Political News

Need any more proof that Donald Trump’s pettiness knows no bounds? The president signed an executive order Thursday to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”

After sparking a trade war with Canada last week, Trump turned his attention to the incredibly important issue: changing the name of a lake.

The executive order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to update the geographic names to reflect the new name of the Great Lake that shares a border with Canada.

Trump: We’re going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. Effective immediately. It’s going to take place as sign this order. pic.twitter.com/8Ga4qycjeQ

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 27, 2026

The move is reminiscent of his first act as president, which was to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” This is what happens when a president can’t actually govern: he’s forced to revert to trolling.

“So, if you think about it, we have a gulf, and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean. So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and or Pacific,” Trump said at the signing.

Trump admitted Wednesday that he’d been behind the detonated trade negotiations last week.

American negotiators reportedly revealed at the last minute that they planned to exclude medium- and heavy-duty trucks from their promise to drop tariffs on Canadian automobiles, and tried to restrict Canada’s ability to strike trade deals with other countries. Another reason that Canadian negotiators walked away was reportedly because the U.S. made what were, in their view, unreasonable demands restricting French-language product documentation.

Since then, Trump has threatened to double tariffs to 50 percent on roughly $28 billion worth of products starting on January 1. In response, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a slate of retaliatory tariffs on about 700 products of up to 50 percent that will go into effect on September 8.

Earlier this week, Trump joked that he’d change the name of Lake Ontario, observing that “we don’t expect to [be] doing much business with Ontario any longer.” That’s one of the many problems with this administration: they take their jokes way too far.

But if Trump’s latest approval numbers are any indication, Americans just aren’t impressed by rage bait—not as prices continue to rise thanks to Trump’s months-long war in the Middle East.

This story has been updated.

An ICE agent accused of shooting a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis in January has been released from a Texas jail with no clear indication as to the future of his charges.

Christian Castro was one of thousands of agents that descended upon Minnesota during Donald Trump’s Operation Metro Surge. On January 14, Castro allegedly chased Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, a DoorDash driver, to the entryway of his home. Upon arriving at the residence, Castro shot Aljorna’s roommate, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, in the leg. Castro claimed at the time that he shot Sosa-Celis in self-defense, purporting that the Venezuelan national had attacked him with a snow shovel.

But even Trump’s Justice Department had a difficult time proving that one. In a rare reversal, the DOJ moved to dismiss charges against Sosa-Celis and Aljorna relating to the assault, and Castro was the one left facing criminal consequences. Surveillance footage of the encounter released in April showed Sosa-Celis tossing the shovel early into his exchange with the ICE agent, and Castro firing shots into the home.

By mid-May, a Minneapolis state court charged Castro with four counts of assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime, issuing a nationwide warrant for his arrest. Days later, Texas Rangers cuffed Castro in Cameron County. He remained in jail until Thursday.

But the ensuing extradition process would prove to be a tumultuous one. Defying historical precedent, Texas Governor Greg Abbott opted not to comply with the warrant and hand Castro over to Minnesotan authorities. Abbott questioned whether the agent qualified as a fugitive since Castro had not technically fled Minnesota but had rather been transferred to work in Texas by the Department of Homeland Security.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. refused to force the extradition, despite fears that Castro would evade further capture by fleeing to Mexico.

“Governor Abbott still has the ability to prevent Christian Castro from walking out of jail. He can choose to stop harboring a fugitive by simply signing the extradition paperwork today,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a statement following the decision. “If Castro walks out of jail tomorrow and disappears into Mexico, it will be the fault of one person—Greg Abbott.”

By 7 a.m. on Thursday, Castro’s detention had hit the maximum limit for a pending extradition as set by Texas law, and he was released.

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, wants Republican state leaders to stay away from any regulations of prediction markets. 

The New York Times reports that Trump told a gathering of GOP state attorneys general in New Orleans this spring that gambling businesses were attacking prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi to protect their own “monopolies.” Prediction markets already have oversight from the federal government, Trump said, according to four anonymous sources cited by the Times. 

