Political Junkie Podcast

The second half of today’s episode involves sexual assault and drug use; it may be inappropriate for some listeners and distressing to others. If you or someone you love has been sexually assaulted or abused, you can get help 24/7 at the RAINN Sexual Assault Hotline.

We began this segment with an October 1 press conference, where New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced that she has asked Attorney General Letitia James to intervene in a case of alleged sexual assault on the campus of Cornell University in 2024.

Our theme music this week is “God Is A Girl” by W&W and Groove Coverage, copyrighted music licensed from LickD.

Sign at southern entrance to Cornell University's West Campus. Photo credit: 颐园居/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

* A New York Times team continues to dig into grifting at the Department of Homeland Security under former Secretary Kristi Noem. When Noem was on her way out the door, she authorized payment to a campaign donor for hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase planes the department never needed—and has not used. Daedalus Aviation flipped planes to the government at markups of at least $20 million. This highlights what a boondoggle the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant campaign has been. Among other things, DHS spent $2.85 million for a tent city at Guantanamo that was never used; and $4.8 billion for warehouses in Chicago, never converting them into detention facilities as planned.

* Republicans are burning money in Texas Senate as James Talarico pulls ahead of Ken Paxton in that Senate race. A New York Times/Siena poll shows Talarico ahead by 6 points, two weeks before early voting begins. President Donald Trump has campaigned in Texas three times in the last month: in leaked audio, Paxton has admitted that he is no longer controlling his strategy. In a surprise twist, Paxton’s estranged wife Angela is now campaigning for him.

* In addition to predicting that the Democrats will take the House, The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter estimates that Democratic candidates will ultimately pick up anywhere from 2 to 6 Senate seats. Kansas just joined Alaska, Maine and Ohio as toss-ups: Democrats need four to regain the majority.

* Pioneering televangelist Jim Bakker has died at 86, leaving five children and a second wife, Lorri Bakker. Preaching a gospel of prosperity, Bakker is best known as the husband of Tammy Faye Bakker with whom he built and operated the PTL (Praise the Lord) empire, a highly emotional Assemblies of God ministry that changed the industry. At one point, it included a popular television show, a theme park, and a private satellite broadcasting network; at one point, the Bakkers brought in $129 million a year. It all came crashing down in 1987 when Jim Bakker admitted that he had had an affair with a 21-year-old secretary. Fellow evangelist Jerry Falwell claimed that he had proof Bakker had erotic relationships with men as well.

Your hosts:

* Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

* Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

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Flyer advertising the first anti-rape speak out, organized by

New York Radical feminists in January, 1971

News focus: Neil and Claire discuss the revived investigation of gang rape at Cornell—what happened, what it means, and why this might have happened decades ago. Because guess what? It did.

* On September 21, the Cornell Daily Sun ran an editorial under the headline “Cornell Won’t, We Will” in which they named seven men disciplined by the university for participating in what a former Cornell student, Jane Doe, asserts was a 2024 gang rape at the Chi Phi fraternity house.

* Here is a timeline of events leading to a civil suit filed by Jane Doe against Cornell and the seven men she has accused. Here is Cornell’s official statement about the case and Tompkins County D.A. Michael van Houghton’s official statement about the case.

* Late last week, New York Governor Kathy Hochul directed Attorney General Letitia James to re-open the case as a special prosecutor. Meanwhile, the Cornell Board of trustees has retained former Justice Department official Sally Yates as an independent investigator.

* Critical features of the case are that the encounter began as consensual, and then became non-consensual; that Jane Doe’s alleged assailants drank, used ketamine, and insisted that she do so as well; and that Jane Doe only gradually became aware of what had happened, and reported it three weeks after the fact. During that window, she also exchanged friendly texts with two of the men—none of these things are unusual in a sexual assault case. In addition, the 100-page summary of what Jane Doe told campus police was boiled down to a 6-page report that did not include her statement that she was raped. Based on this attenuated account, Ithaca prosecutor Matthew van Houghton declined to prosecute or investigate further.

* President Michael Kotlikoff responded to the Cornell community’s outrage this week by telling the campus community that he would “take a serious look” at the role of Greek organizations on campus. The Cornell faculty senate has prepared a vote of no-confidence in the administration.

* Campus activism has escalated: this week vandals wrote phrases like “Smash the patriarchy” and “At Cornell rapists are protected protesters are expelled” on a campus administrative building and smashed several windows. The reference to expulsion is linked to harsh discipline the university imposed on pro-Palestinian protesters. Twenty student organizations rallied in Ho Plaza on Monday; campus organizers, including the NAACP and Cornell Black Students United, brought activities on campus to a halt on Wednesday.

* Jane Doe has received an upswell of solidarity across the country similar to the #MeToo movement. She has also been attacked by prominent conservatives, including Megyn Kelly and conservative influencer Matt Walsh.

* One named assailant has sued Cornell to have his name removed from the lawsuit, asserting that he is innocent and that the university violated its own procedures when it disciplined him.

* The case has drawn comparisons with the Duke Lacrosse case, in which three members of the team were accused of raping a stripper they had hired for a party. They were ultimately exonerated amid charges of prosecutorial misconduct.

* Those of us with very long memories also remember the 1983 case at the University of Pennsylvania, in which a half dozen members of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity raped a woman who was high on LSD. Anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday wrote a book about it, Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus (New York University Press, 1990), in which she revealed that sexual assault was woven into the culture of the fraternity itself and that members viewed these practices as bonding rituals.

What we want to go viral:

* Neil loved Vassar English professor Pasquale S. Toscano’s essay about teaching a historical religious text, “Why My Gen Z Students Are Fascinated by the King James Bible” (New York Times, October 4, 2026). Neil talks about his own realization as a student that the Bible he had grown up with was the key to understanding so much of Western Culture; as a teacher, he loved Toscano’s presentation of the Bible as a text produced by group work over time, an example of slow, collaborative, enduring creativity in a moment of fast-paced cultural change.

* Claire wants you to read (or listen to) Evan Gershkovich’s This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian American Story (Crown, 2026), about the Wall Street Journal reporter who was imprisoned in Russia for almost 16 months. Arrested on trumped up espionage charges in March 2023 for the purposes of an international prisoner swap, Gershkovich shows how his love for Russia, his parents’ country of origin, already cultivated in the time he had spent there, deepened and grew in prison.

Don’t miss new drops from Claire and Neil. You can subscribe for free or support us for only $5 a month. You can also become an annual supporter for $50/year and choose Neil’s Coming Out Republican or Claire’s Political Junkies: as a welcome bonus.

You can also get all audio content for free by subscribing on Apple iTunes, YouTube, or Spotify.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

We began this segment with MAHA influencer Jillian Michaels reacting to Donald Trump’s February 18, 2026, executive order ramping up the production and distribution of the glyphosate, often sold as the household weed killer Roundup.

Our theme music this week is “Thanks A Lot,” written by Johnny Cash, performed by Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two, and licensed from LickD.

Donald Trump opened the new White House helipad on Monday, absent a press pool boycott. Note the absence of boom mics: video of the event was circulated, but here was no sound. Photo credit: The White House.

In the News:

* Last Friday, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had already left for the weekend when President Donald Trump canceled press pool credentials for MS NOW, CNN, and Politico. Was the president simply left unattended for too long (Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had just stepped down.) Is he in a rage about repeated failures? The rest of the pool, including Fox News, joined a Trump boycott, depriving the President of his favorite thing: attention. In response, the administration launched a YouTube channel called TRUMP TV. On Monday, all three banned outlets sued in federal court, citing their First and Fifth Amendment rights. Here is the response filed by White House lawyers, characterizing press access to the President as a privilege. That ain’t what the Constitution says, and it ain’t what the judge who blocked the order says; as of Thursday morning, the White House continued to enforce the ban, lifting it that afternoon.

* What else happens when the grownups leave Washington? 760,000 Americans lose their health coverage! Vice President JD Vance explained at a Tuesday press conference that these people were “fraudulently enrolled” in the ACA; the administration is now looking at over 400,000 more Americans who require “additional verification.” An HHS report from earlier this year estimated that half of the 12 million people who bought their policies through ACA exchanges were ineligible. One million Americans had already been dropped from their health care after Donald Trump took office; Vance projects that additional cuts will save $2.2 billion. Democrats released a plan that makes restoring healthcare a priority.

* In a follow up to last week’s story about Donald Trump Jr.’s Big Fat Russian wedding, which at least one observer has called a “counterintelligence nightmare,” the Trump administration claims that all funds have been repaid. Senator Bill Cassidy wants evidence, and Senator John Curtis of Utah has called for a Judiciary Committee investigation. They are both Republicans.

Your hosts:

* Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

* Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Texas Senator John Cornyn greets fellow Republican Brooke Rollins at the hearing for her nomination for Secretary of Agriculture, January 23, 2025. Cornyn has since been dumped by the GOP, and Rollins has championed pesticides that the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement seeks to ban. Photo credit: Tom Witham, USDA/Wikimedia Commons.

News focus:

Earlier this summer Elaine Kamarck and E.J. Dionne noted that the GOP was splintering over Trump’s agenda, with non-MAGA Republicans sitting out the midterms. With a little more than 6 weeks before Election Day, independents, regular Republicans and MAGA influencers are abandoning the Party of Trump.

* Energizing MAGA turnout appears to be Donald Trump’s midterm strategy. However, vulnerable candidates continue to distance themselves. This week, Florida Republican Representative Byron Donalds, in a tight race against Democrat (and former Republican!) David Jolly, reduced and obscured references to the President on his campaign website.

* Earlier this month, former George W. Bush political advisor Karl Rove criticized Trump’s strategy of making the midterms about him; now, in a surprise move (given his history) Rove has denounced racism in the Republican Party, announcing he will vote against Bo French, a GOP candidate for Texas railroad commissioner and legendary bigot.

* Outgoing Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) raises money for GOP Senate candidates—but not Trump-endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, beat him in the primary. Cornyn says it is because Paxton is lazy and a poor fundraiser. A Cornyn event this week, which looked like an alumni reunion for the George W. Bush White House and includes the former president, will also exclude Republicans Mike Collins (Georgia) and Michael Whately (North Carolina.)

* In June, mega-MAGA Tucker Carlson expressed regret about supporting Donald Trump. He left the Republican Party, stating that Trump put Israeli interests over American ones. Carlson has also defended Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate opposing former Representative Mike Rogers in Michigan, and criticized Rogers as “a toady to Israel and an enemy of civil liberties.”

* More recently, two members of Utah’s all-Republican delegation spoke out against Trump’s media ban; so has Representative Mike Simpson (R, ID-02).

