Political News

While members of his cabinet stuff sauerkraut down their wives’ handbags to maintain diets, speculation is suddenly mounting over whether President Donald Trump may have received early access to retatrutide, the potent experimental weight-loss drug from Eli Lilly eagerly anticipated by millions.

The questions come amid a new report in STAT News pointing to a certain 79-year-old man with special insider connections who somehow managed to gain access to retatrutide, which has not received FDA approval, through the agency’s “compassionate use” program. You know, the kind of powerful individual with extraordinary ties to the Food and Drug Administration, as well as Eli Lilly, the same pharmaceutical company Trump bought stock in through the end of March and has partnered with the Trump administration to hash out pricing structures.

The White House on Tuesday denied that Trump was the applicant who made the retatrutide request. Eli Lilly, meanwhile, declined to outright deny the report. “In rare situations, when individuals can’t join a clinical trial and have run out of treatment options,” a spokesperson for Eli Lilly told Mother Jones, adding that the company does “not comment on the specifics of individual cases.”

None of which is likely to quell the theory. After all, Trump, according to his most recent health evaluation, just about hits the threshold of clinical obesity; he approvingly refers to GLP-1’s as the “fat shot” and has publicly complained about the high costs of accessing weight loss medications in the United States. Trump has also been something of a pioneer when it comes to experimental drugs. In 2020, after infamously suggesting people could inject themselves with bleach if they got infected with Covid, the president opted for an unapproved antibody treatment after testing positive himself months later.

But perhaps the biggest tell is the president’s unflinching record of indifference when it comes to outcries over inappropriate behavior, general shadiness, and conflicts of interest. So did Trump use the levers of power to gain unusual access to retatrutide? Time will tell if the president starts to debut a trimmed-down physique. It’s either that or the kimchi.

A mysterious, well-connected 79-year-old man has gained sole access to an experimental obesity drug created by Eli Lilly.

The outlet that first reported the early access, STAT, speculated that the patient could be Donald Trump, in no small part due to the president’s unabashed support for weight-loss drugs, which has extended to suggestions that he and his staff should take what he calls “the fat drug.”

In January, the president told The New York Times that while he hadn’t yet taken Ozempic or Wegovy, he “probably should.”

Trump tips the scale at 224 pounds, according to his 2025 physical results published by the White House. At 6-foot-3, that puts his Body Mass Index in the overweight category. The data suggests Trump has slimmed down since his first term: In 2020, he weighed 244 pounds, which placed him firmly within the BMI’s obesity range.

Throughout his second term, Trump has expressed a keen interest in weight-loss drugs and has even directed his administration to lower their costs.

In April 2025, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr told CBS Mornings that Trump had “ordered” his department to bring the costs of GLP-1 drugs down in America to compete with European prices.

Months later, in November, Trump announced that the prescription costs of Ozempic and Wegovy would come down by hundreds of dollars if purchased through his discounted prescription drug marketplace, TrumpRx.

Trump has even used his own officials as props to promote the drugs. During the White House event unveiling the TrumpRx arrangement, Trump said he was “thrilled” with manufacturers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, and proceeded to conduct a fat-shaming round-robin of his underlings to determine who was already on the weight-loss drugs.

“Secretary Howard Lutnick. You take any of this stuff, Howard?” Trump asked his Commerce Secretary at the time.

“Not yet,” Lutnick replied.

“OK, good,” Trump said before going back to reading names of people on his team. “CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz—he doesn’t take it. Food and Drug Administrator, Commissioner Marty Makary, and Director of Medicare Chris Klomp. And we have Steve.… Where’s Steve? Is he here? Head of public relations for the White House? He’s taking it.”

President Donald Trump blatantly lied about how much oil is actually traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, amid growing backlash to his peace deal.

In a post on Truth Social Tuesday, Trump bragged that the 19 million barrels of oil that flowed through the strait on Monday constituted “an all time RECORD.”

That’s a complete lie. Before the U.S. attacked Iran, an average of 20 million barrels of oil passed through the strait every day, according to the International Energy Agency—more than Trump’s so-called “all time RECORD.”

Plus, Trump’s numbers don’t seem to add up anyway.

From Saturday to Monday, only 109 vessels passed through the Strait of Hormuz, The New York Times reported, citing Kpler, a global maritime data firm. That’s the largest three-day number since the war began in February—but still less than the nearly 140 ships that once passed through the strait on a daily basis. It seems unlikely that 19 million barrels could have passed through in one day with the strait still facing restrictions.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Trump pushed phony numbers about oil. Trump previously claimed that he’d directed the military to conduct a “secret mission” to send more than 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz without anybody knowing—including his own energy secretary!

Trump’s latest lies were part of a larger meltdown Tuesday, as Iran denied having made commitments the Trump administration had touted as a done deal.

