Maybe the key to Graham Platner’s popularity was that he was running against Susan Collins?

When she was a candidate, Gov. Janet Mills was running even with Collins. When Graham Platner became the party’s Senate nominee, he was either tied with or had a small lead within the margin of error over Collins.

Now that Platner will drop out of the race on Monday, Maine Democrats are lining up to become the new nominee.

The process that the Maine Democratic Party will be using is a convention that will feature hundreds of delegates selecting the new Senate nominee. The convention will throw back to decades past, but the one part of the convention that needs to stay in the past is the backrooms.

The Maine Democratic convention to pick a new Senate candidate needs to be open, transparent, and televised.

What is already very clear is that there is no shortage of candidates who will give Susan Collins a tough race.

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On a day when Donald Trump claimed that America is at war with the Islamic Republic of Japan and kept referring to Zelenskyy as Putin during their meeting, the mentally failing president closed out his NATO misadventure by stumbling into a mess of his own creation when asked why he isn’t flying his Bribe Force One plane back to the US.

Trump was asked, “ I'd like you to address, uh, speculation that you're leaving Ankara not in the new Air Force One because of security concerns involving Iran. You've spoken today twice about them possibly assassinating you and possibly being successful. Did that concern have something to do with it?”

This shift in plans comes a day after a congressional investigation was launched into the plane.

The president rambled and claimed Iran is trying to kill him:

Well, I speak about it a lot because, you know, the life of a president is very dangerous. It's 5.2%. You know what a race car driver is? One tenth of 1%. A bull rider, that looks pretty dangerous. I mean, it's one tenth of 1%. No, it's, uh, 5.2% is you don't make it. You should have told me. You're an excellent reporter. I- You should have told me that years ago. Maybe I wouldn't have run. It's a very dangerous profession.

Trump keeps talking about Iran wanting him dead like it is going to rally the country around him, so something, but it was what the president said next that demonstrated how mentally gone he is.

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Remember, almost a decade ago, when Trump would meet with NATO allies and bluster and bully? Those days are long, long gone. Donald Trump of 2026 increasingly looks like a lost old man rather than the president of the most powerful nation in the world.

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It was bad when Trump showed up in China looking disheveled and completely out of it, but his appearance in Turkey for the NATO summit was even worse.

Trump deboarded Bribe Force One and began looking at the assembled troops there to greet him. With no emotion, and to be honest, we can’t be totally certain that the president knew where he was or what he was looking at.

At one point, Trump just stopped walking and turned his head to look at something. The Turkish president, Erdogan, had to take Trump’s arm and stop the wandering president by directing him to keep walking forward.

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This is the same Donald Trump who fell asleep on Monday during a 4th of July fireworks display that contained 850,000 munitions.

Trump obviously can’t handle anything close to a presidential schedule, but here he was showing up in Turkey and having to be guided around by the hand.

The president must have thought that he had something important to say that JD Vance couldn’t handle, so let’s see what he talked about.

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Progressives have been championing a theory of candidate recruitment that, at its core, believes that the key to winning back white working class voters, especially in red areas, is to run candidates from the working class.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is the modern champion of this theory, and even though it hasn’t yet proven to be effective, there is a segment of progressivism in the United States that tends to fall in love with candidate biographies and overlook red flags.

The Democratic Party put itself in a difficult position in the Senate primary in Maine when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer backed Gov. Janet Mills in the Democratic primary. Mills is an older Democrat who, according to those in Maine, never expressed much interest in running in the primary, leaving a big opening for progressives in the state to win the Senate nomination.

I am not a Democrat or a Republican, so I have no dog in the fight over who should have been the party’s Senate nominee, but as a political scientist, I saw red flags around Graham Platner’s candidacy, and it was also understandable why he won the primary.

The problem is that those red flags have turned into a raging five-alarm fire.

Politico first reported the allegation of rape against Platner:

A woman who dated Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.

The woman, a 41-year-old Maine resident named Jenny Racicot, detailed the alleged incident to POLITICO in three interviews over the past two weeks. POLITICO also spoke with a man Racicot dated and confided in the years after the alleged incident, and reviewed documents, including emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner years before he ran for office.

