Today’s episode begins with a February 6, 2026 press gaggle on Air Force One, in which Donald Trump discusses the lawsuit he filed against the Internal Revenue Service. It is unclear what he means when he says that the United States government gives $40 billion a year to charity: we can’t document that.

Our theme for this episode is LFG by Divisioner--you can find their work, and all the talented artists we feature on these episodes, on Soundstripe.

TPUSA CEO Erika Kirk delivers remarks during the memorial service for her husband Charlie in Glendale, Arizona on September 21, 2025. Recently, Kirk threatened to sue three different people for falsely implicating her in her husband, Charlie Kirk’s, murder. Photo credit: Daniel Torok/Wikimedia Commons

In the News:

* On Monday, a new front opened in the redistricting and election security wars: Riverside, CA County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican, seized more than 650,000 votes cast in California’s Prop 50 special election. Bianco claims that the final vote tally did not match the number of ballots cast. Both Republican and Democratic officials say this charge is baseless; however, it matches the Trump administration’s seizure of 2020 presidential election ballots last February in Fulton County, Georgia.

* Florida is the gift that keeps on giving—to Democrats. This week, first-time candidate, Democrat Emily Gregory prevailed in a special election in HD-87. That’s Palm Beach County, and Gregory, a small business owner and military spouse won by 800 votes in a district that the previous Republican won by 19 points. She will now represent President Donald Trump in the Florida legislature. In West Tampa’s SD 14, another first-time candidate—union organizer, electrician and navy vet Brian Nathan—upset Republican State Representative Josie Tomkow by 408 votes; the previous Republican in that seat won by ten points. Meanwhile, former North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn is running for Congress again—this time in Cape Coral’s ultra-MAGA Florida-19, formerly Byron Donald’s seat. According to the Cook Political Report, this is an R+14 district.

* Last May, South Carolina Democratic pediatrician Annie Andrews announced she would run against four-term incumbent Lindsay Graham, who beat his last challenger by 10 points. The last Democrat to represent South Carolina was Fritz Hollings, who was defeated by Jim DeMint in 2004. But Andrews just released a new ad on Instagram that points to how the Democrats are positioning candidates running against Donald Trump’s allies. We feature a controversial ad Andrews dropped on Instagram.

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.

Image credit: AndriiiKoval/Shutterstock

News focus: MAGA’s lawsuits

* Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk has had it up to her waterproof mascara with accusations that she arranged the murder of her late husband Charlie Kirk. Her attorneys have sent a cease-and-desist order to Collin Scott Campbell, the Maryland-based figure behind Project Constitution, which has also alleged that Kirk procured underage girls for the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, and trafficked orphans from Romania. Influencers Candace Owens and Zach de Gregorio have received similar letters: all say that views they have expressed are their opinions, and fall under their right to free speech. The MAGA-sphere seems to be standing with Kirk, and directing most of its opprobrium to Candace Owens.

* Lawsuits are a feature, not a bug, of MAGA Republicanism. There are so many lawsuits against, or instigated by, the Trump administration that the Lawfare blog created a litigation tracker. Universities, media outlets, and law firms have been in court almost non-stop, and it seems like when these institutions fight, they win.

* Donald Trump has always employed lawsuits as a strategy: USA Today has counted 4,095 over three decades.

* Since he was re-elected president, Trump has filed a number of personal lawsuits. He sued the Des Moines Register and its legendary pollster Ann Seltzer (ongoing) for fraud. He is seeking $15 billion from the New York Times and four of its journalists for reporting fraudulent business practices. He is suing the BBC for $10 billion, and the Wall Street Journal for another $10 billion. ABC/Disney settled a lawsuit with Trump for $16 million; as did Paramount/CBS, which some Democrats believe was basically a payoff for FCC approval of the Skydance merger. In January, Trump and his sons filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in compensation for his tax returns being leaked to the New York Times.

* Let’s compare these lawsuits, which seem designed to extract payoffs and concessions from major corporations, to Prince Harry’s three lawsuits against British tabloids. In 2024, he was awarded about $300,000 in a phone-hacking suit against The Mirror Group. In early 2025, the Prince settled a lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s English tabs in exchange for a “full apology” but no money; and he is currently suing The Daily Mail for “media intrusion.”

* This strategy goes beyond Trump: Peter Thiel destroyed Gawker, a gossip website, in 2014 by financing a successful lawsuit against it.

* In the ultimate tabloid event, Melania Trump threatened to sue journalist Michael Wolff, because he has tied her to Jeffrey Epstein, for $1 billion. In retaliation, he hit her with a SLAPP suit which, if it goes to court, would cause both Donald and Melania Trump to be deposed about their relationship with Epstein. Wolff has been chronicling the progress of this lawsuit on his Substack and podcast, and in the Daily Beast.

What we want to go viral:

* Neil wants you to read and subscribe to LA Material, Los Angeles’s new neighborhood-by-neighborhood local paper. You don’t have to live in the City of Angels to find it interesting: it’s got stories that matter to any community that cares about art, culture and politics, as well as fascinating general interest stories like what actor Mickey Rourke left behind when he was evicted from his home. And I have to tell you: it looks a lot like it was built on a Substack platform, which is really exciting.

* Claire wants you to watch Louis Theroux’s documentary, “Inside the Manosphere” (Dir. Adrian Choa: Netflix, 2026), which digs into the gamified world of right-wing male influencers, a number of whom are one or two degrees of separation from Donald Trump. As a film, as Theroux is filming them, their people film him filming them and turn the event into content. While the misogyny and reactionary politics are real, it’s all in service of making money by selling the dream of power, independence, and style to boys and men who are insecure and directionless. You can read more about the movie here.

Short takes:

* A new investigative report from Tiffany Hsu and Stuart A. Thompson at The New York Times explores how much the Trump family and its various imitators have profited from all that MAGA merch: the answer is over $300 million a year. “The vast economy of tchotchkes and trinkets has become a visceral proxy for the energy behind his political movement, with the products acting as billboards for membership in the club,” Hsu and Thompson write. “No other sitting president has tried to make money off of the office the way Mr. Trump has, according to several ethics watchdogs. For members of Congress and many federal employees, using public office for private gain is explicitly forbidden by their codes of conduct. There are no comparable rules for the president.” (March 27, 2026)

* “America’s tech oligarchs are pathologically unreflective,” Thomas Chatterton Williams writes at The Atlantic. “From their perspective, looking inward is a waste of time better spent moving fast and breaking things, or hoovering up money and consolidating power.” Why do these powerful men “whose work is most profoundly shaping our collective reality” lack the desire or ability for introspection? Relying on a crude and reductive reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, they view conscience itself as“a sickness that emerges when repressive social norms cause us to turn our aggressive instincts inward—leading to crippling guilt and obsessive self-reproach—rather than directing them outward,” Williams explains. “In order to justify exerting their will and creating their own values, some readers reduce Nietzsche to a mantra: Act and then forget.” (March 27, 2026)

* “In one talk radio appearance after another, Sheriff Jerry Sheridan has declared that his department had eliminated the racial bias that plagued it under his former boss Joe Arpaio,” Rafael Carranza and Arizona Luminaria write at ProPublica. But their new investigative report shows that Maricopa County, Arizona, the poster child for anti-Latino racial profiling in the western United States, has not changed all that much. “When all traffic stops by deputies were analyzed, the report concluded: “Stops involving Hispanic drivers were more likely to result in an arrest than stops involving White drivers”; and traffic stops involving Black drivers, who are not covered in the Melendres settlement, were more likely to take longer and result in an arrest compared to stops of white drivers.” (March 26, 2026)

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