Graham Platner primary democrat senate win received more votes than all other democratic candidates combined!

Echo Maine Primary 2026, Graham Platner Democratic vote margin by Steve Mistler published b Maine Public 

Graham Platner gets more primary votes than any other Democratic Senate candidate in Maine history.

Graham Platner has already received more primary votes than any other Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Maine history.

Platner has received more than 150,000 votes on primary Election Day so far, according to data compiled by the Associated Press. An analysis of state election data show that's more than any of his predecessors going back to 1918 — the first year Maine began electing U.S. Senators by popular vote.

His vote share was also significantly more than all eight of the Republican candidates running for governor combined as of Thursday, with more than 90% of the votes counted. The GOP gubernatorial primary turnout was the highest it's been since 2010.

An analysis of early absentee data also suggests the combat veteran and oyster farmer may have benefited from the state's second use of semi-open primaries, which allows unenrolled voters to participate in the parties' nomination contests.

More than 18,000 unenrolled voters cast absentee ballots as of Tuesday afternoon. Seventy-five percent of those voters voted in the Democratic primary.

So far, Platner has won every town in Maine except three, Hersey, Moose River and Weston, which went to Gov. Janet Mills.

Courageous Republicans who are brave enough to abandon evil Donald Trump like Maryland Allan Kittleman

Maryland:  Allan Kittleman: Why I’m leaving the GOP (aka "Growing Old Party") | Reader Commentary published in The Baltimore Sun

After 50 years as a registered Republican, I made the difficult decision to leave the GOP party and become an unaffiliated voter.

My family spent generations helping build the Republican Party. 

My grandfather chaired his county GOP, in lowa. My father, Bob Kittleman, led the Howard County (Maryland) Republican Party and served more than two decades in the Maryland General Assembly. I followed the same path, chairing the county party, serving in the Maryland Senate — including three years as minority leader — and later as Howard County executive.

For several years, I hoped this was temporary. I stayed through 2016, through 2020, through January 6, believing the party might eventually reclaim its core values. 

But, tragically, Trump’s 2024, election and his illegal actions during the past year have made the truth unavoidable: The Republican Party has fully become the Trump maga Party. Those who refuse to fall in line are pushed out or ignored.

My own beliefs have not changed. I remain fiscally conservative and socially moderate — a combination that once had room in the GOP. It no longer does. And to be clear: I am not joining the Democratic Party. I cannot support the direction of either party, both of which have drifted toward their extremes and away from the broad middle where most Americans live.

My decision isn’t a rejection of the people in my life who remain Republicans. This is not a conversion to the other side. 

Rather, this is simply me saying I can no longer put my name next to a culture that treats disagreement as warfare and political opponents as enemies.

Yet, I try to remain optimistic about our future.

But the GOP party we devoted our lives to no longer exists.😟😥

The GOP once stood for limited government, fiscal discipline and individual liberty. Today, it is defined by loyalty to one man: Donald Trump. Principles that once guided Republican leaders — even in moments of national crisis — have been replaced by a demand for personal allegiance. The independence Republicans showed during Watergate has all but vanished. Too many elected officials now treat dissent as betrayal.

Most Americans want something better ❗than the politics of fear, outrage and blind loyalty.

What we want are leaders who tell the truth, who listen, who solve problems and who put country above personal ambition. We want public service grounded in integrity, not intimidation. I will continue to advocate for these principles and for leaders who fit this profile.

For me, leaving the Republican Party is painful. It means stepping away from a lifelong identity and a family legacy I deeply respect. But staying meant accepting what the party has become — and I refuse to do that.

From— Allan H. Kittleman, West Friendship, Maryland

Kittleman is a former Republican Senate minority leader in the Maryland General Assembly and was the Howard County executive.

Donald Trump said he does not think about consumers! Yes, he said that!

Donald Trump Is Now the Un-Populist

Donald Trump, on May 12, 2026, while taking questions from reporters about the Iran conflict. When asked if he was considering Americans' financial situations during negotiations, he responded, "Not even a little bit."

Published in New York Magazine Intelligencer by Ed Kilgore

From the expensive and unnecessary ballroom to the illegal Iran war, to blatant self-dealing, Donald Trump is ignoring the will of the people — to his Growing Old Party's peril.

Less than four months from now, early voting begins in the 2026, midterm general elections. Political scientists differ on exactly when voting intentions are formed, but the consensus is that for the vast majority of the electorate, it happens well before the last-minute rush of campaigning. Most Republicans, whose control of Congress is at risk in November, are acutely aware that they are running out of time to convince swing voters that their sour perceptions of Donald Trump’s job performance — always the single most important variable affecting midterm outcomes — are erroneous. And at almost every turn, the president seems to be on a mission to make that as hard as possible.

