REPUBLICANS HAVE BEEN TRYING for five years to rewrite the history of Donald Trump’s two biggest moral crimes. One was his violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The other was his deadly mismanagement of COVID.

Since Trump returned to power, his party has fallen in line. It has echoed or acquiesced to his nutty tale of a “rigged election.” Republicans have defended or accepted his pardons of the January 6th felons, as well as his persecution of the public servants who investigated those felons.

Yesterday’s Senate hearing on COVID—which saw Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the government’s response to COVID, subjected to hours of lies and insults—showed that the GOP has now fully embraced the other revisionist story: the one about the pandemic. In this twisted narrative, the villain isn’t Trump, China, or even the virus. It’s Fauci.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), the second-ranking Republican on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, insisted that the COVID vaccines were “experimental gene therapy.” (They aren’t.) As evidence of their putative lethality, he cited a poll in which 24 percent of Americans supposedly claimed to know someone who had died from the vaccines. That’s 82 million people. Hiding such a colossal death toll would be, to put it politely, impossible.

The committee’s chairman, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), claimed that Fauci’s advice to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo “led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people—or tens of thousands of people.” Paul referred to the elderly, making it clear that he was talking about Cuomo’s disastrous practice of sending infected patients back to nursing homes. Paul’s numbers were wildly off—the real death toll was about 6,400—and his attempt to blame Fauci was completely backward. Multiple reports found that Fauci had no role in the nursing-home policy. In fact, Fauci had recommended the opposite.

Paul accused Fauci of having denied the plausibility of the lab-leak theory, which holds that the COVID virus developed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s not true, either: Fauci didn’t buy the theory, but he routinely said it was plausible. Sen. Ashley Moody of Florida repeated another Republican talking point: that Fauci’s change of advice on masks—first opposing their use in the general population, then encouraging it—was based only on the availability of masks, not on evidence that they worked. In reality, Fauci has consistently explained that such evidence was a major factor in his decision.

Meanwhile, Johnson spewed conspiracy theories. He suggested, with no apparent basis, that a pulmonary infarction suffered by Fauci in 2021 was caused by COVID booster shots. The senator also claimed that harm from the vaccines was vastly undercounted because a government “algorithm” systematically hid the evidence. But Johnson’s vigilance was selective: He dismissed the known risks and side effects of his favorite drug, hydroxychloroquine.

THE SENATORS’ CONSPIRACY THEORIES ABOUT COVID intersected at some points with Republican conspiracy theories about

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LINDSEY GRAHAM’S ABRUPT DEATH on Saturday, at age 71, was tragic for many reasons. One of them, perversely, is that he was about to win re-election. Death robbed him of the final prize for which he had sold his integrity.

A few years ago, when I was researching his career for The Corruption of Lindsey Graham, I noticed several forks in the road he traveled. These were points at which he could have protected America and the world by turning away from Donald Trump. One of them, in particular, puzzled me.

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MARK TWAIN ONCE LAMENTED the way Washington’s never-ending flow of booze prevented him from attaining proper health and a good night’s sleep.

“Washington is no doubt the boss town in the country for a man to live in who wants to get all the pleasure he can in a given number of months,” Twain, a former congressional reporter and staffer, said in an 1889 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “But I wasn’t built that way. I don’t want the earth at one gulp.”

Twain reported that his doctor advised him to give up the town’s lifestyle for the sake of his longevity. He died in 1910 at the age of 74.

Many years later, booze remains a major lubricant of formal and informal Washington functions. Indeed, for today’s Capitol Hill staffers and reporters, the prescription for a long and successful career often starts with off-hours drinks.

But it comes with risks, and not just the ones Twain’s doctor warned of. For women, going to the bar brings the potential of being groped—occasionally by a prominent congressman. One female staffer who talked to me for this edition of Press Pass relayed that this happened to her at a bar in the city. She declined to name the member on record, for fear of reprisal, but relayed that she got away from him by swapping seats with a male colleague.

It was a moment notable, in part, for its commonness. In ways big and small, younger women in D.C. make calculated decisions to minimize their risk of harassment by powerful political figures, and they rely on whisper networks to know which lawmakers to be more vigilant around. Some of their bosses—or the power-players they interact with or report on—are known for having too much to drink, others for cheating on their wives. Some are known for both.

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“This was something that was really present for me from the time I was an intern,” a House staffer told me, referring to how she learned to conduct herself during off-hours drinks and to avoid ending up in a vulnerable position with male lawmakers or senior aides.

But they go to the bars anyway, not just because it is inherently unfair that they should be deprived of these social settings but because

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An enemy of the people

VICTOR MELLOR HAS QUITE THE RESUME. He is the former (unpaid, informal) chief of staff to disgraced QAnon advocate and retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn, he was present at the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, and he is vying for the Republican nomination to challenge incumbent Democratic Rep. Seth Magaziner for his seat in Rhode Island’s 2nd Congressional District.

And now Mellor has added a new job to the list: foreign agent on behalf of Communists in Cuba.

According to a Foreign Agents Registration Act filing dated June 16, Mellor was engaged in late May by Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for work “deliberating on ideas for improving Cuban-American relations, suggesting content ideas and discussing how Cubans communicate amongst each other compared to Americans communicating amongst each other.”

Cuban muckety-muck Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro has also engaged Mellor for similar purposes, according to a separate FARA filing. The grandson of Raúl Castro, the former Cuban leader recently indicted by the United States, the younger Castro is a well-connected figure within Cuban government, politics, and internal security; he has reportedly been involved in talks with the U.S. State Department about the future of the island and its Communist government. Over there, according to CNN, they call him “the Crab”—on account of a malformed finger. Pretty cruel, really.

Castro and Mellor met to discuss “potential preparation of informational materials and dissemination, currently providing sample ideas for social media content and strategies plus how to bridge communication gaps between Cubans and Americans,” according to the second filing.

The filing also notes that Mellor discussed “expectations and relationship building” with his Cuban contacts, and that the activities he is undertaking related to the Cuban government are intended to promote “communication and cultural differences to further perspective and conquer communication challenges.”

Mellor’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

About a week prior to Mellor’s registration, USA Today spotted him returning from a trip to Cuba, during which he met with Communist Party leaders and seems to have served as a sort of self-appointed envoy to the island nation.

“I’m not back-channeling and I’m not going to circumvent Marco Rubio,” Mellor insisted to USA Today. “[Rubio’s] been doing an amazing job. A conversation isn’t betrayal. We’re having an open dialogue. I don’t see how I could hurt anybody.”

The move earned a stern condemnation from the U.S. State Department. A spokesperson told the paper that Mellor “is not authorized to speak on behalf of the United States government and is not involved in anything the administration is doing.”

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As for what Mellor is expected to deliver for the Cubans, both filings state, “There is no agreement or understanding.” This suggests that the filings could be meant to circumvent further scrutiny from the Trump administration. It’s all quite strange. Typically, a single meeting does not warrant registration as a foreign agent. Registration usually comes after the agent has entered into a fleshed-out agreement to influence U.S. public policy or opinion on behalf of the foreign actor. Curiously, in the filing in which Mellor claims he working as an agent of the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the field where he would list the “name and title of official(s) with whom registrant engages” is marked simply “Unknown.”

Shortly after becoming attorney general early last year, Pam Bondi defanged the FARA unit to limit criminal enforcement to “instances of alleged conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.”1

Mellor seems to have a thing for smoke and mirrors. Last Wednesday, a group of House Republicans hosted a press conference at the U.S. Capitol urging the passage of a third reconciliation bill to advance health policy changes. Mellor accompanied them but did not speak. Instead, he departed the press conference before it ended, then returned to the lectern to film his own speech, which was staged and edited to give the impression that he was answering questions from reporters. A person familiar with the event’s planning said Mellor was not included as an official speaker.

In the Oval Office on Monday, after being prompted with a question about “socialist candidates across the United States” being inspired by the success of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, President Donald Trump said he considers “communism” to be the “biggest threat to our nation there is—maybe since our founding.”

“That includes World War I, World War II, September 11th. It includes the Pearl Harbor attack,” he added. “I think this is the biggest threat to our nation.”

Maybe he should check the House races in his own party this cycle.

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The Thomas Kean affair

Rep. Tom Kean (R-N.J.) had been missing in action since March 5, and during his absence, he skipped more than 140 votes. Until this past weekend, Kean had not been seen at all, and he had only been heard from once while conducting a brief phone interview with local media. (During that call, he vowed to run for re-election but refused to explain his disappearance.) He gave no notice to Republican leaders or his fellow Republicans in the New Jersey delegation before making his sudden disappearance. His constituents were left equally befuddled. His absence came to light only after reporters and other lawmakers started wondering why there was consistently at least one missing GOP vote.

Despite his absence, Kean continued to file stock transaction disclosures, introduce legislation, and submit remarks to the congressional record. This wasn’t exactly positive proof of life so much as evidence of exceptional work by his staff, who continued to post on Kean’s various social media accounts using a first-person voice on the congressman’s behalf.

Well, now we do have proof of life. Kean returned to Capitol Hill and revealed in a floor speech Tuesday that earlier in the year, a doctor diagnosed him with depression and advised him to remain in the hospital for treatment.

Kean said when he first entered the hospital, he “did not believe that this would result in a long-term stay.”

But following what he characterized as a proper amount of treatment and time away, he is back and ready to serve in Congress again.

“I am grateful that I accepted help, because today I stand before you healthier, stronger, and excited to return to the work that I love,” he said.

“Asking for help is not a weakness,” Kean concluded. “It is a strength.”

Kean did not address his reason for withholding the diagnosis or treatment from his colleagues and constituents. Perhaps he considers keeping people in the dark to be a strength, as well.

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The great escape from boring shirts

A couple weeks ago, I noted a new trend that appears to be taking hold this summer: religion-themed sportswear. Today, I want to share a great story about the history of one of the original pieces of cool sportswear: bowling shirts.

You might have noticed bowling shirts being worn by more and more men these days. They’re easy to spot, thanks to their characteristic construction and use of unique color patterns. Those features owe to the sport’s long history of individualized design and customization in its uniforms. Versions of bowling date back to ancient Egypt, but our modern conception of it is uniquely American. Learning about the iconic open-collared garment that bowlers wear can serve as a perfect palate cleanser in advance of the July Fourth weekend.

Oli Stevenson has the story at Heddels:

When we think of clothing made specifically for sports, we tend to think of technical fabrics designed to keep athletes at the top of their game. But not for bowling. As a sport where you spend most of the time hanging with your homies and maybe drinking a few beers, bowling needed something different. Bowling needed a shirt that was loose and comfortable, so that bowlers could wear them for hours down the alley. So, in a way, they are designed for movement and to keep athletes at the top of their game.

In truth, the bowling shirt is just a tweak on the classic mid-century sports shirt, but its history is so much more than that. Join us as we take a look at the history of the bowling shirt, what it is, how it came to be, and where to buy some really nice examples today. We’ll set ’em up, you knock ’em down.

