Two Republican election officials told ABC News they expect President Donald Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting to be struck down in court, even as a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general filed suit in federal court in Boston to challenge it.
Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt and former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer both said they believe the litigation to block the order is likely to succeed. Their comments arrived alongside a growing number of legal challenges from Democrat attorneys general, House Democrats, and left-leaning advocacy groups, all racing to block the order before it reshapes how states conduct elections.
The White House has defended the order as intended to strengthen election integrity and ensure only eligible citizens vote. That goal is not controversial among Republicans. But the messengers lining up against it, and the legal terrain they're choosing, tell a more complicated story.
Trump's executive order directs his administration to compile a list of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state and to use federal data to help state election officials verify eligibility. It requires the U.S. Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on each state's approved mail-in ballot list. States must also preserve election-related records for five years.
None of those provisions sound radical. Verifying citizenship, maintaining voter rolls, preserving records: these are the basic hygiene of election administration that conservatives have demanded for years. The question isn't whether those goals are worthy. It's whether an executive order is the right vehicle to achieve them.
Schmidt, appearing on ABC News' "This Week," framed his concern around voter confidence rather than partisan loyalty. He said:
"We want voters to know that the election is going to be free, fair, safe, and secure, and that everyone knows what the rules are prior to going into this."
His worry is confusion, not the underlying policy. When rules change mid-cycle or get tangled in litigation, voters lose clarity about how to cast their ballots. That uncertainty, Schmidt argued, cuts against the very trust the order is meant to build.
"So confusion is never a positive thing unless you are seeking to sow distrust in the outcome of an election."
According to Newsweek, Richer, who ran Maricopa County elections from 2021 to 2025, struck a similar note. He acknowledged agreeing with "some of the elements in the executive order and some of the aspirations" but called the order unnecessary, noting that Arizona already has many of the features Trump wants applied nationally. His core objection was procedural:
"While I agree with some of the elements in the executive order and some of the aspirations, the form does matter."
This is a familiar fault line on the right. Conservative election officials who have spent years building integrity measures at the state level often bristle when Washington attempts to dictate process from the top down. It's the same federalism instinct that drove Republican resistance to federal election mandates under the Obama administration. The principle doesn't change because the president signing the order has an R next to his name.
A coalition of Democrat state attorneys general announced Friday they were filing a lawsuit challenging the executive order in federal court in Boston. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who filed one of the separate lawsuits, offered predictably breathless commentary on "This Week":
"That executive order is unlawful and unconstitutional. We've already filed litigation, and we expect that it will be declared so in short order by the courts."
Jeffries also declared his side would "work as hard as we can to make sure that this is a free and fair election." Which is interesting language from a party that has spent the last several years arguing that any attempt to verify voter eligibility is voter suppression. Democrats have fought voter ID laws, resisted citizenship verification on registration forms, and sued states for cleaning outdated names from voter rolls. Now they invoke "free and fair elections" as their rallying cry against an order that asks the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to approved voters.
The contradiction is loud. When Republicans propose verifying who votes, Democrats call it disenfranchisement. When Democrats sue to block those verification measures, they call it protecting democracy. The principle bends to serve the outcome they want.
Additional cases are being pursued by what the source material describes as "arms of the Democratic Party and voting rights advocates," a coalition that functions as the legal infantry of the progressive movement whenever election rules shift rightward.
The honest conservative conversation here isn't about whether election integrity matters. It does. It isn't about whether mail-in voting has vulnerabilities. It does. The conversation is about strategy.
Executive orders are inherently fragile instruments. They can be reversed by the next president, enjoined by a single federal judge, and litigated into irrelevance before they ever take effect. The legal challenges already piling up in Boston and elsewhere suggest this order may spend more time in courtrooms than in practice.
State-level election reform, by contrast, has proven durable. Georgia's Election Integrity Act survived a corporate boycott, media hysteria, and DOJ scrutiny. Florida tightened its mail-in voting rules and saw smooth elections with broad public confidence. Arizona, as Richer himself noted, already has many of the features the executive order seeks to impose nationally. These reforms succeeded because they were built through legislatures, survived legal challenges on their own constitutional footing, and earned democratic legitimacy in the process.
The goals embedded in Trump's executive order, citizen verification, ballot delivery controls, record preservation, are goals that belong in state law. Codified through legislation, they become far harder for the next Democrat administration to unwind. Issued by executive pen, they become lawsuit magnets that hand Democrats a sympathetic narrative about overreach.
The legal trajectory is predictable. A federal judge, likely in a blue-leaning jurisdiction, will issue an injunction. The administration will appeal. The case will grind through the courts while Democrats fundraise off every hearing. Meanwhile, the actual policy goals remain unimplemented.
None of this means the underlying impulse is wrong. Americans deserve to know that only eligible citizens are voting. The Postal Service should not be delivering ballots to addresses with no verified voter. Election records should be preserved long enough to audit.
But achieving those goals requires building them on ground that courts cannot easily wash away. Two Republican officials who share the president's priorities are saying, plainly, that this particular foundation won't hold.
That's not opposition. It's advice worth hearing.
Rep. Eric Swalwell is threatening to sue FBI Director Kash Patel if Patel complies with a request to send the so-called Fang files to the Trump White House. The files are part of a long-secret trove of documents showing Chinese infiltrations into American politics and elections dating back more than a decade.
The same congressman who spent years demanding the release of every document even tangentially related to Donald Trump now wants these particular files locked away. The reason isn't hard to guess. They include him.
Swalwell, a top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and now a candidate for California governor, learned last week that the Trump White House might release the files. His attorneys, Norm Eisen and Sean Hecker, fired off a letter to Patel that read less like a legal argument and more like a warning shot:
"The Congressman has never been accused of wrongdoing in that matter and your attempt to release the file is a transparent attempt to smear him and undermine his campaign for Governor of California."
The letter went further, promising consequences:
"Your actions threaten to expose you, others at the FBI, and the FBI itself to significant legal liability."
Swalwell's office and Eisen did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Just the News on Sunday.
