Politics

A federal judge late Monday dismissed portions of a lawsuit brought by “Alligator Alcatraz” detainees, handing the Trump administration a partial win in its pushback on allegations that the migrants aren’t being given sufficient access to attorneys.  U.S. District Judge Rodolfo Ruiz agreed the administration’s new designation of a Miami-based immigration court to handle the detainees’ cases makes their…

President Donald Trump on Tuesday returned to his tactic of blaming Ukraine for Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of the nation. Trump’s latest edition of his blame game comes as his recent attempts to negotiate an end to the war have foundered. “It’s not a war that should have been started. You don’t do that—you don’t take on a nation that’s 10 times your size,” Trump said during an appearance on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends,” widely understood to be his favorite show on the right-wing network. YouTube Video Russia chose to violate Ukraine’s sovereignty in 2022, in a repeat of their seizure of Crimea in 2014. Ukraine responded to the invasion by defending their nation, a response that virtually all nations in the world—including the United States—would pursue in a similar situation. Since the conflict began, Ukraine estimates that more than 46,000 of their soldiers have been killed, as of February. A United Nations report published in December 2024 estimated that more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in the conflict as well. A public bus stop is damaged after a Russian air attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, on July 21. Trump’s rhetoric, beyond insulting Ukraine’s resistance, also denigrates the American war of independence, which saw our small nation taking on what at the time was a global superpower with a large military. Trump also told Fox that he had given “my assurance” that no Americans would be deployed to defend Ukraine against further Russian aggression if a peace deal is ever agreed upon. The Fox News appearance comes after a pair of high-level foreign policy meetings between Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (along with a host of European leaders backing Zelenskyy). Trump failed to secure an agreement to end the war despite repeatedly boasting as he campaigned for the presidency that he would solve the issue on his first day in office. Instead the world has watched as Trump caved to Putin’s demands and pushed Zelenskyy to give in to continued Russian brutality. FOX: What was the reaction among European leaders when you decided to call Putin during your meeting? TRUMP: I didn’t do it in front of them. I thought that would be disrespectful to President Putin. — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-08-19T12:23:21.077Z Trump even told the Fox News hosts that his widely criticized phone call with Putin that occurred while he spoke to European leaders happened in private because he feared it would be “disrespectful to President Putin.” In the aftermath of his diplomatic failures, Trump has once again emerged as a shill for Putin. He has time and again lied about the underlying causes of the war, blaming Ukraine when Russia is at fault. Trump’s rhetoric bolsters the case of Putin, whom a bipartisan Senate investigation determined was working on Trump’s behalf to intervene in the 2016 presidential election. Trump continues to repay his major political ally.

PoliticusUSA is 100% reader-supported, and we need your help. Please stand with us by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now Something happened in the 2024 election that isn’t discussed enough. The Republican Party spent tens of millions of dollars boosting mail-in voting and undoing the damage caused by Trump in 2020 to their mail-in voting program. The result was that Republicans narrowed the mail-in voting advantage that Democrats enjoyed in 2020, and the Republican increase in vote-by-mail played a big role in the GOP’s victory. Trump is trying to sabotage his party ahead of the 2026 election by attacking vote-by-mail. The president’s latest claim that he can get rid of mail-in ballots with an executive order is absurd. Fair Elections CEO Rebecka Caruthers was asked how Trump could get rid of mail-in ballots on CNN, and she answered: He can’t. So he could go ahead and bring it on. He could go ahead and sign a fictitious, legally non-legal executive order. But many groups, many civil rights groups and voting rights groups and people of sound judgment are going to fight him on this. Quite frankly, the states should be up in arms because he does not have the ability to order the states to cease mail-in ballots. Each state gets to decide how they’re going to conduct elections. Video: In fact, we have some states now that are 100% mail-in ballots, so he simply can’t do it. But also Congress. Where are you? We need you to stand up to this president because you are a coequal branch of government. The president can’t just unilaterally decide what he’s going to do. Where is the courts? Where is the Supreme Court? The Supreme Court is the branch of government that’s supposed to interpret the Constitution. And here it is a constitutional overreach. If Trump moves forward in trying to get rid of mail-in ballots. PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Trump’s latest outburst is a combination of distraction theater and his inability to let the 2020 election go. Trump has convinced himself that the 2020 election was stolen from him through mail-in voting, and he wants the country to ignore everything that is crumbling around it, and focus on what makes him mad. Trump can’t end mail-in voting. He can’t get rid of mail-in ballots. His executive order would be worthless. The country has already turned on Trump, so he wants to make it as difficult as possible for people to vote. With each passing day of failure, it grows more likely that the American people will march to the ballot box to essentially end his presidency in November 2026. Donald Trump is trying to cheat, but he can’t end mail-in voting. What do you think about Trump’s war on voting? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Leave a comment