* Influencers Candace Owens, Joe Rogan, and Alex Jones have all broken with Trump over Iran as well. Influencer Milo Yiannopoulos, deported to Great Britain at the end of August, says he is “ashamed” to have supported Trump.Megyn Kelly has called the war and the Trump family’s profits while in the White House, “grifty.” The increasingly factional quality of the MAGA coalition also seems linked to plummeting influencer numbers.

* Last week, Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders shared a stage at the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington, D.C. Both criticized the Trump administration’s unwillingness to regulate AI. Earlier in the summer, Bannon also gave a lengthy interview to Politico in which he depicted the GOP as out of touch, without ideas, and vulnerable to a populist -infused Democrat party.

* MAHA influencer Kelly Ryerson, a.k.a. “The Glyphosate Girl” called the Trump administration siding with Bayer in Johnson v. Monsanto, “devastating.” Ryerson and her allies also oppose Trump’s nomination of Heidi Overton as commissioner of the FDA: she supports glyphosate and food additive deregulation. Last week, the Agriculture Committee voted to send a farm bill to the full Senate that cuts funds for pesticide-free farming, delays pesticide review, and kills a provision proposed by Democrats permitting Americans harmed by pesticides to sue.

* Support for Republicans has gone very soft among Latino voters, with 78% saying they would prefer Democratic control of Congress. Representative María Salazar (R, FL-27), in a hot race with former TV news anchor Elliott Rodriguez, has pushed back publicly on the administration’s immigration policies, and as a result, is being battered online by the MAGA faithful.

What we want to go viral:

* Once you finish listening to our show, Neil wants you to head on over to Drafting the Past, an online magazine of history books and ideas. Begun as an independent podcast by Princeton’s Kate Carpenter in 2022, award-winning historian Megan Kate Nelson joined up a year ago to create a terrific new website.

* Claire wants you to read Micki McElya’s Liberation Summer: The Moment That Changed the Women’s Movement and the Future of American Politics (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2026), about the many revolutions that intersected at the September 7, 1968 No More Miss America demo on the Atlantic City Boardwalk.

Don’t miss new drops from Claire and Neil. You can subscribe for free or support us for only $5 a month. You can also become an annual supporter for $50/year and choose Neil’s Coming Out Republican or Claire’s Political Junkies: as a welcome bonus.

You can also get all audio content for free by subscribing on Apple iTunes, YouTube, or Spotify.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

We begin this episode with President Donald Trump’s pledge, issued in Dallas last week at the GOP midterm convention, to give adult citizen of the United States $5,000, should the Republicans keep control of the House and the Senate in November.

Our theme music this week is “Pennies from Heaven,” written by Arthur Johnston and Johnny Burke, performed by The Skyliners, and licensed from LickD.

Rendering of the interior of the new White House ballroom, distributed on X by Donald Trump

In the News:

* Mitch McConnell is back! On Monday, the Kentucky Republican and former Majority Leader showed up on the Senate Floor. Last seen on June 11, he was in a wheel chair to be sure, but he was alive. A written statement issued by the 84-year-old said that he is “not yet 100%,” is in physical therapy, and will show up for important votes. The New York Times team said that McConnell “could be heard speaking in characteristically low tones with both Democrats and Republicans who came to wish him well.” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has been asking for updates on the Senator’s health for three months, and as of Monday, had not received one. But McConnell’s absence is not unprecedented: 91-year-old West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd was away for two months in 2008 because of illness; then-Senator Joe Biden did not return to the Senate for 7 months after aneurysm surgery; South Dakota Republican Karl Mundt waited almost three years to resign after a 1969 stroke; and Virginia Democrat Carter Glass simply stopped coming to work in the spring of 1943—the seat became vacant in 1946 when Glass died.

* On Tuesday, a New York Times/Siena poll shows Democrats making gains against Republicans in a generic midterm ballot. The spread is now eight points, and in nine out of ten categories, voters trust a Democratic Congress to do a better job. Support for Trump among independents has dipped to 27%, 11 points lower than those registered with a party. Voters overwhelmingly see Republicans as more extreme, more elitist, and more corrupt than Democrats. A massive 71% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the affordability crisis.

* In a surprise move, Republican Thomas Massie, the outgoing representative in Kentucky-04, has filed two articles of impeachment against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Primarily focused on the Iran war, the articles contend that the conflict is illegal, and that Hegseth defied Congress by not withdrawing troops and murdering civilians in the March bombing of a school. The resolution also accuses Hegseth of mishandling classified information, murdering people accused of being drug traffickers, violating the Geneva Convention, and imperiling the reputation of the United States and its military. Rather than permit a vote on the resolution, Speaker Mike Johnson sent everyone home a day early, canceling all business scheduled for Thursday. After having worked for 7 days since its summer break, Congress will not convene again until November 9.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

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Donald Trump spent nearly $1 billion on the Trump Taj Mahal Casino and Resort; a year later, it was bankrupt. Photo credit: Kevin Wong/Wikimedia Commons

News focus: Claire and Neil focus on how, under Trump, the Presidency is sloshing in gifts, taxpayer dollars, unrealized promises to the little guy, and donations from cronies.

* Last week, President Donald J. Trump promised to send every adult citizen in the United States a $5,000 check, which he is calling a “dividend,” if the Republicans win the November midterms.

* Trump has offered to give Americans free money five other times: tariff checks, DOGE dividend checks, direct health care payments, the “warrior dividend,” and Trump accounts seeded with $1,000 federal grants. Only the final two are remotely real. The payment to service members was a repurposed one-time housing allowance already budgeted by Congress, while the only babies eligible for Trump accounts are those born during Donald Trump’s second term.

* MAGA figures have a history of paying people to support them. In 2018-2019, the Trump campaign ran at least 15 promotions promising small donors that they would be entered in a contest for an all-expense included evening with the President. The Trump campaign insisted that there had been a winner for every contest, even though they could not produce one. Then, in October 2024, Elon Musk ran a legally dubious contest in which he paid small sums (between $47 and $100) to registered voters in swing states who signed a petition pledging to support the First and Second Amendments—which then entered them in a raffle for a prize of $1 million. Seventeen people won the prize and became spokespeople for Musk’s AmericaPAC. The tech oligarch tried the same thing in the Wisconsin State Supreme Court election in the spring of 2025. In both cases, officials tried to bring charges, but it was unclear what laws had been broken.

* Trump and his family have profited enormously from the Presidency. In the first term, the Trump family business took in a reported $2.4 billion over four years; in 2025 alone, Trump’s personal earnings and net worth jumped to between $2.2 and $2.4 billion. His current personal net worth is $7 billion, largely powered by crypto, but also by legal settlements, licensing fees, and global real estate ventures.

* On Monday, a team from ProPublica broke the story that Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev paid for Bettina Anderson and Donald Trump, Jr.’s May 24 destination wedding in the Bahamas. It was a three-day event, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Kremlev, head of the International Boxing Association and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin with a criminal past, were wired through Dubai. No one can explain why a person Trump Jr. describes as a friend he met only a few years ago would have a reason to pay for his wedding. It casts a new light on why Junior’s father did not attend. In response to a query from the New York Times, the President said he has no idea who Mr. Kremlev is.

* During Trump’s first term the national debt, which now clocks in at over $40 trillion (or around $116,000 per United States citizen), grew by $7.2 trillion; Trump has now added about half that in a single year, even as he has gutted the government and solicited hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations and crony billionaires for his pet projects. Many donors are then rewarded with appointments, no-bid contracts, and pardons.

* One basic problem is that the Trump administration spends money that he doesn’t have and collects money he isn’t legally entitled to collect, and then announces to taxpayers that he has generated “savings” and “profits” that are impossible because the national debt is growing rapidly. This week, we learned that the employees who were put on administrative leave by DOGE in 2025 were paid $9.5 billion to not work—a 435 percent increase over 2024. The promise was that the layoffs would save taxpayers $1 trillion, a number rounded this down (and without documentation) to $200 billion. As Senator Patty Murray pointed out, pushing out experts and paying them to stay home was “the most expensive way to make government worse.”

* Listeners may be interested in a 2019 essay by James Banner that looks at the long history of Presidential misconduct, much of which seems to be Republican. But what’s interesting is that Republicans and Democrats define corruption differently. Republican voters see government itself as the primary location for corruption, whereas Democrats are more highly focused on self-dealing, cronyism, and lying.

* To think about why Republicans understand government itself as corrupt, Claire recommends Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking, 2017).

What we want to go viral:

* Neil has been bingeing “The Bombing of Pan Am 103” (Netflix, 2026), a limited series about the terrorist attack on a US aircraft over Lockerbie, Scotland—and its consequences for victims in the air and on the ground. Neil came to understand the event as a tragedy that marked a turn towards 9/11 for the United States, but was less well understood as a national trauma for the people of Scotland.

* Claire wants you to read Helen Lewis’s “Mothers for Sale” (The Atlantic, September 9, 2026) an essay about the politics and ethics of surrogacy, why the United States is an outlier because of its almost complete lack of regulation, and what the consequences of unregulated surrogacy are for the women involved. But regulating surrogacy out of existence also has consequences—usually for the health and welfare of poor women in other countries.

Don’t miss new drops from Claire and Neil. You can subscribe for free or support us for only $5 a month. You can also become an annual supporter for $50/year and choose Neil’s Coming Out Republican or Claire’s Political Junkies: as a welcome bonus.

You can also get all audio content for free by subscribing on Apple iTunes, YouTube, or Spotify.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

We began this episode with a clip from a 1972 press conference in which Gloria Steinem protested an abortion reform bill passed by the New York State Legislature designed to circumvent the feminist demand that women have the right to choose.

Our theme music this week is “I Am Woman,” written by Helen Reddy and Ray Burton, performed by Tanya Stephens, copyrighted music licensed from LickD.

If you wish to read my memory of 9/11 on the 25th anniversary of this tragic event, go here.

Gloria Steinem at a Fire Drill Friday with Jane Fonda and Dolores Huerta, an event organized by Fonda to protest government inaction against climate change, in Washington D.C. on December 20, 2019. Image courtesy of Fire Drill Fridays/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

* On the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks on the Pentagon and Manhattan’s World Trade Center, a New York Department of Health study reveals what we know about long-term health damage from toxins released as soon as the first plane hit. Documents released by the Mamdani administration show that although New Yorkers were told the air was safe to breathe almost immediately, 10 months later, officials were still finding asbestos up to half a mile away. Of the 54,000 people in the Ground Zero study, half are being, or have been, treated for cancer. Some of them, and others, are also under care for respiratory and mental health, as well as dementia. Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who as on the scene that day for hours, appears to be a possible dementia: in addition to his passionate defense of the January 6 terrorist and support for election denialism, Giuliani has announced that Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is Muslim and constantly defamed as a terrorist in right-wing media, should not attend the ceremony.