The message appeared clear: Back off the idea of regulating any prediction markets.

Trump was hired by Kalshi in January last year as an adviser and is on the board of Polymarket, which he has a stake in through his investment firm 1789 Capital.  

Both Republican and Democratic state governments are pursuing legal action against prediction markets, with 20 states in litigation over whether prediction markets fall under sports gambling laws. In July, 44 states signed a letter calling prediction markets a “new form of casino” endangering young people. In March, Arizona became the first state to criminally charge Kalshi for allowing people to bet on elections and “operating an illegal gambling business.”  

States are trying to recoup state tax revenue, estimated to be at least $2 billion a year according to the research group the Tax Foundation. The president, meanwhile, is encouraging prediction markets, touting the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a small agency that oversees derivatives, as being enough to regulate them. 

Since its founding in 1974, the CFTC had never sued a state government over regulations until this year, when it sued nine of them, all with Democratic governors. In two instances, the CFTC has told prediction markets to go around court orders by invoking emergency powers. 

The issue of prediction markets will likely reach the Supreme Court, with the White House highly likely to back the businesses from facing any legal restrictions. The fact that they involve betting on political and international events has already proven to be a major problem, but that doesn’t seem to deter the Trump administration. 

In another gut-churning example of Wilhoit’s law, it looks like the lone Immigration and Customs Enforcement thug who Minnesota has been able to charge for the deadly rampage across the state will soon walk free—criminal charges be damned. When Christian Castro fled the state—well, with the help of the federal government, of course—after shooting a defenseless Venezuelan immigrant in…

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A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | Canada and US unite to mock Trump’s tariff buffoonery…

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President Donald Trump wants you to pretend that he’s on the ballot in the midterm elections.

Speaking in an interview aired on Fox News’s Hannity Wednesday night, Trump explained his latest strategy to get out the vote in November.

“There’s a theory that I get the vote,” Trump said. “You know, I see it all the time. ‘When Trump’s on the ballot, they win. When he’s not on the ballot, the people don’t go to vote.’ And I’m asking the people through your brilliant show, number one show, I’m asking the people to get out and vote, pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Trump on midterms: Pretend I’m on the ballot. pic.twitter.com/vLg9Pqx10S

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 27, 2026

Trump’s remarks come as he’s directed MAGA Inc. to spend his $400 million elections war chest on ads that focus not on the Republican candidates who are running for the House and Senate, but on the president himself.

But Trump’s new approach to the midterm elections only works if people actually like him—and right now, they don’t.

In recent days, Trump’s approval rating has held at 33 percent, the lowest of his presidency. A poll from Reuters/Ipsos found that Trump’s war with Iran—a conflict that has come to define the first half of his second term—is even less popular, with an approval rating of just 31 percent.

Trump may have been a boost on a ballot before, but this time around, voters are watching his record fall apart. A recent poll published by Strength in Numbers/Verasight found that Trump was underwater on all issues across the board—including border security, which is historically his best issue.

Democrats were hoping to malign Republican candidates for the House and Senate by linking them to Trump—and now those candidates won’t be able to escape him. If this is seriously the president’s best strategy, Democrats may be in for a treat come November.

“Poetry is not sexual misconduct,” writes disgraced North Carolina Representative Chuck Edwards.

The congressman released a rambling 22-page letter to his House colleagues Tuesday detailing all the ways in which he was not a creep while using his position of power to make two young women in his employ feel uncomfortable at work. The letter follows a 25-page report from the House Ethics Committee that recommended Edwards be censured following “substantial evidence” that he violated House rules related to “sexual harassment and hostile workplaces.” Backlash from the report ultimately forced Edwards to pull out of his race for reelection.

Still, Edwards attempted to clear his name with his colleagues, as NOTUS first reported. In the letter, Edwards tries to argue that what the two women reported as harassment was just chummy boss-employee camaraderie, going on to bizarrely claim that “something that could be interpreted as romantic is worlds apart from establishing an unwanted sexual advance.” [Emphasis is Edwards’s.]