When news broke this week that Sherrod Brown would run next year to reclaim a Senate seat in Ohio, Democrats cheered the reports as a huge coup. Before losing a reelection bid last year, Brown had been the last Democrat to win statewide office in a state that has veered sharply to the right over the past decade. His entry instantly transforms the Ohio race from a distant dream to a plausible pickup opportunity for the party. If most Democrats were ecstatic about Brown’s planned comeback bid, Amanda Litman was a bit less jazzed. To be sure, she’s a big fan of Brown, the gravelly-voiced populist who was once seen as a formidable presidential contender. (He never did run for the White House.) But Brown is now 72, and Litman, the founder of a group that encourages and trains first-time candidates, has been among the loudest voices calling for Democrats to ditch their gerontocracy once and for all. “In a year like this, if Sherrod Brown is really the best and only person that can make Ohio competitive, that’s who we should run,” Litman told me. But, she quickly added, “it is a damning indictment” of the Democratic Party in states such as Ohio that a just-defeated septuagenarian is its most viable choice. Litman has called for every Democrat over the age of 70 to retire at the end of their current term in office. A few have heeded that message: Earlier this year, Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois (80), Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire (78), Tina Smith of Minnesota (67), and Gary Peters of Michigan (66) all announced that they would not seek reelection next year. But in some of the nation’s biggest Senate races, Democrats are relying on an old strategy of recruiting—and then clearing the field for—long-serving party leaders with whom voters are already familiar. [Helen Lewis: The Democrats must confront their gerontocracy] In North Carolina, top Democrats aggressively lobbied former Governor Roy Cooper (68) to run for the Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Republican senator, Thom Tillis. And in Maine, the party is waiting to see if Governor Janet Mills (77) will challenge five-term Senator Susan Collins, the GOP’s most vulnerable incumbent, who is 72. If they run and win, Brown would be 80, Cooper would be 75, and Mills would be 85 at the end of their first Senate terms. Democratic strategists and advocates I spoke with acknowledged the tension between the party’s broadly shared desire to elevate a new generation of leaders and its embrace of older candidates in these key Senate races. But they said the decision was easy in the states they most need to win next year. “The frustration of voters, donors, and younger elected officials is real,” Martha McKenna, a former political director of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, told me. But Cooper and Brown (and potentially Mills) “are brave patriots who have already shown they know how to run and win, which is thrilling to the Democratic grassroots base.” Any Democrats unhappy with their candidacies, McKenna added, “are defeatist bed wetters who would rather complain from the sidelines than get into the fight.” Winning the Senate is a long shot for Democrats in 2026. They would need to flip at least four Republican-held seats without losing any of their own, and the only blue state where a Senate race is up for grabs is Maine. But even a gain of two or three seats could put Democrats in position to take the majority in 2028, and they hope that a voter backlash to President Donald Trump’s second term, combined with the recruitment of strong candidates, could put states such as North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, and Alaska in play next year. Republicans have also tried to woo popular governors to mount Senate campaigns, with less success: Governors Chris Sununu of New Hampshire (50) and Brian Kemp of Georgia (61) each passed on the opportunity. Brown lost to Bernie Moreno by three and a half points in a state that Trump carried by 11 points. He will likely start as an underdog against Senator Jon Husted, who was appointed by Governor Mike DeWine to fill the seat that J. D. Vance vacated when he became vice president. But even if Brown falls short, Democrats argue, his strength as a candidate could force Republicans to spend millions of dollars they would otherwise have directed elsewhere. No other Democrat in Ohio can make the same case. [Read: Retirement is the new resistance] The push for Democrats to get younger has been driven not only by the party’s panic over former President Joe Biden’s age and performance last summer, but by the more recent deaths of three House Democrats during the first five months of 2025. The activist David Hogg sparked an internal feud by declaring, soon after becoming the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, that he would back primary challengers to some party incumbents in safe House seats. Younger Democrats did win key Senate seats last year in Arizona, New Jersey, and Michigan. And the party’s leading Senate contenders for 2026 in Texas, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Minnesota are in their 40s and early 50s. “We are in the fight of our lives, and that requires a truly multigenerational front,” Santiago Mayer, the founder of the youth-oriented progressive group Voters of Tomorrow, told me. “Of course we need young people running. We need young leaders who are vocal and visible around the country.” But Mayer said he had no problem with older Democrats such as Brown, Cooper, and (possibly) Mills leading the way in crucial races. “We need to be supporting the candidates who are proven winners,” he told me. Nowhere are Democrats more desperate to win than Maine, where Collins’s resilience has both frustrated the party and scared off some of its rising stars. In 2020, Collins defeated a well-funded Democratic opponent by nearly nine points even as Biden carried the state by the same margin.