* As the midterms approach, Donald Trump decided to double down on making the election about him, even as his popularity declines and candidates in tossup districts actively avoid him. A two-day midterm convention in Dallas this week cuts the sheep—candidates already receiving funds and endorsements from a man with 38% favorability rating—from the goats, Republicans with an unexpected family emergency that kept them as far from Dallas as possible. But both choices are bad: embracing Trump drives away independents, while separating him risks losing MAGA fanatics. The Brookings institution released a report this week that has Democrats on track to outperform previous forecasts as they take the House by 25-30 seats, while CBS news has expanded the number of Senate seats in playfrom 6 to 12. Here’s an account of Day 1, which featured a two-hour stemwinder from Trump; and Day 2, which featured JD Vance talking about his wife and Charlie Kirk.

* Then, there was the unexpected, WTF convention video appearance from Democratic Senator John Fetterman. This week, we learned that a new X account allegedly controlled by former Fetterman staffers—@FettermanStaff—plans “to share our stories (and screenshots) to show Pennsylvanians exactly who their Senator is.” The first document dump is scheduled for next week, when the Senate is back in session. But the announcement comes on the heels of a Wall Street Journal exposé by Will Hobson and Siobhan Hughes. It alleges that Fetterman is indifferent to the work of the Senate, spends much of his time doing conservative media spots, fails to meet with constituents, and is isolated in the Democratic party. This is not news: an earlier report by Ben Terris at New York Magazine portrayed Fetterman as depressed, exhausted, erratic, and of uneven mental health since the stroke that disabled him in the 2022 campaign. Last week, Fetterman lost his third chief of staff in less than three years.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

News focus: The feminists we lost in August

* We were all shaken on August 25 when Dolly Parton, who had cancelled a number of events in the months following husband Carl Dean’s death from Alzheimers, passed at 80 after a short bout with cancer. On September 3, 92-year-old radical feminist Gloria Steinem passed; then, on September 5, Robin Morgan, an essayist, poet and colleague of Steinem’s at Ms. Magazine, died at the age of 85.

* All three women were hard-working and prolific. Morgan wrote 20 books, and compiled the first anthology of radical feminist writing, Sisterhood is Powerful, in 1970. Steinem founded Ms. Magazine, wrote 11 books, traveled hundreds of thousands of miles for the movement, and created nonprofits to funnel money into feminist causes. Parton, who would not have used the word “feminist” to describe herself, nevertheless displayed all the best traits that feminism upholds. She was independent, kind, a performer, a self-made multi-millionaire, a tireless philanthropist, and endlessly creative; she wrote as many as 5,000 songs, 1000 of which she recorded herself on 49 studio albums.

* Both Parton and Steinem made feminism approachable and friendly. This is something Robin Morgan was never accused of, although all three women believed that women could not create an egalitarian society without including men in that vision. Feminist Katha Pollitt also notes that, despite the occasional blunder (such as her remark that young women supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 because “that’s where the boys are,”) Steinem was witty, charming, kind, generous, and believed in a big tent movement for women. But she is also currently being targeted by socialist feminists and other leftists as an agent of the state who sabotaged feminism’s most radical impulses.

* Claire and Neil also discussed the history of feminist struggles over the meaning of beauty. In contrast to Dolly’s deliberate artifice, Gail Collins noted that Steinem’s simple good looks as she became older were a guide to rethinking the relationship between the female aging process and the preservation of a youthful appearance.

* Another thing these three women had in common was a belief that men were part of a feminist project. Although she emphasized women’s independence, Steinem—who married once, late in life—welcomed men into the movement, and believed that true liberation would include all genders. Morgan was married to poet Kenneth Pitchford for 20 years: he was a founding member of the Effeminists, a subset of Gay Liberation Front founded to fight misogyny; they had a son, Blake, who Morgan loved dearly. Parton, on the other hand, was married to one man her entire life, businessman Carl Dean, and skillfully navigated a music industry dominated by men with her wit, intelligence, and canny business sense. Although she had no children, she cared deeply about the welfare of children. She also used her cultural power to defend LGBTQ+ people and, among other things, paid for her chauffeur’s gender transition.

* Dolly’s passing produced a gusher of love across political differences, perhaps because her feminism went unstated. In contrast, although many commenters have expressed fond memories of both women, the deaths of Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan have resulted in something more familiar: accusations on the right and the left that they undermined the well-being of women, families, and society. One notable contribution to this is the revival of charges, initially launched by Redstockings in the early 1970s, that Steinem began her career with a CIA front, and that her central goal was not to elevate feminism but to suppress its most radical impulses. Similarly, within hours after her death, numerous feminist critics have denounced her as having spearheaded the anti-trans, anti-sex worker, and anti-pornography activism in the movement.

What we want to go viral:

* Neil wants you to read Haley Cohen Gilliland’s A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2025), a New York Times Notable Book and Pulitzer Prize Finalist about a group of courageous women in Argentina who fought to find and reclaim grandchildren stolen by the junta between 1976 and 1983.

* Claire wants you to read Gregory Barber’s “The 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice” (New York Times, September 6, 2026.) It’s a longread about an elderly female professor who teamed up with a 15-year-old who loves math: together, they solved a problem no one had ever solved and launched a girl on her own career as a scholar.

Don’t miss new drops from Claire and Neil. You can subscribe for free or support us for only $5 a month. You can also become an annual supporter for $50/year and choose Neil’s Coming Out Republican or Claire’s Political Junkies: as a welcome bonus.

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Our opening segment is from “Drawing on the Archive: Tillie Walden’s Charity & Sylvia,” a short video featuring cartoonist Tillie Walden explaining the experience of creating a graphic novel from the Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant archive at the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History in Middlebury, VT.

This week’s theme song is “Steal My Heart Away, written by Van Morrison, sung by Morrison and Willie Nelson, and licensed from LickD.

These silhouettes are the only existing images of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake; the border is created from the two women’s hair, braided into one thread. Image courtesy of the Henry Sheldon Museum/Wikimedia Commons

At the beginning of July, I stumbled across an open letter that Rachel Hope Cleves, a professor of history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, had posted to Facebook. Cleves is the author of four books, three of which fall in what some call the history of sexuality, but many of us call queer history because such work is not strictly about sex, or how people understood sex itself, but about how intimate relations are refracted in, and shape, the larger realms of culture and politics.

In this letter, Cleves recounted what she believes are the troubling similarities between her path-breaking book, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2014) and a new graphic history by cartoonist Tillie Walden. It’s also called Charity and Sylvia (Drawn and Quarterly, 2026) but without the subtitle. Both books tell the story of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, a Vermont couple who lived openly, and were acknowledged in their community, as married at a time when that was not legally possible. Cleves, along with other scholars like Jen Manion and Elizabeth Reis, refute the notion that categories like gay, lesbian and trans are modern inventions; or that early Anglo-American society was uniformly repressive, either of non-heteronormative identities or queer people fashioning new identities that allowed them to be respectable.

Histories like these have long been a source of pride and comfort to LGBTQ+ people: after all, being grounded in a proud past was a companion task to the forms of civil rights activism that liberated queers, women and people of color. It’s no wonder that, at a time when these hard-won rights are under threat, Walden would create an accessible version of Charity and Sylvia’s story. So, she dug back into archives and artifacts that Cleves had studied a decade earlier, and wrote her own version.

But Cleves believes that the similarities between the two books—the use of silhouettes in Walden’s cover, the title itself, the structure of the book—too closely resemble her own work. While I cannot link to Cleves’s social media post, here is the text of the letter, in which she contests Walden’s work as an act of uncovering.

She protests insufficient acknowledgment of her own extensive research, work that went well beyond the original archive that Walden did not duplicate but seems to rely on. Finally, Cleves expresses her distress that Walden’s book seems designed to divert readers from her own work and direct any future telling of the story in other media to the graphic novel.

The ensuing controversy, largely fought out on social media, demonstrated a revealing split between professional historians and general audience readers. Numerous scholars chimed in to say that similar things had happened to them, and to their friends, and expressed solidarity with Cleves.

Walden, however, has defended her own research, pointed to differences in the substance and purpose of two texts and to a website where she listed her sources and bibliography. Walden’s press, and her supporters saw the controversy as a David and Goliath struggle, in which an economically secure and prestigious historian was trying to “own” the story at the cost of an independent artist’s reputation. They have also argued that Cleves has misrepresented Walden’s claims about the originality of the story itself, minimized the work Walden had to do to produce the book. They maintain that, by virtue of it being a graphic account with conversations and other elements that Walden acknowledges she invented, the two are necessarily quite different books.

Some of Cleves’s antagonists have inferred that historians concerned about Walden’s possible infringement on the original book have disparaged the art that graphic writers produce. I cannot speak for the rest of the guild, but I could not disagree more. I myself learned some of my first history from non-scholarly texts that included comic books from the 1930s and 1940s. Graphic histories are not only a great way to get young people interested in stories about our past, but I have used them in college classes to convey the larger narratives that the subject I am teaching relies on.

There are no easy answers here, and I don’t intend to propose them. As the high-profile plagiarism cases of the past few years have demonstrated, historians aren’t perfect either, and work written for a general audience does not always reflect the respect for intellectual property that scholars expect. As one person who commented on this quarrel pointed out, this controversy might never have arisen had Walden simply chosen a different title. But, as Cleves herself states in the interview, an author cannot copyright a title; and it is not uncommon in publishing to make those choices so that a new book will appear in an internet search alongside another, well-established one.

So, I wanted to see what Rachel had to say.

An acrostic poem written by Charity Bryant to Sylvia Drake, expressing her love. Image courtesy of the Henry Sheldon Museum/Wikimedia Commons

Show notes:

* At The Daily Cartoonist, D.D. Degg writes that the controversy relies on the misapprehension of graphic books as a narrative form (June 30, 2026)

* Christian Holub covered the controversy for Publisher’s Weekly (July 2, 2026).

* Samantha Puc of Comics Culture interviewed all parties, including the Henry Sheldon Museum, where Drake and Bryant’s papers are held (July 3, 2026)

* Cecilia Luce, of Seven Days, an independent Vermont newspaper, quotes Vermont cartoonist Alison Bechdel as saying that Cleves is correct to be concerned that her book will be superseded, which is “as much a commentary on our postliterate era as anything else.” (July 20, 2026)

* For a meticulous (and, I think, largely fair) comparison between the two books, listeners may want to read an anonymous post in the literary newsletter, Witchcraft for Cyborgs, “Charity and Sylvia: the extraordinary claims of Rachel Hope Cleves.” (August 13, 2026)

What I’m reading:

Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear (Knopf, 2026), a novel about a tradwife influencer who wakes up one morning to find herself in the mid-19th century world that she sells as a fantasy. With Labor Day a scant 6 days off, I think it is fair to say that Yesteryear is the book of the summer. Confusingly, or perhaps fittingly, Burke is herself an influencer.