At the center of this is Christine Fang, also known as "Fang Fang," a suspected Chinese intelligence asset who, according to a 2020 report by Axios citing U.S. intelligence officials, conducted an extensive political influence operation between 2011 and 2015 on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
According to Just the News, Fang reportedly helped Swalwell with fundraising and placing an intern in his office during the 2014 campaign cycle. Federal agents carrying out a counterintelligence investigation into Fang alerted Swalwell to their concerns and provided him with a defensive briefing in 2015, according to Axios. Fang soon left the United States in the summer of 2015.
The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into Swalwell in April 2021. By May 2023, the committee sent a letter closing the matter:
"The Committee on Ethics informed you that it had determined to investigate allegations raised in the complaint that you may have violated House Rules, laws, or other standards of conduct in connection with your interactions with Ms. Christine Fang."
The committee said it would "take no further action in this matter." Swalwell has consistently denied any wrongdoing in his dealings with Fang.
That's the end of the formal inquiry. But it's not the end of the story, because the files themselves remain unseen by the public. And Swalwell clearly wants to keep it that way.
The hypocrisy here isn't subtle. It's structural. Swalwell built a significant chunk of his political career on the principle that the American public deserves full transparency into government investigations, particularly when those investigations touch powerful people. He just never imagined that principle would come for him.
Start with the Mueller report. In March 2019, Swalwell declared:
"Congress and the American public must see every single word of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report. And we should see it at the same time as President Trump, a subject of the investigation, sees it. Nothing less than the rule of law in our country is on the line. Congress must also hear from Mueller himself to make sure that we have received the whole, unvarnished truth. No President is above the law."
Every single word. The whole, unvarnished truth. No exceptions.
Then there was September 2019, when Swalwell appeared on Fox News and accused the Trump White House and the Department of Justice of "an ongoing cover-up." He complained that transcripts with the Ukrainian president "were moved into a top secret covert action system" and called it "consciousness of guilt."
Swalwell also talked openly with liberal talk show host Rachel Maddow about investigating former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who was targeted by a secret FISA warrant. Page was never charged with wrongdoing. Special Counsel John Durham ultimately concluded there was no basis for the FBI to even open a probe into Russia collusion and target Page with a FISA warrant. Multiple probes found significant evidence of wrongdoing in that FBI investigation, including the false submission of a court filing.
Swalwell's own congressional website still carries a post about Page's 2016 trip to Moscow to deliver a speech, noting that "the Trump campaign approved this trip" and that Page "criticized American foreign policy as being hypocritical." The post treats a speech in Moscow as inherently suspicious. Bill Clinton did the same thing.
Then came the Epstein files. Swalwell relentlessly pressed to release all the Jeffrey Epstein files, even if innocent people were implicated. He dismissed concerns by the DOJ that the names of innocent Americans should be redacted. When the files weren't moving fast enough, he suggested penalties, including contempt charges and reduced DOJ funding for violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
In a tense exchange at a congressional hearing late last year, Swalwell confronted Patel directly:
"Every member of the Judiciary Committee, every Republican, every Democrat voted to release these documents and to have them in our hands."
"Where the hell are these files? And why are you keeping Donald Trump's name, to the degree that you are, out of them?"
No redactions for the innocent. No patience for process. Full transparency, immediately, regardless of who gets caught in the blast radius.
Unless, of course, the blast radius includes Eric Swalwell.
The New York Post editorial board called him out last week with characteristic directness:
"Eric Swalwell wants the Jeffrey Epstein files released — just not the Fang Fang files."
"Now, all of a sudden, Swalwell doesn't like the idea of the FBI releasing files."
The Post noted the obvious: "this time, the files involve documents about Christine Fang, or Fang Fang, an alleged Chinese spy who reportedly had a relationship with Swalwell."
Swalwell's response to all of this has been to frame himself as a political target. He posted on X:
"The reason Trump is so desperately trying to stop me is not because I'm running for Governor of California, but because now I'm the favorite."
That's the move. When transparency threatens someone else, it's a sacred democratic principle. When it threatens you, it's a political attack.
Here is the standard Eric Swalwell established with his own words and actions over the past six years:
Every single one of those principles now applies to him. And he wants none of them enforced.
Swalwell himself, in an exchange with Patel about the Epstein files, asked the question that now echoes back at him with uncomfortable precision:
"If the president is not implicated, then why not release everything?"
If the congressman is not implicated, then why threaten to sue?
Democrats filed suit against the Trump administration on Wednesday, aiming to kill an executive order that would require the U.S. Postal Service to send mail-in ballots only to verified American citizens. The lawsuit, backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer(D-NY), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the Democratic National Committee, and other party organizations, treats the most basic election integrity measure imaginable as an existential constitutional crisis.
The order's mechanism is straightforward. President Trump announced earlier this week that he directed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, along with the Social Security Administration, to create a list of verified U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote. The Postal Service would then send ballots only to those people.
That's the proposition Democrats are calling tyranny: confirming that voters are who they say they are before mailing them a ballot.
According to The Hill, prominent Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias wrote the complaint, and his language tells you everything about the strategy. This isn't a narrow legal challenge. It's a messaging vehicle dressed in constitutional clothing.
"Our Constitution's Framers anticipated this kind of desire for absolute power. They recognized the menace it would pose to ordered liberty and the ways in which it would corrode self-government like an acid."
Absolute power. Menace. Acid corroding self-government. All because the federal government wants to verify that people receiving ballots are, in fact, eligible to vote. Elias also argued in the complaint that the order "seeks to impose radical changes to the manner and conditions under which citizens may cast absentee or mail-in ballots" and that these changes "plainly exceed the President's lawful authority."
Schumer called the executive order "outlandish" and promised a courtroom victory:
"Senate Democrats have led the fight against Donald Trump's voter suppression efforts before and won. We will see him in court and we will beat him again."
Jeffries, for his part, declared that Trump's "unhinged efforts to rip away our rights will not prevail."
Ripping away rights. Voter suppression. Unhinged. The rhetorical escalation is as predictable as it is revealing. None of these statements engages with the substance of the order. Not one Democratic leader quoted in the complaint or in public statements explained why verifying citizenship before mailing a ballot is unreasonable. They skipped the argument entirely and went straight to apocalyptic framing.
