Political News

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas and comedian Janesh Rahlan take on the AI-powered Flock Safety surveillance systems on this week’s episode of “Room Temp.” The number of privacy abuses and attempted privacy abuses connected to Flock cameras has grown and the majority of Americans do not like the technology, regardless of their personal political affiliation. Janesh pointed to a recent…

Source

President Donald Trump has just been sued for trying to sell early access to his Truth Social posts. 

The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Wednesday, calling Trump’s plan “extraordinary, corrupt and unconstitutional.” 

Truth Social is part of Trump’s company, Trump Media & Technology, which announced the plan last month. Under a new product, known as Trump API, it seeks to get Wall Street companies to pay between $60,000 and $100,000 per month for preferred access to Trump’s posts so their traders can have an advantage on market reactions to them. 

Trump API would provide 24/7 access, along with Trump’s archived posts going back to 2022, including ones that were deleted or altered. Trump Media’s interim CEO Kevin McGurn says that the company intends “to create a lot of friction for those folks that aren’t coming to us directly.”   

This seems a lot like insider trading, which is a federal crime prosecuted by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the lawsuit directly takes aim at the ethical issues behind selling access to market-moving information from the president of the United States. 

“This scheme is profoundly corrupt. The President stands to gain financially by giving ‘market-moving’ government information to those who are willing and able to pay his personal company,” the plaintiffs write. “There is no legitimate interest, let alone a significant one, in permitting President Trump to profit from selling government information.” 

According to the lawsuit, Trump Media disclosed on Monday that it already has more than 10 subscribers to the service, including financial news outlets and high-frequency trading firms. The president stands to personally profit from those companies having access to privileged information generated by his position. 

With any other politician, this would be a massive ethical violation possibly coming with legal penalties, but for Trump, it’s only the latest in a series of schemes that have allowed him to profit off of his presidency. For now, this lawsuit is the only attempt to end his insider trading venture. 

Newly-confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche seems to want to resurrect President Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization” Slush fund by another name.

Blanche claimed that the fund was dead, while at the same time insinuating that the administration would look for other ways to offer payouts to insurrectionists and allies during his introductory press conference on Wednesday.

“The president has never gone as far as you have to say that the Anti-Weaponization fund is dead. Now that you’ve been confirmed narrowly, arguably because of that Anti-Weaponization fund ... is it dead, and is it ever gonna come back?” a reporter asked.

Blanche offered a verbose, noncommittal answer.

Blanche: The president feels very strongly, as do I, that there were people who were victims of a DOJ that was absolutely weaponized. He feels very strongly he would want to make them whole, as do I. But it will not be through the anti weaponization fund. pic.twitter.com/1DMWSMP9Uo

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 12, 2026

“I quibble with that, because the president said in the cabinet meeting that it’s dead. He’s also said that he likes it. But he has also said it’s dead,” Blanche said. “As for me ... I have testified under oath that it’s dead. I have testified in front of the House when I wasn’t under oath where I said it was dead. I have answered questions after my hearing where I said that it was dead. I rescinded the order that set up the weaponization fund, which means that it does not exist ... I’m not sure how I can further say that the Anti-Weaponization Fund does not exist.”

“We also have said ... that if Congress would like to make it a law, that we would support that,” Blanche continued, changing tack. “The president feels very strongly, as do I, that there were people who were victims of a Department Of Justice that was absolutely weaponized, and he feels very strongly he would want to make them whole, as do I. But it will not be through the Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

Within Blanche’s answer is a strong desire to gift reparations to Trump’s aggrieved supporters and friends through whatever means accessible to them—an alarming answer given that it was one of the issues that his confirmation apparently hinged on.

The boondoggle that is President Donald Trump’s wrecking of the White House, the People’s House, just gets dumber and more expensive. We keep learning that the price tag is going up and up, even as the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals told him he can’t keep building his bribe palace ballroom without congressional approval. But Trump doesn’t care, and he’s already hoovered up an absolutely…

Source

A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Trump pals are cashing in on migrant kids’ suffering…

Source

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, the youngest person to hold the role, will leave at month’s end, President Donald Trump announced Wednesday. Leavitt, 28, just recently returned to the White House after taking a brief leave for the birth of her second child in May. Leavitt, who served Trump as a press aide during his first go-around in the White House, has been one of the…

Source

President Donald Trump was asked about his endorsement of Sen. Darline Graham of South Carolina, who has now been forced into an Aug. 25 primary runoff against Rep. Ralph Norman after being appointed to serve the rest of her late brother Lindsey Graham’s term. “Well, she just called me to thank me for the endorsement, and it’s great that she’s doing so well, and she’s a very good woman…

Source

Here’s a dispatch from the Financial Times: If anyone is wondering why oil markets are unstable, it isn’t because of Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil infrastructure. It has far more to do with the unnecessary war that Donald Trump, Vance’s boss in the White House, launched against Iran. It’s a war that has given Iran full control over the Strait of Hormuz, and a war no one in the Trump…

Source

The Los Angeles Lakers may soon be sold for $12 billion—and the Trump administration might have something to do with it. 