President Trump is practically begging Illinois Governor JB Pritzker to allow a federal takeover of Chicago.

“At least 39 people injured, 4 dead, in Chicago weekend shootings. Governor Pritzker, I, as President, can fix this, FAST and Permanently. D.C., Memphis, New Orleans, all down to record lows, and quickly!” Trump wrote just after midnight Tuesday on Truth Social. “CALL ME!”

Trump said the same thing out loud on Monday, calling the city of Chicago a “shooting field.”

“If the governor would call me … I would solve the Chicago problem in three, four months,” he said in the Oval Office.

While talking about the reflecting pool, Trump says if Governor Pritzker calls him, he could solve the Chicago problem. pic.twitter.com/EQNRL7ynoN

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 22, 2026

Chicago has long been on Trump’s radar for a federal takeover, and he has exchanged barbs with both Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson since his return to the White House last year.

President Trump has already brought federal takeovers to Washington, D.C., Memphis, and Minneapolis, with varying results. His claims of cleaning up each city are tenuous at best, as each city has had violent and negative experiences with the influx of federal agents and the National Guard.

Pritzker has yet to respond, while Johnson spoke out Monday after the president’s comments.

“Trump has worked overtime to defund the agencies and programs that actually build safer communities. Whether it’s by defunding the ATF—the federal agency tasked with getting illegal weapons off our streets—stripping our community violence intervention partners of their funding, or starting illegal wars that send prices skyrocketing, Trump has completely betrayed his promise to working Americans and is making all of our lives less safe,” Johnson wrote on X.

It was President Donald Trump who took the United States to war with Iran, a catastrophic decision that caused gas and other prices to spike as the Middle Eastern nation blocked one of the world’s major oil passageways. And it was Donald Trump who, in a fit of desperation, agreed to a deal in which Iran gets hundreds of billions in reparations, new revenue from tolling the Strait of Hormuz…

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The Pentagon wants $80 billion from Congress, mostly to cover the cost of the U.S. war against Iran, the Associated Press reports.

This is on top of the White House’s request to boost defense spending in the 2027 budget to $1.5 trillion—nearly 50 percent more than current allocations. Increased military spending in the budget would come alongside cuts to housing, health care, and green energy programs.

Given that, it’s even more galling that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been reportedly making his way around Capitol Hill, asking senators for an additional $80 billion to cover war expenses.

When Hegseth testified to Congress last month, he estimated that war costs would be around $29 billion—far lower than today’s asking price. But that estimate didn’t include the cost to repair or rebuild damaged U.S. military sites in the region, which may require extra cash, according to the AP.

However, the estimates for how much this war will cost American taxpayers have been all over the place: The Pentagon’s initial estimate was a whopping $200 billion. Whether Hegseth will actually get this money is a different story. The Iran war is opposed by a majority of Americans, and the Pentagon may struggle to get congressional support.

“You’re spending families’ hard-earned tax dollars on a war that many strongly oppose,” Democratic Senator Patty Murray told Hegseth last month.

Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz hasn’t polled his fellow Democrats, but he told the AP, “I haven’t found anyone who wants to do this.”

When 14-year-old Mehjabin Habib took the microphone at an early June meeting held by New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board in Queens, her legs shook. She was there to give testimony as a rent-stabilized tenant from a largely Bangladeshi neighborhood in Astoria (Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s former New York Assembly district), and she wanted to get it right. Rent-stabilized housing is one of New York’s bright spots in a city otherwise notorious for its sky-high cost of living, but for years, Habib had lost neighbors—and friends—pushed out by increased rents. “I love New York City, and I don’t want to leave,” she said. To Habib, the more than 12 percent increase in rents under former Mayor Eric Adams constituted “a threat to our safety.”

But at the top of her mind was not just the undue budgetary pressures placed on her family, a latent anxiety for parents that children so often absorb. Habib’s community has faced harassment from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; having a home to run to was the “first line of defense” when federal agents came knocking. “As a U.S.-born citizen who comes from an immigrant family, I am still afraid of ICE,” she told the board. “When ICE is detaining any person of color on the street, I fear being outside my home.”

Habib is a youth member of the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, or CAAAV, one of many groups organizing tenants to demand a rent freeze. This Thursday, June 25, New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board will hold its final public meeting and vote to determine whether this cornerstone of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign will become a reality. The RGB regulates annual lease adjustments for rent-stabilized apartments, affecting 2.4 million tenants—arguably the most organized group of voters that helped lift Mamdani into power. A rent freeze was, for many, the campaign promise that elevated him beyond the likes of Andrew Cuomo. Today, however, those I spoke to say freezing the rent is all the more necessary, particularly for a sizable contingent of immigrant tenants facing threats from their landlords by ICE.