While assessments of Trump’s handling of a broad range of issues have remained well underwater for over a year now, there are particularly and especially salient negative perceptions of how well he’s dealt with high living costs (arguably the issue that most determined his 2024 victory over Kamala Harris) and whether his strange and aimless war with Iran was a good idea. Trump’s two biggest problems are dangerously interactive, since the Iran war’s effect on global energy prices has clearly boosted domestic inflation, and his prosecution of this “war of choice” has come to symbolize his refusal to focus on the public’s actual concerns. For all the interminable discussion of a GOP “affordability agenda,” it’s getting very late in the year for that agenda to suddenly appear.

And, most recently, despite the intense loyalty congressional Republicans have consistently shown toward Trump, an unprecedented revolt has broken out, for the moment shutting down the legislative process. The growing GOP grievance is that Trump is continuing to elevate personal hobbyhorses (e.g., his White House ballroom project, which he now wants taxpayers to subsidize, and his bizarre new slush fund for alleged victims of Biden administration persecution) over the measures Republicans need to stay in office.


The implications of this revolt go beyond smooth executive-legislative relations or even the unity of the GOP. Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump from the perspective of ethics, policy, the U.S. Constitution, or the health of democratic institutions, his prowess as a gut-level politician has been universally, if grudgingly, respected. An essential ingredient of the loyalty he has inspired in the Republican ranks has been his ability to bend traditional conservatism to “populism,” a voter-friendly blend of themes and proposals that probably saved the GOP from the irrelevance it seemed to be courting before he came down the escalator in 2015. He famously convinced a party in love with “entitlement reform” to lay off trying to slaughter the sacred cows of Social Security and Medicare. He talked Republicans out of a near century of free-trade orthodoxy because culturally conservative blue-collar voters hated NAFTA. And he convinced the militarist wing of the GOP that massive defense spending didn’t require actually using it in unpopular “forever wars.”

Now comes the terrifying possibility that the man who made Republicans “populists” is himself becoming the ultimate un-populist. Trump is not just ignoring (or, because he can only acknowledge praise of himself, actively denying) public opinion; he seems to be courting unpopularity. Americans really dislike his beloved tariffs, and although Trump has the perfect legal excuses to stop pursuing them, he still persists. Trump can’t stop bashing Obamacare, even though he got badly burned on the subject in his first term and has no coherent replacement for it. His war in Iran was the rare U.S. war that was unpopular from the get-go, but he can’t seem to let go of it, and it’s an even bet he’ll start another war before suppertime. The political “outsider” who was too rich to bribe is now the consummate insider grabbing money with both hands to enrich his family and friends and the most disreputable of his supporters.

Most astonishing of all, the veteran entertainer who understood the intense resentment of working people for elites who seemed to mock them while fleecing them is now becoming the elitist-in-chief. He is explicitly annoyed that people struggling to make ends meet don’t appreciate they are living in a “golden age” in which stock markets climb dizzily upward on record corporate profits. He’s angry that Americans don’t just take his word for it that they need to pay higher prices for gasoline or light and heat so that he can win some more wars and peace prizes. And he is indifferent at best to how very bad it looks that he is devoting more time to his many tacky and self-glorifying vanity projects than to his day job. Many regular folk used to enjoy watching Trump thumb his nose at the powers that be. Now he’s the Man, the very opposite of a plucky underdog.

For Republicans who desperately need his help to retain their offices and their power, it increasingly appears that Trump has lost touch with the country. Yes, he’ll help them in the midterms by rigging congressional districts and perhaps interfering with the vote itself, but not by bending to adverse public opinion. It would be one thing if like some second-term presidents of the past, he drifted toward lame-duck status and began ceding power to his allies and successors. But no: Trump dominates news media and the political landscape more forcefully and ubiquitously than ever. (The more Trump talks, the more he contradicts himself and his advisors.)

He’s in danger not only of squandering his party’s midterm-election hopes, but of handing his putative heir J.D. Vance an anvil and the GOP an indelible MAGA brand — even as the idea that he has restored “American greatness” becomes ridiculous to all but his fiercest acolytes.

It’s possible, of course, that such assessments once again underestimate the 47th. Perhaps, against all expectations, he will snap out of his extended fugue state and begin listening to the public and his party leaders. But, Donald Trump would be well advised to make his 80th-birthday wish Make Trump popular again. In the meantime, the candle  he’s already🕯️ blowing out is his own.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must face the truth. Donald Trump has a list of impeachable offenses Senator Susan Collins alert!

Trump will be impeached in 2027.  Philadelphia Inquirer opinion, by columnist Will Bunch.

(BTW, where is Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins❓)

War❗ Good God, y’all. Since my music brain stopped growing around age 11, Edwin Starr’s “War,” a No. 1 hit from the fall of 1970, always gets stuck in my head every time the United States starts dropping bombs on yet another foreign land, and the tune usually stays there for a long time. 