Read the whole article to get the taste of politics out of your mouth, and maybe pick up a vintage bowling shirt the next time you’re out shopping. Not for nothing, but they go great with a can of domestic beer and a pair of grilling tongs.

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If you ain’t first, you’re last

POLITICS USED TO BE A LOT SIMPLER. You’d get elected to local office, then a lower-tier state-level office, and then, after that, maybe you could win an election to serve in the U.S. House. If you were fortunate enough to get that far, doors would open for you to pursue major state-wide offices, like a governorship or a seat in the United States Senate. But a rotten tree has lately fallen across that pathway: the terrible reputation of the House, which outgoing members have discovered to be an unexpected obstruction to their larger political careers.

Previous editions of Press Pass have touched on the high number of House Republicans retiring or seeking statewide positions back home after years of frustration under the historically ineffective speakership of Rep. Mike Johnson (R–La.). Unfortunately for the candidates looking to move on up from the federal kiddie table, voters seem unimpressed by their claims to be ready for a seat among the adults.

Of the 21 House Republicans running for statewide office this cycle, eight have lost or abandoned their primaries.1 Just four have won their respective races—several of whom ran in non-competitive primaries or received a hefty assist from President Donald Trump.2 While eight more are still outstanding, there will be at least one more loss as Reps. David Schweikert and Andy Biggs are competing against one another for the Republican nomination in Arizona’s gubernatorial race.

What gives? Well, for starters, the stench of currently being in office. Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah), who made the leap from House to Senate in 2024, told me, “It’s a tough climate” this year, noting that Utah has lost “a lot of incumbent mayors in non-partisan races.”

“I think it always has been [toxic],” Curtis said of incumbency in Republican primaries. “I mean, it has its advantages, obviously. But people love the new, shiny things.”

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White House down

President Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to spend $14 million to fix up the Reflecting Pool on Washington’s National Mall offers a perfect example of the selective fiscal conservatism that defines Republican governance. The president has made a massive show of the restoration effort, which was contracted out to a Trump-connected company that took on the project without needing to competitively bid for it. Within a week of the project’s completion, the fruits of the effort were plain to see: The pool was an Olympic regulation–sized petri dish of algae, hydrogen peroxide, adhesives, fragments of “American Flag Blue” coating, and at least one dead duck.

Unable to accept the possibility that his shoot-first, denounce-whatever-was-hit-later administration may have erred, Trump is now blaming the reflecting pool’s squalid conditions on vandalism, a subject on which he appears to have flip-flopped.

The pool now must be drained again for repairs, meaning even more taxpayer funds must be spent on it. So I spoke to some of the fiscal fauxhawks on Capitol Hill about this becoming a money pit. After all, isn’t this a good example of just the sort of willy-nilly government spending they ought to address?

They offered various answers, but all of them were careful to avoid the appearance of any criticism of the project.

“This is our nation’s capital,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) told me. “Everything should look pristine.”

Tuberville, who was a forceful proponent of Trump’s anti-weaponization fund that would have compensated people who defiled the nation’s capitol on January 61 repeated the unfounded claims that vandals caused the pool to turn into an algae swamp.

“The people, they need to be arrested and jailed and throw the key away,” he said.

When I noted that there have not yet been arrests or evidence that the pool’s deterioration had resulted from vandalism, Tuberville quickly replied, “They’ve arrested people.”

Trump has claimed five individuals have been arrested so far in connection with the alleged Reflecting Pool sabotage. However, the Justice Department has said little about those arrests. “We’ve received only a handful of citations which we will review,” a spokesperson for U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office told USA Today. Some individuals detained for interacting with the Reflecting Pool have said they were targeted for simply touching pieces of pool flooring that had floated to the surface.

So far, no evidence has been produced by the administration to corroborate the president’s vandalism claims. There is, however, a growing body of evidence that the pool’s problems have natural origins. The new flooring’s color likely increased the heat of the shallow pool, creating ideal conditions for an algae bloom, and the copious amounts of hydrogen peroxide—a potent oxidizer—poured into the pool to combat the algae could have helped loosen the peeling flooring in the process, among other factors. The pool also has longstanding structural problems that were not addressed by the recent application of the new coating, and which have made algae blooms in the pool a recurring headache over many years.

Still, Tuberville was adamant that there had been something foul-smelling at play. “I don’t think they’d arrest people just to be arrested,” he told me.

But what about the way this money has been spent? Surely the self-professed penny-pinchers on the Hill wouldn’t be so blithe about that, right? Right?

“Well, I think getting the reflecting pool looking beautiful again is a good thing,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who has taken repeated opportunities to demand fiscal responsibility from the federal government, including DOGE cuts and rescission packages.

I noted that it did not look very beautiful at the moment.

“No, it doesn’t look very beautiful,” Daines said, laughing. “We gotta find out what went wrong with it; [it] needs to be corrected. It’s a great part of the experience coming down to the Mall.”

But the most surprising answer about the pool’s costs came from Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), one of the more mild-mannered and genuine conservatives on Capitol Hill. He insisted the restoration project was not on his radar.

“I have no way to be able to answer that,” Lankford said. “But we do need to fix it, but I have no way to answer that. I’ve not been tracking that.”

Routine partisanship aside, Lankford’s position struck me as especially odd because it’s just the sort of thing he’s spent much of his congressional career tracking as a tenacious opponent of wasteful federal spending.

For context, when Lankford arrived in the Senate, he succeeded former Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the godfather of the conservative austerity approach to government programs. During his time in Congress, Coburn published an annual “wastebook” detailing the most peculiar and questionable ways in which the federal government allocates taxpayer dollars. Lankford and Coburn were sympatico on this issue, and the former has carried his predecessor’s wastebook torch forward since, renaming the report “Federal Fumbles.”

This report has frequently scrutinized projects just like the Reflecting Pooldoggle. For starters, in his most recent Federal Fumbles, which he posted this February, Lankford characterized several grants as misuses of federal funds, including projects that were much less expensive than the reflecting pool restoration effort.

“Despite growing concerns about US dependence on China for critical drug development and biomedical research, NIH paid a Chinese laboratory $124,000 to conduct drug experiments on up to 300 beagles per week,” the report states. That’s two orders of magnitude below the cost of Trump’s Reflecting Pool restoration so far.

In a 2015 edition of Federal Fumbles, produced when Lankford was a freshman senator, he lambasted federal property acquisitions being prioritized over properly maintaining its existing lands and monuments, citing the National Mall’s poor conditions as an example of how the government “has completely lost the ability to care for the lands it already controls.”

“Even right in Congress’s front yard, the water conveyance system on the National Mall is a ‘dilapidated and complex network of water lines’ that was ‘installed by the War Department of the early 1900s,’” Lankford wrote.

In theory, Lankford could argue that the cost of restoring the Reflecting Pool was already quite large and that even if Trump had done everything above board, it would have been a serious burden for the taxpayer to bear. But Lankford’s previous Federal Fumbles reports also were critical of the use of no-bid contracts, something Trump explicitly has used for the pool’s restoration and clean up. In 2016, when Barack Obama was president, Lankford wrote that a fair bidding process “can help save taxpayer money while also ensuring the government receives the best product.”

Lankford apparently has no thoughts about this now. His weak parry points to a much larger and well-attested political reality: Professional Republicans rarely engage in genuine fiscal conservatism when they’re the ones in power. Consider the explosions of high debt approvals under Republican presidents, or DOGE’s inability to decrease government spending despite tearing up various federal programs. The scummed-over Reflecting Pool captures this issue in perfect microcosm.

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Magic Mike

There isn’t a single human being in the Senate who wants to pass the SAVE America Act more than Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). Unfortunately for Lee, he is not advocating for the voter suppression bill very effectively.

Lee has insisted on using a tool called the “talking filibuster” to get around the chamber’s rule requiring all legislation outside of executive nominations and reconciliation (special budget-related packages) to garner at least 60 votes to advance. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has dismissed the talking filibuster concept as both unrealistic and risky because it would hand over significant control of the floor to Democrats.

Typically, a senator trying to drum up support for a piece of legislation will work behind the scenes to construct trade-offs with other lawmakers and assuage skeptical senators’ concerns about their bill. Lee hasn’t done any of that. His strategy has instead centered on his X account, which he’s used to attack colleagues for disagreeing with him about his bill.

Replying to a post of a floor speech by Thune, Lee posted, “Cool. Let’s pass the SAVE America Act now. As I’ve been asking you to do for months, please bring it up now and announce that we will debate it until it passes.”

Asked about Lee’s posting habits, Thune told a reporter on Tuesday, “It’s his prerogative to communicate how he wants to communicate. But at the end of the day, I have to deal with reality. And sometimes the alternate universe that is X doesn’t reflect the facts on the ground.”

Not many senators have criticized Lee publicly for his posting, but a few have done so more freely in recent weeks. Since losing his primary for re-election, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has engaged Lee several times on his home-turf (the internet).

In response to a pro–SAVE Act user asking him whether President Lyndon Johnson would dismiss a critical bill for simply lacking the votes, Cornyn wrote:

No, you are correct. But he wouldn’t just hand a cudgel to his political opponents. He would do the “hard work” and get the votes! That is how you pass legislation; not by creating unrealistic expectations; not by criticizing your own party leaders; not by creating a circular firing squad. That helps Democrats.

Cornyn has also posted fact checks of Lee’s claims about the SAVE Act’s viability and even called out Lee directly, writing, “You don’t have the votes. [Thune] can’t change that. It is math.”

On Tuesday, another Republican Senator on the way out—Thom Tillis of North Carolina—joined the pile on. “I never speak ill of members when they want to be professional and they want to engage in a productive way, but when you do some of the bullshit he’s done on social media, that’s why he gets these comments out here,” Tillis said of Lee. He called the talking filibuster idea, “goofy.”

Lee launched his X alter ego, “Based Mike Lee”—where he regularly insults colleagues, falls for fake news, and engages with bots—in July of 2022. Coincidentally, June of 2022 is the last time a bill authored by Lee was signed into law.

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The vow

Widely read newsletters have apparently been undergoing some gain-of-function research. Some of them have become hubs for singles hoping to get hitched.

Anna Holmes writes in the Atlantic:

Fulton is the publisher of a year-old Substack newsletter called The Eastside Rag, which focuses on the goings-on in a collection of L.A. neighborhoods, including the trendy Silver Lake, the upscale Los Feliz, and the quickly gentrifying Atwater Village and Highland Park. He returns to certain scenes, themes, and characters again and again—celebrity sightings at Canyon Coffee (Echo Park), the sex appeal of the delivery guys at the east-side restaurant Bub and Grandma’s (Glassell Park), sales at the hipster apparel store Mohawk. What he wasn’t expecting, when he began his project, was that he would also become a relationship matchmaker—and that his newsletters featuring personals would become subscriber catnip (his readers now number in the thousands). . . .

Newsletter “dating,” such as it is, tends to feel both more grassroots and more curated than the newspaper-based personal ads of yore. People’s profiles are chosen by someone whom readers view as a vetted, trusted individual. They also read less like advertisements and more like a careful introduction.