The accuser is a Democrat who shares Platner’s views, and the more details there are, the more troubling the story becomes.

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You may have forgotten about Trump’s Board of Peace. The vanity organization created by Trump appears to have been put together as Trump’s vehicle for getting a Nobel Peace Prize by creating a front organization that he put himself in charge of that is supposed to be about solving conflicts and creating peace.

However, billions of dollars have been poured into the board, and nobody knows who is in control of the operation or where the money is going.

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A big red flag went up when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office applied for a trademark on the Board of Peace for Donald Trump.

Democrats in Congress have been quietly fighting this trademark because if Trump holds the trademark, he would be able to monetize the Board of Peace for financial gain.

House Judiciary Democrats have been pressuring the Patent and Trademark Office to drop the application, and they have.

House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said in a statement:

The USPTO’s decision to abandon its disturbing trademark applications for the ‘Board of Peace’ is a welcome and necessary course correction. From the start, the USPTO’s Director’s baffling and unprecedented decision to apply for trademarks for President Trump raised serious concerns about its legality given that the Lanham Act forbids applications on behalf of another person unless you are their lawyer, which the Director specifically denied.

House Judiciary Committee Democrats have been aggressively investigating whether the USPTO is being manipulated and misused to conceal the true owner of what appears to be an unregulated global slush fund bankrolled by both foreign governments and U.S. taxpayers but effectively controlled by President Trump, the Board’s self-appointed ‘Chairman for Life.’

The structure and the shadiness of the Board of Peace should raise red flags, as the top House Judiciary Committee Democrat went on to explain.

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Believe it or not, there was a time during the 2016 presidential campaign when Donald Trump could stick to a message and make a point. I recently went back and looked at some of his speeches and rallies from a decade ago, and many of them, while still full of lies and misstatements, were in the 30-minute range. Trump appealed to people because he offered simple answers, which were not based in reality, to complicated problems.

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Looking back on it, Trump’s decline started to show itself by 2018, and since then it has been like an avalanche down a mountainside.

In July of 2026, the United States has a president for whom the purpose of events and people in attendance is meaningless. His fractured mind is going to talk about whatever it wants.

No president has ever looked more uncomfortable around children in the television era than Donald Trump.

The event was supposed to be about new savings accounts for kids called Trump Accounts, but here was Donald Trump positioned beside children:

Trump is standing there rigid like Frankenstein’s monster and doesn’t look at or acknowledge the kids. When his head turns in their direction, the president looks above them, like they aren’t there.

The White House messaging was already off to a bad start, and then Trump spoke.

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Donald Trump talked a big game and promised that a massive crowd would be in attendance at the National Mall to hear him speak before a massive fireworks display was launched

Trump’s Great American State Fair has been empty, so the fact that some people showed up should be considered an accomplishment. However, the crowd estimates ranged from around 15,000 before a weather delay, and storms caused the Mall to be evacuated. It was reported that many attendees did not return once the weather cleared and the gates reopened.

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Half of Trump’s VIP section in front of the stage was empty as the president spoke. Trump said 150,000 people were in attendance.

The truth is that the crowd was at least 10 times smaller than Trump’s stated number.

Those who did stick around to hear Trump speak got to hear an aging president slur his words, rant about communism, demand that the SAVE America Act be passed, while occasionally working in some American history, and getting lots of things wrong in the process.

It was a good thing that Trump started speaking so late, because most Americans get to keep living their lives without any knowledge that this speech happened.

The real newsworthy event that isn’t being covered by the sanewashing corporate media happened during the fireworks display.

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The Great American State Fair has been a great Trump flop. The combination of extreme summer heat and an event that was not very attractive to average Americans has resulted in a fair that was designed to make Trump the center of the 4th of July look like a yard sale in the rain.

Fox News has been broadcasting live from Trump’s event daily and doing its best to beg people to come out, but its broadcasts are also serving to document how empty the event is.

Here is what it looked like at Trump’s fair on Thursday morning:

There were fewer people there on Thursday that there have been all week.

It has gotten so bad that Fox News is even asking Trump administration officials like Agricultural Secretary Brooke Rollins, where are the people at?

Rollins answered by claiming that everything is fine and she thinks the crowds will show up this weekend:

 So from my perspective, it is hitting exactly every mark that we had hoped it would hit at this point.

