THE PLATNER NEWS HAS ESTABLISHMENT DEMOCRATS DOING WHAT THEY ENJOY MOST: BEATING THEMSELVES UP

Graham Platner is, or was, a lousy husband. He was sexting with other women in the early days of his marriage. He and his wife, as she noted in a video over the weekend, are in marriage counseling, and are looking into fertility treatments in order to have a baby. They're trying to make the marriage work. It was Platner's wife who brought the texts to the campaign's attention. That happened last fall. For some reason, this story broke now, more than a month after his main primary opponent suspended her campaign, and with very little time for Maine Democrats to pick another candidate. (In the most recent public poll of the primary, Platner has a 73-point lead over the only remaining Democratic opponent who's on the ballot and actively campaigning. The primary is a week from now.)

Do Maine Democrats even want to switch candidates? In isolation, this is the kind of story that hasn't derailed politcal careers in the past few decades. Ever since Bill Clinton, voters have decided that marriage is personal, people are flawed, and relationship troubles are none of our damn business. Down in Texas, opponents of the GOP's Senate nominee, Ken Paxton, have tried to use his marital woes against him in more than one election. Voters don't care.

But many members of the Democratic Establishment have decided that they should be angrier about Platner's philandering than the voters themselves are likely to be. First out of the gate was Cory Booker, over the weekend on ABC:

Asked Sunday if Booker had concerns about Platner jeopardizing Senate control for the Democrats, Booker said he did.

"Yes, I have concerns. That guy has questions to answer,” Booker said.

Booker didn't have to say this. Booker could have shut this down. He could have changed the subject by giving a rah-rah response about Democrats, or by attacking the GOP, President Trump, and the complicity of Susan Collins in Trump's reign of terror.

But no. The happy place for Establishment Democrats is self-flagellation. Democrats love saying Democrats are flawed. They love being Artie Fufkin, the promo guy who fails to draw a crowd for the band Spinal Tap at a record store event in Chicago, and then berates himself and asks the band to physically abuse him:



Booker, to be fair, expressed mild concern. The Democrat who really makes me see red is an anonymous consultant quoted in this Politico story:

“Is he going to be an albatross to run with? Absolutely,” said one Maine Democratic strategist, who, like others in this article, was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “He’s going to lose. All these polls showing him up against Susan Collins — people forget that the voters who decide this race make their decisions in the last two weeks.”

A Politico reporter shoves a mic in your face and you, a Democratic strategist, say, of the presumptive Democratic nominee in a critical Senate race, "He's going to lose"? Seriously? What the fuck is wrong with you?

And he's not alone:

“Up until now, the things that have come out, most Mainers have been pretty forgiving — enough to force out a sitting governor in a primary,” said Chuck Rocha, a longtime Democratic strategist who is advising multiple Senate campaigns but is not involved with Platner’s bid. “The thing that bothers me about Graham is every week it seems like it’s something else. … I worry because I have the scars of trying to beat Susan Collins for many cycles.” ...

“If [Platner] dips below like 65 percent or something [on Tuesday] I think he’d be in trouble,” said a second Maine Democratic strategist. “That’s gonna be tough for him.”

The sitting governor, Janet Mills, dropped out of the race in April, but she's still on the ballot -- and she reminded voters of that over the weekend in an interview with a Portland Press Herald columnist. That's an obnoxious thing for her to say. If she wants to try to take Platner down, she should reenter the race. She should start campaigning again. This half-in, half-out nonsense helps no one except Susan Collins and the Republican Party.

But for observers of American politics, Democratic self-hatred is, in the David Foster Wallace sense, the water we swim in and don't even notice. We think it's normal that Democrats routinely attack their own party ("Weak!" "Woke!") and are afraid to say categorically that their own party is better than the opposition party. We think it's normal that Democrats echo Republican framing of Democrats. We think circular firing squads like the one in Maine are normal.

