It’s been a very alarming couple of weeks for democracy. Whistleblowers at the United States Postal Service have warned that a faulty new system rushed into place by the Trump administration this summer is basically designed to reject millions of mail-in ballots this November.

Federal “monitors” sent to babysit Wyoming’s primary election (in what seems to be an early dry-run of Trump’s plans for the midterms) were so blatantly trying to meddle in the process that the state’s Republican governor called the DOJ agents “aggressive, irregular and disruptive.”

Texas suspended the voter registrations of 1.2 million people without notifying them, just two months before midterms, by flagging that they may no longer live at their current address. (Voters who live in the county can still vote on regular ballots by taking the extra step of declaring their residency when they vote; folks have until October 5 to update their registrations and can check their status on the Texas secretary of state’s website, at a county election office, or by mail!)

And now, a pivotal purple county in Texas—the state’s third most populous—has voted to slash 30% of its own polling places, cutting the number of locations from 316 to 224. The three Republican officials on the Tarrant County elections board voted for the change, and the two Democrats voted against it. The deleted polling places are, of course, at places like the campus of UT Arlington, which is expected to heavily support Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico over Attorney General Ken Paxton. The move is designed to create long lines at polling places—there will be about 5,800 voters per location now—and increase the distances people have to travel from their homes or offices to cast a ballot.

Voters Tarrant County heavily protested the move, showing up at town halls to register their disgust. “Nothing you can do can stop us from removing you in November,” one resident told GOP officials yesterday.

Tarrant County voters are also not buying officials’ claims that the move was to “save money” rather than to suppress turnout. “I’d love to know what you all think our tax dollars are for,” a local woman said at the town hall meeting. “They are to serve us, and I can’t think of a better use of taxpayer money than to encourage and support the democratic process.”

Tarrant County is the one Republicans fear the most this year, because it broke for Joe Biden by .22% and is also quite gettable for Talarico. Trump’s approval rating is 13 points underwater in Texas—and hovering just over 30% nationwide, which is horrible—and Talarico and Paxton are currently neck and neck in the polls. Suspending a million voters and removing polling places from college campus could provide just the amount of election fuckery the GOP needs to pull this one out.

On the other hand, voters really don’t like to be disenfranchised. Texans are especially activated against AI data centers and flock cameras right now, and Paxton is a historically foul candidate who was impeached by his own colleagues for corruption, bribery, and abuse of public office. I suspect that the more word gets out that Republicans are openly cheating to defeat Talarico, the more any given UT Austin student will be willing to travel miles off campus and stand in hours-long lines to make sure and vote their asses out.

Yesterday, Trump adviser and right-wing internet agitator Laura Loomer called a group of elected Black women “ghetto, entitled, race-obsessed, destructive black BITCHES who are completely unfit for the power they hold.”

When State Rep. Angie Nixon (D) clapped back by pointing out that Loomer once ate dog food on camera, Loomer went so low it actually shocked my sensibilities, which is hard for her to do these days:

These comments have not made the news at all—not only because we have come to expect them from Loomer, who is, again, ADVISING THE PRESIDENT. But because less than three months before a deeply consequential midterm election, the mainstream media have been hyper-focused on pressuring Democratic candidates to answer for recent remarks by Hasan Piker, a leftist Twitch streamer that most Democratic voters haven’t even heard of, about Israel and antisemitism.

For context: Piker essentially said last week that that Jewish people are not “monolithic” and that conflating Israel’s policies with the values of all American Jews may exacerbate threats of antisemitic violence in the US. Here are his words, condensed for clarity:

“Look, the anti-Zionist Jews in my community, you have a very tough job ahead of you, where you have to go back to your communities and try to get your elderly relatives to understand that this connection between Israel and Zionism that is expressed over and over again through a lot of these Jewish institutions…is teaching people the idea that Jews are monolithic. And this is a dangerous…mode of propaganda…If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action. Not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews…I don’t know how many different ways I can explain this. I don’t know how people don’t recognize how dangerous this predicament is, how dangerous this is for Jews.”