Strip away the hysteria, and the executive order does something that most Americans, when asked plainly, would consider common sense. It directs federal agencies to compile a list of verified citizens eligible to vote and limits the Postal Service to sending ballots to those individuals.
This is not a poll tax. It is not a literacy test. It does not prevent a single eligible American from casting a ballot. It prevents ballots from being mailed to people who aren't eligible to receive them. The distinction matters, and Democrats know it, which is why they refuse to engage with it directly.
The left's position on voter verification has become genuinely difficult to articulate without exposing the contradiction at its core. They claim to support secure elections. They claim to oppose fraud. But every single mechanism proposed to verify that voters are citizens, that ballots reach the right people, that rolls are accurate, gets branded as suppression. At some point, the pattern speaks for itself.
Democrats have reason for confidence in the court, and conservatives should be clear-eyed about the terrain. After the president issued an executive order last year seeking to overhaul elections, federal judges ruled it was likely unconstitutional. That history gives the left both a legal precedent and a talking point.
But prior judicial skepticism toward one order does not automatically invalidate a differently constructed one. The question before the courts will be whether the federal government can use existing agency infrastructure to verify citizenship for ballot distribution. That is a narrower and more defensible proposition than a wholesale election overhaul, and it deserves to be adjudicated on its own merits rather than dismissed by reference to a prior ruling.
Democrats and their allies in the press have spent years noting that Trump himself votes by mail. He cast his ballot that way in a Florida special election last month. The implication is supposed to be hypocrisy: he votes by mail but wants to restrict it.
The argument collapses on contact. Trump is a verified U.S. citizen casting a ballot in his state of residence. His executive order would not prevent him, or anyone like him, from voting by mail. It would ensure that the system sending out those ballots knows who is eligible to receive one. The fact that Trump uses mail-in voting and still wants the process verified is not a contradiction. It is the entire point.
Every election cycle, the same dynamic plays out. Republicans propose verification. Democrats call it suppression. The media amplifies the suppression framing. Courts weigh in. And the underlying question never gets answered honestly: why would anyone oppose confirming that ballots go only to eligible voters?
The arguments offered are always procedural or constitutional, never substantive. It's always about executive overreach, or disenfranchisement in the abstract, or the specter of eligible voters somehow falling through the cracks. What it never is, curiously, is a straightforward defense of mailing ballots to unverified recipients.
Because that argument can't survive daylight.
Schumer promises a court victory. Jeffries promises resistance. Elias promises constitutional grandeur. What none of them promise is a better system for making sure that only eligible citizens receive and cast ballots. That silence is the tell. They are not fighting for voting rights. They are fighting against verification. Those are not the same thing, no matter how many times they pretend otherwise.
President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday, tightening the rules around mail-in voting, directing federal agencies to build state-by-state citizenship verification lists that will determine who receives an absentee ballot ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
The order is straightforward in its mechanics: only voters confirmed as citizens will be mailed ballots. Ballots will arrive in secure envelopes with barcodes to track them. The Department of Homeland Security, working with the Social Security Administration, will create the voter lists. The Department of Justice will investigate any wrongdoing in mail-in ballot distribution.
States that disobey the order may lose federal funds.
Trump signed the order during an Oval Office ceremony, framing it in terms that cut to the core of the issue.
"We want to have honest voting in our country, because if you don't have honest voting, you can't have, really, a nation if you want to know the truth."
According to the New York Post, the executive order requires a list to be created in each state of citizens who are eligible to vote. Absentee ballots will only be sent to those on the approved list. Trump has directed DHS to establish a system to compile and transmit the "state citizenship list" within 90 days, which puts the deadline at the end of June.
That timeline matters. Midterm primary elections are already underway in many states, and Election Day is November 3. The administration is moving to get the infrastructure in place well before voters head to the polls.
The concept is not radical. It is, in fact, the bare minimum of what election administration should look like: verify that the person receiving a ballot is a citizen, and track the ballot to ensure it arrives where it's supposed to. The fact that this requires an executive order tells you everything about how degraded the system has become.
Trump has pushed heavily for the Save America Act, which would require proof of U.S. citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote in federal elections. He has said he is in favor of the act.
But the legislation remains stuck in a legislative logjam on Capitol Hill. The executive order functions as a parallel track, achieving through administrative action what Congress has failed to deliver through legislation. It targets the specific vulnerability of mail-in voting rather than the broader registration system, but the principle is the same: if you aren't a citizen, you don't get to participate in choosing American leaders.
This is not a controversial proposition anywhere outside Washington. Every other serious democracy on the planet manages to verify voter identity. The resistance to doing so in the United States has always been more revealing than the arguments against it.
Mail-in voting, by design, removes the voter from any point of human verification. No poll worker is checking an ID. There is no signature compared in real time. There is a ballot, an envelope, and a mailbox. The opportunities for error, and for something worse than error, multiply at every step of that chain.
A long-standing vocal critic of mail-in voting, Trump has consistently identified this as a structural weakness in the system. The executive order addresses it not by eliminating mail-in voting but by imposing verification requirements that should have existed from the start.
Citizenship lists built from DHS and Social Security Administration records represent the most reliable data the federal government has. Cross-referencing those databases to confirm that a ballot recipient is actually an American citizen is not suppression. It is competence.
The mail-in voting reforms are all but certain to face legal challenge in the courts. That much is predictable. Every election integrity measure of the last decade has been met with litigation from groups that treat verification as an obstacle rather than a safeguard.
The arguments write themselves: claims of disenfranchisement, allegations of disparate impact, procedural objections to executive authority. The playbook hasn't changed. But the legal landscape has shifted, and the administration clearly built this order with court battles in mind.
Trump himself seemed unbothered by the prospect, expressing confidence in the durability of the order.
"I believe it's foolproof, and maybe it'll be tested. Maybe it won't."
Watch how opponents of this order frame their objections. They will not say they oppose verifying citizenship. They will say the process is too burdensome, the timeline too tight, the databases too imperfect. They will argue around the principle because they cannot argue against it.
No serious person believes that non-citizens should vote in American elections. But a remarkable number of serious people have spent years building a system where it is functionally impossible to confirm that they don't. Every proposal to close that gap meets the same wall of procedural outrage.