Read the whole article, and if you’re a single Press Pass reader open to mingling with other Press Pass readers, say so in the comments. Other Congress-obsessed singles could be waiting at their keyboards for a chance to reply. Honestly, you would deserve each other. I mean that in a good way, of course; never settle.

The wicked are like the tossing sea

There is an old saw in politics that while the House of Representatives is the kiddie table of Congress, the Senate is where the adults are found. It’s a place for cooler heads, congenial relations, and thoughtful deliberation. Or, it used to be.

The so-called upper chamber is now descending into House-like chaos. But unlike many of the problems besetting the House, the Senate’s problems are not ones it created for itself. No, no. Their problems have been coming directly from the White House.

Just take a look at Trump’s disruptions of Senate business over the last few weeks.

• Trump supported reauthorization of FISA 702.

• He later demanded that FISA reauthorization be paired with the SAVE Act, an unrelated voter-suppression bill that has no chance of clearing the Senate.

• Trump tapped Bill Pulte to serve as interim Director of National Intelligence.

• Trump then nominated U.S. attorney Jay Clayton to be the permanent DNI in response to pushback he received on Pulte, including the prospect of FISA not being reauthorized.

• Trump directed Clayton not to testify before the Intelligence Committee and announced he was delaying his nomination to try to force the Senate to vote on the SAVE Act.

• Trump signed the “memorandum of understanding” with Iran, but withheld the text from Congress and did not brief them on its contents.

• The details of the MOU, now public, show broad sanctions relief for Iran without any guarantee that the country will reduce its long-term nuclear ambitions or its support of terrorism or militant proxies.

By Wednesday, senators’ heads were spinning and their ears were blowing steam. They’ve been frustrated with Trump before. But this, to me, felt next-level. I followed the wisps of vapor through the Capitol until I found the lawmakers producing them.

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The die is cast

I would never claim to be the first person to compare Donald Trump, with his dominion over the Republican party, to Bane, the primary antagonist of Christopher Nolan’s third Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. (I also don’t think I’ll be the Last.) But I’ve been struck once more by the analogy in recent days.

In the opening scene of Nolan’s masterpiece, Bane grabs the shoulder of a fanatical deputy and informs him, “They expect one of us in the wreckage, brother.” The line captures something about the administration’s approach to its memorandum of understanding with Iran. It’s clear, here as it is in so many policy areas, that someone will need to sacrifice it all so that the boss can survive.

Enter JD Vance, the vice president whose stock in the party as MAGA heir apparent has plummeted in recent months.

Vance has been handed primary responsibility to sell the MOU, which is a sort of minimally binding agreement between the United States and Iran that is meant to lead to a more permanent agreement. And as details about the preliminary deal finally started to enter the public discourse late Monday morning, it became readily apparent how hard it would be for him to go unscathed.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) posted some of his concerns about the deal on X, emphasizing both the need for Congress to ratify any arrangement and exactly who he believes is the “architect.”

“I look forward to reviewing the final product and I believe it is imperative that the architect of the deal, Vice President Vance and his negotiating partners, be part of the process in presenting the final deal to Congress,” Graham wrote. “Congratulations to all in getting us to this point. Time will tell.”

Later on Monday, I asked Graham if he was explicitly saying Vance was the architect of the MOU, to which he replied, “I think he is.”

Graham added that he likes the particulars of the MOU that he’s heard about, but he articulated a simple criterion for judging the final product.

“If they can enrich [uranium] anywhere at all, then it’s the same as the JCPOA,” he said. “If they can’t enrich, then that makes it a good deal.”

A bit cryptic, for sure. But that’s just one senator, right?

When a reporter asked Senate Majority Leader John Thune if he thinks the full Senate should get a briefing from Vance on the still-under-wraps MOU, he expressed noncommittal support.

“Somebody will need to, whether it’s the vice president—but for sure, our members are going to have a lot of questions about it.”

Other Republican senators offered varying takes on the ownership they believe Vance has of the MOU. Their comments ranged from propping him up as integral to the process to claiming they haven’t yet seen him address it.

“It sounds to me like for two months he’s played a significant role,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said of Vance. But Grassley withheld judgment on the MOU itself, telling me he’s still waiting to take an actual look at it.

“I haven’t seen anything JD’s said yet,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “I’ve been on a plane today.”

Part of the job of any vice president is to eat the shit that the president himself doesn’t want to digest. And Trump, who understands how to play the public relations game better than nearly anyone, clearly is not interested in personally absorbing this deal. He’s already begun dropping Vance’s name any time the question comes up as to who is responsible for it. Asked about whether he would be present for a hypothetical signing ceremony—the most public-facing component of any deal—Trump seemed intent on getting his foremost deputy there in his stead.

“It depends. JD is coming in for it, he was originally going to do it. I will probably be gone by then, we are having dinner, in a day and a half, I think staying quite late,” Trump told reporters Monday, sounding a bit like a man explaining why he might have to miss a pickleball meet-up. “So I may be involved, I may not.”

The same day, Vance actively took up his new role as the administration’s chief spokesman for the MOU, appearing on major television networks to tout the accomplishment and bat down skepticism.

“I don’t trust anybody,” Vance told CNN. “The benefits of the bargain only accrue, again, if Iran actually complies.”

In an interview with Sean Hannity, Vance did not rule out the possibility of future uranium enrichment. Instead, he said the deal requires Iran to “eliminate the enriched stockpile.”

Responding directly to Graham’s comments expressing concerns about the differences between Iran’s account of the MOU and the administration’s claims, Vance told ABC News, “I’d caution Lindsey Graham and anybody else not to believe the hard-liner propaganda in Iran but to believe what’s actually in the agreement.”

The fact that Vance appears to be positioning himself as a potential fall guy for the nascent deal is registering with other interested parties, too. Democratic senators, who broadly support an end to the war,1 are taking note of the vice president’s outsized role in the process.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told me, “I heard [Lindsey Graham] say, ‘Vance needs to come up and explain it to us.’”

“So if there’s gonna be a deal, a bill that I helped write, the [Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015], requires any such deal to get submitted to Congress for a review,” Kaine added. “And I heard Graham say that should happen, and we should get VP Vance and others to come describe it. So I don’t know what his role is, but I’m glad that we’re entering into a ceasefire that I hope we can actually get signed [on] Friday.”

This is a fraught moment for the veep. Accepting the frame that you are the main architect of a major initiative means accepting the blame if it fails. That can destroy or at least significantly hinder aspirations for higher office. Just ask Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who spent more than a decade in right-wing political rehab on account of his involvement in the “Gang of Eight” immigration reform agenda, which Trump and others happily used against him in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Or talk to Kamala Harris, whose role as “border czar” for Joe Biden was widely misunderstood (she was tasked with dealing with the roots of migration not the physical entry points into the country) but nevertheless effectively deployed against her in 2024.

Vance, whom some reporters described in March as an original skeptic of the war against Iran, is evidently making yet another career pivot as he steps in to attempt to heroically end it. But he would do well to watch those steps. The position he’s taken might be the worst place to be in the coming weeks.

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Making haste slowly

Despite not having seen any details of the Trump administration’s preliminary deal with Iran, lawmakers now have to grapple with the question of whether they should ratify it, or if they should even have to consider it at all.

The Constitution requires Congress to ratify or reject all treaties. Both the executive and legislative branches have gotten around that responsibility by characterizing various deals, which could be interpreted as treaties, instead as “non-binding instruments” or “soft law pacts” like “executive agreements.”

Discussing the prospect with Senate Republicans, I quickly got the impression that this deal—again, merely an MOU—isn’t one they consider to rise to the level of a treaty, and some take this distinction to remove the burden of the ratification requirement. Once again, there’s nothing legislators hate more than actually legislating.

“I think they’ve got an MOU right now versus a treaty,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.). “I haven’t seen the text of the agreement, so we’ll wait and see what comes out.”

There is some intraparty disagreement over this. “We’ll have to see exactly what this is, but you would think it’d have to be ratified [by Congress],” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told me.

Despite some waffling, though, quite a few GOP senators did imply they would want to review the nascent MOU in a formal capacity at some point in the process.

“I do think it needs to [be ratified by Congress]—a final resolution, if there is one,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “I go into it very skeptical of the government of Iran. I’m not skeptical of the agreement because I can’t assess it. But I congratulate the president and his team for confecting it—whatever it is.”

“Any agreement we make with them has to have guardrails,” Kennedy added. “It has to have a way to judge—through independent inspection—if they’re doing what they say they’re doing.”

The confusion about whether this is a memorandum of understanding, an agreement, or an actual deal apparently didn’t get past Trump, who told reporters Tuesday morning in France that Congress should probably handle the hot turd going forward. He even wondered aloud how he could get Democrats to vote for it.

“What I would like to do is send it to Congress and say, ‘You shouldn’t approve it,’” he said. “And they will approve it.”

As for those Democrats, they no doubt want a say in whether this deal goes ahead. Sen. Kaine told me Democrats are eager to bring the war to a conclusion, even if the MOU is imperfect.

“I think on the Democratic side, we’re almost completely unified—with the exception of Senator Fetterman—that this war is both illegal and deeply foolish,” he said. “And so we want the off-ramp. . . . But we do believe that bringing tension down is the right thing for us and the right thing for the region.”

“We’ll see what the terms are when it comes out. I mean, it’s been a waste, because there was no need for a war, fourteen [American] deaths, billions of billions of dollars, we’re paying more for gas—it was extremely foolish,” Kaine added. “But I’d rather we be moving into a more protracted ceasefire than that.”

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Crying havoc

I want to share a piece from 2019 with you by Tom Holland,2 in which the mega-popular historian and author argued that compounding problems in America, while bad and dramatic, simply do not meaningfully resemble the problems that led to the fall of the Roman Empire. I’d also love your thoughts on it, so please let me know your take on Holland’s essay in the comments.3

Since the garish UFC fight at the White House, I’ve seen a lot of fairly predictable tweets and commentary comparing these late-seeming days of the United States to the decline of ancient Rome. In line with Holland, I consider these comparisons a bit foolish. For starters, gladiatorial fights were a fixture during much of Rome’s expansion and great success, not a symptom of its decline.

Second, arguing for simple parallels between America and Rome will lead you into a maze of factual problems. For starters, as a matter of settled strategic doctrine, the United States does not wage wars for conquest (though let’s wait and see with Greenland); it has no formally recognized nobility; and frankly, our country is a much, much safer place for the average citizen. But stressed-out Americans love to relate our situation to the eternal city, as they have since our country’s founding.

As Holland wrote:

The conviction that Trump is single-handedly tipping the United States into a crisis worthy of the Roman Empire at its most decadent has been a staple of jeremiads ever since his election, but fretting whether it is the fate of the United States in the twenty-first century to ape Rome by subsiding into terminal decay did not begin with his presidency. A year before Trump’s election, the distinguished Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye was already glancing nervously over his shoulder at the vanished empire of the Caesars: “Rome rotted from within when people lost confidence in their culture and institutions, elites battled for control, corruption increased and the economy failed to grow adequately.” Doom-laden prophecies such as these, of decline and fall, are the somber counterpoint to the optimism of the American Dream.

