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The conventional media wisdom is that Maine GOP Senator Susan Collins is sitting back and laughing this week, and well she might be. The collapse of Graham Platner’s campaign is an implosion for the ages, and it puts the state’s Democrats in a tricky situation they need to navigate skillfully in these next two weeks.But November is a long way away. If—and it’s a big but by no means insurmountable if—the Democrats make it through these next two weeks without too many bruises and unite behind a nominee, Collins is still going to be fighting for her life in a Democratic state where Donald Trump’s approval rating is 36 percent, where 85 percent say the state’s economy is fair or poor, and where the generic Democratic congressional edge in one recent poll is a hefty 11 percent. Those are all terrifying numbers for Collins, and she knows it.Before we get into all that, a few closing thoughts on Platner. I wrote about him a month ago, after The New York Times published some unsavory revelations about his treatment of some former girlfriends (while others said he was fine toward them), and right before the primary. I wrote that since he was almost certain to be the nominee, national Democrats needed to back him. I did, however, add three caveats, as experience has taught me to do in such situations: “Short of revelations involving murder, rape, or a taste for child pornography, Platner needs to be backed by Democrats to the hilt.” Well, he managed one out of three, but one is enough. It’s utterly and obviously disqualifying. Some Platner defenders have tried to say, What about innocent until proven guilty? That’s ridiculous in the context of running for office. Yes, it means everything in a court of law, where a defendant is on trial for his very freedom; there, he is absolutely entitled to a presumption of innocence, and he must be given his day in court so that we all hear his side. But a political campaign isn’t a criminal trial. In a political campaign, political judgments must be made, and the clear political judgment here is that no party can back someone facing a credible allegation of rape, for God’s sake.As for the intentionally weak vetting of Platner by the young leftist strategists who “discovered” him: I hope people have learned some obvious lessons. Daniel Moraff, the person who’s apparently largely responsible for this debacle, told The Wall Street Journal last month that he sensed a public thirsting for non-cookie-cutter candidates who challenge the status quo. That’s surely true, in a lot of places, but it hardly means you don’t need to put your candidates through the usual paces. It’s grotesquely arrogant and irresponsible, and if Collins ends up winning, Moraff will bear a huge share of the blame.However: I still say, Moraff and Platner aside, Collins could well be in far more trouble with a new Democratic nominee. Kamala Harris beat Trump by seven points in the state. And as I noted above, in a recent poll, respondents said that for Congress, they’d choose a Democrat over a Republican by 53 percent to 42 percent. On top of that, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Hannah Pingree, who will be at the top of the ticket, looks like she’s going to beat her Republican foe by around 15 points. That means Collins is going to have to convince a lot of independents to switch from the D column to the R one as they move down the ballot from governor to senator.Collins has won such voters before, but I would remind people, as they look over past elections for parallels, to take note not only of what’s similar but of what’s different.The main (as it were) case in point here is 2014. Shenna Bellows, the current secretary of state and a leading contender to replace Platner, was the Democratic nominee against Collins that year. Collins blew her out by 30 points, which some say should raise a lot of red flags.Well, there are a host of differences between 2014 and today. One, Bellows was a 39-year-old novice then, who had never held office and whose claim to fame was that she had been the head of the state’s ACLU. Two, it was the sixth year of a Democratic incumbent presidency, a notoriously hard year for candidates of said party. Three, the Maine of 2014 was in such a cantankerous state that it reelected embarrassing extremist loudmouth Paul LePage as its governor. Four, it was pre-Trump, which changes everything. Five, it was before Collins’s vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice because she took him at his word that Roe v. Wade was “settled law.”I’m not saying Bellows should be the choice. I don’t know enough about the available candidates or the ins and outs of Maine politics. That’s up to those 600 Democratic delegates to sort out and decide. I’m just saying that what’s past isn’t always prologue. The point is what’s going on now. And what’s going on now, nationally and in Maine, is a strong anti-Trump sentiment—and a GOP incumbent senator who voted to confirm 22 of Trump’s 23 Cabinet nominees.What the Maine Democratic Party, and to some extent the national Democratic Party, has to do here is run a process that is widely accepted as having two qualities: It must be transparent, and it has to feel fair. The party needs to give voters and citizens regular updates on the process—this is happening today; this is happening next Tuesday—so that everyone feels they’re in the loop and no one feels sandbagged. And it needs to feel fair so that in the end, everyone at least feels that they need to accept the outcome.As for the national party, I hope Chuck Schumer has the sense to stay completely out of this. His fear of Platner turns out to have been justified, but the way he pushed Governor Janet Mills—who ran as if she didn’t really want to be there—into the race only helped Platner score the nomination. If Schumer and national Democrats are perceived as putting their finger on the scale for a candidate—for instance, in order to stop former state Senate Majority Leader Troy Jackson, who is widely seen as most Platner-like in his populist politics—they’ll only sow rancor and help Collins in the long run.In the short term, this was a good week for Susan Collins. But to paraphrase Harry Hopkins, people don’t vote in the short term. They vote in November. By then, she could very well be regretting this week’s events.

“I just want to say there was tremendous love in that room,” President Trump declared as he wrapped up the 2026 NATO summit in Ankara. But anyone looking beyond the carefully choreographed photo-ops saw an alliance beset by public feuds, competing visions of security, and widening political divisions. Here are eight contradictions that defined the [...]

The move leaves the Election Assistance Commission unable to act as the president seeks to reshape voting rules.