The executive order forces a simple question into the open: if you oppose verifying that mail-in ballots go only to citizens, what exactly are you protecting?
Midterm Election Day is November 3. The clock is running. The lists are being built.
Sen. Cory Booker took to MSNBC on Tuesday to level sweeping accusations of corruption against President Donald Trump, claiming on "Deadline" that the president is "openly grifting millions of dollars" through cryptocurrency ventures. The accusations arrived without a single named country, a single specific transaction, or a single piece of supporting evidence.
That didn't stop the segment from proceeding as though the case had already been made.
Booker's central claim was dramatic, Breitbart reported. Speaking with host Nicolle Wallace, the New Jersey Democrat alleged that Trump has profited from crypto-related dealings with unnamed foreign nations that have "national security interests," and that the president is now granting those nations things "that were refused by presidents, Republican and Democrat."
"He's made more money in one year in office than all the other US presidents in American history combined, openly grifting taking millions of millions of dollars in payments through his crypto schemes from the very countries that have huge, national security interests."
Which countries? He didn't say. What payments? He didn't specify. What was given in return? Left to the viewer's imagination. The accusation is designed to sound devastating on cable television and evaporate under the slightest scrutiny.
Wallace, for her part, did what MSNBC hosts do: she provided the runway. Her contribution framed the conversation as though corruption were a fact rather than an allegation.
"I mean, no one likes any of those things, right? Voters hate corruption, and they're doing it out in full view. There's a brazenness that suggests that they don't think Democrats can beat them."
Notice what's happening. The host doesn't ask Booker to substantiate anything. She skips straight to electoral strategy, treating the charge as settled and pivoting to what Democrats should do about it. This is how narrative laundering works. An unsubstantiated claim enters one end of the conversation as an accusation and exits the other end as a premise.
The most revealing moment in the segment wasn't about Trump at all. It was Booker's brief, almost involuntary admission about his own party.
"This has got to be a moment in the we don't just beat Trump. It's not just what we're against. We need to start talking about what we're for and having a bolder vision for what we can be as a country and who we can be together."
He also called on Democrats to "take a little responsibility," acknowledging "gross money-in-politics" and "individuals trading stocks" within his own ranks. That's a remarkable concession buried inside an attack segment. Democrats have spent years defending their own members' stock trading habits while simultaneously positioning themselves as the party of clean government. Booker, perhaps accidentally, admitted the glasshouse problem.
But the admission was fleeting. Within seconds, he pivoted back to Trump, insisting that whatever his party has done, the president has taken it "to a level never before matched." Convenient framing: acknowledge your own sins just long enough to seem credible, then immediately argue they don't matter by comparison.
This segment is worth examining, not because the accusations are compelling. They aren't. It's worth examining because it illustrates the formula Democrats have settled into heading toward the next election cycle:
Booker told Wallace that if Democrats "make this all about Donald Trump," they "make a mistake." He then spent the bulk of his airtime making it all about Donald Trump. He offered no policy. No legislative agenda. No vision beyond the negative.
If a sitting senator has evidence that the president is receiving payments from foreign governments in exchange for policy concessions, that's not a cable news segment. That's a referral to the Department of Justice. That's articles of impeachment. That's front-page news with documents attached.
Instead, it's a Tuesday afternoon on MSNBC, sandwiched between takes about emergency preparedness kits and affiliate marketing links. The venue tells you everything about the seriousness of the charge.
Booker wants voters to believe this is a crisis. He said so himself: "We are in a time of crisis." But crises demand specifics. They demand evidence. They demand action beyond a cable hit. What Booker delivered was atmosphere, not substance.
Democrats keep telling the country they need a bolder vision. They keep not offering one.
Sen. Cory Booker went on national television Sunday and said what most Democratic voters already suspect: his party has no answer for the moment the country is living through. The New Jersey Democrat told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the Democratic Party "has failed this moment" and called for generational renewal at the top, a remarkable public rebuke from a sitting senator who is simultaneously running for reelection and refusing to rule out a 2028 presidential bid.
The admission landed with the weight of the obvious. Booker is not some backbencher freelancing on cable news. He is a two-term senator from a blue state, a former presidential candidate, and a man promoting a new book. When he tells a national audience that his own party has failed, it is worth asking: failed at what, exactly? And who, exactly, is responsible?
The Hill reported that Booker made the comments during an exchange with NBC anchor Kristen Welker, who pressed him on whether Democrats are shrinking their own coalition with ideological purity tests. Booker did not dodge the question. He conceded the point and went further.
"I'm proud of so many things that my Democratic colleagues are doing. But as a whole, our party has failed this moment. It's why I've called for new leadership in America."
That is not a minor quibble about messaging or tactics. It is a senator telling his own voters that the institution they keep sending money to and pulling the lever for has come up short when it mattered most.
Booker framed the failure in broad terms, arguing that partisan tribalism, not any single policy dispute, is the core disease. He called for what he described as "generational renewal," a phrase that carries obvious implications for the aging Democratic leadership class that has held power in Washington for decades.
As Breitbart reported, Booker argued that Democrats risk shrinking their coalition through purity tests and said the country needs a more unifying vision, a direct shot at the progressive wing that has policed ideological conformity within the party for years.
The senator did not name names. But the target was plain enough. The Democratic Party's current leadership structure has presided over repeated electoral losses, internal fractures, and a base that increasingly demands ideological lockstep on issues from immigration to energy to gender policy. Booker wants voters to believe he represents something different.
This is not the first time a prominent Democrat has broken ranks to demand a generational changing of the guard. Even Barack Obama has urged the party to "pass the torch" as its aging leaders face growing restlessness from younger challengers.
"I've called for a generational renewal because this left-right divide is killing our country. And our adversaries know it. They come onto our social media and try to whip up hate in America. That is one of our biggest crises."
Notice the pivot. Booker acknowledges the party's failure, then quickly shifts blame outward, to foreign adversaries, to social media, to unnamed forces stoking division. It is a familiar move. Admit the problem, then locate the cause anywhere but inside the institution you just criticized.
Perhaps the most revealing moment came when Booker tried to reframe the Democratic narrative away from its near-total fixation on opposing the current administration. He told Welker that the challenges facing the country extend well beyond any single president.