You know who's not organizing a circular firing squad right now, in response to the voters' choice of a flawed Senate nominee? The Republican Party. Graham Platner damaged his marriage, but it's still intact. Ken Paxton of Texas broke up his marriage with multiple adulteries, and is a sleazebag in many other ways -- he was once impeached, though not convicted, in a Republican-controlled Texas legislature.

Yet Republicans are uniting in opposition to his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, defining him as trans and vegan, and preparing the party for a meme war:

All these memes are (apparently) coming from outside the official GOP, but the GOP has made the campaign's message abundantly clear, and these memes are in perfect sync with that message.

Democrats could unite around the goal of winning the Maine election the way Republicans are uniting around the goal of winning the Texas election, but too many Democrats are comfortable in defeat, because they don't really believe that their party's ideas and values are better than the GOP's. Graham Platner might win this race anyway, but he'd be better positioned to win it if his party had his back.

MAYBE GRAHAM PLATNER IS THE DEMOCRATIC JOE ROGAN

It pains me to say that I agree with anything in The Free Press, but I think River Page's "Why the Attacks on Graham Platner Don't Work" makes some good points (free to read here).

Getting a regrettable tattoo while drunk does not necessarily prove that you are an antisemite—or at least it didn’t to Platner’s Jewish relatives, who he claims knew about the tattoo for years and never said anything about it. It does, however, suggest that you might be a guy who made an egregious mistake without thinking about what the political consequences might be in 20 years, rather than a neurotic careerist who’s been ruthlessly plotting his rise to political power since grade school, which is worse. If voters liked ambitious robots, we’d be halfway through a second Pete Buttigieg administration by now....

In some sense, the [sheer] scale of Platner’s Reddit-related controversies—which run across the political gamut—do actually suggest that he was, as he claims, more of an internet troll than a hardened ideologue.... On the whole, from his Reddit to the regrettable tattoo to that video of him getting wasted and dancing shirtless at a wedding, Platner comes across as a bonehead, and maybe even an asshole—but never a schoolmarm, careerist, or self-righteous hypocrite. Most politicians do, and that’s why people don’t like them.

I give Page credit for pointing out that voters are responding to Platner's political views, and acknowledging that those views are popular.

... when it comes to ideas, people seem to like Platner’s—if they didn’t, perhaps the attacks on his character would have worked better. Proposals that are ostensibly radical by Washington standards, like Medicare for All, are actually supported by a majority of Americans—including Platner. Similarly, like most Americans, Platner wants to tax the rich. And so forth.

Even what might be considered one of his most controversial positions—that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza—is not a fringe belief by polling standards. Half of registered voters believed this to be the case by the end of last year, including four out of 10 American Jews....

Platner’s willingness to support bold ideas and run against the Democratic Party establishment, despite the skeletons in his closet, makes him look like he’s interested in enacting genuine political change. At the end of the day, this is all people really want. And the fact that, despite his upbringing, he genuinely does seem like a guy you could meet at a dive bar doesn’t hurt either.

Do you remember the moment, about a year ago, when Democrats were talking about the need to find a "liberal Joe Rogan"? Many Democrats felt that the party lost the 2024 election because Donald Trump and other Republicans were eager to sit down with podcast bros who aren't "woke" and don't self-censor. Kamala Harris has expressed regret because she didn't appear on Rogan's show during the campaign. Personally, I never wanted Democrats to cozy up to podcasters who demean women or gleefully use slurs, but many very smart people thought the party should embrace them.

Well, now there's a candidate who, in the past, demeaned women, Blacks, and others on Reddit, and who thought it was badass to get (and keep) a Nazi symbol tattoed on his body -- and polls say the voters of his state are embracing him. I hope they're embracing him because they like his politics (I like his politics), and because they think he's sincere about wanting to be a better person than he was when he was a Reddit shitposter and Nazi tattoo acquirer.