The overlap is hardly surprising; working-class New Yorkers, immigrant or not, rely on rent-stabilized housing to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. But immigrant tenants are particularly vulnerable right now, and to some landlords, that added vulnerability is an asset. It’s illegal in New York to retaliate against anyone who reports housing issues. Yet, for decades, the business model many rent-stabilized landlords have followed has relied on pushing longtime tenants out, often through neglect or overt abuse. To Irene Hsu, communications manager at CAAAV, ICE has become another tool in landlords’ toolkits: They “stand to profit from the displacement and deportation of working-class tenants.”

The RGB is a nominally independent body, though it tends to follow the proclivities of whichever mayor is in office. Just before exiting Gracie Mansion, former Mayor Eric Adams attempted to stack the Board with pro-real-estate members. Ultimately, Mamdani was allowed to choose six board members. Since then, he’s mostly kept mum on the RGB’s work; in early May, after the board’s preliminary vote capping rent increases between 0-2 percent for one-year leases and 0-4 percent for two-year leases, he only said he was “encouraged” to see them “taking seriously the data around affordability, operating expenses, and the pressures facing both tenants and small property owners as it sets this preliminary range.” For Mamdani, this was a notably cautious statement, a far cry from his campaign trail pronouncements.

His tact is, frankly, necessary, if only to avoid drawing further ire from local real estate groups practically frothing at the mouth over a potential rent freeze. In mid-June, for instance, Gotham Housing Alliance hired fifty or so counterprotesters dressed as zombies outside an RGB hearing, warning that a rent freeze would mean more “zombie” properties—that is, empty buildings due to the landlord’s inability to maintain them.

But as J.W. Mason, an economics professor at John Jay College, recently showed, the “great majority” of residential properties generate income well above their operating costs, even with rents much lower than today’s. Under Mayor Adams, operating incomes actually rose by roughly 30 percent. The problem is that many landlords borrowed too much money at inflated prices, based on the hope that rents would increase faster than they actually have. If landlords are having problems maintaining their buildings, it’s because, by and large, their financial gambles didn’t pan out. “No matter what landlords say, the data supports a rent freeze, and the majority of New Yorkers support a rent freeze,” Sumathy Kumar, executive director of Tenant Bloc, said in a statement to The New Republic. “A blanket rent hike for 2.4 million rent-stabilized tenants would simply reward landlords for long-term neglect.”

For rent-stabilized tenants like Parveg Hasan Dolar—a Bangladeshi immigrant in his early 70s, also a CAAAV organizer living in Astoria—this meant a roughly $400 rent increase within the past four years. Dolar, who worked in a Halal cart until he required heart surgery in 2024, isn’t in a position to leverage his finances to own a building, let alone multiple buildings in New York like his landlord. But today, he and his neighbors carry the brunt of the responsibility to bail their landlord out. For his family, this means rationing food to accommodate rent increases; he says the stress of working additional hours to make ends meet is what contributed to his heart condition.

At a New York City Council joint oversight hearing on Housing and Immigration in April, officials heard testimony from tenants threatened with deportation for simply asking their landlord for repairs. One tenant in the Bronx reportedly refused to go to housing court because his landlord said ICE would be there. Since then, there have been multiple cases of management companies posting signs in the lobby encouraging tenants to report immigrants to ICE—“a pretty clear retaliation” against organizers, said Joanne Grell, a tenant organizer in the Bronx working with Community Action for Safe Apartments, but, she added, “The buildings we want to shame are never going to be secret.”

While New York isn’t seeing the kind of ICE occupations witnessed in Chicago or Minneapolis, a recent investigation by The City Reporter, a local nonprofit newsroom, showed street arrests clustered around Canal Street in Manhattan, Sunset Park in Brooklyn, and Corona, Queens: immigrant neighborhoods with a sharp overlap of rent-stabilized apartments. When ICE recently visited Dolar’s building, knocking on the doors of tenant leaders at around 5 a.m., “none of us opened our doors,” he said. But the threat alone was enough to change the feeling in the neighborhood. “People are afraid.”

Tenants in New York have reached a high-water mark of mobilization not seen in decades, but the terrain is shifting. Suddenly, door-knocking takes on a different valence: Many working-class immigrant households are no longer opening their doors, for fear of ICE. New York’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development is already taking efforts to make immigrants feel safer when answering the door for apartment inspectors. “When I got people to come testify at the RGB, I told them we would have marshals there to keep an eye out… If I ever see cops in the neighborhood, I call my neighbors to see if anything happened.”

All of this combined is “making a crisis for working-class people.” A rent freeze would be “a good first step, but we know it’s not enough. I want to decrease my rent. I pay around $2,200 on rent, and all of that money is for my landlord’s luxury. We, as tenants, need so much more.”

President Donald Trump’s acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, has wasted no time purging staff members from his new office.

Pulte, a housing regulator with no experience working in intelligence, has already begun implementing sweeping personnel changes in the intelligence community.