“An affectionate friendship is not a sexual proposition. A gift is not sexual misconduct. A compliment is not sexual misconduct. Poetry is not sexual misconduct.

“Friendship is not misconduct,” Edwards’s letter continues. “Generosity is not misconduct. Social interaction is not misconduct. Caring deeply about colleagues who have become important parts of your life is not misconduct. And conduct does not become sexual harassment merely because someone looking backward through thousands of pages can construct a theory under which it ‘could be interpreted as romantic.’”

Among the inappropriate actions listed in the committee’s original report, Edwards paid for expensive gifts and lavish vacations; he tearfully read an original poem at one staff member’s going-away party; he hired a singer to perform Ed Sheeran’s ‘Hills of Aberfeldy’ for her on her birthday; and he sent a trove of long, gushing messages to both staffers. Edwards also regularly commented on the two women’s appearance, calling them “pretty” and “breathtaking,” including comments like, “That’s a great looking dress, I like that color, I like that texture.”

In one staffer’s testimony for the committee, she explained that Edwards ignored “the fact that [she is] a young female in politics and that [her] image is everything. And while he can navigate rumors like those that are circulating now without concern because he is, I guess, a male in politics, he had no regard for how something like this could impact my career.”

Edwards will not remain a sitting member of Congress for long, so this letter looks like an attempt to save his reputation. Unfortunately for the congressman, the evidence speaks for itself.

Poetry is not sexual misconduct. But poetry written by your boss who thinks you’re “pretty,” read aloud at your going-away party, followed by a slideshow, followed by him bursting into tears in front of your co-workers … that might cross the line.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lied to the Senate about his 2019 trip to Samoa.

During two separate confirmation hearings last year, America’s foremost anti-vaccine activist claimed that his trek to the Polynesian island country had “nothing to do with vaccines.” Fact check: It did.

Letters obtained by The Guardian and the Associated Press, published Thursday, reveal that Kennedy explicitly informed the Samoan prime minister ahead of his trip of his intention to study the efficacy of the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, vaccine.

In one such letter dated January 20, 2019, Kennedy unambiguously argued that he believed two recent infant deaths on the island were “temporally associated with MMR vaccines.”

“For most of the world, investigation of adverse health events associated with vaccines—or any pharmaceutical for that matter—is both difficult and time consuming,” Kennedy wrote. “Health information systems are rarely designed to support rapid study of associations between diagnoses and specific vaccination events.

“It is, however, known that vaccines vary both lot-to-lot from specific manufacturers, and between manufacturers for a single vaccine type,” he continued. “This makes the likelihood of adverse lot and manufacturer specific effects higher for smaller nations where all vaccines can be from a few or a single lot and manufacturer.”

Kennedy’s visit preceded a deadly measles outbreak on the island in 2019. At the time, Kennedy’s anti-vax nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines throughout Samoa, tanking the nation’s vaccination rate from a 60 percent–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones.

Up until that point, Samoa had not experienced a severe measles outbreak since 1985, when 1,095 confirmed cases were reported to the World Health Organization. But in 2019, after Kennedy’s visit, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of five.

During his confirmation hearings in February 2025, Kennedy repeatedly told skeptical lawmakers that his visit had “nothing to do with vaccines” and was actually focused on implementing public health systems that would digitize Samoan health records.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told The Guardian in a statement that “Secretary Kennedy’s visit to Samoa in 2019 was unrelated to vaccines.”

The spokesperson added that “any claim or insinuation based on these letters that Secretary Kennedy lied under oath or to Congress is not only false but outright defamatory,” despite the fact that Kennedy was not sworn in under oath before his congressional hearings.

However, that didn’t grant Kennedy the ability and free license to lie to America’s lawmakers: It’s a felony to make false statements to or conceal facts from the federal government, as detailed by U.S. Code.

So long Karoline Leavitt, we hardly knew ye—and what we did know, we didn’t like.

Leavitt will officially step away from the podium Thursday, a relief to those of us who care about honesty in government. As press secretary, Leavitt lied all the time. She parroted the president’s fake stories, conspiracy theories, and baseless accusations. She defended his lack of transparency and antagonized his critics.