"Because the challenges on the horizon aren't just this current crisis that Trump has caused. He shouldn't be the main character of our narrative right now. We have real challenges from new technologies like AI and robotics, new challenges that we need more unity in our country and a reminder that we are not each other's enemies."
For a party that has built its entire brand around resistance to one man, that is a striking concession. Booker is essentially telling Democrats that their strategy of making every election a referendum on Trump has left them without a governing vision of their own. He is right about that, even if his proposed alternative, vague appeals to unity and common ground, sounds more like a book tour than a policy platform.
The deeper problem Booker cannot quite bring himself to name is that the Democratic coalition is fracturing along multiple fault lines simultaneously. Left-wing insurgents have swept contested primaries in states like Illinois, pushing the party further from the center even as figures like Booker call for broader appeal.
Booker added a line that read more like a campaign bumper sticker than a governing philosophy.
"In fact, our ability to find common ground has always been our greatest hope."
Common ground is a fine aspiration. But it is hard to square with a party that has spent years enforcing the very purity tests Booker now criticizes, excommunicating members who break with progressive orthodoxy on crime, immigration, or cultural issues.
Welker gave Booker the opening every ambitious senator dreams about: the presidential question. Booker played it exactly the way candidates-in-waiting always do.
"I am definitely not ruling it out. I'm running for reelection. I hope New Jersey will support me for another six years."
"Definitely not ruling it out" is Washington code for "I'm already thinking about it." Booker ran for president once before, in the 2020 cycle, and dropped out before the Iowa caucuses. His candidacy never gained traction with the base, and there is little evidence that the political landscape has shifted in his favor since then.
But the timing of these comments, a new book, a Sunday morning interview, a public critique of his own party's leadership, suggests Booker is laying groundwork. Whether Democratic primary voters in 2028 will want a candidate whose central pitch is "we failed and I'm the answer" remains an open question.
The internal reckoning Booker is calling for is not new. Obama strategist David Plouffe has said Democrats still haven't reckoned with their 2024 losses, a pattern of avoidance that stretches back years. Every cycle, a few brave voices inside the party say the coalition is too narrow, the message too insular, the leadership too old. And every cycle, the same leadership class survives.
For all his talk of failure, Booker never identified a single policy position he would change. He did not say Democrats were wrong on immigration enforcement. He did not say the party's embrace of soft-on-crime prosecutors cost them credibility. He did not say the push to reshape American energy policy alienated working-class voters. He said the party needs "new moral imagination." That is not a policy. It is a slogan.
The senator also did not explain why, if the party has truly failed this moment, he continues to seek reelection under its banner. He wants credit for the critique without bearing any cost for the failure he describes. That is a comfortable position for a man promoting a book and testing the presidential waters.
Conservative voters watching this unfold can be forgiven for a certain skepticism. Democrats periodically discover the virtues of unity, common ground, and big-tent politics, usually right after they lose an election. The question is never whether they can diagnose the problem. It is whether they can stop doing the things that caused it.
Booker says his party has failed the moment. On that much, at least, he and the voters who sent his party packing seem to agree. What he hasn't explained is why anyone should trust the same institution to get it right next time.
Graham Platner, the 41-year-old Democratic Senate hopeful in Maine who built his insurgent brand on attacking the "Epstein Elite," received a $20,000 grant from a family foundation whose board member appears in recently released Department of Justice files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Platner, who is running in the Democratic primary against Governor Janet Mills for a shot at incumbent Republican Susan Collins, took the grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation in 2021 to fund an oyster farm he operated, according to an article from the Maine Small Business Development Centers.
The foundation currently lists Spyros Niarchos as a board member. Spyros Niarchos has been described by Greek newspaper Documento as a member of the "inner circle" of Jeffrey Epstein. He appeared in several of the DOJ files released in recent months.
That's a problem for a candidate whose entire pitch involves pointing fingers at the powerful for their proximity to Epstein.
Platner targeted Collins specifically for not voting to release the Epstein files, the Daily Mail reported. He accused her of "protecting pedophiles and abusers" and publicly asked, "whose bidding is she doing?"
Strong words from a man whose oyster farm was bankrolled by the family of someone who shows up in those very files.
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation was established after the death of Greek shipping magnate Stavros Niarchos I in 1996. The family's entanglements with Epstein, however, extend well beyond a foundation letterhead. The shipping mogul's grandson, Stavros Niarchos III, was also named in the files and co-hosted a 2013 Halloween party to which Epstein was invited. Niarchos III, who has dated Paris Hilton and is now married to Dasha Zhukova, the ex-wife of former Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich, occupies the kind of rarefied social orbit where Epstein thrived.
The released files paint a picture of Spyros Niarchos's proximity to Epstein that goes beyond casual acquaintance. In a January 2018 conversation between Epstein and a redacted individual, Epstein asked about Niarchos:
"Is there a new boy?"
The redacted person replied that there was "an older man" and added, "You will be proud of me." Epstein called Niarchos "very interesting" and noted they "shared a mutual friend in the 80s," whom he described as a "beautiful Venezuelan girl."
By April 2018, the exchanges grew more disturbing. Epstein emailed a redacted person with a request:
"I need a girls with great task to help decorators. Help dinners, and flowers design etc the island. HELP."
The redacted person responded by asking what nationality and age Epstein wanted, adding: "I am in Saint Moritz with Spyros now!" Epstein's answer: "up to 30 years."
The appearance of an individual's name in the files is not necessarily evidence of wrongdoing. But when a candidate builds his entire campaign on Epstein accountability, the standard he set for others applies to him, too.
The Niarchos Foundation grant is not the first headache for the Platner campaign. It may not even be the biggest one. Last year, a video surfaced showing Platner with what was identified as a Nazi SS symbol tattooed on his chest, reportedly obtained during a drunken visit to a tattoo parlor in Split, Croatia, in 2007. Platner released a statement last fall insisting he was unaware of the symbol's meaning:
"I absolutely would not have gone through life having this on my chest if I knew that – and to insinuate that I did is disgusting. I already had the tattoo covered with a new design."
He later showed off the replacement tattoo in a video posted on X, describing it as "a Celtic knot with some imagery around dogs, because my wife Amy and I, love dogs."
