Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and oyster farmer Graham Platner are locked in a dead heat in their race for Maine‘s senate seat, as Platner hits Collins on her abortion record while attempting to circumvent attention from his stack of personal controversies. The latest poll from the New York Times, the Portland Press Herald, and Siena […]
The US Supreme Court refused to let President Donald Trump immediately fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook in a case that tested the central bank’s independence from the White House.
Dispatch writer Nick Catoggio says he knows what probably drove President Donald Trump’s little hissy fit in the Senate earlier this week and his threat to veto a popular housing bill. The bill would have made housing cheaper, for starters. “Americans want cheaper housing, [Trump] wants the SAVE America Act. He didn’t debate for a second whose desire should take precedence, I’m sure,” said Catoggio. “Still, there might be more to his Trumper tantrum over the housing bill than rank spite at not getting his way on election reform. … For all his pretensions to being an avatar of ‘the forgotten man,’ the president remains a Manhattan real estate developer at heart. And real estate developers have been conditioned by their trade to want property to grow more expensive, not less.“Just ask him. ‘I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes,’ Trump admitted in January. Later, in March, the Great Populist assured House Speaker Mike Johnson that ‘no one gives a s—— about housing,’ according to four sources who spoke to Punchbowl News. Some of the president’s infamous quotes about the cost of living have been taken out of context to make him sound more callous (some, not all), but his attitude toward high housing prices is what it is. He doesn’t care. At best.”But the potential electoral consequences for his party don’t seem to be keeping him up at night either, said Catoggio.“He’s not behaving like somebody who cares. Maybe he will start to at some point, but he is not right now,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman wondered Thursday about the GOP’s affordability problem after the housing bill went unsigned.“I doubt it,” said Catoggio. “An old guy who’s entered the “YOLO phase” of life is unlikely to revert to worrying about what other people — that is, 150 million American voters — think of him. All told, in Trump we have a president who got elected on populism and popularism yet has functionally renounced both in less than two years in office. He plainly isn’t prioritizing the welfare of the working man and he also plainly no longer worries about making the average voter happy, at least when doing so would conflict with his own whims. Even his decision to strike a terrible deal with Iran for the sake of bringing down gas prices was framed less as a matter of helping Americans than of protecting his own legacy.”But Trump is a weird mishmash of psychology issues, Catoggio said“… [I]t’s always been hard to tell … whether his paranoia about elections is a knowing lie told by a dissembling megalomaniac to discredit a threat to his power or a sincerely held delusion by a fragile egomaniac to reassure himself that the people love him,” Catoggio said. “If you see him mostly as a strongman, you think it’s the first. If you see him mostly as a narcissist, you think it’s the second.”Regardless, Trump knows his bad behavior is sinking his popularity, and he desperately needs to do what he can to upset a natural democratic order that tends to toss out a president who stops caring about what the voters want.“Enjoy ‘Stop the Steal 2.0’ this fall, American voters. You earned it,” Catoggio said.
Texas Democrats rallied around their nominee for the United States Senate seat being vacated by Republican Sen. John Cornyn during their convention on Friday. Democratic Texas state […]
The goal is to make the survey more deeply representative of the population.
What happened when a GOP candidate had a Nazi history.
Former CBS News correspondent Scott MacFarlane expressed astonishment on Sunday at the viral reach of a Senate floor speech by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) cataloging alleged corruption across the first 500 days of President Donald Trump's second term."Wow," MacFarlane wrote, noting that Murphy's floor speech on Trump administration corruption "has now received 1 million views."MacFarlane highlighted the speech's striking opening framing, writing that Murphy "opens the remarks by arguing that Trump has turned the White House into a 24/7 corruption operation."That characterization came directly from the senator's address. Murphy told colleagues that over the last year and a half, Trump "has turned the White House into a 24/7 corruption operation," calling it "a national crisis" and saying lawmakers "should start acting like it."The roughly half-hour speech, titled "Trump's 500 Days of Corruption," followed up on earlier floor addresses Murphy delivered on the administration's first six weeks and first 100 days. In it, the senator highlighted what he described as the most egregious instances of Trump, his family, and members of his administration using their positions of power to enrich themselves and do favors for their billionaire allies at the expense of American taxpayers.Murphy argued that the president's goal was to engage in so much corruption and self-enrichment that it simply becomes "the pitter patter of rain" — normal, constant, and never-ending. He contended that Trump is betting the steady drip of new corruption stories will eventually exhaust the press and the public into no longer paying attention.The senator walked through a month-by-month timeline of alleged self-dealing. He began with an April 7, 2025 memo from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche ordering the termination of several Biden-era DOJ investigations into crypto companies, noting that Blanche was himself a major crypto investor working for a president deeply involved in the crypto industry. Murphy also pointed to pardons issued at taxpayers' expense as part of the pattern.Murphy closed by insisting the presidency "is not a license to steal from the American people" and that the federal government "doesn't exist to make Donald Trump rich," urging both Democrats and Republicans to confront the issue.For MacFarlane, the takeaway was less the substance than the spread — a lengthy, detail-heavy floor speech, the kind that often disappears without notice, instead racking up a million views and breaking through to a much wider audience.
'They say that James is trans, we're all trans'