And now we have his bad behavior early in his marriage to contend with, although his wife's video response over the weekend seems like a sincere plea for voters to let the two of them work it out.



Platner has not been well behaved for much of his life -- but not being well behaved is what a lot of Democrats seemed to like about the podcast bros, or at least what they thought their fans liked about them. Now there's a badly behaved candidate in a statewide race, and he's leading in the polls. Draw your own conclusions.

THE FANTASY WORLD TRUMP SEEMS TO LIVE IN WAS CREATED BY FOX NEWS

President Trump was just interviewed by his daughter-in-law Lara Trump for Fox News. One of Trump's claims in the interview has been contradicted by ... Trump himself:

One reason people would be surprised to hear that Trump has left Iran’s “military alone” is that earlier this month Trump said he had “completely destroyed Iran’s army,” and that “every single ship they had is resting underwater at the bottom of the sea.”

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— Larry Glickman (@larryglickman.bsky.social) May 31, 2026 at 6:27 AM

You might say he's sundowning, but I'm reminded of what Mark Cuban said about Trump back in 2015:

“He’s like that guy who’s going into a bar and he’ll say whatever it takes to get laid. Only in this case he’s not trying to f*** some girl, he’s trying to f*** the country.”

A few weeks ago, when Trump said he'd "completely destroyed Iran's army," he was trying to impress us with his display of manly force. Now, when he says he hasn't destroyed Iran's army but implies that he could destroy it any time he wants to, he's acknowledging the fact that we can all see Iran is still fighting, so he needs us to believe that this is only because he hasn't gotten really mad yet.

But there are other falsehoods in the interview that just seem delusional.

Trump: "California's elections are a fraud"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 30, 2026 at 9:24 PM

It's not just the suggestion in this clip that California could go red if it weren't for all the (imaginary) voter fraud. (Trump has been saying that since his first term.) It's also this claim about fraud in government programs:

On the economic standpoint, if we find half of the fraud that's going on in this country -- and we will -- we're gonna have a balanced budget very soon.

Trump said this in his State of the Union address earlier that year. (“If we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight.”) Stephen Miller also made this claim in late May, and Trump subsequently repeated it.

Stephen Miller: "Based on what I've heard, we could balance the federal budget if the only dollars that went out of the treasury went to individuals who were properly, lawfully, correctly eligible to receive them"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 26, 2026 at 2:32 PM

Trump claims preposterously that if Vance does a good enough job rooting out fraud, "we'll have a balanced budget without having to do anything. This is the kind of money they stole. I hope Todd is gonna do a real job."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 27, 2026 at 12:08 PM

This is false, of course:

It is implausible that eliminating all fraud in government programs would balance the federal budget. The federal deficit was $1.8 trillion in 2025. A 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office estimated that the federal government lost $233 billion to $521 billion to fraud annually, including schemes that were undetected. Eliminating all fraud in government programs across the country would reduce the federal deficit by a third.

Stephen Miller, who's not stupid, knows this is false, but he says it anyway. Trump, who is stupid, apparently believes this is true.

From the beginning of his career in business, Donald Trump openly admitted to shading the truth. This is a quote from Trump's first book, The Art of the Deal:

I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.

But when Trump was a businessman, he had to live in a world where other people disagreed with his grandiose claims -- bankers, politicians, journalists (though not enough of them), the buying public. However, when he discovered Fox News, he entered a world where truth is subservient to narrative. Trump subsequently took over the political party that uses Fox as its media wing, and now Fox, along with the rest of the right-wing media, is subservient to his narrative.

Long before there was a Trump cult, there was a Fox News cult, which persists to this day. The cult members think anything that contradicts what they're told by Fox is a lie. The cult leaders -- Fox prime-time hosts -- tell the cultists that every Democrat is a communist and a jihadist sympathizer hell-bent on destroying America with debt, crime, multiculturism, and transgenderism. The leaders say that every undocumented immigrant and asylum-seeker is immediately registered as a Democratic voter upon crossing the border -- or was until Sheriff Trump showed up. It's one lie after another, and millions of Americans believe them all.