A podcaster and TikToker, Burke has both profited from new media and produced a wry commentary on the individuation through mass consumption that new media promotes. As an added bonus, the heroine, Natalie Heller Mills, is possibly one of the most unlikeable protagonists on modern literature. A hundred pages in, she seems unredeemable. And yet: I cannot put Yesteryear down. So go figure.

Short takes:

* How to win the internet: “MapQuest has seen a surge in app downloads after the company said it will not rename Lake Ontario to Lake America, following an executive order President Donald Trump issued last week amid an ongoing trade war with Canada,” Aiofe Walsh reports at The Washington Post. “As of Tuesday, it was the top free app in both Apple’s U.S. and Canadian App Stores—its highest ranking in its 30-year history.” The company says it prefers names that are familiar and historic, but MAGAs can use a tool provided by the company to change it on their own devices. (September 1, 2026)

* What grift will former Congressman George Santos pursue next? Now banned for life by prediction market Kalshi “for engaging in insider trading related to his attendance at President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address,” Erum Salam reports at MS Now. Santos also agreed last month “to pay more than $35,000 after the federal regulator concluded he improperly profited from trades tied to his possible attendance at the State of the Union.” Having agreed to go, “Santos placed a bet on Kalshi that he would not attend the event. Hours before Trump was set to deliver his speech, Santos announced his absence.” George, just get a job! (August 31, 2026)

* Why has a very successful youth movement focused on climate change has pivoted almost completely to climate activism? “Wokeness is not concern about a particular issue or issues, or even an ideology,” Jonathan Chait writes at The Atlantic. “It is, instead, a political style, a form of apocalyptic obsession that is serially fixated on different issues, waxing and waning in intensity. It offers the comfort of Manichaean morality—telling adherents that they alone can see the world in its true horror. But what it doesn’t offer, by design, is any practical resolution.” (August 31, 2026)

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I posted this as a podcast so that I could re-up an interview I did last year with Martha Ackman, Dolly Parton’s biographer. You can read the show notes here, and purchase Ain’t Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton (St. Martin’s Press, 2025) here.

Left to right: Zubin Mehta, Dolly Parton, and Smokey Robinson in the East Room of the White House after accepting honors from the Kennedy Center, December 3, 2006. Image credit: The Eric Draper/Wikimedia Commons

Years from now, people will ask each other: Where were you when you found out that Dolly Parton died? And we will all remember.

I was on the beach: I was shocked, but not shocked; everyone knew that she hadn’t been well, but people who are 80 also have chronic medical issues that recede for long periods of time. It wasn’t inconceivable, as recently as last week, when Dolly canceled an appearance at Dollywood, that she would be back, as she said, to do all the work she had yet to do. On Instagram, she looked beautiful as always, with her warm reassuring smile and perfect makeup.

It seems that Dolly just didn’t want us to fret about things we couldn’t do anything about.

The family has confirmed that Dolly died of cancer after a recent diagnosis. But in the 18 months since her husband, Carl Dean, passed after a years-long struggle with Alzheimer’s, it was clear that Dolly was not herself. It was unsurprising that, after a lifetime of carefully shielding her personal privacy, that Dolly did not exactly say what was wrong: most recently, she had gestured to dehydration and digestive issues. But in December 2025, she postponed a month-long residency at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, rescheduling it for September 2026. Dolly was last seen on June 24, at the grand opening of Dolly Parton’s Tennessean Travel Stop truck stop but did not perform.

Now she is gone. I wasn’t ready for this.

I didn’t start crying until I came home and told my wife; then, I teared up off and on all evening as I read the tributes and played the YouTube videos and reels proliferating across social media. Let me say that as an older person, this kind of grief plays differently: in the last third of one’s life, there is no replacing the icons that were the wallpaper of one’s youth. When Dionne Warwick dies, as inevitably she will, I won’t be able to muster a similar commitment to Cardi B; nor will there ever be a song like “Walk On By” that returns me to a moment when it seemed like romance could be just around the corner.

Like only a few other figures—Elvis and Aretha come to mind—Dolly earned universal appeal. Unlike those two other figures, she appeared to live her life without a whiff of scandal. Elvis, for example, was a generally weird person. It’s not just that he began courting his first wife when he was 24 and she was 14, it’s that he had a range of personal tics and fetishes, from pharmaceutical abuse to guns to having girls and women delivered to him wearing little girl panties, that coexisted alongside the conservative, law-and-order persona that endeared him to Richard Nixon. Differently, Aretha Franklin was not weird, but her musical brilliance competed with constant acts of overcoming that are typical of celebrity: sexual abuse and teenage motherhood, domestic violence, and the occasional run-in with the law.

The closest Dolly ever came to controversy were the rumors that she was a lesbian. They were fed in part by her childlessness, but also by her husband Carl Dean’s refusal to be a public person. What few seemed to grasp was that Dolly and Carl’s long marriage, much like the decades-long partnership between Loretta Lynn and her husband Oliver (known as Doolittle, Doo or Mooney), may have exactly depended on allowing the non-performing, male, partner to have his own life. In turn, marriage became a private space where these women could rest, retreat, take off the wigs and the sequins, and just be themselves.

Carl’s apparent absence, and the fact that Dolly took on a childhood friend (who served two stints in the military and never married) as her traveling companion and body woman fed rumors about her sexuality. Yet, instead of running from them, Dolly staked a part of her reputation on defending the LGBT community—not as a political cause, but as if to do this were only a common-sense act of kindness and decency. In a day and age when sexual and gender identity have become ugly fodder for conservative activism, Dolly created a cultural space where LGBTQ people could feel welcomed and at home.

The fact that she did this took courage: it also speaks to her economic power and influence in a genre heavily dominated by bro culture. Country music has always been a somewhat conservative industry, one inflected with a form of Protestant Christianity that is, at best, generally capable of tolerance and studied ignorance about non-heteronormative sexualities. In that context, it was a big deal that Dolly made a point of being not just accepting, but loving, and—without identifying them—made a point of saying that she had LGBT people in her family (like everyone else does!)

But Dolly also got away with taking this stand because she was very careful about sharing her opinions as if everyone wanted to know them. In addition, as Russell Moore pointed out in Christianity Today, Dolly responded to insults and objectification with pointed humor that always made her attacker look mean and small. “That was more than just good media training,” Moore writes. “Parton showed she was more cunning than those who looked down on her: She didn’t seem the least bit offended by the questions, nor did she seem to be the least bit shaken in who she was.”

This became a valuable skill as social media became an unregulated technology for spreading bad takes and ugly information. Dolly is also one of the few celebrities who managed to simultaneously rise above politics and be on the right side of things: she was, for example, a staunch union woman, not just someone who played an exploited worker in the movie 9 to 5 (1980). But Dolly avoided partisanship, something that in retrospect, perhaps we should all have done. The closest she ever came to endorsing a candidate was in 2016, when Dolly told the New York Times that if the Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton it “would be wonderful. Hillary might make as good a president as anybody ever has.” Then, she delivered a prediction that was shockingly accurate. “I think no matter if it’s Hillary or Donald Trump, we’re gonna be plagued with PMS either way—presidential mood swings!” she said. “But I personally think a woman would do a great job. I think Hillary’s very qualified. So, if she gets it, I’ll certainly be behind her.”

And yes, of course Dolly was a feminist. She was not beyond reproach, I am sure. But if you were going to reproach her, you better watch out. Two years ago, I was in Nashville when conservative blogger Ericka Anderson accused Dolly of supporting sin with her pro-LGBTQ views.

“To be sure,” Anderson wrote, “the culture is on a constant witch hunt for those who would call homosexuality sinful.

I understand wanting to avoid the avalanche of criticism, but calling sin out by name isn’t judgment. It’s adhering to Scripture.

Parton had no problem identifying another kind of sin, saying, “Judging [others] is just as bad as any other sin.” I guess she’s a “good enough” Christian to call that one out.

Furthermore, it’s illogical to avoid taking a stand on something simply because of imperfection or human nature. If this were the case, we couldn’t call anything wrong.

Anderson did not avoid an avalanche of criticism. As I walked around Country Music Fest, Nashville’s annual tribute to itself, chalking, tee shirts, and rainbow bracelets all sent the same message: WWDD, or “what would Dolly do?” (For those unacquainted with popular Christianity, this is a play on the phrase: What would Jesus do?”) More pointedly was a fan comment, since expunged from the site, but memorialized on a gay journalism site, “You do not come after Dolly Parton. You absolutely do not.”

Anderson had to apologize for the piece, becoming perhaps the only conservative in recent years who has done this. The fact that even Donald Trump, who has something nasty to say about everyone, has ordered flags to half-mast without a whimper, or a single reference to the fact that she twice found reasons to decline the Medal of Freedom from him, speaks volumes.

As Spencer Kornhaber noted at The Atlantic, Dolly Parton was the ultimate franchise, “an idea that everyone could benefit from.” That’s true. But her superpower, and what she exemplified, was fairness, something we could use more of in a world awash with inequities, both real and imagined. She didn’t love indiscriminately, as many celebrities appear to do; she treated others with love, and that is a huge difference.

She modeled what it meant to be both wildly successful, and to use her influence and fortune to be of service to others. It’s what we want from our leaders, and almost never get.

But Dolly would tell us not to give up hoping.

What I’m watching:

Image courtesy of Apple TV

“Shrinking” (Apple TV, 3 seasons) is a dramadey (yes, I used that word) about a therapist (Jason Segal) who is finding his way back to friendship and connection after his wife’s sudden death. Unlike most therapists, however, he has an actual workplace: Harrison Ford and comedian Jessica Williams are his co-workers, and the cast is sprinkled with terrific secondary characters. Christa Miller, who you may remember from “Scrubs”(2001-2008) plays a neighbor with no boundaries—but in fact, no one in this show has boundaries, which is why it is hilarious that the main characters are therapists. The scripts are snappy, the characters are believable—and yeah, three seasons!