And so they have always been. At various points in American history, various reasons have been advanced to explain why the United States is bound to join the Roman Empire in oblivion. In 1919, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, The New York Times warned that the Huns and the Vandals were massing again. “The Roman Empire and its civilization were destroyed by barbarian hordes coming from the East—and it is from the east that comes the wind.” Thirty years earlier, visiting the abandoned Roman city at Baalbek in Lebanon, Brooks Adams—the great-grandson of John Adams—had been inspired by the spectacle of shattered greatness to dread that his own country’s gilded age was bound to end in similar ruin. In the decades before the Civil War, opponents of slavery repeatedly cited the fall of Rome as a warning of what might happen to a slave-owning society. In the 1830s, opponents of Andrew Jackson cast him as a dictator and a demagogue whose tyranny would inevitably bring the infant republic to share in the fate of the ancient empire. Present anxieties that Trump’s presidency portends America’s decline and fall are the contemporary expression of a tradition quite as venerable as the United States itself.

In short, our problems are our own. The Romans couldn’t hold a candle to the extraordinary accomplishments of our republic. Also, we wear pants.

Read the whole piece, and if you need some more context, pick up a copy of one of Holland’s many great books on Rome, including Pax, Dynasty, and Rubicon.4

I scream social

Mike Johnson did something very out of character Monday. Normally coy in public, the speaker of the House openly admitted to a radio interviewer that if Republicans retain their majority heading into next year, they are planning to flatten their palms against the hottest stove in politics—and he broadcast this just months before an election in which many forecasters are already projecting a Democratic wave.

“The reason we’re in trouble is because over seventy-four percent of federal spending is on autopilot—mandatory spending, that is your entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and things like Social Security—they have to be adjusted and fixed,” Johnson said on a radio show. “We have a plan to do that next year, and it’s critical, because we’re at $40 trillion-plus in debt. At some point, you get into a hole so deep you can’t climb out of it, so desperate times call for desperate measures.”

Johnson later called the circulation and discussion of his comments “fearmongering” and said, “Everyone knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is rampant waste, fraud, and abuse throughout government programs.”

Johnson continued to leave it unclear exactly what he’d do about that waste, fraud, and abuse, which, frankly, is not as prevalent as he and other Republicans often insist. But any proposed reform would almost certainly involve further restricting eligibility for those programs to exclude more of their current beneficiaries—along the lines of what Republicans did with Medicaid last year.

The bigger picture takeaway though is that this was dumb. There are a few general rules for survival in politics. Chief among them is to never, ever fuck with Social Security. Suggesting that the widely popular, essential program could be on the chopping block if your party holds the majority is a kind of political malpractice almost unthinkable for how stupid and self-damaging it is.1 Johnson obviously knows this. He serves under President Donald Trump, who has made it very clear he is never going to touch Social Security, even if he also said the same once about Medicaid. Johnson was also in Congress in 2022 when Sen. Rick Scott proposed an 11-point plan sunsetting all federal programs (Social Security included) after five years. It was a big deal in those midterms!

Why in the world would Johnson make that same mistake?

I wanted to know what Johnson’s colleagues and Senate counterparts made of his admission. So I went looking for them.

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Submission

The House Freedom Caucus, a group of former congressional rebels who have over the past few years evolved into Trump lackeys, is on the verge of total irrelevance. In a scenario where House Republicans become the minority, the caucus will lose whatever semblance of leverage it has, and current members know it; half a dozen of them will be leaving Congress at the end of the year.

Founded in early 2015, the caucus has routinely disrupted regular business by noisily complaining that their leaders made too many concessions before eventually committing to support must-pass legislation. They have had some impact along the way. Its most rogue members took down a speaker of the House. And during Donald Trump’s second term as president, Freedom Caucus members played a pivotal role in forcing the release of the government’s Jeffrey Epstein files by way of a discharge petition.

But these displays of power and rebellion have largely been isolated incidents, and they have become more isolated over time.

A quick refresher:

• HFC holdouts caved to support Mike Johnson’s speakership bid, which has since yielded few accomplishments for the caucus.

• HFC members voted for a continuing resolution to fund the government despite many of them having long opposed the practice on principle.

• Despite feigning hardline opposition, HFC members voted to significantly increase the federal deficit by supporting the Senate’s version of Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” reconciliation package.

I could list many more examples, but there would not be enough space left over for this newsletter to be about anything else. The group’s recent squishiness is owed to the fact that Trump can easily work them over with a White House visit or a phone call. And it has prompted a running joke in the Capitol Hill press corps that they’d be better described as the House Folding Caucus.

The self-neutering has been remarkable. The entirety of the caucus’s power comes from its ability to stall important votes on must-pass legislation, knowing that party leadership needs them to be brought on side for that legislation to pass out of the chamber. Under Trump, they’ve surrendered that influence. In the event of a Democratic wave election, they will lose it completely.

“I think if we do lose the House, obviously, everybody in the conference—not just Freedom Caucus—loses leverage,” Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) told me. “But the joke within the Freedom Caucus is that when we’re in the minority, everybody becomes Freedom Caucus. Because everybody votes ‘no’ on everything.”

Crane’s view of the landscape is one shared by other HFC members. Far from reassessing how they’ve bungled things while in the majority, many wax whimsical about life in the minority.

“One thing I think we’ve always tried to do is make sure that the newer, younger men and women get mentored,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who’s running for governor, told me Monday. “I don’t think you’re gonna have a big hiccup.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a former HFC chairman who is well positioned to run for minority leader in a Democratic-controlled House, told me he didn’t think Republicans would lose the House this cycle. But if they did, he added, it could do wonders for the HFC ranks. “When they did [lose the House] back in 2018, you saw the Freedom Caucus—saw a number of us—who were really engaged on the weaponization of government and all the oversight work we did.”

It goes without saying that HFC members have the ability to engage in oversight right now, too. In fact, they have more power—since the majority party on the oversight committees can set committee agendas and issue subpoenas. But what Jordan was getting at is actually something core to the HFC experience: power doesn’t come from acts of Congress, it comes from political messaging.

“In the minority, you’re trying to craft a message and push back on all the crazy policies that the Democrats—or the left—are trying to do,” he said. “I think that’s the key element in this campaign . . . pointing out all the crazy positions they have, and we’re for the common-sense position.”

But if being in the minority may seem liberating, many Freedom Caucus members aren’t sticking around for it. Instead, they’re heading for the exits. So far, at least six members1—and four former members2 who’ve already left the group—are not seeking re-election. In addition, one member and one former member resigned during the 119th Congress.3 There are currently 32 HFC members at this moment, well below the high of 45 it had in 2022.

Asked whether they view this exodus as more a result of the group’s declining record of accomplishments or a happy graduation to better endeavors, the Freedom Caucus members I chatted with didn’t sound very chippy.

“I prefer to think of it as seeding out,” Biggs said. “People are going on to other ways to serve and go home. And I’m also a big believer that much more than ten years here is really not the ideal.”

“It is interesting that we have so many guys running for governor, attorney general, we got one guy running for Senate,” Crane told me. “It’s kinda cool to see as a new guy—you definitely feel like you’re losing a lot of talent and experience. So it’s kind of that next-man-up mentality.”

The Freedom Caucus will most likely spend at least the next two years—possibly longer—in obscurity. That may just be what they want. Or it may just be a just outcome for their behavior.

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The Hoax

The Los Angeles mayoral primary is moving to a runoff between the Democratic incumbent and a progressive challenger, and because a very-online conservative upstart candidate failed to make the cut, conservatives are once again claiming without evidence that the election was corrupted by fraud. President Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, an online chorus of DMV-based political operatives, and many others across MAGA world seem incapable of imagining that Spencer Pratt, a technically nonpartisan but MAGA-coded reality TV heel, could lose to Democrats in a city in which Democrats regularly defeat Republicans by more than 30 points.

While exiting the Capitol Monday night, I caught up with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a conservative who’s represented Southern California off and on for the last quarter of a century. I asked him whether he bought into the theory that L.A. was rigging its election to make incumbent Mayor Karen Bass face a more difficult re-election fight against a liberal challenger than she would have had against Pratt.

“I mean, they kept counting until they won,” Issa said. “What’s new about that? We have a corrupt system. They mail ballots to people who are dead, people who have moved, and then they count them endlessly. The system is inherently flawed in California.”

“It doesn’t mean that the outcome would’ve been the same or different,” Issa added. “We won’t know that. But what we do know is that we’re the only state in the union that will still be counting—that we don’t have an election day, we have an election month.”

Issa’s comments are slippery. He repeated virtually every conspiratorial Republican talking point about fraudulent elections with the caveat that the outcome probably wouldn’t have changed if the state’s election system were set up differently. Perhaps he wants to keep relations decent with some folks in his state’s political establishment while not being totally ostracized from Trump land. Or perhaps he just knows there aren’t contingents of shy MAGA voters in Los Feliz or Silver Lake.

Outside the Capitol Monday night, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said that the president’s claims of a rigged election were both “disgraceful” and nothing new.

“This is just palpable falsehoods—lies—about California elections,” Schiff said. “[Trump] understands that, but he is still willing to denigrate the California election system to try to cast doubt on it, to try to inflame the public, maybe set the pretext to intervene in the midterms if the vote is not going his way.”

However, Schiff added that California needs to figure out a swifter method for counting ballots to instill confidence in its process and tamp down on the fraud conspiracies.

“Everyone understands how the California voting system works. We vote by mail,” Schiff said. “It takes a long time to count the ballots and yes, we can improve the speed and we should address that and address resources to improve how quickly we process the ballots. But there’s no evidence of the kind of fraud the Republicans [are claiming].”

Something tells me that nothing the state does will ever be enough to satisfy its critics on the right.

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Men of Respect

The United States Constitution prohibits titles of nobility for Americans. Still, some Yanks want their own coats of arms as a sort of cosplay.

Helen Lewis writes in the Atlantic:

Today, if you can find an ancestor who was “armigerous”—noble enough to bear arms—then you have an inherited right to their coat of arms. Otherwise, you can design your own, complete with chevrons, castles, and all the heraldic animals that you desire. Ingram said his heart “sinks a bit” when someone wants a lion: “There’s so many lions already.” He appreciates those who choose something unusual, such as a frog or a flamingo. A more traditional choice might be a mythical beast, such as a unicorn, a griffin, or an enfield—“sort of like a fox but with the legs of a chicken.”

The demand for arms is so high that scammy companies have sprung up online, claiming to award arms and even titles. “I went to several different vendors on the internet only to be let down in the process,” Harry Rossander, a retired Army Corps of Engineers lieutenant colonel in Rapid City, South Dakota, told me. He eventually ended up with a design of a bald eagle perched on a tower, registered with a college of heraldry in America.