Meanwhile, there’s not much new to say about Donald Trump’s folly in the Persian Gulf. The bombs keep coming down. Gas prices keep going up. And what is it good for❓ Absolutely nothing.

A political bombshell fell over the weekend. You just didn’t hear it, thanks to all the real bombshells that fell across the Persian Gulf and the Middle East as Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war of choice against Iran slogged into its third week.

It had to do with one of the 1,700 pardons or commutations that Donald Trump has issued since he returned to office 14 months ago — including just about everyone involved in the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021 but also a rogue’s gallery of ex-GOP officials, crypto scammers, and politically connected folks making massive donations.

Thanks to federal prosecutors, the dark underbelly of the Trump pardon machine was unexpectedly revealed in a court case that, the New York Times reported, appears to be related to a nursing home mogul named Joseph Schwartz. He pleaded guilty in 2024, to federal charges around failing to pay 💲40 million in payroll and Social Security taxes and was sentenced to three years. But, Schwartz only served about three months, after Trump abruptly issued the millionaire a pardon last November.

The Times reported that Schwartz hired a conservative lawyer and friend of Donald Trump Jr. named Josh Nass as a “pardon broker,” an increasingly lucrative business under Trump Sr.’s lax interpretation of his clemency responsibilities. Records show that Schwartz paid Nass 💲100,000, but — according to the Times account — the lawyer apparently believed he was owed a lot more.

According to a federal indictment, Nass hired a Russian-speaking convicted felon to collect another 💲500,000 from his client, telling his alleged goon to “do anything and everything” to get the money. Prosecutors in Brooklyn have now charged Nass with extortion in the matter.

What did the president, and his aides and allies, know about Nass’s pursuit of a pardon payday, and when did they know it❓ 

We don’t know, nor do we know the facts behind the October pardon of Binance cryptocurrency founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who does substantial crypto business with the Trump family, or auto billionaire Trevor Milton, also pardoned last year after donating 💲900,000 to pro-Trump groups, or Paul Walczak, a Florida nursing home executive whose mom gave 💲1 million to a pro-Trump super-PAC and 12 days later ... you guessed it, got a pardon.

Thanks to federal prosecutors, the dark underbelly of the Trump pardon machine was unexpectedly revealed in a court case that, the New York Times reported, appears to be related to a nursing home mogul named Joseph Schwartz. He pleaded guilty in 2024, to federal charges around failing to pay 💲40 million in payroll and Social Security taxes and was sentenced to three years. But Schwartz only served about three months, after Trump abruptly issued the millionaire a pardon last November.

What did the president, and his aides and allies, know about Nass’s pursuit of a pardon payday, and when did they know it❓ We don’t know, nor do we know the facts behind the October pardon of Binance cryptocurrency founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who does substantial crypto business with the Trump family, or auto billionaire Trevor Milton, also pardoned last year after donating 💲900,000 to pro-Trump groups, or Paul Walczak, a Florida nursing home executive whose mom gave 💲1 million to a pro-Trump super-PAC and 12 days later ... you guessed it, got a pardon.

There’s a lot more like this, but you get the point.

Trump’s dodgy pardon practices, with millions of dollars changing greasy palms, deserve a major, Watergate-style investigation. That’s not going to happen — not in 2026, anyway. One Brooklyn blip doesn’t change the reality that Trump’s Justice Department and its lapdog attorney general, Pam Bondi, mainly only do white-collar probes of Trump’s perceived enemies. The Republicans who control both houses of Congress would rather wield their subpoena powers against Hillary Clinton.

But it’s looking more and more likely that a big part of this equation is going to change in January. Nothing is a lock in American politics — sorry, Polymarket bettors — but Democrats have a healthy lead in the polls ahead of this fall’s midterm election, have flipped seat after seat since 2024, and are posting big early turnout numbers.

With Trump’s popularity falling with every uptick of the gas pump, November is looking now like a wave election for Democrats who only need a couple more seat flips to regain the House majority. The party’s new committee chairs will find themselves with power to investigate whatever suspected misdeeds of MAGA World they want to, And — as we saw twice during Trump’s first term — it only takes a simple majority vote to impeach a president.

As Trump himself is well aware. “You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be — I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” POTUS 47 told House Republicans at a gathering in January, Well, there actually are reasons.

It’s kind of the opposite of what happened in 2023 when the GOP retook the House with a burning zeal to impeach Joe Biden but didn’t really have anything to charge him with. With Trump, it’s more than a matter of, where does one start? For example:

• The pardon mess, as described above. Trump’s outrageous abuse of his clemency pen has proved America’s founders made a big mistake in granting such absolute power to just one man. Congressional hearings can and should spur pardon reform, but could also expose evidence that could be used in a Trump impeachment case.