Short takes:

* Was General Randy George fired by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth because he refused to drop an investigation of why a U.S. Army helicopter conducted an unauthorized fly-by of Trump pal Kid Rock’s home? “General Chris LaNeve, the Army’s No. 2 officer, told George that Hegseth did not want the investigation to proceed, one person said,” Dan Lamothe and Noah Robertson of The Washington Post learned from confidential sources. “The two others said that George later confided in colleagues about the encounter with LaNeve and seemed troubled bit it. George told them that LaNeve suggested it would be best if the review was scuttled, those people said.” Secretary Hegseth “and his advisers have for months declined to say what precipitated George’s ouster, even when asked directly by Republican and Democratic lawmakers who objected to the firing.” (August 26, 2026)

* Dolly wasn’t the only gay icon we lost this week: yesterday, Tim Curry, who originated the role of Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, died on Tuesday at 80. “Although the famous actor never publicly disclosed his sexual orientation,” Ricky Cornish writes at The Advocate, “he consistently stated throughout his life that his romantic relationships were private. While his gender-bending performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter led many to assume he was gay, he fiercely protected his personal life from public scrutiny.” (August 26, 2026)

* “Travel sports, a term that has come to encompass all sorts of private teams, leagues, and clubs, used to be for the truly exceptional young athlete,” Caitlin Moscatello writes at New York Magazine about how unregulated vertical integration by big-money investors ate youth competition. “Now, they’re for anyone willing to pay — an expensive, exhausting commitment that has become popular not necessarily because millions of parents want them for their children but because it can feel like there’s no other choice. Rec programs are underfunded and struggle to compete with for-profit leagues for prime field, rink, and court times. As more children leave rec, so do their parents, creating a void of volunteers.” (August 24, 2026)

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We opened with a clip from former Vermont Governor Howard Dean announcing his bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination in Burlington, Vermont on June 23, 2003.

Today’s theme music is “Go, Go, Go,” by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, copyrighted music licensed through Likd. Neil and I are off until after Labor Day—but there will be plenty of bonus content in August!

Back in the spring of 2007, I was teaching at Wesleyan University when a student in one of my lecture classes dropped in to ask if I would advise his senior honors thesis in American Studies. When I asked what he planned to write about, Ryan McLaren answered: “Something about the history of Vermont. I love Vermont!”

Who could resist such a request? This was also an ambitious guy. Most members of the football team didn’t write an honors thesis. The time they devoted to the sport, even at a Division III school, made it hard to fit a rigorous independent study—one that required intense research focus in the fall—into their schedules.

Ryan graduated with honors in American Studies in the spring of 2008, and I learned a lot about the history of Vermont, and that state’s distinctive place in our democracy. Get acquainted with Vermont’s commitment to civic excellence and it won’t surprise you that it is one of four states to have produced two presidents, Chester Arthur and Calvin Coolidge; that it has supported a Senator, Bernie Sanders, who has reshaped the Democratic Party; or a presidential candidate, Howard Dean, whose investment in a digital strategy, revolutionized how campaigns are run, something I discuss in my book Political Junkie.

After he graduated from Wesleyan, Ryan devoted himself to contributing to his state. I’ll let him tell you his story, but that path included AmeriCorps, coaching, working on schools and Democratic Party politics—working for Governor Peter Shumlin, and as a staffer for Senator Peter Welch. That upward trajectory was interrupted by a 2017 catastrophic spinal injury which left Ryan disabled in body but not in spirit. He’s still that same sunny guy I met back in 2007, still an athlete, and still devoted to public service—so much so that on Tuesday, August 11, he will be on the ballot for Lieutenant Governor of Vermont.

Photo courtesy of Ryan McLaren for Vermont

You can read more about where that campaign stands here, and an in-depth interview with Ryan here.

Short takes:

* “We’ve been living under the penumbra of Trump for so long that it can feel as if we will never escape it,” Lydia Polgreen writes at The New York Times. “But the battle over who will succeed Trump as the Republican nominee in 2028 is well underway.” One of those aspirants is billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, currently running for Governor of Ohio. What could give him a chance? That he left the second Trump administration almost before it began. In fact, Ramaswamy seems to want to pretend that MAGA is already over—and maybe never happened. In a recent appearance, “he steered clear of culture war topics altogether. Indeed, far from leaning into Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, he emphasized his immigrant roots as emblematic of the American ideal. And though he praised the success of other Republican states, Ramaswamy had little to say about the Trump administration’s record. He hardly mentioned Trump, and only in passing.” (July 31, 2026)

* If you know someone in New York City who owns a condo or co-op worth more than $1 million (and believe me, that isn’t hard) or a townhouse worth more than $5 million (a heavier lift), you know someone who is pissed at Mayor Mamdani. “The ownership of every property in New York City is public and searchable through a funky website that takes a minute to master,” Adriane Quinlan of Curbed wrote about the preliminary, and flawed, rollout of the city’s pied à terre tax. Problem? Of the thousands of properties on the list, many are primary residences. “The residential properties on the list that could be hit by the tax included a bunch of media catnip, too: Anna Wintour’s Manhattan house was included, for example, and she certainly seems to live there. Councilmember Gale Brewer found her own home on it, the one she’s lived in since 1994.” (July 31, 2026)

* At The Forward, Alyssa Katz reminds us that charges of antisemitism in the New York City Mayor’s office aren’t new. During the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict between a largely Jewish teachers’ union and a Black community demanding Black teachers, “Mayor John Lindsay’s attempt at making peace was an utter disaster: He had to flee East Midwood Jewish Center into his limo, with a jeering mob behind him.” Hiring Black teachers in significant meant firing Jewish union members from jobs they had held for years, however. “Jewish alarm in the face of such provocation — not to mention dismissals without cause, something out of a Soviet Union purge — was certainly warranted. Conflicts between the community-control school board and teachers escalated inside school buildings, prompting Jewish teachers to file complaints that prompted grand jury indictments and to seek police protection.” (July 30, 2026)

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We began this episode with a February 2016 clip of South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham speaking to the Washington Press Club Foundation. In a darkly funny speech, Graham warned journalists about what a danger Donald Trump posed to the GOP and the United States—and offers to jinx Trump by endorsing him.

Our theme music this week is Knocking on Heaven’s Door, written by Bob Dylan and sung by Bryan Ferry, copyrighted music licensed from Lickd.

The late Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in the Oval Office with Donald Trump on February 3, 2026. Photo courtesy of The White House/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

* Perhaps responding to President Donald Trump’s claim that 250,000 non-citizens were registered to vote in New Jersey, California, Nevada and Pennsylvania, Governor Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey has publicized the fact that the state has removed 6,600 noncitizens from the voting rolls. Added by computer error under the previous governor Phil Murphy, the Wall Street Journal reported this week that these individuals “were erroneously registered to vote when they applied for driver’s licenses and identification cards from June 2023 to June 2024. Fewer than 400 of those people, registered across the state, actually voted.

* On Wednesday morning, Trump celebrated a MAGA sweep in the Arizona Republican Party primary, as if the November results were now predetermined. “THE DUMOCRATS ARE DUMBFOUNDED,” he crowed. Election-denying Congressman Andy Biggs (R, AZ-22) will challenge incumbent Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs. Alexander Kolodin, sanctioned by the Arizona State Bar for his role in the lawsuits filed by MAGA activists in 2020 will oppose Democratic incumbent Adrian Fontes for Secretary of State. In AZ-01, a tossup district that includes a chunks of liberal Scottsdale and Phoenix, Trump-endorsed former NFL kicker Jay Feely IV won his primary in AZ-01; he will face ER doc Amish Shah, not the DCCC pick, in what is projected to be a potential pickup for Democrats. Finally, in AZ-04, Democratic incumbent Greg Stanton handily dispatched Democratic Socialist Kai Newkirk, ensuring that Democrats will hang onto that seat.

* In Michigan, where voters will select candidates on August 4, we have a brawl in the Democratic Party for the Senate seat being vacated by Gary Peters: progressive physician and public health official Abdul El-Sayed and Congresswoman Haley Stevens (MI-11) are leading the pack. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is the most recent endorser to sign on to El-Sayed’s campaign, while Leader Chuck Schumer has endorsed the more moderate Stevens. This is an important Senate seat to hang on to; Trump won the state in 2024 by a point and a half, and the winner faces a strong opponent in former Representative Mike Rogers.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

A proof of life photo issued by Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell’s office earlier this month that has failed to stem rumors and conspiracy theories about his health.

News focus:

* As of last week, the Senate is missing two notable figures: Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, died suddenly on July 11 at the age of 71 of an aortic dissection,. Meanwhile, former Leader Mitch McConnell was last seen in the Senate on June 11; supposedly he remains in care at a rehabilitation center from a fall and pneumonia. Although aides released a statement under his signature on July 12, and a photo of McConnell holding a newspaper was released on July 13 (along with a statement that he is doing Senate business and intends to return), rumors have circulated that McConnell is fatally compromised.

* Graham’s death also exposes how much he had lost control of his own story. He was regularly derided by some on social media for being an allegedly closeted homosexual, something he denied his entire life. In the immediate aftermath of Graham’s death, memes of this genre proliferated: was that homophobia really just a political smear? Hunter Biden says no, alleging on a recent podcast that there’s a closeted gay Republican “mafia” waging culture wars to protect themselves.

* The sudden absence of two very senior Senators has once again cast a spotlight on how old this body is. Let’s start with a little arithmetic: the average age of the Senate is 64. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is 92; Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) are both 84; Jim Risch (R-ID) and Angus King (I-ME) are 82; and Dick Durbin (D-IL), who is retiring is 81. A third of the Senate is over 70. One aspect of this longevity may be that the last party to have a Senate supermajority was the Democrats in 2009, and both parties are using incumbency to hold seats. Senators are not required to reveal health status, and the seniority system has long made it advantageous to keep Senators in place, regardless of age: remember that Lindsey Graham replaced 100-year-old Strom Thurmond in 2003.

* The current alignment in the Senate is 45 Democrats, two independents who caucus with Democrats, and 53 Republicans. With Graham’s passing and McConnell’s incapacity, the GOP was temporarily down 2 votes; with the appointment of Graham’s sister, Darline Nardone, to fill out his term, that is now one vote. However, there are also five other Republicans in play on any given day for the next 18 weeks: Maine’s Susan Collins, Texas’s John Cornyn, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski.

* To complicate matters, Graham was up for re-election this year. There will be a special primary in August to choose a replacement. Former representative Trey Gowdy has been mentioned as a strong candidate, although he has said he doesn’t want to run, as has Lt. Governor Pamela Evette. And while Darline Nardone, an optician who has worked on behalf of disabled people in state government, was initially seen as a placeholder, she has announced her candidacy: Trump has endorsed her.

* Does Graham’s death create an opening for pediatrician Annie Andrews, the Democratic candidate, in the South Carolina Senate race? Unlikely. At the time of his death, Lindsey Graham was only up 3 points, but South Carolina has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since Fritz Hollings in 1998, and Trump won the state by 14 points in 2024.

* It has not been uncommon for wives to replace their husbands in the House and Senate; some were then even elected in their own right. But Graham didn’t have a wife; his sister, however, was a prominent supporter and element of his political biography.

* Numbers don’t tell the whole story of what it means for senior Senators to suddenly drop out of that body’s business. Although McConnell has been failing visibly for over a year, until this illness he chaired the Committee on Rules and administration, was on the Appropriations Committee (chaired by Susan Collins), and the agriculture committee. McConnell cannot be easily replaced, and not without testing the constitutionality of the recently passed law that bars Democratic governor Andy Beshear from doing so. Until McConnell returns, his seat on all these committees also remains vacant, since replacing him requires a vote of the full Senate.