Maybe it’s because my family came from the poorest province4 in one of the poorest regions of Italy, but I don’t think you should be rocking a coat of arms in the year of our Lord two-thousand and twenty-six. It’s embarrassing.

Read the whole article.

Ghost in the shell bill

The rapid, power grid–draining growth of the AI industry has led to a surprisingly intense popular backlash—one divorced from other criticisms of AI that focus on its plagiaristic regurgitating of anything that can be sucked into the machines’ “training.” The data centers’ power demands are great enough that they are contributing to increased energy costs for the Americans who live near them, and the prospect of widespread AI-driven job loss isn’t helping the industry much with its PR problem, either.

Few mainstream politicians seem overly concerned about these data centers and the way the industry building them is reshaping the U.S. economy, which some critics argue could be setting it up for a catastrophic bubble burst. But some lawmakers are keyed in, and they are introducing legislation to either promote AI or take significant steps to curb its growth. For those seeking to implement restrictions on the industry, it’s unclear whether their primary goal is to address the genuine concerns Americans have about the disruptive new technology, or to instead harness AI’s unpopularity to advance their preexisting populist policy goals.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has two bills right now that directly address artificial intelligence. The first, which he unveiled in March, would impose a moratorium on the development of new data centers for AI pending the adoption of safeguards for the industry “to ensure the safety of humanity.” The second, debuted in a New York Times op-ed on Monday, would have the federal government take a 50 percent ownership stake in AI companies. The federally expropriated stock would in turn create a sovereign wealth fund, a state-owned investment program to manage the United States’ surplus wealth and pass along some of the proceeds to the American people.

You may have noticed that these two proposals seem to run counter to one another: A moratorium on data center construction would result in an immediate reduction in the value of these companies, at least temporarily. Meanwhile, the primary purpose of a sovereign wealth fund—as with running any for-profit company—is to generate money. It’s not meant to be like the Postal Service, which Republicans often characterize as a money-losing business but in reality is an essential government service. The proposed moratorium would shut down the AI industry’s means of expansion and operation, crippling its financial growth. It makes no sense for the government to be taking partial ownership of a company it is simultaneously hindering. That would seem to be putting on hold its fiduciary duty to the taxpayer. When I asked Sanders how these two pieces of legislation would mesh together, he appeared a bit stumped—a rare state for the Vermont senator.

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The creep

Maine Democratic Senate primary candidate Graham Platner and Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton are different candidates dealing with different scandals. Paxton’s infidelity is not the same as Platner’s, nor is Paxton’s pattern of corruption and other moral shortcomings the same as Platner’s Nazi tattoo and history of racist comments online. I am not equating their wrongdoings, nor do I propose doing so.

But the scandal-infused coverage about each candidate has given rise to a similar debate in their respective parties. It’s a debate about fitness for office and whether character—that fickle quality that is separate from a candidate’s policies, but which can result in good or bad policymaking—should be a consideration at all in a time when voters are demanding wins at any cost.

I asked some senators from both parties, many of whom either jettisoned all principles after coming to Washington or came to power in the first place simply by not having any, whether Americans should demand more of their elected officials on the character front.

Yes, they all seemed to agree: Americans should hold politicians from the other party to a higher standard.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said he’s “of course” backing Paxton.

“You know who his opponent is, don’t you?” Grassley asked me. “If you look at who the opponent is and what he believes about transgender and all that stuff, you’d have a whole different view of Paxton.”

Asked about both candidates, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) expressed support for Paxton but opposition to Platner, although not for character-related reasons, exactly.

“I’m gonna support the attorney general. On Mr. Platner, that’s something the Democrats—I can give you my opinion about Mr. Platner—I’m sure Jesus loves him, but everybody else thinks he’s an idiot.”

When I asked if he considers it a double standard that Republicans are judging Platner for character problems while skating over Paxton’s issues in that domain, Kennedy wouldn’t hear of it. “Well that’s your opinion” he replied, curiously treating my question as a statement of the facts instead.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), whom Paxton defeated in last week’s primary, told reporters he stands by his characterization of his triumphant opponent as a “crook.”

“I’ve said no, he’s not [fit for office],” Cornyn said. “But he won the race fair and square.” Cornyn has pledged to vote for the ticket in November—implying that Paxton will get his support.

Democrats I spoke with also tended to downplay the relative importance of character in today’s political environment. But they also did seem to feel a need to offer a lot more excuses for this.

I spoke with Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), a man who understands better than most the political risks that lawmakers take on when they embrace open corruption and immorality. Kim succeeded longtime Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) after a jury found the latter guilty of accepting bribes and acting as a foreign agent.

When I asked for his thoughts on Platner’s situation, Kim said, “I’ll take a look where things stand, but we’re gonna fight everywhere we can.”

Asked if character is an important component in assessing a candidate, Kim said it is, but he added the caveat that policy is an equally significant part of the assessment.

“Look, I’m in the Senate by virtue of a corruption scandal,” he said. “There’s a reason I took on this race—my race—because I certainly have concerns about that. And character matters. It matters not just in terms of their personal behavior, it also depends on who they vote for for Supreme Court justices [and] in terms of what is ultimately our job, which is trying to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and whether or not, you know, people can be trusted.

“So, look,” he concluded, with a bit of a punt: “the voters will take all of that into account.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), one of Platner’s early and most high-profile backers, remains a Platner backer.

“I think it might be a good idea if we focused on the important issues facing the working families of Maine and this country,” Sanders told a gaggle of reporters on Monday. “My understanding is that Amy—Graham Platner’s wife, who I met—is working with her husband, loves her husband, feels that their marriage is working, and maybe as a nation we focus on issues more important than the Platner marriage.”

“Is he a saint?” Sanders said elsewhere of Platner. “I guess not. I don’t know too many saints here.”

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Selective moralizing has been around in politics as long as the profession has been practiced. The prominent Republicans who admonished Bill Clinton for his peccadilloes in the 1990s were hardly men of high character themselves. White evangelicals grew more supportive of Donald Trump the more his traditionally sinful behavior came to light. Many Democrats who admonished Trump for his character are now biting their tongue about Platner. That’s the way this stuff goes.

If control of Congress is the only goal you consider meaningful for this fall’s election, then the character issues these candidates have either don’t matter, or they are of only minor relative importance in the larger scope of things. And, as of right now, current polling rates Platner’s political prospects more highly than Paxton’s. But both have a real shot at a seat in the upper chamber.

But candidates like this are still a massive risk, and not just because we don’t know what is yet to come out about either. Just consider the recent spate of expulsions, resignations, and absences in this Congress alone. Very thin majorities are often just one scandal away from stopping regular business for an entire chamber.

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Incredible thoughts

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has a plan to make everyone’s lives a lot worse. He is proposing to pull customs agents out of airports in cities that flout federal immigration laws, which would result in a de facto ban on international flights to and from those destinations.

Mullin has repeatedly brought up the plan, both on television and reportedly in the middle of unrelated White House meetings.1 Despite one Fox News host’s claim the policy would be “a boon to red states,” other airports simply do not have the capacity to assume all the extra international flights. Besides, would, say, a family intent on visiting New York City from Europe simply accept that they need to fly into Dallas or Oklahoma City instead?

In truth, I have a hard time thinking of a dumber policy proposed by a member of any president’s cabinet since I started working in political journalism. So my question for the senators on the Commerce Committee’s aviation subcommittee was basically, “Is Mullin’s plan even possible?”

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), who chairs the Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on aviation, told me that he hasn’t spoken about it with Mullin or anyone else in the administration.

“It’d certainly be a very complicated and messy circumstance,” Moran said. “I don’t know what our capacity could be in that circumstance.”

“Well, I understand the secretary’s frustration,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said. “I’m not sure that the flame is worth the candle. It would be terribly disruptive for American commerce, including international commerce. I know Secretary [Sean] Duffy has counseled against it.”

Kennedy added he would ask Mullin “more about it” when the DHS head testifies before the Senate this week.

The senators’ skepticism about Mullin’s harebrained plan is warranted. To put the plan into context, think of how this would affect just one part of the country: California. Sanctuary City San Francisco’s SFO can host around 120 international flights in a day from 50 different countries. Other international airports nearby belong to cities, like Oakland, San Jose, and Sacramento, that would also likely be subject to Mullin’s customs staff pull, meaning they would not be able to receive the extra flights; theirs would also be forced to find new places to put down.2 Ultimately, finding a nearby international airport that isn’t in a sanctuary city would require crossing state lines and traveling more than 200 miles to Reno, Nevada, which currently receives passengers from just one international destination on flights that come in typically once a day, if at all. Receiving potentially hundreds of new international flights per day full of irate international travelers meaning to go elsewhere would complicate the lives of many innocent Nevadans who work at the airport.

“I don’t know why he keeps raising this,” Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) told me. “It would do so much damage to our country as a whole.”

But Kim isn’t brushing off the possibility of Mullin’s proposal the way some of his Republican colleagues have been.

“I mean, this administration has demonstrated that if they want to do things and use [them] for political retaliation, . . . they are capable of doing it,” he said.

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We like sportz

If you read this newsletter, you probably know ball. It turns out that there’s a further corollary to that proposition, which is that you’re probably also not running for office.

That’s because politicians—and Democrats, in particular—often flub when trying to discuss sports, something they typically do in a bid to reach elusive male voters. Even the ones who seem like they’d be sports-conversant have had problems; recall Gov. Tim Walz posting an embarrassing tweet about running “a mean pick 6.”

Nathaniel Frum writes in the Atlantic:

As Democratic politicians scramble to seem in touch and ensure that their faces appear on our phones as much as possible, they are neglecting the free real estate offered by sports talk. A popular meme mocks men for being content to sit and name obscure athletes to one another for hours. It’s popular because it isn’t far from the truth. The politically disengaged male voters whom Democrats are so desperate to reach aren’t at bars arguing about Medicare funding. They are arguing about a roughing-the-passer penalty. Bettors on Polymarket give Stephen A. Smith higher odds of winning the 2028 Democratic presidential primary than Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, and Ruben Gallego. Nothing gets attention like sports takes.

Political consultants often overthink things. Perhaps they should just force candidates to memorize the names and career stats of obscure wide receivers from the 2000s. Rattling off some of that material in the right context could do wonders for them at the ballot box.

Read the whole article.

Correction (June 2 2026 4:15 p.m. EDT): Because of an editing error, as originally published, this article described San Francisco as being in Southern California. It is not.

The Best of Both Worlds

Earlier this week, I put out an ask to Bulwark readers to share any direct communications they received from their members of Congress about the January 6th cop-beater compensation slush fund currently causing outrage and consternation on Capitol Hill. The constituent letters I reviewed show just how differently Republican lawmakers can sound when dealing one-on-one with constituents instead of addressing the public at large, when they know the world’s most prolific media consumer might be watching what they say.

For example, after the administration announced the “settlement”1 establishing the “anti-weaponization” slush fund, Rep. Nick Langworthy (R-N.Y.) expressed tepid skepticism and a desire to see more details, as did many of his similarly cautious and ambivalent Republican colleagues.