“The deep state firings have begun,” a source familiar with the matter told NBC News. Pulte formally assumed his new post on Friday, and the firings reportedly began Monday.

These are significant changes made by a temporary lackey. Pulte has none of the military or intelligence background necessary to lead ODNI, instead making his name by targeting the president’s political enemies while leading the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

The day before Pulte started at his new post, he directed ODNI staff members to identify 400 employees to be fired from the National Counterterrorism Center in the coming weeks, another source told NBC News. The agency was previously headed by Joe Kent, who abruptly resigned earlier this year in opposition to Trump’s war in Iran. CNN reported that Pulte had requested a list of every employee at ODNI so he could determine who to purge.

Earlier this month, Trump selected Pulte’s permanent replacement: Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York responsible for the shoddy redactions in the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein. The president then upended Clayton’s Senate confirmation hearing, messing up Republicans’ chances at renewing a key spy bill.

The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library is set to open in North Dakota on July 4, but President Donald Trump is getting an early peek because he will “join Freedom 250” for the dedication of the library on July 1. We all know this is going to be terrible, right? Even the announcement of Trump’s visit is weird, coming as it does from Freedom 250 instead of America 250.

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A special 79-year-old man has received unparalleled access to Eli Lilly’s obesity drug.

Millions of Americans are eagerly awaiting access to retatrutide, a powerful new drug from the pharmaceutical company. But one unidentified person has been able to gain premature access to the drug via the FDA’s “compassionate use” program, STAT reported Tuesday.

The FDA program is designed to prioritize access to experimental drugs for patients with grave or life-threatening medical issues. And while the name of the individual is not known, several signs indicate that they are likely very well-connected.

A senior clinician at the National Institutes of Health, Ranganath Muniyappa, requested access to the drug for the unnamed patient in April. Muniyappa cited a diagnosis of refractory obesity with obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, a potentially life-threatening disease characterized by high blood pressure in the lungs. The request reportedly drew the attention of top health officials, which STAT noted was indicative of the patient’s influence.

Based on the vague parameters of the patient’s identity, STAT reached out to the White House to see if the recipient could possibly be Donald Trump, who similarly suffers from obesity and has publicly expressed interest in obesity drugs. The White House did not explicitly deny the patient was Trump.

When asked if Trump was the 79-year-old man in question, White House spokesperson Kush Desai did not say no, and instead referred STAT to the Department of Health and Human Services. When asked if Trump had obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, Desai offered Trump’s latest medical evaluation as a counter, which he falsely claimed “covers this,” according to STAT. It does not—the memo makes no mention of either disease.

HHS did not address the issue of the retatrutide application or the patient’s identity.

“The FDA supports expanded access programs that can provide patients with serious or life-threatening conditions access to investigational treatments when no comparable or satisfying approved therapies are available,” HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard told STAT. “Each request is reviewed on a case-by-case basis based on the clinical circumstances and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.”

Whoever the patient is, they had been previously treated with other obesity drugs such as tirzepatide, though sources who spoke with STAT indicated the patient experienced only moderate weight loss as a result. Muniyappa reportedly recommended against bariatric surgery because of the patient’s age and comorbidities.

The Trump Justice Department planned to subpoena journalists at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, attempting to force them to testify before a grand jury for vague national security concerns. The subpoenas were eventually withdrawn this month without any explanation after news organizations pushed back.

This was an extremely unprecedented decision that follows the all too familiar trend of weaponizing the DOJ against whomever President Trump is upset by that day.

Washington Post reporter Ellen Nakashima—who covers the security and intelligence community, including the present war on Iran—was subpoenaed this spring. The Post was in the process of fighting Nakashima’s subpoena before the DOJ suddenly rescinded it.

“The unwarranted subpoena of our reporter Ellen Nakashima — a clear violation of constitutionally guaranteed press freedom — was another sign of the government seeking to compel journalists to become instruments of its investigations,” a Post spokesperson said. “We will continue to stand fully behind the journalism of The Washington Post and fight all efforts by any administration that violate our First Amendment rights.”

Three Wall Street Journal reporters, who also cover national security issues, received grand jury subpoenas from the DOJ, according to the Post. In May, the DOJ also subpoenaed the Journal’s reporters over leaks from the Department of Defense related to the Iran war.

The DOJ has yet to comment on or explain its decisions to file and rescind the grand jury subpoenas.

“The potential of the government intruding into the newsgathering process is even greater when you are in the grand jury than it is for a subpoena for documents,” said Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “The administration has taken a number of extremely aggressive steps in respect to the press … These are all aggressive attempts to target journalists reporting on the actions of the Trump administration. They are a dangerous intrusion of the independence of the press.”

After watching President Donald Trump nod off during meetings over and over and over again, we may finally have some answer as to why.

In Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, a new book by New York Times writers Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump’s bizarre sleep schedule has been exposed, reports The Daily Beast.