ESPN reported Wednesday that Josh Kushner, the brother of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and ex-Disney CEO Bob Iger have reportedly reached a deal with business executive Mark Walter to buy the NBA team just a year after Walter purchased it for $10 billion. 

The timing is suspicious, as Walter is facing a loan fraud investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, over $16 billion in private credit deals concerning insurance companies he owns. Walter also happened to visit the White House in June to be honored with the Los Angeles Dodgers, which he owns, for winning the World Series. 

Did Trump cut a deal and get his son-in-law’s brother involved to help Walter out with some impending financial trouble? Josh Kushner is said to politically disagree with his brother and Trump. But he still would have been the main investor in the abandoned plan by FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who has cozied up to Trump, to sell stakes in the World Cup. Kushner would have to sell his minority stake in the Miami Heat to complete the Lakers deal.

Walter faces a serious threat to his business empire with the federal probes, according to The Wall Street Journal. Trump’s second term has been marked by visible corruption involving business executives and wealthy foreign leaders close to the president, and that appears to be extending to professional sports.  

Remember when the Justice Department was an actual agency rather than President Donald Trump’s personal revenge machine? Well, those days are long gone. In the latest development, Trump is demanding that the DOJ find a different way to charge former Olympian David Hearn with felonious touching of the crappy liner Trump’s pool boy installed in the Reflecting Pool. Sure…

Source

After a tense month in which she drew the ire of President Trump, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro has called a special grand jury to Washington, D.C.

A special grand jury is a judicial body made up of 23 American citizens that exists to conduct large, sometimes yearlong investigations usually centered on government corruption or organized crime. They can also issue a report regarding the potential “preponderance of evidence” upon the conclusion of their investigation, something a regular jury can’t do. Anyone named in their investigation may later testify in front of them.

Pirro’s move is unprecedented, as a federal special grand jury has never been called in a jurisdiction as small as D.C. And while she has yet to speak on what the body will actually focus on, one doesn’t need to look far to identify why she might be taking aggressive measures like this right now.

Pirro couldn’t get the “DC Sandwich Guy” after charging him with assault for throwing a sandwich at a federal agent during Trump’s takeover. She failed to indict the six congressional Democrats—led by Senator Mark Kelly—who made a video urging federal law enforcement and members of the military not to obey illegal orders in February. And most recently she’s failed to get any kind of prosecutorial motion on the Reflecting Pool drama, getting into screaming matches with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum of all people while Trump publicly rebukes her. The former Fox News host has had her back against the wall for some time now. While this move still might not put any actual bite into her bark, it might be just loud enough for Trump not to fire her.

Following a chaotic race for Wisconsin governor, moderate Democrat David Crowley defeated progressive Francesca Hong on Tuesday night. 

Although Hong held a convincing lead in many of Tuesday’s polls, she lost by about 4,000 votes—a narrow 0.5 percentage point. As someone presenting herself as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and without endorsements from key progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)—who notably distanced herself from more progressive policies on Sunday, Hong came across as an outsider candidate who gained popularity over time.

Critics on the right, and some Democrats, criticized Hong for past social media remarks, such as a deleted post to “Cancel Thanksgiving” and calls for “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police”. If she won, she would have become the first democratic socialist governor in US history. 

On the establishment Democrats’ side, multiple candidates who were once considered front-runners withdrew—including Sara Rodriguez, Wisconsin’s current lieutenant governor, who suspended her campaign in mid-July after she fired her campaign manager for inflating financial reports. Even the victor, Crowley, re-entered the race shortly after Rodriguez’s departure (he initially suspended his campaign in early July due in part to poor polling).

It was a messier race than others where progressives won, such as Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate primary victory in Michigan, and may provide fewer clear takeaways about the future of progressives running as Democrats.

Ben Wikler, who heroically rebuilt the Wisconsin Democratic Party as its chair from 2019 to 2025, is fond of describing our election system as akin to an “electric grid.” The idea is that local elections are interconnected in obscure ways. Just as losing one substation can wreak havoc on electric power in nearby areas, local electoral outcomes can have ripple effects that are not immediately obvious but nonetheless prove hugely consequential.

Case in point: David Crowley’s upset victory over democratic socialist Francisca Hong in Tuesday’s Wisconsin gubernatorial primary. Crowley, the candidate of the Democratic “establishment,” defeated Hong by half a point. Yet this extraordinarily narrow win could have hidden, surprising implications that benefit the party more broadly, perhaps impacting Democrats’ ability to combat MAGA-GOP tactics in the 2028 presidential race and in the longer-term House redistricting wars.

Let’s connect the dots. Most obviously, a Crowley win in the primary probably makes it more likely that a Democrat will take over the Wisconsin governorship next year from incumbent Democrat Tony Evers. Republicans spent millions to boost Hong for exactly that reason. But that’s not all: With Crowley at the top of the ticket, Democratic strategists believe, wins in many down-ballot state legislative races in Wisconsin are now more likely.