Was this artfully stated? No. Was Piker actually blaming Jewish people for any future attacks against them, as the worst faith interpretations of his words claim? Probably not. Piker has condemned antisemitism many times and was trying to echo a point that has been made by many others, including Jewish scholars, about the dangers of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

More importantly, you do not have to listen to Hasan Piker or give one shit about anything the man says! He is not running for anything, was not elected to anything, and does not work for the Democratic Party in any capacity. He’s not a politician with media training and message discipline; he’s a leftist Twitch streamer who broadcasts his random thoughts for something like eight hours a day. Sometimes he uses his platform of 3+ million Twitch followers to advocate for candidates he likes on the left, much like Elon Musk wore a cheesehead on stage in Wisconsin to campaign for a conservative state Supreme Court candidate.

But this does not explain, for instance, why Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia was pressed to answer for Piker’s remarks, despite never campaigning with him and having nothing to do with him. An Ossoff spokesperson responded to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s repeated questions about Piker this week that the senator “unreservedly rejects reckless and dangerous rhetoric suggesting that policy advocacy invites violence against the Jewish community or any community.” This generated headlines all over the MSM that Ossoff has joined the chorus of Democrats condemning the a beloved figure on the left, which in turn prompted Piker to snipe at Ossoff back. All of this was completely unnecessary and, frankly, stupid.

Likewise, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El Sayed is repeatedly being forced to answer for Piker’s words, to the extent that no reporter lets him talk about anything else. Here he is getting grilled about it again two days ago on MSNBC:

CNN has panelists talking about how El-Sayed campaigning with Piker is more "depraved" than the president having dinner with literal neo-nazi Nick Fuentes. Democratic congressmen are even going on Fox News to condemn Piker:

Meanwhile, whose “extreme” comments and ideology are Republican candidates being pressured to answer for? Not those of virulently racist Loomer, who says all Muslims are terrorists and once wrote that if Kamala Harris won the presidential election, "the White House will smell like curry and White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.”

Not Elon Musk, who spends his days spreading white supremacist propaganda, is about to nuke the Louisiana coastline, believes “childless” people should not be allowed to vote, and is spending hundreds of millions to elect Republicans this cycle.

Not right-wing influencer Matt Walsh—probably the closest equivalent to Piker on the right—who wants women confined to the kitchen and said the country is better off because of slavery.

Not even the president himself, who recently posted a video of the Obamas as monkeys, called an entire African country “low IQ,” and does so much wildly offensive and corrupt shit on a daily basis that it’s hard to pluck out specific examples.

No, Republicans are mostly being allowed to use their media hits to condemn so-called “extremists” on the left, like Piker. The only words that seem to matter in U.S. politics right now is this one ungenerously interpreted paragraph of Hasan’s; everything else is just background noise!

The irony here is that Piker is really the first successful left-wing personality in the streaming space, which has long been weaponized by right-wing provocateurs to activate young men toward Trump and Republican candidates. Independent media is full of well-funded reactionary quacks like Tim Poole, but very short on left-wing equivalents, as Taylor Lorenz pointed out in my Elle profile of Jessica Reed Kraus. It clearly drives Republicans crazy that there’s a Twitch streamer demanding Medicare for All rather than the subjugation of women, which is why his words are being treated as the Gospel of Mainstream Democratic Opinion.

If Democrats want any shot of flipping the Senate this year, they need to recognize this trap for what it is. Republicans will call left-leaning candidates extreme socialists and communists no matter what they say or who they campaign with; the task here is not to alienate half of their own base by stumbling over themselves to track to the center.

And now for…

A Brazil update!

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Guys— I must say that Jon Ossoff has been growing on me like a fungus. The buzzy young senator from Georgia, who is probably going to run for president in 2028, has come a long way from being known as the “hot Hank Johnson staffer” by DC media circles circa 2012. I’d argue that he’s now one of the best communicators the Democrats have, delivering barn burner speeches on the regular, destroying men like Pete Hegseth with unrelenting lines of questioning in Senate hearings, and incisively articulating the Trump administration’s corruption and dysfunction in a way I haven’t seen many other politicians be able to do.

But I was not prepared for what Ossoff did yesterday when he name-checked Natalie, the young blonde Trump aide who’s reportedly obsessed with him in an unhinged way, and insinuated what everyone else has been thinking about the two of them.