According to the new book, the octogenarian reportedly barely sleeps at all. He goes on Truth Social posting sprees at all hours of the night—something we’ve all had the misfortune of witnessing—and stays up late watching TV.

The president has grown even more erratic since his last term in office.

More than just gilding fireplaces and building ballrooms, the authors describe how Trump has fundamentally changed “the rhythms and structures and operations” of the White House. Where the president used to arrive predictably by 10:30 or 11 a.m., now it’s anybody’s guess. Sometimes he’s up in the morning making phone calls, and other times White House staff find him still asleep between 8 and 10 a.m.—a sign that he probably stayed up all night watching TV and scrolling.

Privately, aides told Swan and Haberman that, for the first time, Trump was “beginning to seem old.”

“Those who spent time with him could see the signs—the moments of fatigue, the cupped hand behind the ear.… The repeated bouts of drowsiness during mid-afternoon public events,” the authors write.

Regime Change also revealed that the president and his wife, Melania, sleep (or in Trump’s case, don’t sleep) in different bedrooms.

Donald Trump began his Tuesday morning by melting down over the status of his agreement with Iran.

“Despite their protestations and false statements to the contrary, coupled with the drumbeat of the Fake News, which is doing everything possible to make the U.S. Victory as small and insignificant as possible, Iran has fully and completely agreed to highest level Nuclear inspections long into the future (Infinity!!!). This will insure ‘Nuclear Honesty,’” he wrote on Truth Social. “If they did not agree to this, there would be no further negotiations!”

Well, Mr. President, I have some bad news …

Speaking at a press briefing Tuesday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei denied the Trump administration’s claim that the country would allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit its nuclear bombed sites.

“We have not had a meeting with the director general of the IAEA, nor do we have any plans for the agency to inspect Iran’s nuclear facilities damaged by the US and Zionist military aggression,” Baqaei said.

That also contradicts Vice President JD Vance’s claim on Monday that Iran had agreed to allow IAEA inspectors, who could visit Iran “this week, maybe as soon as today.”

The vice president did not offer specifics on what kind of access IAEA inspectors would be granted, or how frequently their inspections would take place. Last week, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff reportedly assured U.S. lawmakers that in agreeing to the MOU, Tehran had drafted a letter inviting IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi to bring inspectors into the country.

In the 14-point memorandum of understanding, Iran has only agreed to commit to “down-blending” its enriched nuclear material under the supervision of IAEA inspectors. In return for that commitment, the U.S. has offered Iran unprecedented waivers allowing them to sell their previously sanctioned oil.

As New Yorkers head to the polls on Tuesday, a crowded Democratic primary in the state’s 12th congressional district could serve as a referendum on tech money in politics. But why this race has drawn quite so much money is a little mysterious. To some, it’s an intra-industry disagreement about the best approach to regulation—or, more cynically, a fight about which companies will get to influence future law. To others, it’s a sign that certain pro-AI interests want to make an early and brutal example of anyone who stands against them.

AI industry political action committees have flooded this race with cash since it started. Leading the Future, a PAC funded in part by tech giants like Andreessen Horowitz and the co-founders of OpenAI and Palantir, has spent over $7 million against one particular candidate: two-term New York Assemblymember Alex Bores. Other PACs then jumped in on Bores’s behalf, including Public First Action PAC, which is supported in part by Anthropic and spent $10 million in Bores’s race.

Bores, a former Palantir employee himself, might seem like an oddly small-fish target for one of the country’s richest, most powerful industries. His troubles with the PACs started with the Responsible AI Safety and Education, or RAISE, Act, an AI regulation bill he co-sponsored last year in the state legislature.

The act, Bores’s own team acknowledges, is merely a “first step” toward robust AI regulation. Yet it’s also one of the strongest AI oversight laws currently on the books in the U.S.

The bill, which New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law in December 2025, is somewhat aligned with California’s Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, signed into law earlier that year. Both laws only apply to the largest AI companies, like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. New York’s RAISE Act requires these large frontier developers to write and publish a yearly framework that explains how the company will assess risk, mitigate any safety threats, and comply with national and international standards. The law also requires these companies to disclose serious safety incidents within 72 hours of learning about them, and introduces an enforcement mechanism, empowering New York’s attorney general to bring civil actions against companies that fail to submit the required reporting or make false statements. Bores and State Senator Andrew Gounardes—the bill’s other champion—originally wanted the penalty for the first violation to be $10 million, with up to $30 million in fines for subsequent violations, but the lawmakers brought those fines down to $1 million and $3 million to better align with California’s law.

The bill was wildly popular with New Yorkers—84 percent of respondents supported it in a June 2025 poll—and it passed handily in both the state Senate and Assembly. But it quickly received pushback from the AI industry; Leading the Future announced its plans to target Bores in November 2025, before the bill had even been signed.