* Similarly, Graham, a Trump critic turned loyalist, chaired the Budget Committee, and was also on the Judiciary, Appropriations, and Environment and Public Works Committees. While Nardone can cast votes, she cannot fill the role her brother played in the Senate, particularly in foreign policy, national security, and jamming through key Trump nominees like Todd Blanche, currently in hearings to be confirmed as Attorney General.

* Naturally, at a moment when trust in government could not be lower, there are conspiracy theories about both Graham and McConnell! Laura Loomer and George Santos used their platforms to assert that Lindsey Graham was murdered; and Kash Patel assured everyone he was on the case. Mitch McConnell is rumored to be variously dead or in a coma: Loomer claims that he is “brain dead.” These rumors were fueled last week when Governor Beshear said he had received two phone calls from agencies saying that McConnell had “passed.”

What we want to go viral:

* Neil wants you to watch “The Predator of Seville” (Netflix, 2026), about a man who ran excursions for American students abroad—and used that position to prey on women at their most vulnerable.

* Claire wants you to read Rebecca Egan McCarthy’s account of horse racing’s slow collapse in the United States, after one of New York City’s two storied venues closed at the end of June: “The End of Aqueduct Race Track,” July 21, 2026.

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And now back to our regularly scheduled programming!

Maine Senator Susan Collins has long been positioned as a persuadable moderate Republican who nevertheless has a strong record of voting for extremist policies and Trump nominees. Here, Collins meets with Ketanji Brown Jackson on March 8, 2022, who was successfully confirmed as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court with three Republican votes: Collins, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitt Romney of Utah. Photo credit: Renee Bouchard/Wikimedia Commons

Our opening clip is from a 2020 interview in which Susan Collins, Republican Senator from Maine up for re-election this November, expresses “concern” about then-President Donald Trump’s remarks that he would not accept the election results if he lost.

Democrats targeted Collins’s seat as part of their plan to win the Senate majority. So, when Democrat Graham Platner, dogged by scandal and credible allegations of sexual violence, I knew Amy Fried could help us think more insightfully about what had happened in Maine, that state’s political culture, and whether a new candidate has the time and savvy to win.

Fried is Professor Emerita of Political Science, and the former John Mitchell Nickerson Professor of Political Science, at the University of Maine, and a former President of the New England Political Science Association. She has served as the Policy Advocate for the Rising Tide Center, funded by a five-year National Science Foundation ADVANCE-Institutional Transformation grant Frored co-wrote and for which she served as Co-Principal Investigator. She is also an alternate delegate to the Maine convention that will pick a new candidate to replace Collins.

Neil and I began the political obituary for Platner here in case you missed it. Our theme music this week is “Susie Q,” written by Dan Hawkins and Robert Chaisson, performed by Johnny Savage & the Riders, and licensed through LickD.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Claire Potter: I am here with one of my favorite political scientists, and definitely my favorite political scientist from Maine, Amy Fried of Political Sightlines. Amy, can you tell our listeners a little bit about your Substack?

Amy Fried: I decided to start it about a year ago: I always knew I would be writing some about Maine politics because I’ve lived in Maine since 1997; I thought I’d write about other things as well. But somehow, with everything that’s been going on in Maine, particularly the Senate race. But there’s also this interesting race in Maine’s second congressional district, one of the few competitive house races really out there; it’s a Trump district with a now a very conservative Democrat who’s not running again.

It seems like Maine has taken over.

It certainly has. Last week, Neil Young and I talked about the implosion of the Graham Platner campaign. Before that, when the sexting scandal occurred in May, I wrote a post called “Who’s Afraid of Graham Platner,” in which I talked about whether sexting was a political issue or not.

It turned out there was a lot more bad stuff out there, which a number of political journalists told me on X, and it makes me think that some of these stories were more well and widely known than Democrats who endorsed and supported Platner had imagined.

Well, that’s certainly possible. I heard various rumors over time as well. I think that when the earliest controversies about the tattoo and the Reddit posts came out, Platner had a whole narrative about how he had changed, how he had worked through a lot of things in his life—including a lot of anger. The tattoo he just attributed to being drunk in Croatia with a bunch of his buddies, even though the social media posts were afterwards.

Platner created this whole redemption arc, and Americans like that sort of thing a lot, I think. It always seemed to me to have certain kinds of Christian overtones that I didn’t necessarily relate to, and Maine’s a very secular state. But it’s in the cultural water currently, right? So, a lot of people were willing to say: That’s fine. That was in the past.

They could believe Platner’s story because they liked other things about him. They liked his message. And he certainly was exciting. Lots of people were going to the town halls, and he got tons of volunteers. It fit a political moment in which people are somewhat anti-establishment.

In addition, Platner’s major opponent initially was Governor Janet Mills, who’s 78 years old, and people don’t want older politicians. So, voters were willing to let a lot go when the campaign began. I think when that started to change was the sexting story in May, these texts between him and his various partners after he got married. After that came the first story, from Lindsey Fifield, about abuse. But with the sexting story, I started to see some people pulling away from him.

Finally, there was Jenny Racicot’s allegation that Platner raped her. And I think the big difference, even before that, was that we had gone from things that happened a while ago, in words primarily--messages on Reddit and such--to behaviors, and they were more recent. All of those incidents—the sexting, the alleged violence towards women—were within the last five years.

I agree with you: I think it escalated, as you’re saying, and on a certain level, the early scandals allowed us to become inoculated to later scandals, and then that too crumbled. With the Nazi tattoo, I thought, I’ve known a lot of troubled young men who’ve gone into the Marines. I’ve known a lot of troubled young men who’ve gotten weird tattoos when they were drunk.

Platner doesn’t have a whole lot of formal education, so it also seemed plausible to me that he really had thought it was just a tough guy tattoo. And then that level of believing and making excuses takes you to the next level: sexting. Is this really something a voter should be concerned about? Isn’t this something his wife should be concerned about?

Two other red flags that I think many people like me missed. Apparently in 2024 there was a Facebook post by Jenny Racicot on a Facebook forum where women identify men that might be cheating on them or might be married while trying to date them. Racicot saw his picture, wrote the woman and said: This is a problem, PM me.

But the other red flag, and this allows us to turn to your post this week about misogyny on the left, was that very early on, a woman who was very high up in the campaign resigned.

Genevieve McDonnell resigned in October 2025 after the Reddit posts and the tattoo came out.

That should have been a signal for the rest of us to step back and look a little more coldly at this, right?

I think so. And you know, people sometimes say Maine is just a big, small town. I don’t live far from Genevieve McDonald; probably an hour and a half away. I know people who know her and they said to me, I really trust her.

Very oddly, it turns out that someone I know also knows Jenny Racicot: Jenny was her massage therapist. So, there are all of these like connections. But one of the things Genevieve was upset about was that the vetting was so poor. She said, I would have never joined this campaign if I knew they hadn’t really checked him out. She was also upset because of the way she was being treated by the consultants. Because even though they tried to create this flavor of it being very homegrown main campaign, Platner was recruited by people from out of state and that’s who was really running the campaign.

Right. And there’s a lot of money in political consulting. I mean, some political consultants routinely recruit candidates who they actually know aren’t going to win because of the fundraising. If you raise ten million dollars, the political consultant gets about twenty-five percent off the top, the media people get another twenty-five percent, and so on. So, there’s a lot of money passing through political campaigns.

But the political consultant, and maybe you can remind us of his name, had also been part of the Sanders movement since 2015, where had misogynist elements, and this guy apparently had been kicked off Summer Lee’s campaign for sexually harassing people. So, as we were all focused on “should we or shouldn’t we” with Graham Platner, there was other evidence we should have been looking at.

Absolutely. The one who had this sexual harassment thing from the other campaign is Daniel Maroff, and he was one of the two main recruiters. He had been involved with Sanders, involved with Fetterman and a number of other people. and interestingly, Platner wasn’t even his first choice. They were first trying to get this guy who is a labor leader in Bath, where naval ships are built. It’s one of these things which is very important, a local part of the military industrial complex. And Susan Collins is always bragging about getting the contracts for Bath Ironworks. But it’s also a place with very strong organized labor.

And so initially, they had tried to recruit this labor leader, and they found something in his background they thought could be a problem. So, they decided to go find someone else and they ended up with Platner and didn’t have much time.

Now, why didn’t they have much time? Because they had a schedule they wanted to follow. They wanted him to launch by Labor Day. To launch by Labor Day, you then have to make the launch video, you have to get some training, you have to get some of the legal stuff set up so they can start taking contributions.

So, it meant that they were kind of pushed up against their own self-imposed deadline and they went ahead with him. Maroff, after his first conversation with Platner, called Mo Katz, who’s another one of these consultants, and was very involved in the Zohran Mandami campaign. Actually, the Democratic Socialists recently came out with a statement saying maybe this isn’t a good guy to work with because he doesn’t do things very well, they didn’t really vet him. They did this super-cheapo job: normally it takes at least a month to do a full vetting. They create a whole big book, hundreds of pages, so you don’t have any surprises—or you may even decide not to run.

At least you know what’s in the person’s background. But instead of doing a month-long one that would cost at least twenty thousand dollars, they did a cheapo one that took three days and it cost about, I don’t remember, $4500, something like that. That shows kind of an arrogance and a lack of seriousness.

Well, let’s talk a little bit also about this fictional outsider candidate who’s supposed to be the magic man for Democrats, something I don’t remember being a thing in politics until Donald Trump was so successful, or maybe right before—the Tea Party.

The problem of a sketchy political consultant is amplified when the candidate is also not a politician, or an experienced campaigner. People who have run before are aware of what a good campaign looks like or doesn’t look like. Platner himself might have thought, in all of his inexperience, that none of these things in his background were that important, and been very willing to take the political consultants’ opinion that he had something special that would override his vulnerabilities.

Do you think the political consultant even knew about these things?

I think that there’s a lot they didn’t know, but they should have known more because they should have done a serious job in looking at his background and asking him questions. One thing that struck me about the sexting story was that it was a few days after the campaign launched when Platner’s wife Amy Gertner told Genevieve McDonald about it.

They shouldn’t have waited until after the campaign started to find these things out, and it shouldn’t have been up to the candidate and the wife to just volunteer the information. That should be something that someone running a campaign would ask about. Do you have a history of XYZ? You go through a whole list of possibilities, have them tell you about it. and then decide what to do about it.

The flip side of this is that we have someone in the White House, Donald Trump, who has been convicted by a civil jury of sexual assault. We have Ken Paxton, running for Senate in Texas, who allegedly committed Biblical sins against his marriage. We have former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, who engaged underage sex workers. There are any number of Republicans about whom various ugly sexual shenanigans, some of them illegal, some of them immoral, have been revealed.