To her credit, Leavitt lasted longer than almost all of Donald Trump’s other press secretaries. She held the position from January 20, 2025, until August 27, 2026, a whopping 584 days total. This would be impressive if Trump didn’t have another 877 days left to go.

But this isn’t out of the ordinary for Trump, who Leavitt claimed Thursday is his own “best spokesperson.” Over the course of his two terms in office thus far, the president has had five press secretaries—each more ridiculous than the last.

After Trump’s first inauguration came Sean Spicer, who lasted a total of 183 days. As press secretary, Spicer was inarticulate and clown-like, and after seven months, he resigned over Anthony Scaramucci’s appointment as communications director. Spicer should best be remembered as he began: touting the crowd at Trump’s inauguration as “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.”

(Although an honorable mention should be given to the time he literally hid in the bushes to avoid answering questions.)

After Spicer’s departure came Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who served for 711 days. Her style of defending despotism differed from Spicer’s shrillness. Instead, she focused on discrediting the press and deflecting from tough questions. And similarly to Leavitt, she departed from the podium in 2019 to spend more time with her children.

Stephanie Grisham served for just 282 days from July 2019 to April 2020, when she left to serve as chief of staff for the first lady. She later resigned, after Melania Trump refused to issue a statement condemning violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and has turned into an outspoken critic of the president. Kayleigh McEnany replaced Grisham for the final 289 days of Trump’s first term—and she’s continued defending the president’s bad behavior as a host on Fox News.

Leavitt announced her departure earlier this month, following an abbreviated parental leave. (Apparently Trump wouldn’t leave her alone.) Despite Leavitt’s comparatively longer term, Trump has still managed to manufacture a mass staffing exodus from his administration.

Now Trump is hurtling toward midterm elections with record low approval ratings and without his MAGA “machine-gun” mouthpiece.

Emilie Hopson, a Nacogdoches, Texas, rancher and agricultural consultant, was pissed. President Donald Trump took a sledgehammer to her industry and her ability to make a living, and she was livid about it. But the Facebook comments on her friends’ feeds were replete with people delivering a simple message: FAFO—fuck around, find out. They voted for Trump, so they deserved the consequences.

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Inside Washington

Kamala Harris has been flexing her political power in the South this year, most recently with her general election endorsement of a long-shot House candidate in Arkansas, raising the question of whether the former vice president’s goal is to rack up wins in 2026—or lay the groundwork for another White House bid in 2028.

Harris on Wednesday endorsed Democratic nominee Chris Jones, an MIT-trained physicist and minister running in Arkansas’s 2nd congressional district, which includes parts of Little Rock. It’s considered by far the most likely Arkansas district to flip blue this year, as evidenced by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s decision to add the race to its “Districts in Play” program. But that’s not saying a lot: The district is R+8, or “Solid Republican,” according to the Cook Political Report. 

The district is represented by GOP Congressman French Hill, who has held the seat since 2015. In past elections, Hill has tried to damage his Democratic opponents by linking them to women party leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton. It’s no far stretch of the imagination that he could seize on the Harris endorsement to tie Jones to any of her past statements or policies that don’t play well in Arkansas.

Jones isn’t worried. “We’re not scared, we’re prepared,” he told me on Wednesday. Hill, he predicts, “is gonna send out mailers that darken my skin, as if people don’t already realize that I’m Black.”

But why is Harris wading into an under-the-radar House race where the odds are heavily stacked against the Democratic challenger? That’s unclear for now, but Jones is not the first candidate she has endorsed in the 2026 cycle. She has endorsed at least seven other candidates for Congress. She has backed two former Biden White House officials in their primary campaigns: James Martin won the Democratic nomination last week in Florida’s 21st congressional district, and Dan Koh is vying for it in Massachusetts’s 6th next week. And last week, Harris endorsed House candidate Richard Pan in his general election campaign against Republican turned independent Representative Kevin Kiley in California’s 6th congressional district. The Cook Political Report rates the district “Solid D,” and Pan is a member of the DCCC’s Red to Blue program. 