“They want to send a message to any member of Congress that the cost of trying to regulate the AI oligarchs is complete political destruction,” said Alyssa Cass, a communications strategist working with the Bores campaign.

The Trump administration also attempted to get out in front of the law, publishing an executive order on AI regulation just eight days before Hochul signed the RAISE Act. The executive order directed the Department of Justice to challenge “onerous” state AI laws that it believes conflict with a “minimally burdensome” national AI policy. In the order, the administration specifically said that state AI regulation hampers the country’s ability to “win” its “race with adversaries for supremacy” and called state laws “cumbersome.”

Asked about the PAC’s heavy spending against Bores, a Leading the Future spokesperson provided a statement arguing that “Anthropic and its allies” started the spending war: “Their network of outside groups has spent $21 million across 5 dark-money super PACs to prop up Alex Bores’s campaign. Leading the Future is proud to stand against that unprecedented effort and for a transparent, national AI framework that serves workers, families, and the country.” The statement added that “any claim that we oppose regulation is flat wrong.”

Public First Action explicitly markets itself as a pro-regulation PAC. One of its main principles is to support federal AI regulation, but ensure that it would not preempt state laws until the federal guidelines are robust enough to stand on their own. Anthropic, which has positioned itself as the safety-first tech company, gave $20 million to the PAC this February. The PAC’s other funders are less clear.

Asked about Public First’s involvement in Bores’s race, a spokesperson for Jobs and Democracy, a subsidiary of Public First Action, wrote that opposing PACs were trying to “end [Bores’s] political career” in retaliation for the RAISE Act. “We’re in this race because candidates who champion AI guardrails shouldn’t have to stand alone against Big Tech. The fact that this race has gone from a crowded primary to a two-way race between the author of the RAISE Act and a cosponsor is proof that Leading the Future’s plan has backfired.”

While Bores is betting that his strong stance on AI and public battle against AI PACs will win him the election, his opponents are focusing on other issues. Bores has three main competitors—State Assemblymember Micah Lasher, Jack Schlossberg of the Kennedy family, and the formerly Republican, anti-Trump crusader George Conway (once-husband of Trump 1.0 adviser Kellyanne Conway).

Lasher—who also supported the RAISE Act—has been described in the media as a “nerd” or “wonk,” and is running a strong if somewhat bland campaign. He was in the lead in one mid-May poll. Schlossberg’s campaign has reportedly been disorganized, and the candidate seems to be banking on his family legacy to overcome his relative lack of political experience. Conway has framed his campaign as an effort to impeach Trump.

If Bores loses, it may simply be because voters were drawn to the allure of a Kennedy or inclined to vote for a policy wonk. Then, too, some voters may remain put off by Bores’s former work for Palantir—a company whose AI software has reportedly been used to identify military targets. To his supporters, though, a Bores loss would show that the AI industry has a powerful grip on our elections, and can push out any candidate it doesn’t like. And if that message gets around, Cass said, it will be that much harder to get politicians to stand up to the industry.

“Members of Congress are rarely known for their acts of political bravery,” Cass said. “And there is a really limited window, given how fast this technology is moving, for regulation.”

South Carolinians head to the polls on Tuesday for a spate of primary runoffs, most notably to decide on the Republican gubernatorial nominee. And President Donald Trump is desperate to avoid looking like a loser, pulling a desperate, last-minute endorsement switch as his preferred candidate appears on track to get walloped. At the end of May, Trump endorsed Lt. Gov. Pam Evette in the…

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CBS News is losing heads, both in the newsroom and across America.

Viewership plummeted at CBS News weeks after its chief, Bari Weiss, fired numerous producers and correspondents from 60 Minutes, according to Nielsen ratings data obtained by Status.

Damage was particularly bad at CBS Mornings, hosted by Gayle King, which has long held the third place ratings spot among network morning shows. But that changed dramatically: CBS Mornings averaged 1.8 million total viewers earlier this month, and then immediately dropped to 1.59 million following June 3, the day after executives fired Scott Pelley, the de facto face of CBS News.

That amounted to an 11 percent slip in audience following what was already the “worst-rated May on record” in CBS Mornings history, according to the ratings data.

The dip was short-lived, but nonetheless “alarmed some officials” since morning shows typically produce the lion’s share of ad revenue for the major news networks, according to Status reporter Oliver Darcy.

Change at 60 Minutes, the network’s famed investigative weekly program has been rapid and corrosive. Late last month, Weiss simultaneously fired executive producer Tanya Simon, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on Trump deportations to the notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. That same day, she appointed Nick Bilton—a former Vanity Fair columnist with no broadcast experience—to lead the venerated newsmagazine.

But Weiss may not be running the place for much longer at all. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, is pursuing a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, a monumental industry shift that could see Weiss’s brief tenure atop the network come to an end, according to some longtime 60 Minutes staffers.