Fox hasn't been alone in this, of course. Talk radio hosts were cult leaders too, and podcasters are leaders now. QAnon and health conspiratorialists also built the narrative of the cult, as did sites like Breitbart and the Daily Wire.

Trump is a cult member as well as a leader. Many of the delusional things he says are things he "learned" from Fox. And when he tells his own lies, no one in the cult will contradict them. The cult affirms his greatness:

Lara Trump to her father in law: "Obviously, you have set the country up so perfectly to make life more affordable on the other side of the Iran conflict. What is your message?"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 30, 2026 at 9:25 PM

It's possible that Trump utters more falsehoods now because his aging brain can't distinguish the truth anymore -- but I think his problem is that he lives in the hermetically sealed information bubble of the right-wing media, which affirms his delusions and feeds him additional delusions to believe.

So I still believe it's not dementia that's rotting Trump's brain. It's Fox.

REPUBLICANS ARE EXTREMIST WEIRDOS AND DEMOCRATS SHOULD SAY THAT EVERY DAY

If you're wondering what will happen to the Republican Party when Donald Trump leaves the scene, the answer is obvious: It will continue to be what it is now -- a party dominated by extremist weirdos.

Sometimes the extremist weirdness is merely ridiculous. We all know that Republicans are accusing James Talarico, the Democrats' Senate nominee in Texas, of having low testosterone and being secretly transgender. But Utah senator Mike Lee decided that those smears weren't weird enough, so he went here:

James Talarico will put you first

On the altar to Moloch https://t.co/V5So901u9g pic.twitter.com/pZfTcq07VX

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) May 28, 2026

Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee recently likened Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico to a child-sacrificing worshipper of the ancient god Moloch....

Lee's post was accompanied by an AI-animated video of an 1800s illustration of Moloch surrounded by flames and worshippers offering him a baby.

Moloch is “a Canaanite deity associated in biblical sources with the practice of child sacrifice,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and is mentioned in the Old Testament as an example of the polytheistic gods that the Hebrew God forbade Moses and his followers from worshipping.

In more recent years, far-right conspiracy propagators have alleged that global political and business elites worship Moloch in secret and enact policies to appease the sadistic deity.

The only thing stupider than this attack is the likelihood that hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Republican voters find the Moloch conspiracy theory completely believable.

Sometimes the extremists are more menacing. This week a former Trumpworld hero, Greg Bovino, traveled to Portugal to speak at RESUM26, a conference on "remigration" of immigrants (legal and otherwise), and also of "Non assimilated naturalized migrants in paralell [sic] societies." As anti-fascist researcher Jeff Tischauser notes, Bovino shared the stage "with no fewer than five people who idolize Hitler, including one who joined a group created by two Nazi SS members. Another guy is a self-described racist who refers to women as 'cockroaches.'" (You can read more about the "cockroaches" guy, Afonso Gonçalves, here.)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Remigration Summit (@remigrationsummit)

Bovino also gave an interview to the white nationalist VoxEuropa Herald in which he made his white nationalist allegiances clear.

In his interview with a white supremacist blog, disgraced former-CBP officer Greg Bovino also said he supports the neo-Nazi AfD party in Germany. 2/3 More on AfD from @globalextremism.bsky.social here: globalextremism.org/post/ein-pro...

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— Jeff Tischauser (@jtischauser.bsky.social) May 28, 2026 at 12:22 PM

In the interview, Bovino goes on to say:

Your daughters are being raped and your sons killed in Europe by aliens just like here in the United States. Same problem over different geographic regions. Why not unite and solve this problem once and for all worldwide?

A final solution, you might say.

Another proud Republican hatemonger is the lieutenant governor of Indiana.

Indiana's lieutenant governor is facing criticism from Muslim advocacy groups after comments he made about Islam during a Christian talk show appearance.

... Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith appeared on the Christian talk show "Flashpoint" on May 21. Around the 43-minute mark in the video, he expressed his hatred for Islam, saying they have "radical, jihadi mindsets."

"I am going to call on others to hate it because I hate Islam," Beckwith said. "It is a death cult. Now, I love Muslims, because they make great Christians when Jesus gets a hold of them. But I hate Islam. And we need to be OK with hating again."

But not every Republicans is a proud hatemonger. Some are just performative macho whackjobs.

Consider Colorado gubernatorial candidate Victor Marx:

The self-described “high-risk missionary” recently sat for an interview with 9News’ Kyle Clark where, among other things, he:

* Claimed to have been forced to kill a man at age 7.

*Got upset at Clark for asking if he’s killed people as an adult.

* Took credit for helping rescue 43 missing children in Florida, yet could offer no proof of that, nor of rescuing more than 45,000 women and children ― which he’s also previously asserted before removing the claim from his campaign website.

* Declined to address a claim that, as a civilian, he once called in a military airstrike that killed 70 fighters from the Islamic State group.

And here's my favorite:

* Told Clark how he performs exorcisms over the phone.

Victor Marx performs exorcisms, commanding demons to be cast off.

Marx says he doesn't charge for exorcisms but instructions appeared in a $99 Spiritual Warfare Guide on his website.

"Do you understand why so many of your critics think you're a con man," I asked.

"No," he said pic.twitter.com/4fEnISBVGy

— Kyle Clark (@KyleClark) May 28, 2026

In the only available poll of the Republican primary, Marx leads his nearest rival by 29 points and has a +32 net favorability rating. Marx has been endorsed, unsurprisingly, by Ted Nugent, Mike Flynn, and Lauren Boebert.

And that's just from the past few days.

This is who Republicans are. They hate everyone who doesn't worship like them or eat like them or enjoy the sports and vehicles they prefer. They hate whoever doesn't live like them in every way. Many of them claim to be superheroes cleansing the world of evil, but they're usually lying or fantasizing, or their voters are fantasizing on their behalf -- see every AI image and video of a buff, youthful Donald Trump conquering his enemies without breaking a sweat.

I'm old enough to remember that even at the height of Ronald Reagan's popularity, his religious-right allies became objects of mockery for being slimy, finger-wagging, money-grubbing moral hypocrites. They alienated much of America, including many people in flyover states who weren't liberal but had no use for their moral rigidity and sanctimoniousness. Also, their public displays of wealth were ridiculous and tacky.

Democrats should describe the current crop of Republicans as extreme weirdos because that's what they are. Millions of normal people don't want to hate everyone who's unlike them and don't want leaders who have chest-thumping delusions of masculine grandeur. Tim Walz was saying the right thing about Republicans in 2024 before the consultants persuaded him to stop.

DONALD TRUMP COULD BE CHARLES FOSTER KANE

In the opening monologue of his latest podcast, Ezra Klein tells us that he has a theory: that President Trump doesn't want to help Republicans win the midterms, and might be happier if they lose.

My pet theory right now is that President Trump is not trying to win the midterm elections. I’m not saying he’s trying to lose them, exactly. I just don’t think he cares.

What he cares about is controlling the Republican Party. The Republican Party is his power base. The Republican Party is his protection. The Republican Party is how he can wield power far into the future, long after his presidency, and so control of it is what he’s prioritizing.

Klein gives us the conventional wisdom about how a president helps his party in midterm elections.

Well, if he wanted to win the midterms, he’d be moving to the center. He’d be focusing on the things that Americans are angry about, disappointed in him about. He’d be supporting the strongest Republicans in contested races and doing everything he could to bolster Republicans in vulnerable states and districts.

He’s not doing even a little bit of that. Instead, he’s doing the opposite.

Klein's theory is that Trump is attacking electable Republicans who have challenged him because he cares more about keeping Republicans loyal than about winning the midterms.

