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Donald Trump’s nostalgic delusions are only fooling his flunkies.

Whatever distinctions may exist between the eight candidates to replace Graham Platner as Maine’s Democratic nominee for the Senate, they weren’t on display in the first and likely only debate on Thursday night. The candidates ranged from political neophytes to longtime civil servants, but they all sounded like they were ready to champion left causes—abolish ICE, pass Medicare for All, tackle corruption in Washington, hold President Trump accountable—in the fight against five-term Republican incumbent Senator Susan Collins.“Whoever wins this nomination, we need to show up at the polls,” said Ashley Webb, a transgender activist. “We need to vote for them, and we need to make sure they win, no matter what, because what’s going on in this country is not right.” When sexual assault accusations forced Platner from the race on July 9, a month after he’d won the Democratic primary, he posted an 11-minute video on social media claiming innocence and blaming the political establishment and corporate media for his exit. He said “large forces” were working against him. “We live in a political system that is not built for normal people,” he said. “It is a system that is built structurally to make sure that movements like ours cannot flourish. That if they begin to succeed they can be crushed.” That video left a sour taste in my mouth because he seemed to imply that any “normal” person running for Congress could be plagued by scandals such as having a Nazi tattoo and being accused of rape. Yet eight normal-ish people took the stage on Thursday to be his replacement, and none thus far seem to have a past like Platner’s—but they do presently have a politics like Platner’s, as all sounded eager to win over the enthusiastic movement he’d built. It made me wish for an alternate timeline in which the Democratic establishment hadn’t meddled in the primary, allowing for a wide-open field. Instead, primary voters had a choice between Governor Janet Mills, the 78-year-old centrist who was handpicked by Senate Minority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer, and an oyster farmer whom political operatives plucked from obscurity and didn’t properly vet.Because nine candidates jumped into the truncated race, which will be decided by 601 delegates at the party’s state convention on July 25, the debate was held in two-hour blocks between four candidates each. The first half contained the expected front-runners: Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, former Senate president Troy Jackson, former state CDC director Dr. Nirav Shah, and Jordan Wood, who came in third in the primary for the 2nd congressional district. In the second half, there was David Costello, an environmental policy consultant who worked in Maryland’s Department of the Environment, former state Representative Elizabeth Dickerson, brewery owner Dan Kleban, and Webb, who visibly teared up when she spoke about trans rights issues.Their responses to questions were often hurried, unfinished, and a little unprepared—except Shah, who sounded the most polished, if a little professorial. But on substance they were very similar, and there wasn’t much time to go deep. The ICE shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday was top of mind, especially because Collins had voted for no-strings-attached funding of the agency in April. Not a single candidate wanted ICE to continue in its current, lawless form. They also all wanted to guarantee health care for all, a big issue for Mainers, enshrine abortion rights at the federal level, and fortify Social Security. And they all pushed back on the idea that there wasn’t enough money to support the kinds of reforms they wanted, blaming instead a political system that favors the elite.“Senator Collins is just a rubber stamp for the wealthy elite in this country, and that is nothing that’s ever going to help the people here in Maine,” Jackson said, arguing that Collins’s seniority power did little for Maine’s voters in the end because she didn’t stop Trump when she could have. “She wasn’t willing to because she’d rather go along with the Trump administration and make it harder for … working-class people all across the state.”Bellows, too, argued that the country’s wealth was going to the wrong places. “Stop spending money on things that the billionaires and the massive corporations want, like endless war, and trying to create urgency and panic, so we fall for it, and start spending money on the things that matter for folks at home,” she said.Indeed, they all sounded like Democrats, which was the point that Dickerson wanted to make in the second half. “The platform that we all have, I think, that we’ve heard tonight, is kind of simple,” she said. “But the thing that really keeps us from achieving this is one seat in the Senate, and that seat is currently held by Senator Collins. And it’s really important for people to vote blue to get that seat in Democratic hands for food security for all, health care for all, housing for all, to abolish ICE, and to reverse climate change and end the war.”Since the choice to replace Platner will be up to convention delegates instead of primary voters, it was hard to see the point of the debate until then. What will people watching at home be able to do, if they can’t pick the party’s nominee? Instead, the debate served as a pitch for the Democrats in general, a plea to Mainers not to give up on the party this year just because of the Platner mess. Vote for us—whichever one of us is on the ballot in November—over Collins, they effectively argued. We’re all better than she is.The delegates, meanwhile, will have a tough choice because instead of sharp ideological differences, they will be deciding based on the candidates’ résumés and vibes (or their personal or political connections to candidates, in some cases). The state party undoubtedly wishes it had more time—if not to hold a new primary, then at least to give the candidates more runway in their campaigns, to polish their talking points and policies. But the debate at least illustrated that Maine voters don’t have to choose between political beliefs and moral ones; that they don’t have to back a deeply flawed candidate just for the sake of a movement. Plenty of normal-seeming people were ready to show up and assume the mantle, after all.

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Democrats keep promising to fix the country’s problems. But many refuse to name the corporate interests standing in the way.

Lindsey Graham’s sister has spent decades in South Carolina’s disability services, earning praise from advocates who hope she’ll bring that expertise to Congress. Unlike her late brother Lindsey, whose political career spanned 33 years, Darline Graham has never run for or held elected office — until she was appointed to serve the remainder of the [...] The post Darline Graham’s career centered on disability. Now she could help shape national policy. appeared first on DCReport.org.