“While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings,” Ossoff said at a rally in Atlanta yesterday. “He golfs and trades stocks. So he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

Ossoff’s whole speech last night was brilliant, and even just in the clip above he managed to fit in so much damaging material: the sailors jumping overboard on the USS Lincoln because their conditions have deteriorated so badly; Trump losing the Iran war; his constant falling asleep in public; his golfing and insider trading and unpopular ballroom; the naked corruption and stupidity of Trump accepting flying palace from Qatar. Brilliantly communicated. But it was the “and travel with Natalie” Ossoff slipped in there that exploded like a bomb among people in the know and made everyone else curious enough to google who she is.

For reference, Natalie Harp is Trump’s longtime aide known by White House insiders as the “human printer,” because her job is basically to follow Trump around with a tiny printer and keep him happy by printing out positive articles and comments about him. She also transcribes Trump’s ramblings directly into Truth Social and makes his signature stream-of-consciousness posts for him, which you can see happening in real time here:

But this is not a normal professional relationship. Harp and Trump appear to be obsessed with each other; she’s reportedly written him love notes that “raised the eyebrows of Secret Service,” including one that said, “You are all that matters to me,” and another that said, “I want to bring you joy, to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’” When she worked on Trump’s campaign in Bedminster, New Jersey, she reportedly slept in the women’s locker room to be as close to him as possible. She believes that Trump is responsible for curing her bone cancer, even though he’s probably not. Melania supposedly can’t stand her.

In turn, Natalie is Trump’s “binkie” or his “comfort blanket,” per NYT’s Maggie Haberman, and goes everywhere with him from official business trips to golf games. When Trump recently had to hide in a catering truck and then secretly board a small plane out of Turkey due to a safety threat from Iran, he left several members of his cabinet like Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent on the decoy plane to potentially be shot out of the sky—but he made sure this random girl Natalie was aboard his safe plane alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Media gossipers have been referring to Natalie as Trump’s side-piece for years, but the legacy MSM—and certainly actual members of the U.S. Senate—have avoided really going there the way Ossoff finally did last night.

Ossoff’s dig appears to have hit a major nerve in the Trump administration. Stephen Cheung, White House Director of Communications, had a bit of a meltdown about it, calling Ossoff “the biggest cuck loser in politics.”

Another White House spokesman (who looks very much like a theatre kid) called Ossoff a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama,” which just feels like a reluctant acknowledgement that Ossoff is a great communicator.

And Trump himself, who’s really lost the juice in terms of nicknaming his opponents, called Ossoff “Pee-Wee Herman” in an interview today while dodging the whole Natalie part.

My point in diving into this story is not that Trump having an affair with his 35-year-old aide would be an earth-shattering or even remotely surprising revelation to anyone. We know Trump’s a cheater and a creep. This is all more to say that Jon Ossoff, who’s known for being quite serious and disciplined and on message, said something really funny and cutting in his speech last night that opened up an embarrassing can of worms for Trump and makes me think Ossoff might have the juice. One of the most effective aspects of the Kamala Harris campaign, which they should have leaned way harder into, was Tim Walz calling Republicans weird little freaks in his TV interviews. The right would call him “Tampon Tim” and obsess over the genitalia of children, and Walz would just go on TV like a normal guy and say, hey, these people are weird! The message was true and perfect, and it’s the one thing that needs to be carried forward from that campaign.

I still have my reservations about Ossoff in terms of policy. I’d love to see him get behind Medicare for All and abolishing ICE and some of the other broadly popular proposals by the left that he hasn’t been able to embrace as a Democrat in a purple state. I believe he might be able to get there in a general election. But nevertheless, I love seeing this disciplined, telegenic young senator let loose a little bit and make genuinely funny asides about things that people have been afraid to say out loud. The days of Democrats being punching bags for the right and playing by a different set of standards and rules— “when you go low, we go high” type shit—are over. The public wants someone who can fight and land satisfying blows, who feels as genuinely angry as we are, who has an edge and a sense of humor alongside their strong moral clarity with which to pounce on Trump’s 33% approval rating and galvanize the country against him. I need to see more from Jon Ossoff, but he’s starting to look pretty good.