Then there's the Reddit history. Platner has come under fire for posts in which he reportedly asked why "black people don't tip" and suggested that women who are raped in the Army should be careful about how much they drink. On the latter, Platner told local station WGME:
"I made that comment in 2013. I had just come out of the infantry, which was, at the time, all male. I rarely interacted professionally with women in the service."
The explanation is almost more revealing than the original comment. The defense amounts to: I said something indefensible about sexual assault victims because I hadn't spent enough time around women. Platner's campaign dismissed the controversies as politically motivated, timed to coincide with establishment competition entering the race.
"[My donors] know that this is all nonsense. It is no surprise that these stories dropped within days of DC's chosen candidate getting into this race."
Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who favors Governor Mills in the primary, had avoided a public endorsement until after the tattoo story broke. Then he declared Mills "the best candidate to replace Susan Collins." Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, endorsed Platner to "fight oligarchy."
The Democratic primary in Maine has become a microcosm of the party's broader identity crisis:
Platner drew crowds of 500 in Ellsworth and 200 in Caribou. He clearly has an audience. But audiences don't survive the kind of compounding scrutiny that comes from Nazi tattoo stories, Reddit posts about race and sexual assault, and financial ties to the family of an Epstein associate, all landing in the same campaign cycle.
The core issue here isn't the $20,000. It's the hypocrisy. Platner positioned himself as the candidate brave enough to name names and demand accountability for anyone who brushed against Epstein's world. He attacked Susan Collins for insufficient zeal on the Epstein files. He branded himself the anti-establishment warrior who would expose the "Epstein Elite."
The records showed that the foundation of an Epstein associate's family funded his business. His campaign has not provided a public response, and neither has the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
The left loves to construct moral hierarchies. They decide who gets to lecture, who gets to accuse, and who must answer. Platner wanted to be the one asking the questions. Now the questions are pointed at him, and the silence is conspicuous.
When you make Epstein your campaign issue, you don't get to dismiss your own Epstein-adjacent funding as "nonsense." You opened that door. You walked through it with cameras rolling and righteous indignation blazing. You don't get to close it behind you now.
More than a thousand people packed the performing arts center at Lehman College in the Bronx on Sunday to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) demand higher taxes on the wealthy. The one prominent New York progressive who didn't bother showing up: Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the man whose entire governing agenda depends on exactly the policy Sanders was pitching.
Mamdani declined to join the rally or appear onstage, even as Sanders spent nearly an hour promoting a proposed extra 5% tax nationwide on anyone worth $1 billion or more and urging Gov. Kathy Hochul to back Mamdani's own 2% tax on New Yorkers earning $1 million or more. The mayor's absence speaks volumes about the fault lines running through New York's progressive coalition as budget deadlines in June and November elections loom.
The 84-year-old Vermont senator flew to the Bronx to make the case that New York City's mayor apparently couldn't make in person. Sanders deployed his familiar populist arithmetic, telling the crowd according to the New York Post:
"A few years ago, it was estimated that Elon Musk, the wealthiest man alive, paid an effective tax rate of less than 3.3%, while the average truck driver in America paid an effective tax rate of 8.4%."
He then pivoted to a direct endorsement of Mamdani's agenda, telling the audience:
"That is what the mayor of New York City is fighting for."
Fighting for it, just not in the room where it was happening.
Sanders also aimed squarely at Hochul, saying he would "ask Gov. Hochul to listen to where the people are at" and that he hoped she would "join the vast majority of the people who want to see that happen." It was less a policy argument than a pressure campaign, designed to box the governor into a corner with the weight of a packed auditorium behind it.
Mamdani's no-show is the latest signal that the relationship between New York City's new mayor and the state's Democratic governor is something less than functional. Since taking office in January, Mamdani has been pressuring Hochul to approve his proposed millionaire tax. Hochul has come out and said she would not support the legislation.
The past two months have featured alternating periods of tension and détente between the two. In February, Hochul funneled more than a billion dollars to New York City to help offset its budget deficit. Days later, Mamdani responded by threatening to hike property taxes in the city by nearly 10% if Hochul wouldn't sign his tax on the wealthy.
That sequence tells you everything about the dynamic. Hochul extends an olive branch worth ten figures. Mamdani pockets it and immediately threatens homeowners and landlords across the five boroughs. This is not a negotiation. It's a hostage situation where the hostages are New York City property owners.
And yet Mamdani has endorsed Hochul's bid for re-election in the fall. Some have speculated she is simply waiting to secure her seat before signing the controversial tax into law. If true, it would mean the governor's public opposition is theater, which is exactly the kind of governance New Yorkers have come to expect.
The rally's supporting cast was revealing. Grace Mausser, co-chair of the city's Democratic Socialists of America chapter, framed Hochul's resistance as a betrayal of voters:
"She is a public servant, and she owes us the decency of listening to us."
Her co-chair, Gustavo Gordillo, was more candid about the strategy at work. He described an "inside-outside strategy" with elected officials and insisted the DSA doesn't "take orders from the mayor." Then he laid out the goal plainly:
"We're here to build an agitational movement that's going to force the governor to tax the rich, and that's what the mayor wants as well."
Note the word: "force." Not persuade. Not convinced by the evidence that the policy will produce better outcomes. Force. This is the progressive movement in its honest form. When voters don't deliver the result, when governors resist, you build pressure until compliance is achieved. The democratic process is a tool when it works and an obstacle when it doesn't.
Gordillo also framed the situation as a binary choice, saying they want to tell Hochul "she needs to choose a side, whether she's on the side of the working class in New York or on the side of the billionaires and the 1%." This is the rhetorical trick that never gets old on the left: reduce every policy question to a moral binary so that anyone who disagrees is not merely wrong but evil.
Lost in all the rally speeches and populist applause lines is a basic question nobody on that stage bothered to answer: What happens when the rich leave?
New York already has among the highest state and local tax burdens in the country. The wealthy residents that progressives want to squeeze harder are also the most mobile. They have accountants, second homes, and the resources to relocate to states that don't treat success as a funding source for an ever-expanding government. Every new millionaire tax proposal assumes the target population will sit still and take it. History suggests otherwise.