I do think this weekend we're gonna see massive, massive crowds, but, you know, my goal is that people can come and walk and experience it. And 150,000 people coming to celebrate the Great American State Fair over the last five or six days, I call that a huge success.

The people are coming, really, they are. Trust us, seems to be the administration’s wishful thinking.

Fox News kept saying there are “patriots” at the fair only to have to walk it back.

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When Donald Trump decided to hijack the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, there was a strong possibility that things could go completely off the rails and very wrong.

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The entire Trump second administration could be described as routine things going off the rails and very wrong, so why should the 4th of July festivities be any different?

Donald Trump keeps making himself the center of attention at every opportunity, while completely oblivious to the fact that he is the least popular president in polling history, and maybe the least popular president in American history.

Unlike other presidents, Trump has never had a honeymoon period or a time of popular approval. Trump has always been divisive and unpopular, so when the most unpopular president decided to sabotage years of bipartisan planning for the 250th anniversary, you didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing.

Trump’s Great American State Fair has been a disaster from the start. Trump made himself the star of the\ opening night after all the music acts dropped out, and his rally was sparsely attended. Fox News has been broadcasting from the Fair and claiming that there are big crowds of people there, when the network's own cameras show that it is empty, and now, with record-setting heat in Washington, D.C., the Trump administration is worried that no one is going to show up for his 4th of July speech.

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As Trump was pushing Republicans to hold a midterm election convention, Democrats were ruling it out, as they saw little benefit in holding a convention for an election that is made up of hundreds of district and state-level contests to determine control of Congress.

Donald Trump is the least popular president in the history of polling. Republicans who are running for House and Senate seats need to be getting as far away from this orange anchor as they can.

No matter how much Republicans think that they can hold an election where Donald Trump is not the issue in their states and districts, the president continues to hijack the midterm election and make it all about himself.

Trump announced that the least popular president in the history of polling is going to rub his stink of failure all over Republican candidates from coast to coast by holding a midterm election convention.

Coming off of the failed Great American State Fair, Trump unleashed his latest bad idea.

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If the nation’s rules and laws were a game of rock, paper, scissors, the Constitution would beat everything. The Constitution is above it all. One of the most limited forms of power is the presidential executive order. Executive orders are limited in scope to the Executive Branch.

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Donald Trump has demonstrated over the years that he doesn’t know the difference between executive orders and laws. During his second administration, Trump has signed executive orders and behaved as if they are laws only for the courts to come along and throw out his executive orders as unconstitutional.

This dynamic plays out on a regular basis in the courts. For example, all of Trump’s executive orders on election reform have been tossed out, as the courts continually rule that Trump has no authority or power over elections.

On Monday, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s executive order stating that postmarked ballots arriving after Election Day can’t be counted.

On Tuesday, the court ruled that Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship violated the Constitution.

This was an easy ruling that everyone should have seen coming.

Birthright citizenship is in black and white in the Constitution.

However, some Republicans, like Speaker Mike Johnson, were unhappy with the ruling.

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The Department of Justice claims that they are no longer pursuing Donald Trump’s weaponization fund to pay his allies and supporters who attacked the Capitol and tried to overturn the 2020 election.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress appear not to believe the administration that Trump is not going to pursue the fund, and with good reason, because Trump told Meet The Press that he thinks the fund is a great idea.

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Trump said:

Well, look. If it was up to me, I’d pay them the kind of money that they deserve. People have been destroyed. Lives have been destroyed. Many suicides, think of it. People have committed suicide because a bunch of thugs went after them.”

I love the idea.

So let — let me explain what the fund is. People have been hurt so badly by radical left lunatics that worked for the Biden administration and Sleepy Joe. They’re vicious. They’re violent, what they did to people. And, of course, they went after me more than anybody else. They raided Mar-a-Lago and all the other things.

Trump loves the idea, which is why Rep. Jamie Raskin is taking action to force a vote to kill it.

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Legal experts weren’t surprised when Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the liberals on the court and Chief Justice John Roberts to uphold a grace period for mail-in ballots that are postmarked before Election Day.