The headline and photo read as if Hillary herself was calling Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed communist as a pejorative and warning that the Democratic Party has moved too far left. It was designed to fuel frustration and bitterness among progressives and to suggest that the party fault lines are dangerously deepening ahead of the midterms.

Few people, I’m going to assume, actually clicked through to get the full context of Clinton’s quote. Here is what Hillary actually said on Kara Swisher’s podcast about the Senate Democratic primary that Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel moderate, just lost this week to the more progressive El-Sayed:

“The real fight will be, how do we make sure that people who voted for Haley feel comfortable voting for Abdul El-Sayed, and how do we get Independents to feel comfortable?” Clinton said.

“It’s not just about Michigan, but the Republican messaging is ‘communist, socialist.’ It’s going to be a very effective attack,” she said. “People on the left have to be prepared to answer that and be effective in answering that.”

When Swisher asked if Clinton actually believes that the “communist” label is going to work against Democratic candidates in 2026, Clinton said, “All I know is that is the attack Trump is leading with, and I assume they’ve tested that and I assume they have reason to believe it’s effective or they wouldn’t be beating the drum on it.”

Nothing about what Hillary said here should actually piss anyone off. This was reasonable political analysis made, ultimately, in support of leftist candidates. It’s true that Republicans are going all in on reviving the Red Scare and that the “commie” thing might actually work on some low-information Boomer voters. If you found yourself seething at Hillary Clinton this weekend over this supposed betrayal, then Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post headline definitely had its intended effect on you.

And it’s not just the (overtly fascist) NY Post; much of the mainstream media seems to be latching onto this narrative that the left is currently eating its own. Here’s the New York Times talking about a “war” by the Democrats against the ascendant left:

…but when you click through to the piece, it’s just an interview with the president of the moderate corporate think tank Third Way saying they’re spending money to help Republicans win in November.

Here’s Fox News, likewise, featuring James Carville as the quintessential moderate Democrat threatening to leave the party over Hasan Piker (lmao), even though Carville has been a raging conservative and irrelevant dinosaur for at least a decade:

Guys: Nobody need give a shit about what James Carville has to say. There’s also no need to give a shit about John Fetterman, who literally had a stroke and woke up Republican, “threatening to leave” the party over a leftist podcaster who is not running for anything. Fetterman would lose his Pennsylvania Senate race to a ham sandwich right now if he were running; he doesn’t represent any voters.

Smart Democrats who actually care about clawing the country back from its current condition understand the reality at play here, which is that they have to be a big tent party if they want to control anything. Centrists can worry that the left has hijacked the party and the left can be angry that centrists are holding it hostage to corporate interests, but the factions must find common cause right now in rooting out the current administration or the entire exercise is pointless. The way to do this is simply to respect primary voters: If El Sayed is who Michigan Democrats choose, the party enthusiastically rallies behind him; if Jon Ossoff is the choice in Georgia, the party gets behind him with the same vigor. It’s okay to send socialist-adjacent candidates to the Senate alongside neoliberals—let them battle it out with ideas on the Senate floor, rather than having an existential crisis right before the midterms.

Also, this is pretty much what’s happening! Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a Democrat who I have very little in common with ideologically, is nevertheless doing what I would like him to do right now and reaching out to El Sayed to offer his full backing and support. “I said to him, ‘I don’t need you to like me,’” Schumer said this week. “‘I just need you to win.’” Pete Buttigieg joined El Sayed at a unity rally in Detroit this weekend. Most prominent Dems aren’t actually spinning their wheels trying to quash the leftist insurgency right now; they’re focusing on clawing the majority back from Republicans in November, as they should be.

There may be a strong argument to be made that a man like Schumer and a man like Zohran Mamdani do not belong in the same party. The two-party system inherently disadvantages the side that tends to be pickier and more thoughtful in choosing its candidates, as opposed to just voting for whatever bozo hates immigrants and has an R behind his name. But the reality of the current moment is this: The Trump administration has erected concentration camps in our backyards. They’ve started a pointless war, lost that war almost immediately, and humiliated the US on a global stage. They’ve tanked the economy, driven up food and gas prices, stripped pollution regulations and protections for endangered species, and opened up national parks to logging and drilling. They’ve defunded medical research and driven hordes of scientists out of the country. They let Elon Musk feed USAID into the wood chipper, killing millions upon millions of children who needed help.