On that front, the stakes are very high. Another top Democratic goal this year is flipping control of the Wisconsin state legislature, which is notoriously far more right wing than the state itself. To do so, they’re targeting 14 GOP-controlled legislative seats—10 in the State Assembly and four in the State Senate. Winning those seats would have been harder with Hong as the gubernatorial candidate, Democratic strategists say.

“Crowley’s path to victory runs through suburban Wisconsin and through holding down Republican margins in rural communities,” Joe Zepecki, a veteran Democratic strategist in the state, told me. “That overlaps with exactly where Democrats need to win state legislative seats to get the trifecta next year.”

By contrast, Zepecki said, Hong’s path would have run through boosting youth turnout in Wisconsin’s urban centers and around college campuses. “That does not map on to where the competitive legislative races are,” Zepecki noted.

A Democratic trifecta in Wisconsin will be hard to pull off with Republicans enjoying a three-seat edge in the State Senate and nine-seat edge in the Assembly. But with Trump’s approval in the state stuck at around 40 percent, a very good year is certainly plausible. The large number of GOP state legislators who retired this cycle shows that Republicans very much agree.

And a trifecta suddenly makes possible big progressive legislative changes, Zepecki pointed out, like ending the state’s right-to-work status, restoring collective bargaining for public employees, a minimum wage hike, legalizing cannabis, and more. These have had “zero chance of passing since 2011,” Zepecki said, referring to when Republican Scott Walker was elected governor and lurched the state in a reactionary direction. “That’s a long time.”

Now note that the GOP gubernatorial nominee, Representative Tom Tiffany, is an election denier who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 electors. There’s no telling what he’d do to sabotage the electoral count in the 2028 presidential election. Same with a GOP-controlled legislature. If Democrats can win the governorship—and even better, both legislative chambers—it would cut off that option, too.

Want more? Recall that Wisconsin’s congressional seats remain hideously gerrymandered due to the last decade of GOP redistricting: Right now, Republicans control six House seats and Democrats control two. That’s ludicrous in a state where Evers was elected governor in 2022 and in 2018 by very slim margins, not to mention where Donald Trump won in 2024 by less than a point after losing to Biden in 2020 by—you guessed it—less than a point.

That extreme gerrymander gives Democrats a big opening—if they can flip the state legislature. Republicans have unleashed the gerrymandering hounds nationally—the party has long gerrymandered, but Trump and MAGA supercharged it this year by demanding mid-decade chicanery across the country—and most Democrats grasp that they now must do the same.

But in this cycle they were hamstrung by structural obstacles. More redistricting opportunities will soon open up, and a big one could be in Wisconsin: As a recent Fair Fight Action analysis found, Democrats could potentially squeeze three additional House seats out of the state.

It’s not clear when this might be doable: The state constitution probably precludes a redistricting next year (though a Democratic trifecta could try). But if Democrats can assemble and keep this trifecta through 2031, then they can redraw the House maps to gain those three seats into the next decade. As Fair Fight Action’s Max Flugrath put it: “Flipping the Wisconsin legislature is critical to countering the GOP’s war on fair representation.”

There’s still more! The gubernatorial outcome could also impact the hugely contested House race in Wisconsin’s third congressional district, which could figure in a new Democratic majority. The party’s preferred candidate, Rebecca Cooke, just won her primary there. A source familiar with internal Democratic polling tells me Crowley’s victory makes it more likely that Cooke can compete against hard-core MAGA GOP Representative Derrick Van Orden with male independents, a key demographic in the district.

“That wasn’t going to happen with Hong at the top of the ticket,” the source said.

Admittedly, these sorts of calculations—the slicing and dicing of the electorate, the notion that long-term policy and redistricting advances live or die on such infinitesimal shifts—are not a particularly inspiring way to think about politics.

Yet this is how our system is constructed. The reversal of the GOP rigging of democracy in Wisconsin has been incredibly painstaking. It depended on hard-won victories like recapturing the State Supreme Court in 2025 in the face of $20 million in spending by Elon Musk. It has relied on arduous, unglamorous organizing, and on grinding victories akin to tiny movements in trench warfare.

As Wikler has put it, unrigging the GOP capture of democracy in Wisconsin taught him something about how power ebbs and flows—how seemingly isolated victories enable other gains elsewhere down the road. “I compare it to an electrical grid where if you short out one substation, the lights flicker in the next neighborhood,” Wikler recently told Ezra Klein. “American political power is like that.”

Over time, in short, every little victory here and there adds up to something much bigger than the sum of its parts. In Wisconsin, the long-term unrigging of the GOP hammerlock on democracy still hangs in the balance—but it’s certainly more plausible now than it was only 24 hours ago.

President Donald Trump is beginning to show signs of decreased political influence within the Republican Party following a poor showing on Tuesday night for candidates he endorsed. The shortcomings add to recent endorsement failures for Trump and serve as another bad sign for Republicans desperately clinging to power ahead of the midterm elections. Trump’s most spectacular election fail came…

Source