One of the things I remember hearing from people is that Democrats lean too far towards punishing masculine misbehavior. The phrase they use is “HR Lady politics:” you know, “Democrats are just too sensitive and Republicans let men get out there and be men and the voters love it.”

Maybe the Democrats need to sort of adopt some tolerance for human error and flaws, but they draw the line with violence against women. In point of fact, it looks like Maine voters did care: Platner was leaking support even as he was winning that primary by such big numbers, right?

His numbers did start going down in the matchup with Collins. He started out being ahead by eight, ten, maybe even more, points. Then, by the time of the primary and immediately after, it was much closer. There was even a poll with Collins ahead. So, I think this information really made a difference.

I heard a lot of people saying during the campaign, Well, there’s Trump out there, so we shouldn’t care about that. But I think there is actually a different ethic among at least many Democrats where they don’t find this sort of thing acceptable. People didn’t know him well, and I think a lot of people were worried about what was going to happen next, and what was going to come out next. Platner kept saying there’s nothing more, there’s nothing more—then something new would happen. Voters just really lost faith in him.

About that big primary win: I think that in some ways it’s being misinterpreted. By election day, Janet Mills had suspended her campaign, and it was essentially an uncontested race. There was one more person on the ballot, David Costello, who was really not doing much of anything—no events, he didn’t have much money. Very few people knew about him. Then there was a write-in candidate who was trying to get some purchase, but how do you do that when your name isn’t even on the ballot?

So, I saw news reports, both interviews and in print, with some voters who said: I do have concerns, but he’s going to be the nominee and I’m going to vote for him.

So, some portion of the people who voted for him weren’t necessarily hard-core Platnerites. And, putting my little political science hat on, there’s some interesting research about what is called “mandate construction,” in which after an election, the person who wins tries to make a case for why they won that will be politically useful.

For example, Ronald Reagan said: I won because people wanted a tax cut, so let’s cut taxes. But in fact, a lot of people voted for Reagan because they were upset with high energy prices and inflation. It really it wasn’t a big anti-tax moment. In the same way, Platner and his supporters have said he won because everybody supported everything he had to say. And I don’t think that’s quite right.

But then there was the charisma argument. I remember listening to an interview that Platner did with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and up to that point, I hadn’t been impressed with him. I’d thought, this is Maine, I vote in Massachusetts, and I don’t have to be impressed with him. But the interview was deeply moving. I remember him talking about his friends being killed in Iraq and he started to cry and get very emotional. The video in which he dropped out of the race was also extremely emotional—and a little scary.

He has something that a lot of male candidates don’t, which is the capacity to at least appear to be projecting an authentic self. But that too was a problem, since he presented himself as working-class when, in fact, that wasn’t true.

There was a lot of discussion about that, and part of it got into: what does it mean to be working class?

But Platner didn’t come from a working-class family, that’s for sure. His father’s an attorney, and his mother had been very involved in Democratic politics and owns a pretty upscale restaurant. Then, they tried to get their son, in a way all parents want to, the best education they could. They sent him to fancy boarding school; then he came back and he went to a prep school in Bangor—and a lot of people who go to there aren’t fancy because they attend for free. If you don’t have a local high school in your school district, the state of Maine will pay for you to go to private school.

Wasn’t there a Supreme Court case about that?

Yes; it had to do with a Christian school taking public funds that didn’t want to hire gay people.

Let’s pivot back to your post about misogyny on the left. Platner in fact stayed alive as long as he did in part because so many people, perhaps outside the state of Maine, were willing to tolerate bad behavior from men. I remember at one point this phrase sort of popped up about Graham Platner being a “bad boyfriend;” I think around the Lindsay Fifield revelations. Even though I wasn’t sure I believed her, because she was a Republican political operative, I still thought: That’s not being a bad boyfriend. That’s being a really screwed up, violent and scary person.

So why did it satisfy some on the left to say that Platner was just a bad boyfriend?

Young men moved decisively towards the Republican party in the last presidential election. Since then, there’s been a lot of interest in trying to figure out how to recapture them. Now, one thing I can say, as someone who follows polls, is there’s not that much you have to do right now, because those same young men who moved towards Trump now can’t stand him. They’ve totally flipped.

But I think there is still an interest in trying to bring those folks into, or back to, the party, even though women have been the democratic base for a long time. Women became more democratic than men in 1980. In 1980 that, for the first time, the Republican Party platform opposed Roe—and the Equal Rights Amendment, which they had supported when it was first introduced in the early 20th century.

Right. The gender gap.

So, there’s been this recent interest in getting someone with a particular kind of style, a swagger, to appeal to young men. But I think it goes over a line at points, and I wrote the piece with that in mind after that abuse story. That’s when Platner went on the Chris Hayes show and said, “I was a bad boyfriend.” I thought: Is he just totally misunderstanding this? If so, he needed to take women’s studies 101 because he doesn’t understand gendered violence and abuse, and he doesn’t understand how it affects women’s lives.

Is there also something in our current culture that makes it possible for Platner, and/or his political consultants, to ignore misogyny?

Yes. Feminists used to talk a lot about what our experiences were. Whether it was in consciousness-raising groups or whatever, people talked about what it meant to live in a female body and how they were treated by men, experiences that have included sexual harassment and too often, sexual assault.

I think a lot of the feminist movement is now professional and institutionalized. We focus on policies, or on these other things run by organizations. Somehow, we’ve stopped talking so much about the day-to-day experiences of women. There’s a lesson there, because I think the debate over Platner would have been different if feminism had been part of the overall conversation.

Instead, Platner’s campaign was so focused on class, class inequality, the oligarchy, and then relating policies to that, with some focus on war and peace. But mostly it was about Medicare for all and other things we could be getting if we raised taxes on the rich and decided to care about ordinary people. Platner talked only a little bit about race and really did not talk about women at all. When the anniversary of Dobbs, the decision that overturned Roe, came around, he did talk about abortion; and he was endorsed by Planned Parenthood Action.

Then of it turns out that he’s also the guy who’s been accused of taking his condom off in the middle of intercourse and thinking that was really funny, which—maybe because I’m gay—I’ve never heard of before. It’s just an awful, cruel, dangerous and disrespectful thing to do.

Let me add some other cross-cutting themes. The Maine Democratic Party has all of these great candidates who are popping to the top to do the Kamala Harris thing: you know, 100 days and go!

Chuck Schumer stepped on a lot of those candidates during the primary campaign because he wanted Janet Mills. So, for me, one of the cross-cutting themes is age versus youth. I am a great admirer of Janet Mills. How she stood up to Trump for trans kids and won is a lesson for all of us. She’s obviously smart and a great fighter. She is also 78.

I have very strong feelings about how old the Senate is. We’re seeing the Republicans are kind of suffering from that now, having lost two of their most senior members to illness and death. In addition, it never seemed to me like Janet Mills really wanted it. She was obviously very popular with a range of Mainers, but I didn’t feel like she had that campaign in her.

Having watched Mills in two other campaigns, I think she was different. You know, she got a late start. She could have declared much earlier, before Platner created a different dynamic. If she had declared a month after that whole “see you in court” confrontation with Trump, she could have been way, way ahead.

But she didn’t do that, and then she took her time. And yes, there were a lot of people who were thinking of running. I’m not sure if the ones that are in it now are those people, because they claim they always wanted to be governor and not a senator, but who knows? Other people were waiting for Janet to decide and then all of a sudden, Platner bursts upon the scene.

Mills also didn’t campaign terribly hard. She did a lot of very small events. She didn’t push very much or remind people of things she had done, which I thought was kind of a problem. You can’t expect these days for people to know.

There were also some things that people on the left were unhappy with her about. She had vetoed some labor bills. And tribal sovereignty is a really big issue in Maine: while she had taken a lot of steps towards expanding that, the push was for full tribal sovereignty and she didn’t support that. She had a legalistic reason about an agreement signed decades ago, and believed Maine was acting within that.

So, there were a lot of people on the left who called her racist because of it, and those two things really threw the entire campaign. That said, she signed a sweeping reproductive rights bill: Maine had been pro-choice, but this protected women up to the point when any doctor would say it is acceptable to have an abortion, which meant that women with dangerous pregnancies or non-viable fetuses late in a pregnancy could have abortions in Maine.

That was a big step, and she was very good overall on trans rights, which was very controversial. he Maine Christian Civic League was talking about going out and getting signatures for referenda to overturn those two things, which they didn’t end up doing.

My point is: it’s not like those were like necessarily easy things to do. Yet even though she had done a lot of things like that and signed a state-level Family Medical Leave Act into law, she had these other problems. A lot of unions were unhappy, and I think that is really part of how the Platner candidacy came to be, because union people were interested in finding someone to run against her.

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So, that’s another backstory that actually explains the elevation of Platner in a way that that maybe people who aren’t from Maine wouldn’t understand.

Yes, and I think ties that intersects with the lack of attention to women’s issues. Obviously, a lot of unions have women, but with when the voter base is in places like the Bath Ironworks—this is a very male union. You have all these electricians, pipe fitters and welders, jobs which tend to be male. The Maine Education Association was another big union backer, and I don’t know them directly, so maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I don’t think they really had women’s issues on their mind either.

When all of this started coming out, like that thing about being a bad boyfriend, I wrote a piece about how Platner should learn more about gendered abuse and harassment in women’s lives. There were people who tried to get that to his campaign to get them to listen: one told me that she thought women in the campaign felt the same way, but there just was no response.

The phrase “bad boyfriend” is so trivializing. It’s very different from saying “I was a bad man.” Saying you’re a bad boyfriend kind of conveys: “I was I was late to the restaurant all the time, I didn’t open doors, I forgot the flowers, blah blah.” It really does trivialize the nature of these charges.

I think what you’re saying about labor is very interesting too, because of course one of the big struggles nationally over working class votes is when both parties say they support workers, they really do mean white men. They don’t mean Hispanic people. They don’t mean Black people. They don’t mean women or LGBTQ+ folks. Which is nuts, because there is a labor tradition of supporting marginalized workers. Alan Bérubé wrote about a maritime union that was very pro-gay, and we’ve seen a lot of really good queer and feminist politics coming out of labor unions.

If, in fact, you’re saying this archetypic typical working-class voter is really a white man or a young white man who can’t get the training to be a pipe fitter or something like that, you’re really not dealing with the history and, in many ways, the present of labor, right?

And Frances Perkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor and the first woman in the job, is from Maine.

Right. Maine is a really interesting state for labor because there are so many different kinds of workers. There’s the big maritime trade, there is the interior, there’s the seasonal trade: what I am getting at is that a lot of people who I’ve been talking to about this race, I think fundamentally misapprehend the political culture of Maine. Maine is not Connecticut; it’s not even Massachusetts. Maine is a place that, in my understanding and in my experience campaigning there for Sarah Gideon, cares about itself as a kind of state culture, a set of values organized as a state.