Taylor Malkov and Haim Pershtein performed a Trump-inspired dance routine on Israel’s version of “Dancing with the Stars” which has gone viral, delighting many Trump supporters.

Right-wing media company Newsmax has agreed to pay out $67 million in a settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for promoting lies about the 2020 election. The announcement adds to a tally of over $900 million paid out by right-wing outlets for peddling these lies, underlining their role in spreading mass disinformation. Newsmax, which recently became a publicly traded company, disclosed the payment in its latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission submitted on Aug. 15. A display shows a Newsmax logo on the day of their IPO on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange on March 31. The company’s cable news channel is a lower-end version of Fox News that launched in 2011 and an outgrowth of the long-running Newsmax website and magazine. Newsmax has frequently played a role in promoting right-wing lies and misinformation while attacking Democrats including former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In recent weeks Newsmax hosts have attacked federal judges for ruling against the Trump administration, likening it to the Civil War, and have referred to Social Security as a scheme to “bankrupt the United States of America.” Dominion Voting Systems sued Newsmax over its coverage of the 2020 election, specifically citing the network’s repeated amplification of false Republican claims that electronic voting machines were somehow rigged in favor of former President Joe Biden’s campaign. Donald Trump lost the election to Biden and repeatedly lied and alleged that the race had been stolen from him. In reality, Trump lost the popular vote and the Electoral College. In the course of its suit, Dominion alleged that Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy played a central role in hosting conspiracy theorists like MyPillow boss Mike Lindell and Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to push false narratives about the race. The suit even uncovered an email from Newsmax host Bob Sellers asking his producer, “How long are we going to have to play along with election fraud?” The network also re-aired Fox News segments with more election misinformation. In March, Newsmax announced that it had agreed to a $40 million settlement with Smartmatic, another voting services company that was maligned during election coverage. The embarrassing payout come on the heels of Fox News agreeing to pay out nearly $800 million to Dominion for the right-wing outlet’s repeated airing of election lies and smears. The payments expose how the most well-known and watched conservative media outlets have been caught eagerly promoting falsehoods to their viewers, listeners, and readers—a practice which is ongoing. Related | Check out Trump’s dumb new plan to rig elections Despite these admissions and the cost incurred by the right for lying, the sitting president and his minions continue to claim the election was stolen. On Monday, Trump invoked these lies as part of a push to further restrict voting rights and help the Republican Party win elections. And despite Fox News’ embarrassing settlement, former host Jeanine Pirro, one of the network’s most prominent promoters of the election lies that led to the Dominion settlement, now serves as Trump’s U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and is hard at work parroting lies about crime in the capital. Conservative politicians and sympathetic media organizations like Newsmax and Fox continue to prop each other up and lie to the public, monetary consequences be damned.