Harris’s only primary endorsement for Senate was Texas’s Jasmine Crockett, who lost, but she has given general election endorsements to Abdul El-Sayed, James Talarico, Roy Cooper, and Troy Jackson. She also hit a bump earlier this month when her Fight for the People PAC encouraged voters to donate to Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign in Alaska. The National Republican Senatorial Committee immediately used the endorsement to attack Peltola, whose campaign then rebuffed the endorsement (Harris lost Alaska to President Donald Trump by 13 percentage points in 2024). Rob Sand, a Democrat running for governor in Iowa, also said he wouldn’t want Harris’s help on the campaign trail.

A person familiar with Harris’s strategy told The New Republic that more endorsements are slated to come out as early as next week.

Karen Finney, a Democratic political commentator who worked on Clinton’s 2016 campaign, doesn’t see this as evidence that Harris, specifically, is seen as potentially toxic. “I think that’s less about her and more about a broader environment,” in which ties to the Democratic establishment can harm some candidates, she said.

Jones, for his part, welcomed Harris’s support, saying that it affirms the success of his campaign so far and will direct much-needed resources to his race. The endorsement, Jones told me, “says that this campaign is one of the campaigns in the South that needs attention, resources—and by resources I mean media attention and dollars. Not to change what we’re doing, but to scale what we’re doing.”

Harris has been paying attention to the South lately, as has the Democratic Party more broadly. She swung through the region this summer, joining a back-to-school rally in New Orleans and, earlier, in Tennessee, criticizing the state’s redistricting effort as “backdoored racism.” Meanwhile, the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee last month voted to recommend that South Carolina come first in the 2028 primary schedule, shifting power to the state’s Black voters. 

“The South gets overlooked, and particularly Arkansas gets overlooked,” Jones said. “I’m hopeful that national Democrats have learned a lesson that you cannot ignore the South.”

Black voters, particularly in the South, have lost some of their political power as a result of the Supreme Court’s voting rights decision in April, which gave GOP-led states the green light to eliminate majority-Black districts. At the same time, the decision has galvanized Black voters, who are turning out in increased numbers this midterm season. The person familiar with Harris’s strategy said that she has been very focused on areas impacted by the Supreme Court’s decision.

Finney said Harris’s endorsements in the South could further motivate voters to show up at the ballot box. “This is an area of focus for the party, and [we’re] making it clear that we are not turning our back on the South,” she said. “In fact, we are reengaging.”

Harris is popular among Democrats in the South, and broadly; she leads some very early 2028 polls. “Whether that transfers into a 2028 campaign, who knows?” Finney said. “It’s clear that she is still someone who is popular, who people want to hear from, and care what she says and care who she endorses.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

What’s in a name? Alaska voters may ask themselves that question in November, when faced with choosing between Democrat Mary Peltola and two Republicans, both named Dan Sullivan, to represent the state in the U.S. Senate.

The top four vote-getters in Alaska’s nonpartisan primaries make it to the general election. The fourth is yet to be determined. But what we already know about the race is likely causing headaches in the campaign headquarters of incumbent Senator Dan S. Sullivan. Election officials confirmed this week that Dan J. Sullivan, a fellow Republican and retired teacher, had qualified for the general election. Peltola, who would be the first Democrat to represent Alaska in the Senate since Dan Begich lost a reelection bid in 2015, holds a narrow lead in most polls, so the last thing that Dan S. Sullivan needs is confusion over his identity in November. He’s got bigger problems than a doppelgänger, after all—like Trump’s trade war with Canada, which shares a 1,500-mile border with Alaska. But Sullivan did get a boost last weekend with an endorsement from a former Anchorage mayor. His name? Dan A. Sullivan.

—Alex Shephard

The Ideas Factory

One of Democrats’ top bogeymen this century is back in the news: The Center for Media and Democracy’s Don Wiener reports that the Koch Industries, which you may recall from such hits as spearheading climate denialism, waging war on organized labor, and drowning our politics in dark money, is “also a major player in the data center building boom, with a $15-billion stake in the industry.” Edged Energy, a firm launched by Koch Real Estate Investments, reportedly owns seven data centers across the U.S. and has six more in the proposal or development stage, prompting opposition groups from Texas to Pennsylvania. 