Susan Collins has been expert at mobilizing that. I mean, I know somebody, a Democrat, who used to work with her in the Senate who said she’s a really good person. And she’s a really moral person. If the worst thing they could think of to say aboutCollins was that she started dating her husband before he left his previous wife, that really doesn’t hold a candle to a Nazi tattoo.

Sure, sure. When I moved to Maine, which now is almost 30 years ago, what people told me about the political culture was that it had a big emphasis on civility and bipartisanship, and that people liked to be able to talk to each other and be kind of reasonable with. They liked people who would be respected and independent in Washington.

That’s the tradition. In the 1950s, Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican, made a speech questioning McCarthyism, so she has all these things named after her. The federal courthouse in my town, Bangor, is the Margaret Chase Smith courthouse. You walk in, and there’s a quote from her 1950 speech, the Declaration of Conscience, which is about standing up for certain values and not giving way to fake scandals and calumnies; not attacking people for no reason. Maine has elected other Republicans in that vein—Bill Cohen, Olympia Snow—and independents who caucused with Democrats.

Maine voters are calm and even-handed. You may not agree with them on everything, but they’re willing to talk. In a way, I thought when Platner first came along that might be a problem, that he was too hot, and Janet Mills was a better fit.

The national misapprehension of Maine political culture is interesting to me at a moment when so many races nationalize. When it was clear that Platner had to drop out, but hadn’t done it yet, the New York Times wrote a piece in which they had three or four politicians they thought might succeed, a couple of businessmen, and then actor Patrick Dempsey and historian Heather Cox Richardson.

You know, Heather’s great, but I thought: no, she is not running for Senate. Then she put out a video explaining why she wouldn’t. But I thought: only in New York would they believe that the name recognition of a Patrick Dempsey or a Heather Cox Richardson would be the thing that Maine voters were actually looking for.

So, what do what do Maine voters want in the Senate candidate who is going to be picked by the July 25 nominating convention in Augusta?

I think that there are some things they want that Platner had. They want someone who’s going to be aggressive and is going to challenge the Trump administration. In the policy vein, they want a person who are going to stand up for policies like Medicare for all. They want to raise taxes on the rich, preserve social security, and oppose foreign wars. And I think they also want somebody who in some ways is going to run a campaign like Platner did, with lots of town halls.

Because it is true, the kind of thing that Platner did in terms of always getting out there, talking to voters—we really had not seen anything like that. It’s also very rare nationally. The only person I can think of who at least I knew something about doing that was Beto O’Rourke in Texas when he ran for Senate. He did a lot of big events, rallies with Q and A’s.

So, Maine Democrats will want someone who’s going to be accessible and come off as strong. Being less intense and having a little more experience and knowledge may be helpful. That is something that tends to be good for the swing voter in Maine, usually an older woman, either working class, or an educated worker like a nurse. You know, someone with a very like practical, day-to-day, job. They know what that job is and how to do it.

In the past, folks like that have tended to like Susan Collins, and they realize that they would be losing some seniority if he she’s replaced. On the other hand, her popularity has gone down, and I think someone has an opportunity, if they can both keep the energy that Platner had and persuade some of those voters. By the way, in the last New York Times/Siena poll before Platner dropped out, which had him ahead only by two points, he was only winning 4% of Trump voters. Collins was winning 10% of Kamala Harris voters.

So it wasn’t as though Platner was doing what he said he could do. If a new candidate could pick away at more of those Harris voters, they really could win.

My experience on the Gideon campaign six years ago was that voters would say, Of course I’m voting for Joe Biden—and I’m voting for Susan Collins. So, there were all of these ticket splitters who didn’t dislike Sarah Gideon. They were nice about her, but the big line was: She’s not from Maine. She just moved here twenty years ago and she’s not from Maine. Susan Collins is really from Maine, and she really gets us.

I guess I want to end on this question. I can’t imagine what the attack line is on Susan Collins. We’ve hung Brett Kavanaugh around her neck. I don’t think that really grabs people anymore, so what does?

I think the line has got to be that she’s not the Susan Collins you liked before, that she’s done good things, but she’s not the same person. That’s a very different tone than “Susan Collins is a bad person,” which was the Platner line. Say it more in sadness than in anger. She’s not the same person. She’s voting with Trump more than 90% of the time. Collins said she would have so much power when she was chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and yet she doesn’t, because she lets them run roughshod. She put this guy into power at the OMB who didn’t really believe that Congress has any power and that the President should run everything. She voted for him; she’s voted for all these terrible people. She’s not really using her power the way she said she would.

Yes, the Collins campaign can keep running all these ads about how Susan Collins got money for a firehouse here and there or did this little thing, but in the big picture she’s not doing what she should. She voted for the One Big Beautiful bill to proceed, then she voted against it. Before she voted against it, she got a little bit of money in the bill for this rural hospital fund, which is much less than what Maine lost under the bill. Then she runs ads about how she got all this money for rural hospitals.

When people said, But she she’s responsible for the One Big Beautiful Bill passing, one of the fact checkers came out and said, No, she’s not, because she voted against it. But she did vote for it to proceed. So, it’s very hard sometimes. She can be very, very slippery. And I think when debates happen, she will pull that sort of thing. With Kavanaugh, it is an old story. I think the way to frame that is that she either completely misjudged him, so she has poor judgment, or she was not honest about what she thought.

Neither of them is good.

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We began this episode with Graham Platner’s announcement on Wednesday that he will step down as the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine.

Our theme music this week is Born Again, written and sung by Jelly Roll, copyrighted music licensed from Lickd.

Former president of the Maine Senate Troy Jackson and Senate primary candidate Graham Platner at a Portland Hearts of Pine match on September 27, 2025. Jackson is now a candidate to replace Platner on the ballot. Photo credit: MAINEiac4434/Wikimedia Commons

In the news:

* On Wednesday, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who ran a construction crew in Houston, because the most recent casualty of Donald Trump’s deportation machine. Araujo was approached by ICE agents, who claim he was in the United States illegally, and that he assaulted them. The evidence remains vague: Araujo’s son has suggested that his father was alert to being robbed for his tools and may have believed that the agents were thieves. The Office of the Inspector General and the FBI have taken over the case, sidelining local officials: the family has asked for an independent investigation. The Washington Post reported this morning that agents did not have a warrant for his arrest and had mistaken him for another.

* Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair ends today. Billed as a “A world-class exposition and modern-day World’s Fair” clustered around the National Mall, by all reports it was slightly better quality than the 2017 Fyre Festival. It featured, among other things, a piece of the stage falling on a troupe dancing to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” Meghan McCain’s new game show streaming to an empty crowd, massive amounts of junk food, Kash Patel’s girlfriend Alexis Wilkins stepping in when nearly every other performer pulled out, 10 no-show states, at least one Confederate battle flag, and a baptism pool that fairgoers used as a swimming pool. It is said to have cost $68 million, funding run through a third-party, and was organized by a long-time Trump vendor, Event Strategies, Inc of Alexandria, VA. Freedom 250 is claiming that 150,000 people attended: by contrast, the Minnesota State Fair claimed almost 2 million visitors in 2025.

* Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has asked Republican Senator and former majority leader Mitch McConnell’s staff for an update on his health. McConnell has been publicly declining for months, has sometimes appeared to freeze in public, and has fallen in the Capitol. McConnell has not been seen since an emergency medical call to his home on June 14, reportedly because of an “unconscious person.” Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Whip John Barasso (R-WY) each claim to have had “substantive” 20-minute conversations with McConnell on the phone, but no one—not even his wife, former Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, claims to have seen him—and some are speculating that McConnell is in a coma and/or brain-dead. However, his absence throws the Senate Appropriations Committee into a deadlock around requests from the Trump administration for enhanced military spending to find the war against Iran.

Your hosts:

Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.

Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Platner’s Senate campaign headquarters in Ellsworth, ME, following his victory in the Democratic Senate primary in June, 2026. Photo credit: Quintin Soloviev/Wikimedia Commons

News focus: Graham Platner is forced out of the Maine Senate race

* Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner ended his insurgent candidacy last night after suspending it on Wednesday. The final straw was former girlfriend Jenny Racicot detailing rape allegations from late 2021 to a reporting team from Politico. Racicot was one of three women, including Lindsay Fifield, a Republican political operative, who had spoken to the New York Times about violence in their relationship with Platner prior to the primary. At the end of May, Platner’s wife Amy spoke to the campaign about Platner sexting with other women.

* The Wall Street Journal’s reporting team supplied a timeline of Platner’s rise and fall, highlighting a 2024 Facebook post by Racicot that should have been a red flag, and an ambitious pair of progressive political consultants, Daniel Moraff and Morris Katz; Moraff has had close ties to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for a decade. Platner’s social media posts and his obfuscations about his motives, and understanding, of a tattoo that was a Nazi symbol, were an even earlier issue.

* In the aftermath of Politico’s story, new allegations have emerged from Fifield that Platner also removed his condom while they were having intercourse, knowing that she was not on birth control.

* That day, Drop Site’s Ryan Grim appeared to be questioning Racicot’s account, inferring that she had invited Platner over: Drop Site apologized on Thursday, and Grim appears to have removed these posts.

* Here is a complete list of candidates who might replace Platner. In the first round of speculation, the New York Times included actor Patrick Dempsey, as well as historian and Substacker Heather Cox Richardson. Richardson then published a video explaining why she is not interested in running for Senate.

* The state party is planning a nominating convention to choose a new candidate.

* Did Democrats, in their eagerness to win the Maine seat, create a situation in which better candidates were ignored and Platner seemed like the most vigorous alternative to Susan Collins?

* In October 2025, when the news about the Totenkopf tattoo emerged, feminists Moira Donegan and Tressie McMillan Cottom both warned that Democrats were too infatuated with the illusion of working-class authenticity to heed the warning signs about Platner. Monica Potts, Katha Pollitt, and Rebecca Traister have added feminist voices to the discussion.

* In the past two years, a Senate candidate has only been replaced nine times, and in only two cases—Arkansas Republican Tim Hutchinson and New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg—has it been successful.

* That said, Nate Cohn argues that Platner was losing support, and that a new candidate will boost the party’s chances.

What we want to go viral:

* Neil wants you to read Rose Horowitch’s tale of American literary apocalypse, “The End of Reading is Here,” (The Atlantic, July 8, 2026).

* Claire wants you to read, or listen to (as she did), Sarah B. Franklin’s tour de force about twentieth century publishing, The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America (Atria Books, 2025). Jones edited and cooked alongside Julia Child, Marcela Hazan and other great cookbook, as well as major authors like Anne Tyler and John Updike.

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