“I have, I guess, more questions than answers about this fund, in general, as to how it would be executed, how it would be put together. I mean, I think we’re also a little scant on detail. I do think it needs congressional oversight,” he said, according to Erie News Now.

“We have to have really tight scrutiny, a really high burden of proof as to how those monies are going to be distributed,” said Langworthy. “I don’t think this should be seen as some direct slush fund for one particular event. I mean, there’s obviously a lot of arguments about people that claim to be falsely imprisoned. Just because they were pardoned, doesn’t mean that they were falsely imprisoned. They were charged and convicted of crimes—and there were juries of their peers that did that. I just think that we need far more answers, and I think that there’s many of us asking our leadership to go get to the bottom of that.”

In a separate comment posted by Chataqua Today, Langworthy echoed the Trump administration’s line that the government had in the past employed “lawfare” against innocent people.

“People’s lives and livelihoods have been ruined by lawfare and, you know, excessive aggression by the government,” he said. “But, you know, the way that this came together with a settlement, I think we have a little ways to go.”

But in a letter to a constituent this week, Langworthy was more forthright in personally opposing the fund, writing that under no circumstances should taxpayer dollars be used to settle the president’s grievances.

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Keep Ya Head Up

President Donald Trump’s “settlement”1 with his own Department of Justice to establish a fund to disburse completely unaccountable payments to pardoned January 6th rioters and others who claim to have been unfairly investigated and prosecuted by the federal government has met significant opposition in Congress. Even Republican lawmakers have spoken out publicly against it. The situation has gotten bad enough that regular legislative business has gotten jammed up.

Intense intraparty disagreements over the slush fund derailed Republicans’ own plans to vote on a series of proposals for their upcoming reconciliation bill last week. During a conference lunch on Thursday in which acting Attorney General Todd Blanche sought to address lawmakers’ concerns, dozens of Republican senators spoke up—many more than usual—according to a source in the room. It seems as though their concerns were not addressed to their satisfaction: Lawmakers ultimately left town without finishing the week’s business.

“These people don’t deserve restitution. Many of them deserve to be in prison,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters Thursday. “But this is just stupid on stilts.”

“They need to speak up,” Tillis said of his Republican colleagues who’ve opposed the settlement in private. “I mean, this is beyond the pale. This is not good for my colleagues. There’s not one positive thing that could be spun out of this between now and November. This is bad policy, it’s bad timing, and it’s bad politics.”

“So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops?” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement.2 “Utterly stupid, morally wrong—Take your pick.”

In the House, where Republican opposition to the fund is weaker and more diffuse, Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill that would ban the use of federal funds for Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund.

Fitzpatrick and Suozzi co-chair the Problem Solvers Caucus, the long-dormant bipartisan collective whose stated goal is, well, solving problems. And the government shoveling huge piles of taxpayer money into the beds of more than a thousand pardoned convicts' Dodge Ram 2500s might be just the sort of problem they are well positioned to solve.

“It’s really up to the Republicans to join with the Democrats. Everybody knows this is wrong,” Suozzi told ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday. “That’s the purpose of the checks and balances in government, so that [when] one branch of government does something stupid or wrong, the other branch holds them accountable.”

While many share broader concerns about corruption and the precedent that would be set by the creation of such a fund, the primary sticking point about it on Capitol Hill is whether money will go to any of the hundreds of individuals convicted of assaulting police officers.

In response to a question about concerns that violent rioters would be eligible to receive money from the fund, Blanche told CNN, “People that hurt police get money all the time.”

The Fitzpatrick–Suozzi bill would effectively kill the president’s plan to compensate the rioters and criminals he pardoned hours after being sworn in for his second term. Unlike a number of popular pieces of legislation that have been brought up through the discharge petition process in defiance of House Speaker Mike Johnson over the course of this Congress, though, the anti-anti-weaponization fund bill may struggle to reach the threshold of the 218 votes required to override chamber leadership and force a vote.

While many of the successful discharge petitions have been direct rebukes of Trump’s policies and stated positions—notably the Massie–Khanna bill mandating the release of the Epstein files and the recent package of additional military aid to Ukraine, which will come up for a vote soon—those bills have also touched on key areas of interparty frustration. Johnson’s habit of slow-walking any legislation that isn’t a favor to Trump has inflamed tempers among both moderate3 Republican and Democratic members.

There is also the timing component. This tool can’t be used to force a vote overnight. Bills are not eligible for a discharge petition until they’ve sat in committee (in this case, the House Judiciary Committee) for at least thirty legislative days.4 At that point, a petition can start to circulate for signatures. Once the 218 threshold is reached, the curing process can further put off a vote by days or even weeks. But it’s not clear that a sufficient number of House Republicans are willing to go against the president on this for the Fitzpatrick–Suozzi bill to gain enough bipartisan support to reach the magic number of signatures

If Senate Republicans can manage to stake out a genuine policy position against the settlement fund, it’s possible they could actually dismantle it. Their similarly minded House colleagues may face an uphill battle to join them, but given the thinness of the GOP majority in the chamber and the party’s continuing attendance issues, anti-anti-weaponizers might find enough leverage to stop Trump’s slush fund before the trucks start backing into the Treasury Building to load up on the public’s money.

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So Many Tears

Libertarians tend to style themselves a bit differently from their peers across the rest of the political spectrum. (This predilection dovetails nicely with some of their other signature preferences.) In a political environment where the men of the two major parties can sometimes be distinguished only by the color of their ties, Libertarians are easy to pick out for how they often resemble (or literally are) magicians or Bay to Breakers runners.

In the lead-up to the most recent Libertarian National Convention in Grand Rapids, Michigan, an attempt was made to rein in some of the fringe party’s most adventurously dressed representatives. Predictably, this caused quite the uproar.

Alexander Nazaryan reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Live free or die, but would it kill you to wear a tie?

That was the essence of Ben Weir’s plea ahead of the biennial Libertarian National Convention in Grand Rapids, Mich.

In a May 15 post on X, Weir, 36, declared that he’d had it with the wacky costumes, which have long been a staple of political party conventions but seem particularly popular among do-what-thou-wilt libertarians.

No more using a boot for headwear, as one convention mainstay named Vermin Supreme did. No more see-through clothing to promote government transparency.

Weir, who is running for Merrimack County sheriff in New Hampshire and couldn’t attend the convention, wrote that he was calling on the party’s national committee to establish “a baseline professional dress standard for participation in official proceedings.” His proposal called for business casual attire, neat facial hair and closed-toe shoes.

Weir, who is a member of the party’s “emo caucus,”5 faced immediate backlash for his post from his fellow Libertarians.

“BOOT HATS FOR EVERYBODY !!!” declared Vermin Supreme, a perennial candidate for president often affiliated with the Libertarian party.

Melissa Wong, the chairwoman of the Montana Libertarian party, joked, “If we could just get them to bathe, wear pants, and cover their toe fungus with shoes I’d be content.”

Some of the reactions were more serious. Ray Walden, the acting chairman of the Libertarian Party of Illinois, replied to Weir’s post, “You hate freedom of speech my dude.”

“Fuck you, I’m wearing band merch,” responded Justin O’Donnell, a former Libertarian candidate for Senate in New Hampshire.

Bottom line: Libertarians don’t like being told what to do, even if what they’re being told to do is in their best interest. Join me in wondering if this example of people failing to act in their best interest could have wider-ranging political and economic implications.

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Only God Can Judge Me

Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical on Sunday. Titled Magnifica Humanitas, the document called upon the developers of artificial intelligence to put aside their obsession with profit for the sake of the “common good” and encouraged them to “remain human.”

Gerard O’Connell writes in America:

He recalls that the Tower of Babel was “a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion.” But the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem, described in the Book of Nehemiah, “shows how the city is reborn…through the shared responsibility of all. It is an undertaking with God at the center, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones.”

Pope Leo sees humanity today at a historic crossroads, symbolized by those two images, and writes, “Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible.”

“Yet,” he writes, “every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world,” and “we must ask God for the wisdom to interpret the great trends of our time, particularly technological advances.”

He emphasizes that “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” saying that it “has significantly improved the living conditions of humanity.” At the same time, he adds, “each phase of progress has also revealed the ambiguity of tools that can cause harm when not oriented toward the good.”

Read the whole piece. If you have the time, have a look at Leo’s entire 42,000-word encyclical.

Fortune Teller

Donald J. Trump has used his position as president of the United States of America to enrich himself in a variety of ways. From accepting luxurious gifts and suing his own government for billions of dollars to pooling revenues from the sale of seized Venezuelan oil in Qatari bank accounts and demanding payments from other countries to join a private “board of peace” organization he controls unilaterally, the president has shown that when it comes to the hustle, he’s never stopped hustling. But alongside these grand tactics of malfeasance, the president has also found time to ply more relatable styles of corruption. For instance, he’s bought and sold staggering volumes of stock in companies whose fortunes he’s had a hand in elevating or diminishing.

In the Office of Government Ethics’s recent disclosure, Trump conducted more than 3,600 trades with a combined value of up to $750 million during just the first three months of 2026. His purchases and sales included the stocks and bonds of top corporations, small ones, and companies the administration has directly promoted through policy and public statements. He did brisk business in the technology, banking, and entertainment sectors.

Filling in as press secretary on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance told reporters “the president doesn’t sit at the Oval Office on his computer on his Robinhood account buying and selling stocks. That’s absurd.” True enough—someone (or a team of people) is obviously making the trades for him. But they’re still his transactions being conducted in his name using his money. The whole thing reeks of the same unethical behavior that earned Congress its reputation for corruption over the years.

These types of trades, which are at best unethical and at worst horribly corrupt, are hardly new in Washington. Members of Congress frequently buy and sell stakes in companies under the direct purview of their respective committees. Their transactions sometimes signal that a company is set to receive special treatment of some kind—through a contract or grant, perhaps, or some form of regulatory relief. And barring that, these transactions at least suggest the policymaker knows which way the wind is blowing for the company or its industry, and for reasons that may not be visible to the public.

But Trump’s case is different. And it’s not just because of the brazenness of his approach but the sheer volume of his trading.

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Monsters, Inc.

Paid partnerships are a ubiquitous feature of video and photo–forward social media like Instagram and TikTok. Some of the posts are obvious, and they may even include tags like #ad or #sponcon (“sponsored content”) to make clear that the creator is being remunerated for their breathlessly enthusiastic opinion. But sometimes the commercial backing is not so obvious, and this sort of gray-zone #sponcon goes beyond dog food, jeans, and unnecessary supplements. It’s also getting made for political candidates.

Campaigns are starting to more heavily rely on partnerships with social media influencers to generate interest in their candidates and causes through paid endorsements and custom-ordered content—and the material is very often being served up with no disclosure informing the viewer that what they’re viewing is actually an advertisement.