He fears a Republican Party in which members of Congress begin to participate in the investigations of his scandals or they abandon him as his fortunes fall. And so he’s made his choice. He is showing them that to oppose him, even from the right, is to light your political future on fire.

I think there's something to that -- if Republicans ever join Democrats in taking on Trump, he's vulnerable. (That will never happen, of course.) But this doesn't explain why Trump endorsed Ken Paxton over John Cornyn in the Texas Senate race -- neither one was likely to break with Trump. It doesn't explain why Trump is pursuing staggeringly unpopular policies -- tariffs, public displays of self-aggrandizement, the war in Iran.

And, as Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist, reminds Klein on the podcast, Trump is obviously doing quite a few things that will help Republicans in the midterms, or that he thinks will help them. He's demanding pro-GOP gerrymanders. He's pushing for the SAVE Act.

What's my theory?

I think Trump believes he won two elections -- actually, he thinks he won three -- despite saying and doing things that were supposed to doom his campaigns, and he's smarter than the pundits and consultants and is doing what it takes to win, even though his genius is going unrecognized. Part of him undoubtedly believes that the polls are fake news and Americans really love him. I think he believes that the tariffs are a brilliant idea, that he really is the one president who can conquer nations that bedeviled previous presidents (Iran, Cuba), and that the public likes his tasteless self-glorification.

But I think he knows the polls are bad for Republicans, and he can't dismiss those polls outright. I think he understands that the GOP might get shellacked. Klein thinks Trump might prefer that outcome starting in 2027.

A Democratic-controlled Congress gives him an enemy to fight. I think he gets a little lost without an enemy. It frees him from the tedious work of trying to pass legislation. It puts him back in the place he’s most comfortable, which is not wielding power; it’s claiming persecution.

But I think he's looking forward to claiming persecution long before the next Congress is seated. If Democrats are winning, he'll say the elections were rigged right away, and he won't stop. We could have a "stop the steal" period between November and January -- and probably beyone January -- that's even more dangerous and divisive than the one we had in 2024. This time, Trump's entire administration will participate, particularly the Justice Department. And ordinary Trump cultists will participate fully expecting that the law won't touch them. (Trump will explicitly offer them preemptive pardons.)

The movement could fail. The courts are likely to affirm Democratic wins. And public opinion won't be on Trump's side.

But this could give Trump the best of both worlds: the enemy party running Congress and a Republican narrative asserting that he actually led his party to victory.

Trump could be Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane -- the newspaperman who failed in a bid to become governor, and ran a paper that was ready for victory or defeat:

CAN JAMES TALARICO AVOID BEING DUKAKISED?

I'm watching the Republican campaign against James Talarico in Texas and I'm having flashbacks to 1988. That year, a decent, non-macho Democrat named Michael Dukakis, who was the governor of Massachusetts, tried to win a presidential election saying things like this:

... this election is not about ideology. It's about competence.

... It's about American values. Old-fashioned values like accountability and responsibility and respect for the truth.

The 1988 election wasn't about ideology or competence. It was about one thing: Do you believe Michael Dukakis is a dangerous freak? That was the question Republicans had Americans asking themselves, whether they recognized it or not.

Republicans portrayed Dukakis as a freak in part because he wasn't tall or manly and because he didn't look good in the helmet he wore while riding a tank in a campaign photo op. Republicans portrayed him as dangerous because a criminal named Willie Horton who was released on a furlough program on Dukakis's watch committed a violent assault, something that wasn't unique to the furlough programs that had been established at that time by every state and the federal government. Republicans also portrayed Dukakis as dangerous because in 1977 he'd vetoed a bill requiring students to say the Pledge of Allegiance, a mandate that had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court a couple of decades earlier; because he opposed the death penalty; and because he was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The attacks on Talarico feel similar to these attacks on Dukakis because, in both cases, positions that seem reasonable in more liberal and tolerant parts of America are easy to portray as bizarre and civilization-threatening in conservative America.