The Center for Law and Social Policy is out with a new report, “Access Denied: The Public Health Costs of Restricting Immigrant Benefits,” exploring how President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill has cut or restricted benefits to 1.4 million lawful immigrants, while his deportation machine has created an “increasingly hostile environment” that scares immigrants from seeking the benefits that are still rightfully theirs. The report shows how this not only harms health and economic outcomes in immigrant communities across the country but affects everyone in myriad ways—weakening herd immunity, reducing SNAP dollars, increasing demands on medical providers and food banks, and so on.

—Ryan Kearney

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.  

Is it true that Dolly Parton “really liked” Trump? 

That’s what the president claims, anyway. Watch TNR’s Edie Olmsted explain how Trump’s sinking approval rating has him reaching new lows of slimy—in this case, by trying to capitalize on the tragedy of the country legend’s death this week. (This egomaniac truly makes every story about him.)

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

South Carolina GOP Senator Darline Graham just won her primary, and if she wins the general, will go from being an appointed senator to an elected one. Question(s): How many current senators were originally appointed to their seats, and who is the most recent Democrat to fit this description? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Friday’s newsletter.)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has his eyes on his next Army secretary, and true to form, the leading candidate’s résumé includes credible domestic abuse allegations.

Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, Hegseth’s senior adviser, and a two-time failed congressional candidate, has been pushing his own name for the job for a while. Hegseth is apparently considering it, The Hill reported Thursday, even with the accusations against Parnell.

After losing his bid for Pennsylvania’s 17th congressional district in 2020, Parnell decided to run again for the state’s open Senate seat in 2022. But he ended his campaign after losing a custody battle over domestic violence allegations. Panell’s wife testified that he had choked her, strangled her, and verbally and physically abused their children. The judge ruled that there was “credible evidence” for the abuse allegations, though Parnell denied them.

Parnell’s potential nomination comes after months of tension between Hegseth and current Army Secretary Dan Driscoll over the defense secretary’s quest to purge senior military officials and remake the Department of Defense in his own image. Driscoll is expected to leave the Pentagon as soon as Labor Day.

Driscoll is a close ally and friend to Vice President JD Vance and until recently was at the top of the list of names to replace Hegseth, should the defense secretary end up on President Trump’s bad side. Parnell, on the other hand, is likely to make Hegseth’s grip on the armed forces all the more absolute.

“Mr. Parnell has a deep bench of supporters throughout the Administration and has worked tirelessly to enable cultural change and accountability in the Pentagon,” a Pentagon official with knowledge of Hegseth’s decision-making process told The Hill. “Leveraging his extensive combat and executive experience, he will bring the accountability, change, and engaged transformational leadership the Army so desperately needs at this time.”

Parnell’s potential rise in Hegseth’s Defense Department adds his name to the growing list of men who have recently been accused of sexual assault or misconduct while they were in positions of power in Washington. That list includes Cory Mills, Max Miller, Matt Gaetz, Tony Gonzales, Eric Swalwell, and Jimmy Gomez.

A heated scene unfolded at the Cuyahoga County family court in Cleveland on Wednesday, as the key players in a bitter dispute that has grabbed national headlines assembled in one room.

The case is one that Mother Jones reporter Abby Vesoulis has been covering for weeks: a custody fight over the two-year-old daughter of Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) and his ex-wife, Emily Moreno—whose father is Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio). Miller is currently defending himself against Emily’s allegations that he held a gun to her head, shoved her against a wall, and threw scalding water at her—all of which he vehemently denies. Despite these allegations, and at least six Republican senators (including his former father-in-law) urging him to drop out, Miller is running for reelection and has vowed to stay in the race. The deadline to replace him on the ballot passed earlier this month.

Abby got a rare chance to question Miller directly, just weeks after uncovering more than 2,000 pages of court and police records detailing the abuse allegations. Miller had initially declined to speak to the press after the hearing, referring all inquiries to his attorney. But while his lawyer was speaking, Miller interrupted to deliver what sounded like a veiled threat against Sen. Moreno.