Mamdani's approach is particularly striking in its contradictions. He wants Hochul to approve a 2% surtax on incomes above $1 million. When she declines, he threatens a nearly 10% property tax hike that would hammer middle-class homeowners, small landlords, and renters whose costs inevitably rise with property taxes. The people Sanders claims to champion, the truck drivers and working families, are the ones who would feel that property tax increase most acutely.
This is the progressive fiscal model in miniature:
It's a closed loop where government spending is never the variable and someone else's money is always the answer.
Bronx resident Rowshon Sharker, 52, spoke at the rally and addressed Hochul directly, saying voters put her in office and expect results. She also offered a telling line about the absent mayor:
"Mamdani trying to do his job, but we are the part of the people. We are here to say the words. We elected Mamdani for our basic needs, right, universal child care, housing and every point."
Universal child care. Housing. "Every point." The wish list is infinite. The funding mechanism is a 2% tax on millionaires that the governor won't sign. The backup plan is a property tax hike that punishes the very people filling those auditorium seats.
Mamdani skipped the rally because showing up would have meant standing next to Bernie Sanders while his own legislative agenda goes nowhere. It would have meant facing a crowd of a thousand people and explaining why, months into his tenure, the centerpiece of his platform remains stuck. It's easier to let Sanders do the talking and the DSA do the agitating while the mayor works the back channels.
A thousand people showed up to demand that Albany tax the rich. The mayor they elected to deliver it didn't even walk through the door.
CPAC has thrown its weight behind Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race, with Chairman Matt Schlapp announcing the endorsement at the conference held just outside Dallas in Grapevine, Texas. A straw poll of Texas attendees wasn't even close: 67% backed Paxton compared to 21% for incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, with 12% undecided.
Schlapp made it official from the stage.
"It's my honor … to say we officially endorse Ken Paxton."
He cited Paxton's "perfect CPAC voting record" and alignment with President Donald Trump on major political fights. Cornyn, meanwhile, skipped the gathering entirely.
The March 3 primary ended without a clear winner, sending Paxton and Cornyn into a late May runoff after neither secured a majority. But if CPAC is any barometer of where the conservative grassroots stand, Cornyn has a problem that no campaign adviser can spin away.
Hundreds of activists at the conference embraced Paxton as the GOP's clear pick, according to the Washington Examiner. He headlined events, worked the rope lines, posed for photos, took questions at meet-and-greets inside the Gaylord Texan, and spoke at CPAC's Ronald Reagan dinner in Dallas on Friday night. The energy wasn't manufactured. It was organic, and it was lopsided.
Attendee after attendee made clear what's driving the divide. Matthew Kingston, 26, of Lubbock, put it bluntly:
"After Uvalde, Cornyn chose to side with Democrats on gun control. That was the turning point for me. It showed he's willing to compromise on core Second Amendment rights."
Michael Reaud, a 55-year-old boutique owner, said he's been in Paxton's corner for years. On Cornyn, his memory was sharp and unforgiving: "As far as John Cornyn, if I remember correctly, I think he's gone against President Trump on a few things."
Anne Diaz, a 64-year-old retiree from Georgetown, didn't need persuading either. "I just have a feeling that Ken Paxton is honest and conservative," she said, adding that even a Trump endorsement of Cornyn wouldn't change her mind.
That's the kind of loyalty that doesn't bend with the wind.
Paxton used his platform at CPAC to hammer the issue that has become central to his campaign: election integrity. Speaking to the crowd, he zeroed in on mail-in ballots:
"Mail-in ballots … they send them out by the millions, and we have no idea who's voting."
"That shouldn't be the way it is. We should know who's voting. They can vote however they want, but we should verify who they are, that they are citizens, and that they are following our laws."
The SAVE Act, a proposal that would impose stricter proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting, is a top priority for the president. It has stalled in the Senate. Paxton has blasted Cornyn over the impasse and suggested he would consider stepping aside in the race if the measure became law.
Days after the issue gained traction, Cornyn shifted course, signaling openness to altering Senate rules and writing in an op-ed that he would support whatever changes were needed to move the legislation forward. The timing was not subtle. When a 20-year Senate veteran suddenly discovers urgency on a bill his base has demanded for months, the conversion tells you more about the pressure than the principle.
The Cornyn camp isn't sitting still. Campaign adviser Matt Mackowiak offered a statement to the Washington Examiner that leaned heavily on the senator's voting record:
"Senator Cornyn has voted with President Trump 99.3% of the time and is one of his most effective allies in the Senate. He has consistently delivered on conservative priorities, from confirming judges to advancing border security, and has the experience to be effective on day one."
That 99.3% figure is designed to neutralize the MAGA loyalty question. But for many grassroots conservatives, the 0.7% is exactly where the betrayals live. The gun control vote after Uvalde. The dragging of feet on the SAVE Act. The sense that Cornyn's instinct, when the pressure mounts, is to find the bipartisan middle rather than hold the line.
A voting percentage doesn't capture those moments. The base remembers them anyway.
NRSC communications director Joanna Rodriguez offered a different angle, one aimed squarely at electability:
"When President Trump needed him most, Ken Paxton repeatedly went AWOL. John Cornyn is the best candidate to beat radical James Talarico and hold this seat for Republicans. This race isn't just about the primary, it's about winning in November."
The November question is real, and it's the one card Cornyn's allies keep playing. Democratic state Rep. James Talarico awaits the runoff winner, and a Democratic-aligned survey reportedly found Talarico narrowly leading both Republican candidates in hypothetical matchups.
Sen. Ted Cruz, who is staying neutral in the primary, acknowledged the stakes in an interview with the Washington Examiner:
"The voters of Texas can make the choice who they trust to go and fight for their conservative values."
But Cruz didn't hide his concern about what comes after.
"Regardless of who wins the nomination, the two candidates have attacked each other relentlessly, and the hard Left is really energized. We've got a fight on our hands for November."
That's a fair warning. But it also cuts both ways. If the Republican establishment forces a candidate on a base that doesn't want him, the enthusiasm gap in November could be just as dangerous as any Democratic surge. Nominees who excite nobody tend to lose races they should win.