China has officially rolled out its new Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law. Devin Martinez , July 10, 2026

The White House Office of Budget and Management is planning massive changes to the way federal grants are handed out, making it so that government funding can only be spent on programs that are “aligned with administration policies and priorities.”If passed, the new rules would also allow President Trump’s political appointees to supersede federal agencies’ merit-based decisions in order to ensure the grants “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” There is also a portion of the proposal that bans the use of “theories of disparate-impact liability”—a legal concept that helps determine when a policy is disproportionately discriminatory.Experts argue that the change would give Trump’s political appointees, most of whom are not experts, undue control over what kind of research gets funded. “This touches all parts of American life,” Veterans Administration psychiatrist Dr. Eric Rafla-Yuan told the Los Angeles Times in an article published Friday. “Control of how all of the federal grants and programs are funded will fall under a small group of highly partisan individuals who would have very few limits on how they spend these billions of taxpayer dollars.… If there’s a specific age range that is at higher risk for suicide, and we want to figure out, well, what’s going on with people that are aged 14 to 19 … we can’t do that under the wording in this rule.”A massive group of various experts in fields ranging from cancer research to public housing have come out against the proposal, and there are over 100,000 comments on it. OMB published the proposed rule in the federal register in May, and the comment period ends July 13.“A significant number of the provisions in this proposal would in fact increase administrative complexity, create uncertainty for grant recipients, reduce transparency in funding decisions, and undermine the merit-based processes that have effectively guided federal research investments,” the American Association for Cancer Research said in a statement. “This OMB proposal is reckless and does not meet the high U.S. standards required for a meritorious, impactful research grant program.”The Planetary Society wrote in its own statement, “Science is the backbone of the American economy, generating a 3-to-1 return on the taxpayer’s investment. Our nation has always relied on merit-based, independent scientific review to select the best ideas and new technologies for development. The proposed rule changes would all but end the use of scientific merit in the selection of grants and programs across the government.”Even Republican Senator Susan Collins expressed her concern, writing that it would “inject uncertainty into the Federal award process, especially for awards that span multiple years and phases and make these awards more costly.” She also noted that the “termination of clinical trials would leave patients without treatment and could well result in significant scientific and financial losses to both the recipient and the Federal government.” The OMB, led by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, has been one of the president’s most favored tools of administrative destruction, as it’s helped him do everything from slashing crucial programs like U.S. Agency for International Development to shifting money toward his White House ballroom.  

Donald Trump is pitching a fit over a potential bipartisan legislative win in a futile attempt to advance the SAVE America Act.“I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT, which is polling at 97 percent with the Republican Party, and very high with the non-politician Dumocrats,” Trump posted on Truth Social Friday morning.But Trump’s protest is pointless: the Constitution states that bills automatically become law after 10 days if the president neither signs nor vetoes them. The housing affordability measure passed both chambers of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, and Trump has not indicated that he will issue a last-minute veto of the measure. It is currently scheduled to become law at midnight.The SAVE America Act, on the other hand, sparked nationwide controversy earlier this year, particularly over a detail in the first version of the bill that would have made it more difficult for married women to vote. Backlash over the bill has been so severe that, in the months since Trump insisted it should be Congress’s top priority, dispute over the voter ID bill has gummed up efforts to fund the Department of Homeland Security, stalled attempts to pass the National Defense Authorization Act, and upended Trump’s own cabinet nominations.The original SAVE America Act suggested numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, including line items that would abolish mail-in voting, require voters to bring proof of citizenship and proof of residency to register to vote, require voter ID, and mandate voter roll purges every 30 days.But the bill has been radically pared down since then, in large part due to the improbability of passing it in whole. House Speaker Mike Johnson has claimed that the current iteration of the act proposed by the lower chamber preserves the “backbone” of what Trump is pushing to pass in the Senate. That includes requirements to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote—such as a birth certificate or a U.S. passport (which only half of the population currently possesses)—and a mandate to present photo identification when casting a ballot. Trump has also insisted that the bill ban mail-in voting, describing the procedure as “crooked” and “corrupt” despite the fact that he himself has cast several mail-in ballots.“THE SAVE AMERICA ACT’S non-passage is CRAZY, and a serious threat to any politician who votes against it!” Trump continued in his Friday post. “If the Dumocrats, or any RINO (or worse!) working with them, do not allow a positive Vote on SAVE AMERICA, TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, and pass this, and every other Bill that true Republicans have ever dreamt of (In addition to the upcoming Budget BOMB and the 1929 catastrophic style DEBT CEILING BILL!)”But Republicans simply do not have the votes to end the filibuster or pass Trump’s unpopular voter ID bill, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told The Hill last month.Meanwhile, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is an immediate necessity to free up America’s housing market. It was drafted to address the American housing crisis, which has suffered from bottlenecked supply, stalled family growth, and surged home and rental prices across the country. The bill will funnel resources towards increasing housing supply, streamlined environmental reviews, and force the Department of Housing and Urban Development to address red-tape issues related to zoning and land-use that have historically posed barriers to housing development.In June, Trump described the bill as “a yawn.”Trump’s intention to detach himself from the effort comes on the heels of a bombshell report by the National Association of Realtors that indicated national home prices in June rose to the highest level on record.“Republicans would rather make it harder to vote than easier to afford a home,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote on X, responding to Trump. “When people show you who they are, believe them.”This story has been updated.