“I have a feeling that Bari will not be overseeing 60 Minutes for very much longer. I think once the deal gets done with Warner Bros., people will demand that she be let go or move into another position,” Steve Kroft, a 30-year veteran of the show, told Variety earlier this month. “Everything she’s touched has turned to shit. Everything she’s touched has gone colossally wrong. And I don’t think she’s showed any talent for this position. She’s only fulfilling other people’s agendas.”

By Claudia Boyd-Barrett for KFF Damian Zermeño, 15, sensed something was wrong the moment he got home from school. His aunt sat at the dining table, sobbing. His father, who’d walked him to the bus stop that morning and promised to take him to dinner when he got back, wasn’t there. Saúl Zermeño, a 45-year-old single dad, had gone to a routine check-in appointment at an…

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When the Kansas legislature took up a bill in early 2026 that would strip transgender residents’ driver’s licenses and bar them from government bathrooms, Bobby Joe Robertson Jr., a financial analyst at a petroleum refinery in the small town of McPherson, about an hour north of Wichita, decided to write her state representative a letter. 

“Technically, I wrote three,” Robertson says. There was the original letter, asking her legislator if he’d be up to meet with her, a trans woman, to discuss the painful effects the law would have on her family. And then a follow-up asking the legislator if he could please respond. “The third one,” she recalls, “was me telling him that I’m going to take his job.”

It will be an uphill battle. President Donald Trump carried McPherson by a more than two-to-one margin in 2024, as Robertson’s current Republican state representative was running unopposed in HD-73. A different Republican legislator had run unopposed in 2022. And 2020. And 2018. But this year, the incumbent has chosen not to seek re-election—and Robertson has been knocking doors after work for months, organizing her neighbors, and raising money for the race ahead. “I don’t think it’ll be a landslide or anything,” she said. “But I think I have the potential.”

“The power that is built in November in our state capitals…is going to have a national impact.”

Robertson is one of 18 Kansas Democrats contesting a state house seat this fall that went unopposed in the last election. Some of these districts have gone years without even token Democratic opposition—two will feature their first contested election since 2006. You have to go all the way back to 1990 to find this many Democrats running for Kansas’ legislature—incidentally, the last year they won a majority. Most of these races, in deep-red areas, will likely stay out of reach for the party. But Brandon Woodard, the Democratic minority leader in the lower chamber, believes another goal is achievable: that at least five out of the party’s more than 100 local recruits can flip districts—enough to break the Republicans’ supermajority—while turning out extra voters to keep the governor’s mansion in Democratic hands.

It’s not just Kansas. Across the country, Democrats are smashing downballot recruitment records, fielding more candidates in more races than they have in decades—or ever. For the first time, the party has a candidate for every Minnesota state legislative race, as it hopes to build on a one-vote majority in the state senate and break a 67–67 logjam in the house. In Texas, where Democrats are looking to make inroads in a Republican-dominated legislature and get out the vote for Senate candidate James Talarico and other statewide candidates, the party is also fielding candidates for every legislative seat for the first time in history. They’ve got candidates in every race in North and South Carolina (where the party hopes to break Republican supermajorities), and in Arizona (where it’s seeking to flip both chambers).

And in New Hampshire, in a bid for a governing trifecta, Democrats are contesting every state senate race, and at least 361 of 400 state house seats—57 more than Republicans. According to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which invests in state-level downballot races, the party is also contesting a 21st-century record number of races in Indiana and Georgia.

As I reported previously, the DLCC has ambitious targets this fall, with hundreds of seats in play across the country. Democrats have been buoyed by dominant showings in 2025’s off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and a string of victories and overperformances in special elections—including, this spring, a win in the Florida state house district that includes Mar-a-Lago. DLCC president Heather Williams has argued this November has the potential to be “2010 in reverse”—a reference to Barack Obama’s first midterm shellacking, when Republicans picked up 700 legislative seats that allowed them to gerrymander their way to enduring majorities in states like North Carolina. Now, with both parties in the midst of a redistricting arms race, these elections could help determine which politicians control the next stages of the battle—a significance that will be felt far beyond any state’s borders.

“On the other side of this election, we’re going to sharply go into a continued conversation about redistricting, the need to shore up the path to the presidency, and ensure that our voting laws and our certification processes are strong as we go into a big 2028 presidential cycle,” Williams says. “On top of all of that, this Republican administration continues to move policy work of dealing with the issues of today into the states. 

“The power that is built in November in our state capitals is not only going to affect those that live in those communities,” Williams adds. “It is going to have a national impact.”

Downballot recruitment is no guarantee of success—particularly in the sorts of ruby-red areas Democrats like Robertson will be contesting. Republicans’ power in Kansas’ legislature will likely hinge on a small number of competitive districts. But the presence of candidates in almost every race is a useful barometer for an energized base and party organization. In Kansas, Woodard said, the numbers reflect, in part, a strategic shift. Last year, his caucus hired a political director earlier than it ever had, as the state party launched a tour of Republican-dominated areas to drum up interest from local parties and activists.