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Eighteen states have a grace period. Twelve other states have a grace period for overseas and military ballots. Roberts and Barrett were skeptical and more questioning of the Republican position during oral arguments, so court watchers were not shocked that the ruling came down the way that it did.

The unintended consequences of the ruling included sending the 80-year-old president off the deep end as he demanded the passage by Republican Senators of the SAVE America Act.

Trump posted on Truth Social:

In light of the tremendous loss in the Supreme Court today concerning Voter’s Rights, and the fact that “people’s” votes are allowed to be counted LONG AFTER an Election is over, it is more important than ever to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT, which is,

1. ALL VOTERS MUST SHOW PHOTO I.D. (IDENTIFICATION!).

2. ALL VOTERS MUST SHOW PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP.

3. NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS (EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY DEPLOYMENT, OR TRAVEL!).

There is no excuse for a politician, or otherwise, to be against the above three requirements. There is only one reason to oppose — CHEATING! The House of Representatives has approved this vital Act, THREE TIMES. The United States Senate seems unable to do so. In a time when there is a powerful Communist Movement taking place in our Country, one more dangerous than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or September 11th, all Dumocrats, and our five Republican Senate Hold Outs, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and Mitch McConnell must vote to SAVE OUR COUNTRY. There can be no more excuses! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Trump left out what the SAVE America Act really does and why he wants it so badly.

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Fox News is finding out the hard way that the camera doesn’t lie. Fox has been broadcasting live from and telling their viewers for days about the massive crowds at Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair, but as they say, the camera doesn’t lie.

Trump held a rally to open the fair, which was estimated to have drawn a few thousand people. One estimate put the attendance at 1,000.

The fair has been described as sparse and empty by those who have toured it, but according to Donald Trump, 45,000 people attended his rally. Trump was so upset about the poor attendance that he had been posting the lie about the crowd size on his Truth Social account for days.

Fox News has been feeding Trump’s delusions by talking about the massively large crowds at the fair. The problem is that Fox News is also broadcasting from the fair, and anyone with vision can see that they are lying.

For example, on Sunday morning, Peter Doocy claimed, “It's really, it's really something. And the weather, not the best today, but people are still coming out.”

However, this is what the scene was behind Doocy:

Unless Peter Doocy is seeing things that no one else is, there are very few, if any, people there, but Fox News was not deterred by reality.

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If Donald Trump’s second administration were to be summed up, it would be that the biggest failed president in modern history is destroying the nation’s Capitol in a desperate bid to leave behind a forever physical legacy.

Trump’s all-consuming desire to not be forgotten is why he has destroyed the East Wing of the White House, the Rose Garden, slapped his name on the Kennedy Center, and is building a giant arch.

Trump isn’t interested in leaving a legislative legacy or changing the country. What Trump is doing isn’t even about his need to play-pretend that he is a builder. The failed president thinks that he can physically impose himself on Washington, D.C., so that the American people will never forget him.

The declining president has a new obsession.

He is spending his days counting the trees in the park across from the White House, because he wants there to be exactly 47 trees as a tribute to his presidency.

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Trump’s Great American State Fair has been a disaster. The State Fair seems to be misnamed, as there is nothing about the event that resembles a fair. If you were expecting a cross between a World’s Fair and your local county or state fair, you’d be mistaken. The fair has one major ride, which was broken when The Washingtonian visited. There weren’t any reported fair foods or games. The whole fair was described as “bleak.”

After almost all of the musical acts dropped out, Trump announced that he would headline the opening of the Great American State Fair himself.

NBC News reported that the attendance for Trump’s Great American State Fair rally was poor:

Merchandise tables sold red “America Is Back” baseball caps, in the style of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” hats, and an assortment of Freedom 250 shirts, scarves and knickknacks. Concessionaires sold snacks and soft drinks. More than one attendee expressed disappointment after walking into a stand advertising beer and being informed no alcohol was available.

Roughly half of those in Wednesday’s crowd of more than 1,000 wore Trump’s slogans or likeness on their clothes. For them, America’s 250th birthday was secondary to an opportunity to see the president.

Trump has spent days trying to claim that 45,000 people were in attendance.

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Trump has reportedly been mocking his evangelical supporters for years behind closed doors.