The government shelled out almost $2 million in a no-bid emergency contract to clean up a diesel spill that occurred under the watch of Freedom 250, the shadowy organization through which President Donald Trump is administering semiquincentennial celebrations.In May, Freedom 250 and a Trump-tied event management company, Event Strategies Inc., installed temporary lighting while setting up the Great American State Fair on the National Mall. Then, on May 20, fuel lines on the lighting equipment spilled at least 30 gallons of fuel onto the mall. The fuel seeped underground, contaminating rainwater repositories used to irrigate the mall. And another spill of an unknown quantity came soon after.The government awarded a “rushed, no-bid contract” of $1.8 million for the cleanup, reported Anna Kramer of NOTUS Friday. It took two months for the contract, which was awarded to Maryland-based business Custom Lawn Service Inc, to be posted publicly. Officials told Kramer that was due to the “emergency nature of the situation.”Government records reported in May by The New York Times suggest the spill was due to negligence, originating “from event-related equipment that lacked required secondary and tertiary containment measures.” But the Trump administration has described hiccups in its 250th celebrations as the fault of left-wing saboteurs, and this time was no different: The administration alleged that vandals slashed the fuel lines.The government does not ordinarily foot the bill for such cleanup jobs. Permit holders are typically held “liable for the environmental mitigation after a spill of such magnitude,” NBC News reported last month. Accordingly, hundreds of concerned citizens petitioned for Freedom 250, not the taxpayer, to be made financially responsible, but their calls apparently fell on deaf ears.The $1.8 million price tag is also markedly higher than initially estimated. According to the Times, the National Park Service in May was seeking a contractor for $1.1 million, and an interior department spokesperson said the cleanup “could end up costing far less.”

The Trump administration has promised to stonewall federal grants unless states “scrub” their voter rolls and to imprison state officials who refuse to comply.Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced during a press conference in Washington Friday that state officials who refuse Washington’s new election demands could be jailed for their disobedience.“If the states choose not to participate with the state program, and they choose not to participate in securing the elections, we will make sure that we make those states a priority to look at who voted in their states, and hold them—the election officials—accountable,” Mullin said. “If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections, and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even—depending on how far it goes—prison time.”The pledge came hours after Donald Trump delivered a national address that not only included numerous factual inaccuracies and vast exaggerations about how he lost to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, but also weaponized those conspiracies in an attempt to undermine American trust in future elections.“Working with [Commerce] Secretary [Howard] Lutnick, we are going to make our security enhancements mandatory. Meaning that if these states want a grant, and they want to be reimbursed to run federal elections, they are going to have to implement security issues,” Mullin said. “Just security issues. We’re not trying to get into anything else, but we’re saying that the machines have to be secured and that your voter registration lists need to be scrubbed.”“We need to make sure that individuals legally able to vote are voting.”The homeland security chief confidently announced the plot while standing in front of several American flags, despite the fact that the entire scheme is most likely illegal and that he is acting far outside the limitations of his office and even the executive branch. Homeland Security lacks the necessary authority to either withhold federal grants or force states to purge voter rolls. Only Congress has the power to do that.Beyond that, voter fraud is a statistical nonissue in American elections. For instance, a 2024 statewide audit out of Georgia—the epicenter of one of Trump’s baseless 2020 theories—revealed that 20 non-citizens out of 8.2 million residents existed on the state’s voter roll, just 0.00024 percent of the state’s voting population. Out of those 20, only nine participated in elections many years ago, before ID was required as a part of the voter verification process. The other 11 individuals were registered but never actually voted, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.This story has been updated.

President Trump’s rant to the nation about election fraud Thursday night was full of inaccuracies, previously known information, and claims unsupported by evidence. On the biggest conservative TV network, Fox News, which Trump watches regularly, no one is giving it much attention Friday morning.Matthew Gertz of Media Matters, a nonprofit that monitors right-wing media, wrote that Fox News’s Friday morning programming prioritized several other stories over Trump’s speech. Among the stories covered were Caitlin Clark’s WNBA game Thursday night, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s policies toward landlords, Fox’s World Cup coverage for Sunday’s final, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s antifa summit Thursday. Fox & Friends didn’t even mention the speech.It’s a continuation of how the network treated the speech last night. Laura Ingraham didn’t even discuss the speech, even though Trump was scheduled to speak just two hours later. Jesse Watters gave it a passing mention at the end of his show, prioritizing one of his correspondents interviewing people in bathing suits at Central Park. Sean Hannity gave the speech a small amount of discussion and said his show would look into it in the coming days.The most attention Fox gave to the speech was on Special Report, with Hugh Hewitt saying in advance of the speech that he hoped Trump would focus on renewed hostilities in the Iran war, as it was “vital that the president keep that in mind that American servicemen and women are in harm’s way when he is on the air.”The network’s reluctance to give Trump’s speech heavy coverage may have something to do with the hefty settlement Fox News was forced to pay in 2023 to get rid of a lawsuit over how it covered election denial conspiracies from the 2020 presidential election pushed by Trump and his allies. Or it also could be due to the fact that Trump was just repeating old, tired claims of election fraud, and making up new claims of foreign interference without evidence. Maybe Fox sees that Trump is desperately trying in vain to forestall a big defeat this November.