• Cryptogate. Presidents used to put their assets in a blind trust, as Jimmy Carter famously did with his peanut farm. Trump, on the other hand, keeps doing deals and has seen his net worth roughly triple to more than $6 billion in just the first year of his second term. There are many tentacles to what I called Cryptogate with this handy guide I published last spring. Trump’s pump-and-dump meme coin launched on inauguration weekend seems a high crime unto itself.

• War crimes. The war in Iran is illegal,❗. The president did not seek congressional approval to start dropping bombs up and down the Persian Gulf as required by both the U.S. Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Act. It’s also an illegal, aggressive war under international law. Ditto his regime-change assault on Venezuela, which killed more than 100 people. Ditto his regime’s unending lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which have no legal basis. Congress can reassert its authority by impeaching Trump.

• Abuse of power in the justice system. The flip side of Trump’s pardons has been the unprecedented attempt to use the Justice Department to go after the president’s perceived enemies, from former FBI chief James Comey to Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell. These investigations, directly urged on by Trump in Truth Social posts, have repeatedly failed to pass muster with judges or grand juries, but that doesn’t erase the stain of such clearly wrongful prosecutions.

This list doesn’t even cover some of the more morally repugnant aspects of the Trump regime, such as the brutal and too often deadly mass deportation program and the push to build inhumane warehouse detention centers. Nor does it anticipate future surprises, like the Ukraine phone calls that sparked Trump’s first impeachment in late 2019.

It also doesn’t include the political calculation facing House Democrats. Baring a dramatic change in the zeitgeist, there still won’t be the 67 Senate votes needed to remove Trump from office — a likely replay of his first two impeachments. 

Some will argue that impeachment would be a distraction or even a time waster, preventing Congress from tackling meat-and-potatoes legislation.

That’s not the point. Arguably the biggest task facing the 120th Congress will be simply proving that the United States is still governed by the rule of law. Nothing is more central to that than reestablishing that high crimes and misdemeanors against the Constitution have consequences — including the stain of impeachment.

Most importantly, impeachment hearings are the vehicle to air Trump’s wrongdoing before the American people — much as it was during his first term. 

A national denunciation of a president’s abuse of power — even if it doesn’t end Trump’s presidency — is the first step toward making sure it never happens again. 

All American with an ethical conscience ask the same political question? How did our nation get to this terrible place?

In "Who Speaks for Us?" (March 2026), Marilynne Robinson argues in The New York Review of Books that true democracy, not "populism," is the essential response to corruption and the abuse of power. She emphasizes the dignity and authority of the people, warning against the degradation caused by arrogance and avarice.

An echo essay published in New York Review of Books:

The political leaders and elected representatives of our two-party system have made it into a weapon that works against the people.

• Core Argument: Robinson contends that modern two-party politics often weaponizes systems against the people.
• The Solution: She advocates for a return to genuine democratic principles and warns that populist movements often merely reflect the "inchoate" - not yet fully developed or in the process of becoming- resentments of a subordinated class.
• Perspective: As a novelist and essayist known for her Christian, Calvinist-influenced perspective (e.g., Gilead), she often critiques contemporary political culture from a moral and intellectual standpoint.
  
  When Donald Trump was first elected to the presidency, a British friend asked me if his authoritarian tendencies were a real threat to America. No, I said, because the country had so many autonomous centers of power to constrain him—the press, the unions and professions, the universities, the courts, the states, and, of course, various types and sources of political opposition. Not all these supposed checks on his power have capitulated absolutely, but enough of them have capitulated to raise fundamental questions about the country we thought we had and the country we have now. It will always be true that we have seen the Constitution effectively brushed aside by a superannuated game show host who galvanizes his base with talk of showerheads and windmills and the demonic nastiness of the other party. All this is so strange that it is hard to imagine how history will take any lessons from it. It would seem grossly improbable that a billionaire—rich from birth and repeatedly bankrupt yet still a billionaire—could lead a movement of angry “populism.” But here we are.
  
  There are too many answers to the question “What went wrong❓I turn to the two-party system because, although it is at present its own worst enemy, there is still hope that it can allow the great public to make decisions about the course of government. It has gone wrong, too, but it can change, almost passively, if it happens to channel the decisions of an impassioned electorate. 

Insofar as it gives voters power, it is imperiled. It can thwart the intentions of very powerful interests and individuals. This is an assertion of democracy, wonderful or regrettable and benighted, but in any case essential if the historical character of the country is to be preserved.

Our elections have been based on there being two great factions that alternate in roles of power without much conflict. The problems of the system have been largely manageable. Three or more parties lead to the rule of a minority able to provide or deny the numbers necessary to produce a ruling plurality. Government by a group few people actually voted for, that can always threaten to withdraw their support if its interests are not looked after, is not an improvement. One-party government is synonymous with dictatorship.

