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Trump Suddenly Brings Back His Feud With Harvard in Crazed Rant
New Republic • Feb 3, 2026

Trump Suddenly Brings Back His Feud With Harvard in Crazed Rant

Donald Trump is now demanding $1 billion from Harvard after The New York Times reported he’d backed down from a request for the university to pay his administration off.For a moment, it appeared that Trump’s extortion scheme had failed at Harvard. Six other elite schools agreed last year to settle civil rights investigations and regain federal funding by adopting Trump’s authoritarian “compact” on school policy and by signing checks that amounted to millions of dollars to the U.S. Treasury. Harvard, however, refused to settle, though it has faced a whopping 13 investigations by 10 federal agencies in the past year alone. Just hours after the Times reported that anonymous Trump officials and Harvard officials had both quietly accepted that the Ivy League institution wouldn’t pay the president’s ransom, Trump attacked Harvard and the Times—and issued a furious new demand. “Strongly Antisemitic Harvard University has been feeding a lot of ‘nonsense’ to The Failing New York Times,” Trump wrote in a lengthy post late Monday night. “Harvard has been, for a long time, behaving very badly!“This should be a Criminal, not Civil, event, and Harvard will have to live with the consequences of their wrongdoings,” Trump wrote, adding: “We are now seeking One Billion Dollars in damages, and want nothing further to do, into the future, with Harvard University.”In a second post, Trump tried to dictate corrections to the original Times story.“The Failing New York Times story was completely wrong concerning Harvard University. I hereby demand that the morons that run (into the ground!) the Times’  change their story, immediately,” he wrote. He posted yet again Tuesday morning, clearly frustrated that his changes had not been immediately adopted. “Why hasn’t the Fake News New York Times adjusted its phony article on the corruption and antisemitism which has taken place at Harvard,” he wrote. “They never call for facts, or factchecks, because the Times’ is a corrupt, unprincipled, and pathetic vehicle of the Left.”

Trump's Kennedy Center Experiment Fails Spectacularly
6:53
The Majority Report • Feb 3, 2026

Trump's Kennedy Center Experiment Fails Spectacularly

Top Trump Official Insists It’s “Not a Crime to Party” With Epstein
New Republic • Feb 3, 2026

Top Trump Official Insists It’s “Not a Crime to Party” With Epstein

The Trump administration is running out of excuses to explain away the president’s relationship with deceased child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News Monday evening that pretty much everyone who partied with the “pedophile island” operator was off the hook. But in a pitiful attempt to brush off public backlash to the thousands of times that Donald Trump’s name was mentioned in the Justice Department’s latest release of the Epstein files, Blanche practically resorted to gaslighting.“Is there any chance that any of these individuals who partied with Epstein and engaged with relations with minors will be prosecuted?” asked host Laura Ingraham.“I’ll never say no,” Blanche said. “And we will always investigate evidence of misconduct.“But as you know, it is not a crime to party with Mr. Epstein. It’s not a crime to email with Mr. Epstein. Some of these men may have done horrible things, and if we have evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will. But it’s also the kind of thing that the American people need to understand, that it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.” “It didn’t look like that was all that was going on in some of those photos,” pressed Ingraham. “I mean, if the photos could speak, some of them look pretty bad.”“That’s right, and unfortunately photos can’t speak, and so we need witnesses,” Blanche responded.Trump was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the latest batch of Epstein files, according to a New York Times review of the DOJ’s Friday document dump, which consisted of some three million previously unseen pages.All in all, Trump was flagged in more than 5,300 files in the document cache, according to the Times.On Sunday, Blanche told CNN’s State of the Union that the DOJ reviewed the files last summer but did not find credible evidence against the president warranting further investigation.

Epstein BOMBSHELL Reveals DISASTER For Trump
1:48:24
Pod Save America • Feb 3, 2026

Epstein BOMBSHELL Reveals DISASTER For Trump

Graham Platner Isn’t Just Surviving. He’s Leading.
New Republic • Feb 3, 2026

Graham Platner Isn’t Just Surviving. He’s Leading.