The goal right now must be the broader fight. Defeat this administration; root it out; hold it accountable; attempt to reverse its damage. When a candidate in your party wins by actually listening to his or her voters, that is a win for you. This election is still very much the Democrats’ to lose.

Rep. Max Miller, an Ohio Republican running for re-election this year, released a bizarre video on X yesterday attempting to defend himself against allegations of brutal domestic abuse against his ex-wife and 2-year-old daughter. Miller's ex Emily, who happens to be U.S. Senator Bernie Moreno’s (R) daughter, claims he threw boiling water at her, held a gun to her head, shoved her against a wall, slapped her, and broke their toddler’s collarbone. Emily Moreno is the second woman to accuse Miller of physical abuse after former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham.

After nearly a week of silence from Republicans, including from the accuser’s own dad, Miller announced yesterday that he’s staying in his House race. He claimed his ex-wife has “struggled with significant mental health challenges,” called the boiling water incident during a custody dispute “horseplay in the kitchen,” and added, “If I had assaulted her, would she have offered to cook me dinner six days later?”

Calling his ex mentally unwell and describing the textbook appeasement and peacekeeping behavior of a domestic abuse victim only made Miller look worse, of course. But the congressman went even further, releasing what he considers to be exonerating audio of himself: a conversation between him and his ex-wife after the incident, recorded for his lawyer, in which he admits to spraying her with hot water. In the clip, his ex-wife is audibly upset about the fact that he threw scalding water on her, and he tells her it’s impossible for water to come out of the faucet at a boiling temperature. (Tap water gets as hot as 140 degrees Fahrenheit in standard homes; 120 is considered scalding.) “I told you not to come over and screw around with me,” he adds.

Textbook abuse and manipulation. It’s plain as day that the man is terrifying.

Republicans, you’ll recall, shrieked for weeks about the accusations of rape and abuse against candidate Graham Platner (whom Democrats rightfully pushed out of the Maine Senate race). RNC Chair Joe Gruters said that “Democrats rolled in the mud with Platner, and now they are completely stained by their association with this sick monster.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R) did multiple Fox News hits about the Platner allegations and pretended to care about women on X. “Women who dated Graham Platner say he was demeaning, volatile, physically threatening, ‘cavalierly contemptuous’ of women,’” Cruz wrote. “This is not one bad Reddit post. It is a pattern. And Democrats own every bit of it.”

Meanwhile, as their own Max Miller is accused of beating two women and breaking a baby’s bones, a hush has fallen over the party. Virtually all elected Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, joined Republicans in condemning and ousting Platner, despite the vital importance of Platner’s race for their control of the Senate. But facing an uphill battle in the midterms, the GOP would rather greenlight severe domestic abuse than potentially lose even one House seat this year. (Miller is in a tough district; he won his last race by only 51%).

Even Sen. Bernie Moreno (R) dragged his feet for days on calling for his daughter’s abuser to drop out of the race. He finally became the first to say something yesterday, only after Miller publicly smeared her as crazy. “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives,” Moreno posted yesterday morning.

“I believe Max Miller needs to seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake,” he added.

As of today, no other prominent Republicans have condemned Miller or called for him to step aside. That’s because there’s a classic double standard between the parties: Democrats are expected to hold their own monsters accountable, and Republicans only ever hold bad men accountable when they’re Democrats. The media is complicit, too: Whereas the Platner allegations were a front page story for weeks, most Americans probably still haven’t even heard of Max Miller—in part because it’s simply less surprising for the GOP to protect abusive men. They elected an accused rapist president, twice, and his entire cabinet is revenge for the Me Too movement.

Of course, the Democrats should not stop pushing out their own bad men, even though it’s incredibly frustrating to watch the parties play by two different sets of rules. The game is rigged and the hypocrisy of the “Christian right” unbearable. But it’s important not to become groomed or desensitized to the fact that rapists and wife beaters are allowed to thrive in Congress if they belong to the right party. Be loud about Max Miller. Ruin his life. It’s long past time for a reckoning.

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…

Read more

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.