Any free election is, in effect, a referendum. Our binary system can be taken to express either a Yes or a No. More granular interpretations are left to commentators or the opinion polls, or the parties themselves. This leaves the public voice vulnerable to being misread, or to being tendentiously misinterpreted. To the extent that this takes effect, the public has been denied its voice.

Recently there was a Democratic sweep of a series of special elections. What did this mean? In a moment as fraught as this one, it would be good to know what the people are thinking. An issue that supposedly decided these various contests was settled upon immediately—affordability❗

This six syllable word assumes that the problem is not that income has stagnated but that certain grocery items, lettuce and eggs, are too expensive. Higher wages would transform the economy. It would be a redistribution of wealth, however modest. Fiddling around with the price of a few groceries would be cheap and easy. An added, much more significant advantage, it would preempt and dismiss the possibility that the great, sovereign electorate might have anything serious, anything relevant to the well-being of their country, anything generous, on their minds.

• billfold and 
• kitchen table.

These are the two terms used to express the condescension that entraps the voting public, in the way they are addressed by politicians and campaigns, and in the way they and their views are understood and brought to bear on public life. I was instructed by a Democratic candidate for state office on the mesmeric power of the word “affordability,” recently demonstrated so effectively. So the meaningfulness of a solid No to the present regime is reduced to an issue Trump can neuter by waving his (the Treasury Department’s) checkbook.

At one time, the two-party system fit fairly nicely within the structure of our government. The U.S. House and the Senate were deliberative bodies with important constitutional authority, which meant that there were differences within the parties as well as between them. 

Then came Newt Gingrich, a Roman Catholic convert and the creation of GOP party discipline. Republicans discovered the wrongminded power that came with sticking to the party line, however this tactic disempowered individual lawmakers and their constituencies, not to mention the institution of Congress itself. Constitutional obligations lost out to partisan power. Then came the next evil inspiration. They could change the constitutional order by simply playing dead. When they controlled the House, they could refuse to govern, leaving it to the president to fill the void, to do by executive order what should be done by legislation. This strengthens the president, weakens the law by circumvention, and defeats the intentions of the Founders with consequences they insistently predicted. And, it excludes opposition influences and radically minimizes public discussion.

So, now we have a grotesquely 🤢empowered Donald Trump. 

Because of Trump's hubris, great institutions are diminished and humiliated, the House of Representatives being first. 

The No available to the people in our binary system is associated with the Democratic Party, whoever they are. 

The great issues of these days must be confronted by the people. Whatever their (our) shortcomings are, we are figures of shining integrity compared with those who now presume to govern. 

A braver press would educate us better, certainly, but we know enough to be appalled at the grave threats to freedom and justice we see in our streets.

Only consider: Donald Trump claims that many billions of dollars have come in as a result of his tariffs. He speaks of this as a sort of slush fund that he can use as he sees fit, maybe reducing taxes or just mailing out checks to the public, benevolently repairing injuries done by his government to those he thinks will vote for him. But the fact is,  Americans are paying the cost of those tariffs. 

So, it is Americans’ money💲 that is being siphoned into this vast pool, with inevitable consequences for “affordability.” They never voted for tariffs, and in the recent special elections they might well have voted against them. If all this money were collected by taxation, at least the public might have some input into the use of it, especially if they had a functioning House. If Trump extracts $10 billion from his suit against the IRS, where will that money go? This bizarre super-economy of ultra-wealth can create self-protective arrangements neither the laws nor the Founders anticipated, together with a culture of cynicism ready to exploit its worst possibilities.

Money and power corrupt. The proper response to this ancient truth is not “populism,” which expresses the inchoate resentments of a subordinated class, and which has shown itself to be helpless against gross abuses. The one thing needed is democracy. We have seen the people speak and act from a deep awareness of their uniquely legitimate authority. We have seen their humanity, their dignity, and their wisdom. At the same time we have also seen the degradations that follow from arrogance, avarice and impunity. The contrast is as stark and instructive as any moral fable.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans have no plan for the evil and illegal World War in Iran causing Middle East instability

Trump’s war on Iran is already a muddled mess | Echo Editorial published in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Nearly two weeks into the war, Donald Trump’s chaos and confusion have remade the world into a more dangerous place.

Donald Trump has no plan for the World War with Iran and is surrounded by unserious people like Pete Hegseth, the clownish defense secretary.

On the same day Donald Trump said the war in Iran could end “very soon,” the Defense Department declared on social media, “We have Only Just Begun to Fight.” 😟😒

The mixed messaging was in keeping with the president’s circular reasoning for his war of whim. He has cycled through an ever-changing list of reasons for starting the war, including regime change, preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, stopping terrorist proxies, and wiping out its navy.

Out of the confusion this much is clear: Trump has no idea what he is doing, and his word is no good. Nearly two weeks into the war, Trump’s chaos and confusion have remade the world into a more dangerous place.