In 2020, Michael Cohen wrote in his book Disloyal what Trump really thought of his evangelical supporters:

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In Disloyal, published today, Cohen shows how Trump is a master deceiver. He quotes Trump calling Christianity and its religious practices “bullshit,” then soon after masterfully posing as a fervent believer. In truth, Cohen writes, Trump’s religion is unbridled lust for money and power at any cost to others.

Cohen’s insider stories add significant depth to my own documentation of Trump’s repeated and public denouncements of Christians as “fools,” “idiots” and “schmucks.”

Trump views evangelical pastors as scammers whom he admires.

Trump has no faith anywhere in his body, and these performative displays by evangelical right-wing Christians bore him.

America finally got to see what Trump really thinks of his evangelical supporters at the White House on Friday.

Evangelicals formed their circle around Trump, who was seated at his desk in the Oval Office, and they sang his praises in the most godly of terms.

Evangelicals like Trump’s “spiritual adviser,” Paula Reid, were met with total humiliation.

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Sometimes the truth slips out when a political leader gets overly comfortable in front of an audience. House Republicans have been testing the message to their voters that they have to win the House in November to save Donald Trump.

The Republican has gone from “Win one for the Gipper” to " Win one to save the felon.”

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According to polling, this message has failed to resonate with voters, who increasingly seem determined to make Trump and his party pay a heavy price for the unpopular policies and economic despair they are inflicting.

Maybe this is why Mike Johnson felt compelled to say the real reason why he thinks it is important for Republicans to keep the House majority.

Johnson said:

You’ve heard President Trump  say, "I am on the ballot," because in a real sense he is. If we were to, we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats, y'all, impeachment's not even the big concern. They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they'll go after the president's family, the cabinet, his donors and friends. Half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I'll take care of you, okay? We're gonna win. We're gonna win the midterm, okay? All right?

Video:

Mike Johnson spelled it out. He views his job as protecting Donald Trump. Johnson isn’t governing for the American people. He’s protecting Trump.

Trump also spoke at the same conference, so let’s see what Johnson is protecting.

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One of the advantages of Donald Trump’s constant and very public attacks on elections is that those who are protecting democracy have a very good idea about what Trump is likely to try to do during the midterm elections.

It is sad that the world’s beacon of democracy and freedom has to fight an enemy of democracy who is the temporary occupant of the Oval Office, but that is where the United States finds itself in 2026.

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Democrats know what Trump is going to try to do to discredit and delegitimize the midterm election. Democrats are also well aware that the president is likely to try to attempt to influence the results of key Senate races through voter intimidation, which is why Senate Minority Leader Schumer and Sen. Padilla held a briefing with reporters, including PoliticusUSA, to announce a new program where the Senate will be deploying election observers to polling places during the midterm election.

Schumer said:

 The program, the first of its kind in the US Senate, will put trained official observers on the ground as the Senate's eyes and ears in the Senate races. The- their role is transparent, official, and non-interfering. They observe, document, and report the facts.

They will not run elections, count votes, or advocate for candidates, but the goal is simple and important: document threats, protect voter confidence, and make sure fair elections are decided by the voters, not bipartisan meddling. Why are we launching this now? Because of the threats to the two thousand twenty-six election are not hypothetical.

Schumer said that Democrats aren’t going to wait for Trump’s chaos to arrive.

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By all accounts, Trump’s meeting on Capitol Hill with Senate Republicans was a total disaster. The meeting was supposed to be about mending fences and easing tensions, but Trump showed up and proceeded to rant about all of his grievances.

Some Republicans have believed for at least the last month or so that the president is trying to lose the Senate for his party. It is a growing concern among Republicans that Trump is trying to sink his own party.

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The idea is crazy because common sense dictates that a Democratic victory in November will make Trump a lame duck and his presidency will be virtually over, but for a president who is desperate not to let go of the spotlight, could it be that he is so desperate to be the only Republican game in town that he would be happy to see the House and Senate majorities gone?

If Republicans lose the House and Senate, Trump will be his party’s center of attention. It is the attention that he has craved for decades and is refusing to let go of ahead of the 2026 and 2028 elections.

Trump apparently is willing to go so far that he would threaten his own party with election defeat if they do not do what he wants.

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