Paxton's opponents will never stop reminding voters that he was impeached by the Texas legislature three years ago on corruption charges. What they mention less often: he was acquitted. Paxton addressed it directly at CPAC, framing the episode as a fight he never backed down from.
"The people of Texas had just elected me. I had won overwhelmingly. This is wrong. We're going to fight this."
"I am not going to resign. I don't care what happens. We are going to fight this. Whatever happens, happens."
His supporters view the impeachment as political persecution. His critics call it disqualifying baggage. The CPAC crowd made clear which interpretation they've adopted.
There's also the personal dimension. His wife, Angela Paxton, recently filed for divorce, citing infidelity. One attendee, Trimaan Malik, a 30-year-old from Las Vegas wearing a "#TeamAngela" shirt, offered a dissenting take: "I prefer attorneys general who are not always in scandals every five minutes." He then added, "I don't even live in Texas. I don't have a dog in the fight."
Fair enough. But the people who do live in Texas and who showed up to CPAC made their preferences unmistakable.
The wild card remains President Trump, who said weeks ago he would weigh in on the race with an endorsement but has yet to follow through. Some attendees, like Reaud, said they'd follow the president wherever he lands: "I'll support President Trump, whatever his decisions are."
Others, like Diaz, have already made up their minds regardless. That split is instructive. A Trump endorsement of Cornyn might consolidate some reluctant supporters, but CPAC suggests the grassroots energy is already flowing in one direction. Redirecting it would take more than a Truth Social post.
Not every attendee had made up their mind. Xavier Heim, a commercial airline pilot from Grapevine, said he's still weighing his options: "We thought we knew, and then we got some more information, and we're doing our research." Molly Sawyer, a flight attendant also from Grapevine, said she's evaluating both candidates on their track records and electability.
But the undecided were the minority at this conference. The decisions were loud, they were organized, and they were wearing Paxton stickers.
Paxton closed his CPAC appearance with a line that distilled his entire pitch:
"It's about the people of Texas wanting somebody that is going to represent them. Let's get rid of the guy that represents Washington, and let's put somebody in that represents Texas."
That framing is familiar because it works. The outsider versus the institution. The fighter versus the dealmaker. It's the same energy that reshaped the Republican Party over the last decade, and it's the energy that filled the Gaylord Texan this weekend.
Cornyn has the Senate infrastructure, the NRSC backing, and two decades of incumbency. Paxton has the room. In a late May runoff where turnout is everything, the candidate whose supporters actually show up tends to win.
CPAC just showed us who's showing up.
JD Vance won the CPAC straw poll for the second consecutive year, but his margin tells a different story than last year's. The vice president captured 53 per cent support among conservative activists at this week's conference in Grapevine, Texas, down from 61 per cent a year ago. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed 35 per cent, a stunning leap from the 3 per cent he managed last year.
The rest of the field barely registered. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Donald Trump Jr all trailed significantly with single-digit support.
The topline hasn't changed: Vance remains the conservative movement's favorite for 2028. But the trajectory beneath it has shifted in ways that matter.
Rubio's jump from footnote to serious contender didn't happen in a vacuum. The Secretary of State has taken on an increasingly central role in the Trump administration as a key architect of the president's interventionist foreign policy agenda, including the Iran war. Visibility creates viability, and Rubio has had no shortage of either, as Financial Times reports.
There's also the matter of biography. Rubio challenged Trump for the party's nomination in 2016 and lost badly. But a decade in the political wilderness, followed by a high-profile cabinet post where he's executing rather than criticizing, has a way of rehabilitating a political brand. He's no longer the establishment alternative to Trump. He's one of Trump's most trusted operators on the world stage.
That distinction matters enormously to a CPAC crowd that treats loyalty to the Trump agenda as a threshold requirement, not a bonus.
An eight-point decline in a straw poll nearly two years before the official start of the 2028 primary season is not a crisis. It is, however, a data point worth examining honestly.
Vance's path to the 2028 nomination has always rested on the premise that he is the natural heir to the movement Trump built. The 41-year-old former senator from Ohio, who first entered the national conversation with his 2016 memoir "Hillbilly Elegy," has positioned himself as the populist-conservative bridge between Trumpism and whatever comes next. CPAC chair Matt Schlapp framed the stakes plainly:
"I have always had this nagging in the back of my head: what does it look like when Donald Trump isn't leading all of this?"
That question now has a partial answer: it looks competitive. Not fractured. Not hostile. But genuinely contested in a way that a 61-to-3 blowout didn't suggest twelve months ago.
Schlapp himself acknowledged the shifting landscape, noting that the conservative coalition Trump assembled is unlike anything that came before it.
"He has remade the coalition of folks that make up the conservative or the right part of politics."
The question is whether that coalition transfers to a single successor or fragments among several credible claimants. Rubio's surge suggests the latter is at least possible.
President Trump skipped the annual gathering for the first time in a decade. A White House official blamed his schedule:
"He is heavily engaged in the ongoing Iran conflict and managing other critical issues."
That's a perfectly reasonable explanation. But the symbolism was unavoidable. CPAC without Trump is a preview of the Republican Party without Trump. Every handshake, every speech, every straw poll ballot carried the unspoken weight of succession politics. Schlapp acknowledged as much: "People are thinking about it now."
Trump has heaped praise on both Vance and Rubio, which is worth noting precisely because it clarifies nothing. The president is not tipping the scales publicly. Whether that's strategic ambiguity or genuine indecision, it leaves the field open in a way that rewards performance over proximity.
No candidate is likely to formally announce a run until after November's midterm elections, when Republicans will be seeking to hold on to control of both chambers of Congress. That's smart politics. The party needs unity through the midterms, and a premature presidential primary would be a gift to Democrats looking for division narratives.
But the jockeying is already underway, and straw polls are the earliest scoreboard. They measure intensity, not electability. They reward the activists who show up, not the broader Republican electorate that will ultimately decide. Still, CPAC has long served as the conservative movement's emotional barometer, and the reading this week was clear: Vance leads, Rubio is closing, and everyone else needs a different strategy.
Schlapp called it "hard to imagine" that anyone outside the current top tier could break through. Given the numbers, he's right. The 2028 primary is shaping up as a two-man conversation, and it started in a convention center just outside Dallas.