After nearly two months of post-Thanksgiving semi-hibernation, Maine’s Senate race is waking up. Although Democratic primary voters won’t head to the polls until June to decide who will take on longtime GOP incumbent Susan Collins, Graham Platner, the progressive populist oyster farmer, resumed the town hall meetings that made him a sensation last summer and fall, while the state’s governor, the establishment-backed Janet Mills, has begun more actively campaigning than she had at any point last year. In October, the primary seemed like it was over just as it was beginning. Platner was buried then in a wave of opposition research, namely involving revelations of his racist and sexist Reddit posts and a tattoo he had unknowingly gotten of a Nazi symbol. How could he possibly take down a popular sitting governor now? But the outsider candidate has remained remarkably resilient: He has continued to lead in many polls.Mills, meanwhile, has to run a different campaign than she and her allies—including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which is backing her—probably thought necessary when the oppo started raining down in the fall. While Platner has survived his scandals without seemingly losing much, if any, support, Mills is now running from behind and has to answer deep, lingering concerns about her age—78—and ties to a Democratic establishment many voters view with suspicion. Not only that, but Mills has to deal with Collins, who is back to her old tricks. Last week, the senator announced that she had struck a deal with the Trump administration for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials—then busily raiding immigrant communities throughout Maine—to leave the state and halt “Operation Catch of the Day.” It was a classic maneuver from Collins, who has spent most of the last decade in an elaborate dance with Trump, sometimes pulling close and sometimes pushing away. And the implied message was hardly subtle: Collins was telling voters that she—not Platner or Mills—could dictate just how badly the Trump administration would affect their lives. Mills in particular is vulnerable to that message. As governor, her strongest argument against both Platner and Collins is that she has the experience to handle whatever the administration will throw at the state for the final two years of Trump’s term. (Mills, given her age, isn’t expected to serve a second term, though who knows—she would hardly be the first Democratic senator to remain in office into their eighties.) But the race has not gone according to script. Indeed, there are signs that her experience is a negative for many voters: It makes her the representative of a political establishment that many in the state distrust. It’s easy to see why Mills was pushed into the race. She’s reasonably popular, has high name recognition, and has polled fairly well in head-to-head races against Collins in the past. But her campaign has not gotten off to the start that many intended. Mills announced her candidacy on October 14. Three days later, stories started emerging about Platner’s Reddit history, which included posts in which he said Black people were bad tippers, called “all” cops “bastards,” and said victims of sexual assault and rape should “take some responsibility for themselves.” On October 21, Platner revealed—perhaps getting ahead of more opposition research—that he had unknowingly gotten a “Totenkopf,” a Nazi symbol, tattooed on his chest decades earlier. (A few days later, Platner had the tattoo covered with a new tattoo.) There was clearly a hope among establishment Democrats that Platner would drop out of the race, leaving Mills as the only viable contender. But Platner didn’t duck the accusations; he apologized and addressed them head-on both in the media and in several well-attended town halls throughout the state. It seems to have worked: Platner, in most polls, shows a slight advantage over Mills and in some surveys is much higher. One of those surveys, conducted by Z to A Research between November 14 and 18, found that both candidates had a one-point advantage in a head-to-head race against Collins: 46 to 45 percent, with 7 percent unsure and 2 percent saying they had no plan to vote. The only difference is in the undecideds: For Platner, 7 percent are unsure and 2 percent say they had no plan to vote; for Mills, those figures are 5 percent and 3 percent, respectively. That figure is good news for Platner: One of Mills’s most important arguments to voters is that she is the more “electable candidate.” There’s little reason, either from this poll or several others, to suggest she has a huge advantage there. Of course, it may not matter. The same poll—funded by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has endorsed Platner—found that he had a shocking 20-point lead over Mills, with 55 percent of voters saying they “strongly supported” his candidacy. Only 32 percent said the same about Mills. The same poll found that, though Platner is less well known than Mills, he’s better liked—and that voters seem to like him more the more they get to know him. His favorable numbers are roughly comparable to Mills’s—he is +48 with Democratic primary voters, and Mills is +49—but far fewer voters know him: 22 percent have “no opinion” about him compared to just 12 percent with Mills. Perhaps more surprisingly, 22 percent of Maine voters surveyed have an unfavorable opinion of the current governor and only 15 percent feel the same about the embattled oyster farmer.No surveys of Maine’s Senate race have taken place in 2026, which is understandable given that very little has happened in that election this year. Polling in the wake of the wave of scandals that engulfed Platner’s campaign in the fall tells a muddled story. Surveys from November onward suggest anything from a Platner landslide to a slight Mills lead (SoCal Strategies had Mills up five points in late October), to a commanding one (PanAtlantic Strategies has Mills with a 10-point lead shortly after Thanksgiving). But a memo put together by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and obtained by The New Republic argues that other recent Platner polls have methodological flaws, such as failing to weight for a likely primary electorate, the poll’s sample size, and the use of paid respondents. A widely circulated Emily’s List poll, which showed that Platner would lose to Collins, only tested a set of attacks against Platner, not Mills, whom Emily’s List had endorsed. (The Z to A/PCCC poll found that Platner’s support went up when negatives were tested on both.)“All credible polls show that Graham Platner is crushing in the primary and on equal ground in the general—with more room to grow against Collins than Mills,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “For those concerned about negative attacks against Democrats, it’s clear that Mills’ veto of a wealth tax, pro-worker legislation, and mandatory rape kit testing is a political anchor in both the primary and general because it hurts the lives of voters in a kitchen-table way.” Maine might be the most important Senate race in 2026, given that a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t carried the state since 1988—and yet Collins has represented it since 1997. Many pundits outside the state, including me, wrote off Platner after his scandal-plagued October, but it’s increasingly clear that he’s the front-runner.

ProPublica Identifies CBP Agents Who Fatally Shot ICU Nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis
Democracy Now • Feb 3, 2026

ProPublica Identifies CBP Agents Who Fatally Shot ICU Nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis

ProPublica has identified the two Border Patrol agents who shot Alex Pretti, the Minneapolis man killed January 24 while observing immigration enforcement in the city. The outlet says the agents are Jesus Ochoa, 43, and Raymundo Gutierrez, 35. “This is in the public interest,” says reporter J. David McSwane. “This country has a tradition and norm of being able to identify law enforcement officers, both for their safety and the safety of the public.”

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