“If we’re having a wave year, some of those districts that are having the candidate on the ground doing the work might end up in picking up a seat that maybe wasn’t on our radar,” Woodard says. “More than anything, if we can move the needle on a district that we lose by 20 percent, and someone does the work and we only lose by 15 percent, that’s a win in my book as well.”

Other Kansas Democrats, like Pete Ferrell, a rancher and self-described “former Eisenhower Republican” who threw his hat in the ring for a seat east of Wichita, are running for less tangible reasons. No one has contested the district in ten years, and while Ferrell told me he hadn’t raised any money and wasn’t yet sure what his campaign would look like, to him it’s about the principle of the thing.

“I’m 73. I’ve probably got no business doing this,” he said. “But my God, I wasn’t gonna open that ballot up and not see a Democrat.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When the United States took the pitch against Australia last week, millions of soccer fans tuned in. Anyone who hadn’t watched a match since the last World Cup might have noticed something new: players stopping midway through each half to drink some water. 

Introduced in the name of player safety, these mandatory three-minute breaks are a surprise controversy that has shoved climate change into the spotlight. Water-gate, blared a headline in The Independent, a UK newspaper. The chief sportswriter at the Daily Mail called the breaks a “momentum killer” and a “money-grabbing disgrace.”

“I think you have ⁠to look at it in every game separately…We’re inundated with commercials.”

Fans were equally outraged. Spectators at the match between England and Croatia booed when the referee blew the whistle, and comments poured in on Reddit. “I’m booing from home,” read one. Another said, “FIFA ruined the beautiful game.”

FIFA, the sport’s governing body and organizer of the tournament, declined to comment and referred Grist to its announcement of the policy in December. “The use of hydration breaks is part of a focused attempt to ensure the best possible conditions for players,” the statement read. 

Before this World Cup, cooling breaks only occurred when the wet bulb temperature—essentially a measure of air temperature and humidity combined—reached 32 degrees C, or about 90 F. Now the rule applies to all games, regardless of temperature, humidity, or other factors. It even applies to matches played indoors with air conditioning.

The move came after criticism of a tournament in the United States last summer, when the organization representing players, FIFPRO, said extreme heat should have canceled matches. “It has never been more important,” the organization said in a press release before the World Cup, “to give space to scientific knowledge and find mitigation strategies that protect the health and wellbeing of our players.”

There is no doubt that rest and water can help protect players in a world where extreme heat is becoming more common and increasingly dangerous. But many fans, and even athletes, think FIFA has gone too far. “If it’s really hot, obviously it will be good to put them in. But I think you have ⁠to look at it in every game separately, in my opinion,” said Virgil van Dijk, captain of the Netherlands’ squad. One Reddit user complained, “We’re inundated with commercials.”

“I don’t think the health of the players is their primary concern.”

That’s been a frequent complaint, and it has led to speculation that FIFA implemented the breaks to boost the number of ads that are shown. Broadcasters aren’t required to go to full-screen commercials during hydration breaks—Telemundo and the BBC, for instance, don’t. FIFA also dictates that ads must start 20 seconds into the pause and end 30 seconds before play resumes. But that still creates 2 minutes and 10 seconds of extra ad time available per half, which can be extremely lucrative. The Wall Street Journal reports that a 30-second spot during early games sells for roughly $200,000 and rises to around $750,000 when the US national team plays. 

“They’ve essentially divided the game into quarters,” John Kosner, a former ESPN executive, told the Journal, “and made enormously valuable breaks.”

About 67 minutes into the opening game of the World Cup, the referee signaled for a mandatory hydration break. The American broadcaster, Fox, cut to commercials. But they ran longer than the respite, so players were left stalling and many viewers missed the restart entirely. Fox said it didn’t see the referee signal the start of the break because it came during a replay. FIFA doesn’t plan to punish the network. But the incident did little to quell people’s fears about commercialization—in part because the temperature at kickoff was a relatively balmy 74 degrees F.

FIFA has required the breaks in all matches as an effort to be fair across a tournament that sees teams playing in 16 stadiums and three countries. That argument, though, has again done little to ease criticism. “That doesn’t ring true to me,” said Chris Taylor, the head coach of the Vermont Green FC’s men’s team, explaining that every soccer game has different stoppages and different lengths. 

The Green are a climate-focused organization, so the dangers of extreme heat are particularly front of mind. Taylor sees hydration breaks as critical when the conditions warrant them, which they have numerous times during his decades-long career as a player and coach. Still, he questions FIFA’s motives at this World Cup. 

“I don’t think the health of the players is their primary concern,” he said. “This World Cup has felt that every angle has been monetized.”