In the California gubernatorial race, billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer has reportedly paid influencers $10 per post in support of his campaign; his failure to explain to his ad-hoc social media brigade that they need to disclose the payments in the sponsored posts likely resulted in numerous violations of a state law requiring such disclosures. (Team Steyer’s offer has since changed to a $1,000/month partnership, with the disclaimer requirement included in the new listing.) In addition, a California elections watchdog is probing his campaign for an “interview” conducted by a TikTok influencer that came with an undisclosed $10,000 honorarium.

Beyond the ethical concerns about proper disclosure, enlisting influencers carries the risk that they might turn on the campaign that recruited them, switching allegiances to rivals offering more money or even attempting to extort candidates to pony up more cash. As Kamala Harris’s 2024 digital director Rob Flaherty wrote in The Bulwark last week in his personal postmortem for the former VP’s failed presidential campaign:

There are a number of tactics that have become standard practice on the right that are probably going to move over to the left—such as paying creators under the table through LLCs for consulting contracts or otherwise. Each campaign in a 2028 primary is going to need a plan for this sort of thing. Does the money flow? If so, where from? You will encounter (as we did in 2024) creators who say something like ‘Pay me $5,000 or I’ll endorse your opponent’—what’s your plan for that?

I asked some senators of both parties whether they would try out this new approach to political advertising, if they believe it’s ethical to do so, and whether they would entertain the idea of contracting with a potentially mercurial and vengeful content creator.

“I’m very familiar with that. That’s a very common thing,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told me when I mentioned Flaherty’s claim that influencers often seemed willing to extort campaigns for higher fees. “I would also say that used to happen offline, too.”

“There’s definitely a whole world there [in which] you can interact with them, and if you choose not to form a business relationship, you can have the political equivalent of a review bomb,” Schatz added.

Schatz said that, like many policy areas, the United States’ impotent enforcement mechanisms are to blame.

“I think if we had a good Federal Election Commission—or even a functioning one—then we could do something about that,” he said.

When I asked Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) about all this, he at first expressed confusion about whether these influencer payments would need to be disclosed.1 When I noted there are loopholes to legal requirements for #sponcon diclosure—for instance, paying social media partners through consultancies or LLCs, as Flaherty alluded to—Scott said dryly, “I think there’s always a risk in any check you write.”

Members of a free society make important decisions about money, political participation, and more on the basis of their best judgment of information they get through the news, and most of us nowadays consume news through our phones. Knowing whether a piece of content you’re consuming is an ad or not is crucially important for assessing its trustworthiness, which is why it helps none of us for sponsored content to go undisclosed. Unfortunately, the key decisionmaking factors are different for the candidates themselves: They can afford to add another risk to their campaigns if doing so will mean they can pull in a bit more attention during a high-stakes campaign, especially if lax enforcement nullifies the risk.

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Toy Story

Artificial intelligence is the hottest new tool in the world of political campaigns. In federal and local elections, campaigns are using it to give voters the impression of things hitherto unseen—and in some cases, things that are simply unreal.

Chief among AI’s political power users is the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans. In the past year, the NRSC has used AI to reconstruct reported quotes from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to give the misimpression he said them at a press conference, created fake direct-to-camera testimonials from Texas Senate candidate James Talarico using a mix of his tweets and totally made-up self-congratulations, and depicted Maine Governor Janet Mills in a bizarre 1980s QVC–esque commercial where she sells gender-transitioning treatments to minors, or something.

In the Los Angeles mayoral race, the officially nonpartisan but conservative-leaning Spencer Pratt has leaned heavily on AI in his campaign ads. Pratt’s fans have generated completely bonkers cinematic ads depicting his opponent, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, as the Joker presiding over a burning city, and spun up videos of him fighting her with a lightsaber against the backdrop of (again) a burning city.

To my surprise, when I asked about this issue around the halls of the U.S. Senate Monday evening, I found quite a bit of bipartisan enthusiasm for restricting the use of AI in campaign ads, whether through required watermarking on videos and images or by banning it from political advertising altogether.

“We should have broader restrictions on AI-produced content,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “I mean, watermark and identify all of it, and ban it in politics.”

“Oh heavens yes,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) told me in response to a question about enforcing AI use in campaign materials. “Because now they’ve got to where the voice is synced up so perfectly with the AI image that you can’t tell that it’s not an AI image. You cannot tell. It should have to be disclosed.”

In the case of Pratt’s mayoral bid, in which he relies on fan-made videos he then promotes on his official channels, Lummis was less sure-footed.

“Well, I’ve never even thought about that,” she said. “I think if it’s campaign-related, it all needs to be disclosed.”

At the moment, there is one bill in the Senate to restrict AI use in campaigns, authored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). The Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act aims to prohibit “materially deceptive audio or visual media that is generated by artificial intelligence” from being used in federal races.2

The bill has just four additional cosponsors, two Republicans and two Democrats. Unfortunately, as in most cases involving election enforcement or emerging technologies (both of which feature here), bipartisan support doesn’t necessarily translate into political will.

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The Aristocats

When I can, I like to stop by estate sales. Sometimes my goal is to get a glimpse into the life of a corrupt former congresswoman; other times, I’m just after interesting and well-loved clothing items, jewelry, and knick-knacks, which can be had at estate sales for much cheaper prices than you’d ever find shopping new.

Then, too, the things left behind by those who’ve lived a full life are often of much greater value—materially and otherwise—than some fresh find from a department store. While sorting through a recently departed relative’s possessions to help organize a sale can be emotionally trying, there can be solace in knowing that someone will care for the items the way they did.

In the case of legendary fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, that someone might be his pet cat, Choupette.

As Chris Heath writes in the Atlantic:

Karl Lagerfeld, the great German fashion designer, lived in a surreal kind of grandeur. The creative director of both Chanel and Fendi, he owned apartments in Paris, Rome, and the Côte d’Azur, as well as villas in Biarritz and his native Hamburg; enormous collections of Art Deco furniture, antique jewelry, and couture garments; a personal library of some 300,000 books, by his own estimation; paintings and sculptures by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and John Baldessari; three Rolls-Royces; a curious assemblage of 509 iPods; and hundreds of pairs of his trademark wraparound sunglasses and fingerless biker gloves. According to a conversation that his biographer, William Middleton, had with the Parisian florist Lachaume, his annual flower budget appears to have been about 1.5 million euros. Lagerfeld never married or had children, and when he died of cancer, in 2019, the press quickly began to speculate about the immense fortune he’d supposedly left behind, which a number of outlets, including Bloomberg, Forbes, and The Guardian, ballparked at more than $200 million. Speculation also swirled about where these riches would end up.

More than seven years later, here is what is known for certain about the details of Lagerfeld’s will and estate: nothing. (Under French law, such matters are not made public.) But plenty has been rumored. Various figures close to Lagerfeld have been suggested as beneficiaries, including several male models and fashion executives, his bodyguard, his housekeeper, and the princess of Monaco. Even so, from the start, one improbable name has stood out: Choupette, Lagerfeld’s blue-cream Birman cat. . . .

The swirl of scuttlebutt about other beneficiaries, totals, tax liabilities, and relative shares has continued ever since, and there are consistent reports that, even now, no one has received any money. Nonetheless, it has been printed as established fact that, separate from his will, Lagerfeld had arranged a sizable sum, generally said to be about $1.5 million (though sometimes as much as $4 million), to ensure that Choupette would live on in the style to which she had become accustomed. She was, it was sometimes claimed, the richest cat in the world.

I understand wanting someone to care for your pets after you’ve departed this world. But there’s also only so much that a cat needs. Then again, I’m not Karl Lagerfeld.

Read the whole story.

Valar Dohaeris

Each House speakership ends up having its own unique character—forged through a combination of successes and failures. Nancy Pelosi, for example, is remembered for ruling her majority with an iron fist; she also regularly defeated internal party challenges and cleared the pathway for landmark legislation like the Affordable Care Act. Paul Ryan and John Boehner passed some substantial bills, too, and both departed Congress for lucrative second acts. Kevin McCarthy was not so lucky. He failed to quell a rebellion that resulted in his tarring and feathering (not literally) on the House floor. He has not found his way into the sort of plum position his predecessors have enjoyed since their speakerships ended.

Mike Johnson’s speakership is somewhat different from all these. His overriding project has been to cede whatever power and decision-making he can to the White House, and this has, in turn, given shape to an unusual legacy, one defined by impotence.

In recent months there has been a strange spirit of bipartisanship among frustrated House members, who have relied on the previously rare tactic of discharge petitions to circumvent Johnson. The latest such bill directly pushes back on the Donald Trump administration in a policy area the MAGA movement finds particularly divisive: aid to Ukraine.

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The holiday

President Donald Trump is floating a national gas-tax holiday to give some relief from the brutal prices at the pump he has helped to keep high through his war with Iran. Trump rarely credits former President Joe Biden for anything, so it’s no surprise that he has refused to acknowledge that his predecessor floated a similar idea in response to similarly war-fueled price pressures. Biden didn’t get credit for it back then, either: Democrats and Republicans alike panned the proposal. But this time around, for some reason, Senate Republicans have really taken a shine to it.

“Well, I know that [Trump] is working multiple avenues to find ways to lower the price of gas. The best answer is to bring the Iran conflict to an end and open up the Strait of Hormuz,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) told me. “Then we’ll see oil prices drop and gas prices drop. I know the president is suggesting also a possible gas holiday. I think that ought to be an option on the table.”

When I asked if he liked the concept of a gas-tax holiday when Biden was president, Daines said, “If we can find ways to reduce taxes, that’s not a bad short-term option.”

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But Daines did not support Biden’s plan in 2022. Instead, he called that earlier proposal “more gimmicks and bandaid solutions to his manufactured energy crisis.”

The most blatant reversal came from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who called the Biden plan “treacherous” in a 2022 Fox News interview.

“We still have to pay for the upkeep and the maintenance of our interstate transportation network,” Lee said at the time.

But when faced with an open-ended proposal of the same policy under Trump, Lee decided it was worth it to rework it—to put his thing down, flip it, and reverse it:

Some Republicans I spoke to did oppose the plan right away on Monday, citing the critical tax revenue that comes from the gasoline tax, as well as the administration’s ability to lower prices through other means.

“We don’t have a demand problem, we got a supply problem, and I think the president can take a lap on that one by saying what he has done to increase discovery, and getting as much energy out of the ground as he can,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told me.

“I would not [support a gas-tax holiday] right now,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) told reporters. “We obviously have to watch the debt and deficit as well as a country. Those are also things we got to be able to take care of.”

Senate Republicans are in a bind once again. While they historically have opposed taxes of any kind, they also feel it necessary to oppose tax relief when it comes from Democratic presidents. Combine those psychological pressures with their ultimate political duty—never publicly disagree with Trump—and you can easily see why your elected officials end up in such extraordinary contortions on TV.

All the king’s men

The Senate returned to Washington on Monday, and they got right to work solemnly deliberating over several agenda items. Among the most important is deciding whether to agree to provide $1 billion in taxpayer funding for “security” enhancements for the new White House ballroom, which is currently being built over the ruins of the former East Wing.

Despite the bill text having been public for a week, most Republicans weren’t keen on discussing it.

