinet despite that and the drinking problem.) FBI Director Kash Patel announced today that he’s suing The Atlantic over a deeply reported story about his excessive drinking that claims his staff has trouble waking him up sometimes when he’s passed out.

It does feel a little bit like firing the women first would play better with MAGA, who are unclear on whether they believe women should even have the right to vote, much less help Trump to run the country. Republicans like to sprinkle a few women into positions of power for optics, because how can you call Trump a sexist pig if he’s got women like Pam Bondi in his cabinet, openly worshipping and defending him around the big table at those meetings? The Pam Bondis of the cabinet also tend to be the most disposable and the easiest to point a finger at when your poll numbers start circling the drain. Anyone who votes for Trump will be quick to believe him when he blames his problems on a woman. Of course she was a failure; probably a snake who betrayed him, too. Time to get serious and replace her with a man.

Of course, none of this is to defend Chavez-DeRemer—she and her entire family sound like creeps. She took staffers to strip clubs and allegedly pressured the young women to give sexual attention to her husband and dad. During her tenure as labor secretary, the department has broadcast white nationalist propaganda on social media and forced thousands of civil servants out of jobs. She deserves to be fired or exiled whatever exactly happened. But until I see one single man in Trump’s cabinet lose his job for being equally ill-behaved and dysfunctional as the women being thrown under the bus left and right, then this is just more rank misogyny dressed up as an administration having standards.

Hi readers,

After nine beautiful years in Brooklyn, I am shrinking my life into two suitcases and moving to Rio de Janeiro in June.

To be sure, this feels like something one might do in their twenties rather than in the middle of their career. I’m 42 now; I have unexplained lower back pain. My hangovers last three days. I have a small dog who requires an ungodly amount of paperwork to migrate to South America. Moving to a beach city in Brazil with only my clothes and 6-year-old Maltipoo was not on my Bingo card for this decade.

I won’t be writing a Lena Dunham-style “Why I’m Leaving New York” essay about why, because my reasons are pretty simple: My partner and I were an immigrant and a journalist in a country that is increasingly hostile to both. He moved back to his hometown, Rio de Janeiro, in December, and I’m joining him there in June. It’s a romantic decision, in part, but also one that’s best for me right now as it becomes impossible to support myself in New York as a freelancer. I love Rio; its vibrance and sweatiness and soul remind me of New Orleans, except it’s nestled between the sea and mountains1 and is genuinely, shockingly beautiful. And the U.S. dollar, at least for now, stretches a lot further in Brazil than it does in the U.S., so I can afford a much better quality of life there than I can in Brooklyn.

This move also tracks for me in terms of the past few decades of my life: I spent ten years in D.C. and then left when Trump was elected the first time; I spent nearly ten years in New York and am now exiting after Trump’s second election. Brazil has successfully imprisoned its own right-wing aspiring autocrat and is moving in the right direction lately, but should a Bolsonaro scion take power again there in ten years, perhaps I’ll flee again to somewhere even further. The South Pole? A life fleeing fascist regimes by the decade would at least make for great semi-autobiographical novel material.

As for Nightcap, I have great news: It’s not only continuing apace but expanding! I’m writing this post today rather than closer to the actual move on June 1 because we’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of Nightcap this week—my newsletter is a toddler!!!—and I have a couple announcements about it. One, I’ve lowered the monthly and annual subscription price a bit for you guys to accommodate everyone’s subscription fatigue and to acknowledge the rising prices of everything else in this country under Trumponomics, in hopes that folks who regularly enjoy reading this newsletter and find it informative and stirring might be moved to support it. I will keep writing Nightcap for as long as I have enough paid subscribers to make it worth the time and effort, and as always, I am deeply grateful to each and every one of Nightcap’s patrons.

Secondly, in addition to my regular writings, I’ll be adding a new section at the bottom just for paid subscribers that will be more of a personal account of moving to Brazil. I’ll write about attempting to learn Portuguese and to culturally assimilate, post photos and stories of adventures in and around Rio, share the challenges and triumphs of starting over in a strange place with no friends (yet), and just generally enjoy having a freestyle, non-politics section of the newsletter. I hope you’ll come along for the ride!

xx,

Laura

ps. If you know someone in Rio whom you think I should know, please consider introducing us!