When news broke this week that Sherrod Brown would run next year to reclaim a Senate seat in Ohio, Democrats cheered the reports as a huge coup. Before losing a reelection bid last year, Brown had been the last Democrat to win statewide office in a state that has veered sharply to the right over the past decade. His entry instantly transforms the Ohio race from a distant dream to a plausible pickup opportunity for the party. If most Democrats were ecstatic about Brown’s planned comeback bid, Amanda Litman was a bit less jazzed. To be sure, she’s a big fan of Brown, the gravelly-voiced populist who was once seen as a formidable presidential contender. (He never did run for the White House.) But Brown is now 72, and Litman, the founder of a group that encourages and trains first-time candidates, has been among the loudest voices calling for Democrats to ditch their gerontocracy once and for all. “In a year like this, if Sherrod Brown is really the best and only person that can make Ohio competitive, that’s who we should run,” Litman told me. But, she quickly added, “it is a damning indictment” of the Democratic Party in states such as Ohio that a just-defeated septuagenarian is its most viable choice. Litman has called for every Democrat over the age of 70 to retire at the end of their current term in office. A few have heeded that message: Earlier this year, Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois (80), Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire (78), Tina Smith of Minnesota (67), and Gary Peters of Michigan (66) all announced that they would not seek reelection next year. But in some of the nation’s biggest Senate races, Democrats are relying on an old strategy of recruiting—and then clearing the field for—long-serving party leaders with whom voters are already familiar. [Helen Lewis: The Democrats must confront their gerontocracy] In North Carolina, top Democrats aggressively lobbied former Governor Roy Cooper (68) to run for the Senate seat being vacated by the retiring Republican senator, Thom Tillis. And in Maine, the party is waiting to see if Governor Janet Mills (77) will challenge five-term Senator Susan Collins, the GOP’s most vulnerable incumbent, who is 72. If they run and win, Brown would be 80, Cooper would be 75, and Mills would be 85 at the end of their first Senate terms. Democratic strategists and advocates I spoke with acknowledged the tension between the party’s broadly shared desire to elevate a new generation of leaders and its embrace of older candidates in these key Senate races. But they said the decision was easy in the states they most need to win next year. “The frustration of voters, donors, and younger elected officials is real,” Martha McKenna, a former political director of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, told me. But Cooper and Brown (and potentially Mills) “are brave patriots who have already shown they know how to run and win, which is thrilling to the Democratic grassroots base.” Any Democrats unhappy with their candidacies, McKenna added, “are defeatist bed wetters who would rather complain from the sidelines than get into the fight.” Winning the Senate is a long shot for Democrats in 2026. They would need to flip at least four Republican-held seats without losing any of their own, and the only blue state where a Senate race is up for grabs is Maine. But even a gain of two or three seats could put Democrats in position to take the majority in 2028, and they hope that a voter backlash to President Donald Trump’s second term, combined with the recruitment of strong candidates, could put states such as North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, and Alaska in play next year. Republicans have also tried to woo popular governors to mount Senate campaigns, with less success: Governors Chris Sununu of New Hampshire (50) and Brian Kemp of Georgia (61) each passed on the opportunity. Brown lost to Bernie Moreno by three and a half points in a state that Trump carried by 11 points. He will likely start as an underdog against Senator Jon Husted, who was appointed by Governor Mike DeWine to fill the seat that J. D. Vance vacated when he became vice president. But even if Brown falls short, Democrats argue, his strength as a candidate could force Republicans to spend millions of dollars they would otherwise have directed elsewhere. No other Democrat in Ohio can make the same case. [Read: Retirement is the new resistance] The push for Democrats to get younger has been driven not only by the party’s panic over former President Joe Biden’s age and performance last summer, but by the more recent deaths of three House Democrats during the first five months of 2025. The activist David Hogg sparked an internal feud by declaring, soon after becoming the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, that he would back primary challengers to some party incumbents in safe House seats. Younger Democrats did win key Senate seats last year in Arizona, New Jersey, and Michigan. And the party’s leading Senate contenders for 2026 in Texas, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Minnesota are in their 40s and early 50s. “We are in the fight of our lives, and that requires a truly multigenerational front,” Santiago Mayer, the founder of the youth-oriented progressive group Voters of Tomorrow, told me. “Of course we need young people running. We need young leaders who are vocal and visible around the country.” But Mayer said he had no problem with older Democrats such as Brown, Cooper, and (possibly) Mills leading the way in crucial races. “We need to be supporting the candidates who are proven winners,” he told me. Nowhere are Democrats more desperate to win than Maine, where Collins’s resilience has both frustrated the party and scared off some of its rising stars. In 2020, Collins defeated a well-funded Democratic opponent by nearly nine points even as Biden carried the state by the same margin.