More unsettling perhaps, it appears Trump was misled into war by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister who faces corruption charges at home and allegations of having committed war crimes abroad. Talk about a role model. 🙄😓

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. entered the war because Israel was prepared to act first. He tried to walk back the comments but the New York Times detailed a timeline of how Netanyahu manipulated Trump.

Netanyahu has already destroyed most of Gaza. Is that the plan for Iran❓


U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) hinted at a different endgame when he said once the Iran regime is toppled, “we’re gonna make a ton of money.” (His claim makes no sense. What is a "ton of money"❓ Meaningless, just a figure of speech expression.)

Send in Trump’s profiteers, son-in-law Jared Kushner and developer Steve Witkoff. Never have two unelected and unqualified men made more money for themselves while accomplishing so little.

If only some of the U.S. firepower used to bomb Iran went to stop Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, then Trump may have had a legitimate claim to the Nobel Peace Prize.

Instead, when asked about Russia sharing intelligence to help Iran attack U.S. warships, aircraft, and other military interests, Trump called the question “stupid.”

Trump’s continued subservience to Putin is a stunning abdication of his duty to protect and defend the United States.

Likewise, the Republicans in Congress (like Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins) remain uninterested in fulfilling their constitutional duty to act as a check on the president after voting down a resolution to halt the war in Iran.

U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, the Democrat from Pennsylvania who frequently represents Mar-a-Lago, joined with the GOP in paving the way for more war. In the House, all the Republicans from Pennsylvania, including Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick from Bucks County, did the same.

No debate and just a blank check from Congress.

So, what exactly have Trump and his enablers gained by attacking Iran❓

Here’s a quick accounting:

• Oil prices surged and the stock market was whipsawed.
• The economic shock could stoke inflation and fuel the faltering job market.
• The war is costing taxpayers almost $1 billion a day.
• Seven U.S. service members died and about 140 have been injured, eight severely.
• More than 1,200 Iranians have been killed, including roughly 175 people, most of them children, at a school struck by a U.S. missile that Trump refuses to own up to.
• Thousands of Americans were left stranded in a war zone.
• Bombing Iran’s oil depots unleashed thick black smoke and a toxic rain that threatened the air quality and the food and water supply.

The inhumanity risks turning the Iranian people further against America, while making the U.S. a pariah state.

The only positive development was the removal of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s ruthless supreme leader.

However, Khamenei, 86, was replaced by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, who is likely to continue Iran’s hard-line theocratic rule.

So, essentially Trump traded an aging ayatollah for a younger version who lost his father, wife, and a son in the attacks.

Don’t expect any olive branches from Tehran, which responded with missile and drone strikes in 10 countries across the Middle East.

The regime may be battered but it remains dangerous.

An unrestrained and vindictive Trump is also dangerous. He has no plan and is surrounded by unserious people like Pete Hegseth, the clownish defense secretary.

The White House social media account celebrated the war with a disgusting juvenile video that wove snippets of Hollywood movies and video games with real footage of the military strikes in Iran.

Goodbye to the greatest generation. The U.S. is now led by a confederacy of dunces.

Trump looked every bit the head fool as he sported a branded white baseball hat with USA emblazoned in gold that he sells for $55 on his merch website while attending the dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base of the first six U.S. soldiers killed in the war.

While the war in Iran drags on, Trump is already talking about toppling Cuba.

Apparently, all the world’s a stage as the president wreaks global chaos and accomplishes little beyond sowing death, destruction, and suffering.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are responsible for illegally supporting the U.S. invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping Maduro with his wife

 Echo opinion letter published in the Virginian Pilot newspaper

The recent strike (invasion) against Venezuela, and the forceful removal of President Nicolás Maduro with his wife Celia Flores, by Donald Trump, is a violation of our Constitution. 

Although it is true, Maduro is corrupt and an authoritarian, the fact is, Human Rights Watch describes abuses by rulers violating human rights that occur globally in nearly 100 countries — not just in Venezuela. 

Consider places such as North Korea. If Trump was really concerned about abuses, he would offer Ukraine more support against the Russian war crimes that have been committed.

The decision to use military force is in the hands of the Congress because the consequences will not end with an initial strike. The decision should not be in the hands of Trump, who is using the U.S. military as his own strike force. 

(By the way, the illegal U.S. invasion and kidnapping of Maduro and his wife caused the deaths of 80 people. Reports from Venezuelan officials and media, including The New York Times, state that at least 80 people were killed, including both civilians and military personnel, during the recent U.S. military operation in Venezuela.)

Consider his initial use of the National Guard in U.S. cities against citizens, the boat strikes in the Caribbean, the Nigerian airstrikes and bombing Iranian nuclear sites — all without congressional oversight.