The first general election ad from Talarico's opponent, Ken Paxton unloads nearly everything Republicans have got on Talarico:



It's all cultural -- there really isn't anything here about policy. What doesn't make the cut in this ad shows up in the messaging of Paxton's surrogates:

What the hell is he eating?

It’s not BBQ—because Talarico is passionately anti-meat.

Is that a tofu log? https://t.co/J9Uvch1RY7

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) May 27, 2026

(Talarico isn't vegan, though he said during his 2022 state senate bid that he was running a "non-meat campaign.")

It's a huge problem for the Democrat Party that you take one look at the men they run for elected office and just know that they couldn't name a single obscure wide receiver from the early 2000s. https://t.co/fKmt8jhUoL

— Dan Weldon for Congress (FL-14) (@TampaDan) May 27, 2026

(Yes, this is how we decide who runs the most powerful country in the world.)

Watters: Talarico is also 37 and not married. He says he has a girlfriend. He called her his best friend. He’s not revealing her identity because he wants to protect her privacy. Why haven’t we ever seen her before? Does she exist? If he wins, are they going to have a coming out… pic.twitter.com/yFskJ7tcsm

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 27, 2026

It's middle school gay-baiting, but it might work. And Stephen Miller took it a step further, describing Talarico as the Democrats' "first transgender senate candidate." The party, to its credit, responded quickly and vulgarly -- "shut up you ugly fuck" -- but I think Marisa Kabas is right:

as much as i appreciate the democrats responding with vigor for once, the fact that republicans are using "transgender" as a slur for a political candidate is fucking horrifying and dems need to quickly figure out a way to address it head on. calling stephen miller ugly isn't a long-term fix.

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— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) May 27, 2026 at 2:29 PM

Over the course of my lifetime, there's been a significant positive change in how non-gay Americans see gay people, but I don't see any sign that we're approaching a day when the majority of cis Americans will be similarly at ease with trans people, or at least accepting of their rights. Talarico is a trans ally, and he might not be able to win a Texas election for that reason alone.

One big difference between Talarico and Dukakis is that Talarico appears to understand the assignment. Unlike Dukakis (and John Kerry sixteen years later), he's not ignoring the GOP's most vicious attacks and hoping they'll just go away. This is from a new CBS interview:

Pressed on a comment he made that God is nonbinary, Talarico said he was being "intentionally provocative," but added that "what it means is that God can't be defined by human categories." On his comments about gender, Talarico said "I know there are two sexes, men and women. I also know there's a very small percentage of people who have these chromosomal abnormalities, and I believe they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect."

Asked by O'Keefe about the criticism surrounding his diet, Talarico said he is not a vegan, noting that he's an eighth-generation Texan who's "been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton's first indictment."

(Talarico, as you can see in the Paxton ad above, has said that there are six biological genders.)

Talarico, by taking these attacks head-on, might remain competitive in the race, but I wonder if he can really neutralize them. This campaign should be about Ken Paxton's criminality and moral failings, about Donald Trump's incompetence and corruption, and about the Republican Party's failure to make life better for ordinary Americans. But I don't think it will be about that. I fear it will be about whether the Democrat is a big old weirdo. Talarico might win anyway, but he'll have to win on the GOP's turf.

IN TEXAS, DEMOCRATS DIDN'T VOTE FOR THE CRAZIEST S.O.B. (D.O.B.) IN THE RACE

You know about the big headline from Texas last night: Not only did highly corrupt extremist and Donald Trump endorsee Ken Paxton beat incumbent John Cornyn in the Republican Senate primary runoff, he trounced Cornyn, winning by a 64%-36% margin. Paxton appears to have won all but 2 of Texas's 254 counties.