“I have not seen the final proposal on that,” Lankford told me. “I’ve heard numbers thrown around, but I have yet to see, ‘Here’s an actual proposal. Here’s what’s needed.’ So we’ll see what that is.”1

Apart from Lankford, quite a few had seen the bill slotted for Republicans’ next reconciliation package, which would allow them to pass it without Democratic votes as long as the parliamentarian gives each item a green light.

“My understanding is it’s supposed to be paid for by private donations,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters in her classic noncommital style. “That’s what the president has said. We’re going to be hearing from the head of the Secret Service on what the enhanced security needs for the White House and others are in this heightened environment of political violence.”

“I think most of our members, as they are getting briefed on what the money’s going to be used for, are probably going to be in a good place,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Monday. “I think everybody has an understanding of what [the $1 billion is] going to be used for. As I said earlier, it’s to secure the building. And not just the ballroom—the entire East Wing.”

“There’s a lot of subterranean things that are classified that are part of the project,” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) told me. “It’s not for the ballroom. The ballroom just happens to sit on top of that.”

When I noted that the bill specifically aims to allocate money for the East Wing Modernization Project, which the National Capital Planning Commission describes as the establishment of “a permanent, secure event space that provides increased capacity for official state functions,” otherwise known as a ballroom, Moreno briskly walked away and said, “No,” adding, “No, no, no, no.”

Providing such a large sum of taxpayer money for the ballroom, whether for aesthetic purposes or not, forces each senator to go on the record with their support for or opposition to the unpopular project. Vulnerable incumbents in battleground states don’t get a special exemption. But the parliamentarian could always bail them out by not allowing the ballroom security-boost money to be included in the final package.

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Contagion

Measles is on the rise again in the United States, which means that more American children are dying needlessly, and their schools are becoming less safe. These ghastly developments are happening thanks to a surge in anti-vaccine beliefs, something for which the secretary of health and human services—a conspiracy theorist who happily engages vaccine doubters, deniers, and denigrators—bears a large measure of responsibility.

Things never had to be this way, a fact that registers with real pain for those who remember what life was like before we had the life-saving inoculation. Fran Moreland Johns recounts in the Atlantic the pride and hope he and other Americans felt when the measles vaccine finally became a reality:

It was a time of singular, optimistic patriotism. No one thought the road ahead would be easy; everyone believed that peace and shared prosperity were possible. For nearly a century, I’ve been privileged to watch the fits, starts, and swings of that optimism: the forward leaps of science and technology, the backward falls into tragic wars, the sidesteps into misguided ideologies. But the collective effort behind those hot cross buns and front-porch flags? That is still who we are, if we choose to be.

Read the whole piece.

The Grassley is always greener

When President Donald Trump first floated his plan to build a White House ballroom, which turned out to require a complete demolition of the East Wing, he did so while promising that the new building would go up at no cost to the taxpayer. Putting aside the ethical problems entailed by allowing wealthy CEOs and corporations to donate undisclosed amounts to fund special government projects at the behest of the administration, Trump’s promise was a joke.

Senate Republicans now want to appropriate $1 billion in taxpayer funds for the project, which they are attempting to do by tucking the provision into a new proposal to spend even more money on the president’s mass deportation effort.

The bill, which Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) released Monday night, notes that the $1 billion is meant “for the purposes of security adjustments and upgrades, including within the perimeter fence of the White House Compound to support enhancements by the United States Secret Service relating to the East Wing Modernization Project, including above-ground and below-ground security features.”

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Oil of oy vey

Rising gas prices often provide a convenient index for dissatisfaction with the current president, even if the increases have little to do with the administration’s policies.1 When a war breaks out in major oil- and gas-producing regions, prices go up. When gas prices rise, so do the anxieties of political candidates who belong to the party in power. And this year, that includes many Republicans whose campaigns are crucial to maintaining a GOP Senate majority.

At the onset of the Trump administration’s unilateral military action (war) against Iran, gas prices in the United States skyrocketed, which immediately spooked Republicans concerned with holding on to their Senate majority. In the two months since the opening of hostilities, prices have fluctuated in some states while continuing to climb in others, with those around the Great Lakes seeing particularly challenging increases.

“We’re gonna be fine, we got plenty of oil,” Mike Rogers, a Republican candidate for Senate in Michigan, said in March. “You’ll get your oil, because we’re going to pump our oil right here in America, and we got plenty.”

Six weeks later, though, GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan reported gas prices leaping upward in several middle-American states. In Rogers’s Michigan, they went up 88 cents. In Ohio, they climbed 94 cents. In Wisconsin, 33 cents. And in Indiana, prices grew by a calamitous dollar and nine cents.2

On Thursday, Rogers addressed the issue once again. When Newsmax host Ed Henry asked the candidate, “Are you nervous . . . about these stubbornly high gas prices?” Rogers finally acknowledged the reality of higher costs at the pump:

Listen, high prices of anything hurt people in Michigan. . . . Iran is about stopping their nuclear program, stopping their ballistic missile program so they can’t hurt others. I think most Americans are there. We all want this to come to a quick end—I think including the president of the United States. The president’s also taking really direct actions to try to bring those prices down and I support those actions to bring those prices down. I’ll tell you this, Ed. I get around and talk to voters all around this state. The main thing about affordability is they do not trust Democrats.

Well, Rogers sure doesn’t trust Democrats on affordability, at least. That might be why he framed the situation so differently when gas prices surged to four dollars per gallon during the Joe Biden administration.

“I’m not sure we can survive $3.99 a gallon going forward,” Rogers said in a 2024 video campaigning against Democrat Elissa Slotkin. “Listen, the [Democratic] agenda moving forward on gas prices is only gonna make that worse. We must get America back on track.”

The national average price per gallon now sits at just under $4.50 per gallon, according to AAA. In Rogers’s Michigan, it’s over $4.80 per gallon.

Sen. John Cornyn, who is hanging by a thread in the Republican primary for his long-held Texas Senate seat, told me in March that on the subject of higher fuel prices, “we gotta compare that to the threat of a nuclear Iran.” Within that frame of reference, he seemed untroubled by his constituents’ pain at the pump: “I would say it’s a small price to pay to avoid a nuclear weapon in the hands of the number-one state sponsor of terrorism.”

However, Cornyn quickly acknowledged that Republicans aren’t doing a very good job of helping everyone else see things the way they do.

“I think we have to do a better job of explaining it,” he said. “But I think if the American people understood, they would certainly agree that a nuclear Iran is a terrible idea.”

In Ohio, where gas prices are hovering above $4.80 per gallon, Republican Sen. Jon Husted has been largely silent on the issue. His Democratic opponent, former Sen. Sherrod Brown, has been slamming him over his reticence.

“It’s clear this war is hurting people financially and in other ways. There’s no end in sight. [Republicans] have no idea how to end this war. They didn’t plan anything,” Brown said at a campaign event last week. “Husted hasn’t raised one voice against this war or any idea about how to end it.”

Another battleground-state Republican who has been avoiding the subject is Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). While Collins said in mid-March that she hoped the Iran war effort would be “both brief and successful,” her stock portfolio has benefited from the protracted engagement: It includes oil and natural gas investments that are booming thanks to the price increases. Collins owns stock in ConocoPhillips, which has grown substantially since late February, when Trump started the war.

The two House Republicans vying for a chance to face off against incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) in Georgia’s Senate race have been vocal in their support of the Iran war while staying relatively quiet on the increased price of gas.

Rep. Mike Collins touted lowering gas prices two months ago, but since then has avoided the issue. Nevertheless, Collins supports the war effort.

Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) briefly addressed the high gas prices in a Fox Business interview on Friday, shifting blame toward Democrats and asking viewers to remember previous fluctuations.

“He’s made us more prosperous through the Working Families Tax Cut Act3 that has put more money in people’s pockets,” Carter said of Trump. “Now, yes, we’ve seen some gas-price fluctuation. Gas prices will go back down. Remember: High gas prices are the work of the Democrats. Remember 2022: five and six dollars a gallon. That was the Democratic leadership that led to those high gas prices. But gas prices are gonna come back down.”

Georgia residents can get gas for about a dollar cheaper per gallon than folks can around the Great Lakes. Average prices in the Peach State are sitting at $3.91 as of this morning.

In a party that demands complete loyalty to the president, members’ silence on a given issue is often a key indicator of stress. That very few have even attempted to discuss high gas prices suggests the matter is top of mind for them amid the midterm election cycle.

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Small-dollar donors

In Florida’s 19th Congressional District, the Republican primary for the open House seat is attracting a very particular type of candidate: carpetbagging criminal ex-congressmen whose last names start with a “C.”

Former Reps. Chris Collins of New York and Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina have both relocated to DeSantisland in a bid to fill the vacancy left by Byron Donalds, who is campaigning for governor. Unfortunately for both candidates, there isn’t much enthusiasm for their campaigns: The primary donor to each campaign is the candidate himself, and by a massive margin.

Cawthorn donated $500,000 of his own money to his race in October. He’s also received smaller donations from a handful of other contributors, including right-wing influencer Robby Starbuck, bringing Cawthorn’s total donations up to almost $520,000. According to the FEC, Collins has not raised any outside funds at all, but he has given his own campaign more than $900,000, including an in-kind donation of approximately $8,000 worth of his autobiography, My Remarkable Life: The First Sitting Member of Congress to Endorse Donald J. Trump for President. Beyond Collins and Cawthorn, Sun Broadcasting President Jim Schwartzel—who is actually from Florida and does not have a criminal record—is also dealing himself into the race: He donated over a million dollars to his own 19th-district campaign last year.

As mentioned in the subtitle of his book, Collins famously endorsed Donald Trump in 2016 before any other elected federal official. He was later sent to prison for insider trading before catching a pardon from Trump, who has shown similar beneficence to many other criminal members of Congress. Cawthorn pleaded guilty to attempting to bring a handgun through airport security. He did not receive prison time as part of his sentence, and Trump has not indicated that he intends to pardon him again.

Collins’s and Cawthorn’s fundraising totals seem even weaker when set alongside the donations pile of Catalina Lauf, who served as a Commerce Department adviser during Trump’s first term. Lauf has raised more than $900,000 from a diverse pool of large- and small-dollar donors, which is more in line with traditional campaign behavior.

There isn’t polling on how either of the criminal carpetbaggers are expected to perform in the state’s August primary, but both campaigns have paid for internal polling services. The 19th district remains largely unchanged following Gov. Ron DeSantis’s signing of Florida’s new congressional map, so we’ll get to see how all the candidates ride this one out. How wonderful for all of us.

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The many-faced god

My Bulwark colleague Jared Poland ventured to D.C.’s hottest club (the U.S. Capitol Building) to ask members of Congress how they felt about Trump putting his face on U.S. passports to “celebrate” America’s 250th birthday, along with the follow-up question of what the president should add his mug (shot) to next.

Give the video a watch, and please let us know in the comments if you have ideas for further TMZ-style questions we can pose to lawmakers.