“There are certain things that he would like me to remain quiet about,” the scandal-plagued congressman told reporter Abby Vesoulis on Wednesday.Video by Sam Van Pykeren

“I was a part of that family for a very long time,” he said. “There are certain things that he would like me to remain quiet about, and I respectfully have… because that’s not my business to share. But it’s politically motivated.”

His lawyer went further, claiming Sen. Moreno “hates Max and wants to destroy Max” and only “came out of the woodwork” to attack Miller once reporters began asking why he had stayed silent about his daughter’s allegations.

Ratko Mladic, the bullish Bosnian Serb general whose forces rained shells and snipers’ bullets on Sarajevo and carried out the worst massacre in Europe since World War II, has died while serving a life sentence for his crimes, the Serbian state RTS television and the official Bosnian Serb television reported. He was 84. The reports said that Mladic died in a U.N. prison hospital in The Hague…

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Even Georgia Republicans have grown worried about Representative Mike Collins’s staffing choices.

A former staffer for the memeing Georgia lawmaker—24-year-old Preston Parra—shared Ku Klux Klan and Nazi images to his personal social media account over the summer, including a swastika comprised of the word “twink” and an image of himself clad in a KKK uniform, the hood gripped in his hand. In other posts made in June and July, Parra repeatedly used a racial slur to refer to Black people, and posted the phrase “White Power.”

Parra interned for Collins for a couple of months in 2024 before he was tapped to work as a contractor for Collins’s leadership PAC, reported The Washington Post Thursday.

A self-described political provocateur and “twink fascist,” Parra’s consulting website bills him as a political operative who can access more than 70 million followers through an “elite influencer network” for Republican causes. The website also displays multiple images of Parra next to Donald Trump, and highlights his work as a 2024 Trump surrogate.

In an interview with the Post, Parra claimed that the KKK image was artificially generated, and framed most of his posts as “satirical.” He also said that Collins was not aware of his personal X account, as it was set to private while he worked for the congressman.

“What, is there supposed to be some kind of CIA background check?” Parra told the Post.

He added that he does not identify as a white supremacist because “it goes against his religion and he has a Colombian father,” according to the Post.

“I do think that the white race contributes more to the world,” he said.

However, Parra had more derogatory remarks toward the Post’s coverage following publication.

“Let a n--ga build his twink fascist regime,” Parra wrote on X, sharing a screenshot of the article (though he wrote out the slur).

Several Republicans who spoke with the newspaper said they had become concerned by the climate surrounding the Senate hopeful.

“In the South, we have a saying: You lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas,” Debbie Dooley, an original Tea Party organizer and conservative advocate in Georgia, told the Post. “Well, Mike Collins has got a lot of fleas on him.”

Collins has faced scrutiny over his own social media habits, as well. His endless pursuit of viral moments has spurred some questionable moments, including posts that were called racist and antisemitic.

The 59-year-old also has yet to address his son-in-law’s white supremacist social media posts, as reported by CNN last month. Collins’s November rival, Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff, has argued that Collins’s silence on the issue should be “disqualifying” for a candidate seeking higher office.

10 minutes agoWalter EinenkelTrump administration wants to escalate ill-advised trade war with Canada. Bloomberg: Copy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 34 minutes agoWalter EinenkelPolling on Trump’s trade with Canada are not looking good for GOPCopy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 48 minutes agoWalter EinenkelGOP’s message is the same as it was during the Vietnam War.

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Steve Bannon’s attempt to erase his criminal indictment for refusing to testify before the House’s January 6 committee was shot down by a federal judge appointed by Donald Trump himself. 

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols on Wednesday ruled that Justice Department prosecutors didn’t have a sufficient explanation for why Bannon’s indictment should be dismissed, though he gave the government the ability to submit its request again. In February,  U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said in the court filing requesting the dismissal that it would be in “in the interests of justice,” without elaborating further. 