And that's not the only Texas race in which extremism seems to have prevailed. Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo reports:

The Republican primary runoff ran for the open Texas Railroad Commissioner position was too close to call as of Wednesday morning, with extremist candidate Bo French leading the incumbent by less than 15,000 votes, according to the Associated Press’ unofficial tally of returns....

French waged an eye-popping campaign for the seat on a platform that had little to do with the actual work of the office, supporting the deportation of 100 million people and railing against what he described as the “Islamification” of Texas.

As Kovensky previously reported, French

largely campaigned on culture war intangibles, like cleansing Texas’ oil sector of Islam, fighting DEI, and deporting 100 million people. While chair of the Tarrant County GOP last year, French earned condemnation from fellow Texas Republicans for posting a poll that asked whether Jews or Muslims posed a greater threat to the United States....

He’s called Muslims “savages” and demanded their deportation; he’s said that Texas mosques are “training centers” for an “ideology” of people who “get to rape your wife and daughter.” ...

When the city of Corpus Christi began to run out of water this year, French pinned the blame on a nearby plastics factory, which is majority-owned by the Saudi government. French played that up. In a recent runoff campaign ad, French attacked Wright, accusing his opponent of selling the city’s water to a “Muslim foreign government” and claiming a Delaware court had caught the plastics company trying to “enact Sharia law in America.”

“Do you really want a commissioner who would sell out his own neighbors to a Muslim government? I don’t,” he concluded.

A couple of days ago, I quoted a 2017 observation by Thomas Massie, the libertarian Kentucky congressman who's now a lame duck because he crossed Trump. Massie talked about voters who backed Trump in 2016 after previously supporting him and fellow libertarians Ron and Rand Paul.

"All this time," Massie explained, "I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along."

In yesterday's runoff, Texas Republicans voted for the craziest son of a bitch for both U.S. senator and (apparently) railroad commissioner.

You know who didn't vote for the craziest son of a bitch -- or, rather, daughter of a bitch -- in yesterday runoff? Democratic voters in Texas's 35th congressional district.

Progressive sex therapist Maureen Galindo lost the Democratic runoff for Texas’ 35th District after being accused of antisemitism and facing condemnations from within her own party.

Johnny Garcia’s victory over Galindo on Tuesday has national and Texas Democrats breathing a sigh of relief.

They had moved en masse to disavow Galindo after she said in a recent social media post that she would write legislation to turn a local ICE detention center into a “prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking.”

The Instagram post on Galindo's campaign site didn't just call for the imprisonment of Zionists. It said they should be castrated.

Galindo lost the runoff 64%-36% after leading Garcia in the primary by 2 points.

Americans think both parties have an extremism problem. A Pew survey from last year found this:

61% say the phrase “too extreme in its positions” describes the Republican Party very or somewhat well; 57% describe the Democratic Party as too extreme.

But only one party is routinely defined as extreme. In a new Washington Post/ABC poll, respondents were asked to express in their own words what they don't like about the two major parties. For Democrats, the top answer (at 12%) was summarized in the poll as "Too liberal/socialism/race/gender/abortion/crime positions." For Republicans, the top answer was (also at 12%) was "Trump/Loyalty to Trump," while there's no all-encompassing ideological characterization of Republicans. "Lack of concern for ordinary people/cruelty" is at 6%, "Authoritarianism/disregard for rule of law/anti-democracy" and "Racist or anti-diversity politics " are at 4%, but extremism is not front of mind for most voters when they think about Republicans, and there seems to be no Republican equivalent of the W word for Democrats, as used by one survey respondent:

Too woke, focus on issues not central to Americans (economy and jobs).
— California woman, 50s, independent

And there's this:

Gone too far to the left, they are more in line with the communist and socialist parties.
— New York woman, 50s, independent

In reality, hardly any viable Democratic candidates are extreme in the way that Bo French and Ken Paxton are, and Democrats aren't accepting of unrepentant hatemongers, while Republicans increasingly embrace them. But the public still doesn't see that.