As we review responses regarding the illegal Venezuelan strike, the GOP, including the wrong minded Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans, praised the operation. ❓ They used the excuse that drugs were arriving in the U.S. from Venezuela and it needed to stop. A small percentage of illegal drugs are traced to Venezuela. (In fact, no illegal drugs have been produced to provide evidence to support this claim.  No drugs were confiscated from any of the destroyed Venezuelan fishing boats sunk at sea, no drugs were reported to be found on the empty Venezuelan oil tankers taken over by the U.S. military, and Maduro and his wife were not in possession of illegal drugs when they were kidnapped.)

The reality is that cocaine arrives from Colombia predominantly by way of Mexico. More than 80% of the chemicals used to manufacture fentanyl come from China and is made into fentanyl in Mexico. Then the drug make is smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border.

What Venezuela has is oil. That is what Trump desires. Congress must act to stop his unbridled use of our military. If it is legitimate, then get approval from Congress. The Constitution demands it❗

From Patty Bates, in Virginia Beach, Virginia 

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must reject evilism spewed by Tucker Carlson and antisemite Nick Fuentes

"Tucker Carlson is fog," writes John Mac Ghlionn in this interesting political analysis published in the Boston Globe.

John Mac Ghlionn contributes regularly to US News & World Report, Spectator World, and The Hill.

Tucker Carlson recently chose to interview the evil Nazi

Nick Fuentes, a man loathed by most of the American left and by a substantial share of the American right. Fuentes is widely understood, across ideological lines, as toxic. 

Fuentes has spoken admiringly of figures like💢 Hitler and Stalin, flirted openly with antisemitic ✡️conspiracy theories, rejected the legitimacy of liberal democracy, argued that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, and spoken approvingly of political violence and ethnic nationalism. None of this is ambiguous. None of it requires interpretation. Fuentes has said disgraceful things. Full stop.💢❗

But, politically speaking, the evil Fuentes is a much easier problem for Republicans to handle than Carlson is. 

Fuentes is an threatening evil flare 🔥in the night sky. 

Evil, crude, and easy to track. Everyone knows where he stands. He doesn’t pretend to be a loyal party man. He has withheld support when it suited him, including refusing to back Trump in 2024. He attacks Trump directly, in plain language, without deflecting blame onto lower-level figures.

So, it allows the maga Republicans to say, “That’s not us,” 🤥and (sort of❓) mean it.🙄 Fuentes functions, in this sense, as a kind of ideological quarantine zone. He is visible, legible, and — crucially — containable.  (Except that Fuentes continues to attract attention making him dangerous. "Evil is as evil does". His evilism is like an evil magnet that catches metal nails.) 

Carlson is weirdly different. Not because he is “worse” in the moral-ranking sense people enjoy arguing about online, but because he is more structurally dangerous to the GOP. 

Fuentes is outside the house, shouting. Carlson is inside the house, rearranging furniture, insisting he is only “asking questions” while he does it.

Before going further, I should be explicit about where this criticism comes from.

I write this as a conservative who regularly watches Carlson — his YouTube clips, his long-form interviews, his podcasts. This is not the view of a drive-by critic or a partisan adversary. It comes from sustained exposure. And that exposure has become increasingly frustrating. 

Carlson says one thing and then does another. (Ugh❗ "who  knew"❓) He gestures toward restraint and then indulges provocation. He flirts with accountability and then retreats into ambiguity. When viewers notice the contradiction, he waves it away — cackles, shrugs, insists they’re imagining things. What he sells as misunderstanding is, in fact, gaslighting, and any attentive viewer can see it.👀

There’s an old principle here. The better enemy is often the one you can see. The threat you can name. The real trouble is the fog that rolls in quietly and convinces you it’s just “weather.”

Carlson is fog.

He is the kind of “dissident” who wants insider access and outsider swagger, Establishment proximity and anti-Establishment theatrics. He throws stones from behind the wall and then acts surprised when people notice his name etched into them.

This isn’t an abstract concern. In late December, more than a dozen senior staffers left the Heritage Foundation to join a new group founded by former vice president Mike Pence. Their exit followed internal turmoil sparked by the growing influence of right-wing media figures pushing antisemitic and extremist narratives. Carlson became a central flashpoint because he occupies a uniquely powerful position within conservative media — powerful enough to force institutions to choose sides.

The rupture was not really about Carlson alone. It was about what he represented, and what defending — or refusing to defend — him signaled. Editors, donors, board members, and allied organizations faced an uncomfortable choice: Was Carlson still an asset to be shielded or a liability to be contained? The fracture followed those answers. Some closed ranks around him, viewing criticism as Establishment overreach. Others stepped back from him, driven less by ideological disagreement than by their instinct for institutional survival.

The Heritage Foundation bombshell came shortly after Turning Point USA’s annual youth conference — intended as a unifying celebration honoring Charlie Kirk — devolved into a public brawl over the future of Trump’s movement. Ben Shapiro used the stage to deliver a scathing attack on Carlson and his allies, calling them “grifters and charlatans” trafficking in conspiracy theories and falsehoods. 