In April, the Supreme Court threw out a lower court ruling upholding Bannon’s conviction, which opened the door for a trial court to dismiss the case against him. Bannon served a four-month prison sentence in 2024 for defying the House committee’s subpoena, so getting his conviction dismissed would be largely symbolic. 

Bannon fought his 2022 conviction for two years, trying to cite executive privilege as the reason for defying the congressional subpoena even though he hadn’t been a Trump administration employee for two years prior to the 2021 Capitol insurrection. He was released just in time for the 2024 election, but hasn’t been a part of the White House this time around, continuing to be a conservative commentator on his radio show. For now, he still has a criminal record. 

Donald Trump’s so-called renovations to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts have done more harm than good—even his lawyers think so.

In a court filing Wednesday, Ohio Representative Joyce Beatty, the Democratic lawmaker mounting the legal challenge against Trump’s changes to the prestigious theater, said that the president’s lawyers had declined to defend him from accusations that he’d already marred the building.

“Tellingly, Defendants do not dispute that their prior efforts to emblazon the building with President Trump’s name may have irrevocably damaged the center’s historic marble facade,” Beatty’s lawyers wrote.

Trump’s lawyers suggested in a court filing Monday that if the administration was not allowed to proceed with the $250 million renovation project—including tacking the president’s name to the facade—the building would have to be demolished. Beatty’s lawyers called out the thinly-veiled threat.

“In plain English, Defendants have not-so-subtly said: ‘What a nice Kennedy Center you have here. What a shame should something happen to it,’” Beatty’s lawyers wrote. “This is a breathtaking assault on the rule of law. It is delusional. And it must stop.”

In her filing, Beatty’s lawyers also pointed out that Trump’s overhaul of the prestigious national theater has only hastened its demise. The Kennedy Center is on track to fall $100 million short of its profit goal this year, and the shortfall can be directly tied to Trump changing the institution’s name. The center expects to miss its budget target by 70 percent and its contributed revenue by 25 percent, a projected $23 million deficit.

Earlier this month, the board voted again to close the center for two years so that they can renovate the building in Trump’s image. Now, Beatty has asked a federal judge to once again keep Trump’s name off of another man’s memorial.

Isn’t it fun being ruled by someone who is all id, no brains? America’s slide into fascism is terrifying, but it is also very stupid. While President Donald Trump puffs out his chest and goes to war against Canada for not knuckling under on his unhinged tariff threats, and against Iran for, well, who knows why really, he’s also engaged in a stupid attack on your pocketbook—and your pocketbook…

Source

On Wednesday night, the Department of Education posted a video to X comparing President Trump to Adolf Hitler, and then deleted it following massive backlash. 

The video was a clip from the 2017 film Darkest Hour about Winston Churchill during World War II, and has Gary Oldman playing Churchill shouting, “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth!” Oldman’s character was talking about Hitler in the scene, but the department’s clip followed the line with techno music over a montage of President Trump, implying that he’s the tiger. The post carried the tagline, “No one does it like us,” followed by a tiger emoji. 

The U.S. Education Department deleted a video that unintentionally appeared to compare Trump to Hitler.

Officials said a staffer used a trending Darkest Hour clip without understanding its historical context.pic.twitter.com/lePUQtA00C

— Clash Report (@clashreport) August 27, 2026

The post quickly attracted attention and a community note explaining the movie reference, with X users mocking and attacking the DoE account for comparing Trump to Hitler. One X account, @rokhannacycle, pointed out that the video appeared to be a ripoff of a Tiger Woods video from TikTok. 

The Trump administration regularly posts flippant, offensive memes on its social media accounts, sometimes incorporating white supremacist and white nationalist tropes. The Department of Homeland Security in particular regularly evokes neo-Nazi allusions to push the administration’s mass deportation policy. 

White House staffer Kaelan Dorr has pushed the edgy meme strategy, or “banger memes” as the White House X account describes it. It’s not clear in this case whether the communications staffer behind the post wanted Trump to look cool like a tiger and missed the context, or actually wanted to positively compare the president to Hitler. With this administration, unfortunately either is possible.