Carlson took the stage soon after and fired back, escalating the confrontation before thousands of young conservative activists. That moment mattered because it revealed real fault lines in the conservative coalition. Internal division creates opportunity, especially for figures like Carlson, who thrive on provocation and plausible deniability.

The pattern was evident in Carlson’s recent trip to Qatar, when he headlined the Doha Forum, interviewed Qatar’s prime minister, and then announced he was buying property in Qatar “to make a statement,” insisting he’s “an American and a free man” who will live wherever he wants. That’s a remarkable posture for a man whose brand is built on warning Americans about hostile ideologies, foreign money, and the slow-motion sabotage of the West.

Qatar is not some harmless foreign backdrop for a trolling gesture. Rather, Qatar is a hostile regime that has long operated as a banker, broker, and diplomatic shield for Islamist terror networks, including Hamas and Hezbollah. It hosts Hamas’s political leadership, funds aligned groups, and functions as a key back channel in conflicts that have spilled Western blood. Whatever one thinks about Israel, Gaza, or Middle Eastern politics more broadly, Qatar sits at the center of the reality being ignored.

The problem becomes clearer in Carlson’s treatment of Israel and Jews. This is not a defense of Israel or of Christian Zionism, both of which are legitimate subjects for debate and criticism. The issue is Carlson’s insistence on having it both ways. He regularly says he “likes Israel” even as he repeatedly singles it out for scorn, derides Christian Zionism, and peppers his commentary with remarks about Jews that are clearly designed to provoke. 

In the eulogy for Charlie Kirk, Carlson likened Kirk to Jesus and invoked shadowy “people in power” conspiring in lamplit rooms, “eating hummus,” to silence truth-tellers. 

The implication was unambiguous, even if it went unnamed. When challenged, Carlson retreats behind the claim that he isn’t antisemitic  ✡️. It’s a familiar routine: push the line, gauge the reaction, deny intent.

Fuentes, by contrast, dispenses with pretense. He calls himself an antisemite ✡️ and means it. 🤢 His views are abhorrent, 💢but they are unmistakable. He doesn’t hide behind irony or implication. Republicans don’t have to guess where he stands. With Carlson, they are invited to 

pretend there is nothing to see. This is why Fuentes is useful as a foil and why Carlson is the real bellwether. The test isn’t whether conservatives denounce a 27-year-old shock merchant. That part is easy. The real test is whether conservatives will confront Carlson’s far more consequential pattern of deception and evasion.

This is what makes Carlson dangerous in a way Fuentes isn’t. Fuentes doesn’t have institutional leverage. He can’t tilt committee staffers. He can’t normalize a new foreign-policy fashion among influencers who actually shape the party’s mood. He can’t blur the line between “America First” and “Qatar First” while still being treated, by many, as a serious man.

Tucker Carlson can. He has a second kind of leverage, too: family adjacency to real power. His son, Buckley, works for Vice President JD Vance.

That doesn’t mean Carlson dictates policy through his son. It means Carlson’s ecosystem overlaps with the governing ecosystem. The “outsider” is not outside. He is in the wiring. He is close enough to touch the current.

And what does Carlson do with that position? He almost never fires cleanly at the top. He rarely, if ever, says “Trump is wrong, and here is why.” Instead, he attacks the perimeter: appointees, advisers, agencies, “neocons,” “globalists,” nameless operators — anyone who can be blamed without forcing a direct break with the one man whose coalition he still wants to influence.

It’s how you remain “inside” and “against” at the same time. It’s how you get to market yourself as a martyr while still dining at court.

I have grown disillusioned with the right — fed up with evasions, with the Epstein nonanswers, with the reflexive closing of ranks whenever accountability might cost something. This isn’t the opposition talking; it’s disappointment from someone who once believed Trump could actually Make America Great Again. I was wrong. The second term has been more erratic, not less. The promised draining of the swamp never happened; power simply reorganized itself. Tucker Carlson didn’t oppose the marshy makeover. He learned how to thrive within it. And that is why he poses a greater danger to Republicans than Fuentes.

Liberals may be tempted to dismiss this as a family quarrel on the right. That is a mistake. Trump is already a volatile leader, and he still has three years left in office. Internal divisions within his coalition are widening, not narrowing. As Trump's political opposition pressure mounts, he lashes out more frequently, targets more erratically, and governs more impulsively.

Republicans will not win in the midterms in 2026 — and continue to govern after 2028 — when they  continue to blindly support Donald Trump like lemmings heading off a cliff.  Fuentes is an evil marginal figure who is easy to reject, but Carlson is ambitious, he aspires to be a powerful media figure who presents himself as a truth-teller while slowly expanding what the wrongminded Republican party is willing to accept, excuse, and blindly defend.