Two years on, the once Trump-loving Muslim community here looks back on those promises with bitterness. Some of Israel’s worst atrocities in the Gaza war, they believe, took place under Trump’s watch (and the bombings have continued even under his peace plan). Meanwhile, Trump has plunged America into yet another Middle East war — this time with Iran — that is now stretching into its ninth month. And it is putting upward pressure on gas and other consumer prices to boot. In Michigan, roughly 40% of the state’s population is struggling to afford basic necessities, and fuel costs have surged to nearly $5 a gallon, up from an average of $3 a gallon just before the war.

No wonder, then, that some of Trump’s own voters are beginning to reconsider their vote. Many are even prepared to back a very different kind of politician — Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democrat poised to become the state’s next senator, if polls are to be believed.

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Earlier this month, MS NOW conducted a panel with 10 Michigan Trump voters, asking them whom they planned to support come 3 November. Only one voter raised her hand for Republican Mike Rogers, while five others raised theirs in support of El-Sayed. This seemed, to put it charitably, fanciful. Were half of Trump’s Michigan voters really planning to back a progressive well to the Left of most Democrats, never mind MAGA Republicans?

But last month, a New York Times/Siena poll suggested that a shift was underway, albeit less pronounced than the MS NOW panel suggested. It found that El-Sayed was garnering support from 8% of 2024 Trump voters, better than other Democratic Senate nominees in swing states. A recent UnHerd visit to Michigan revealed the reason: anger over the war in Gaza and the affordability crisis back home.

When Trump swept to power in 2024, Michigan was the final piece of the Democrats’ Blue Wall to crumble. In a state that Joe Biden had won narrowly four years earlier, anger over the war in Gaza and soaring inflation helped drive working-class and minority voters toward Trump. Nowhere were these gains more strikingly evident than in Dearborn, the nation’s largest Arab-majority city, where Trump won 42% of the vote.

Among those who voted for Trump was Faye Nemer, who migrated to Dearborn from Lebanon as a child. A lifelong independent, she had rejected Trump in his first two presidential bids but changed her mind after meeting him in Dearborn. “Kamala Harris’s disregard for us was a complete slap in the face,” Nemer told me. “She had no interest in changing the Democrats’ position on the Middle East, whereas Trump came to us and said, ‘I want to make sure you have a voice and a seat at the table.’” 

Ibrahim Duhaini, a Dearborn resident and local physician, felt similarly. Although he didn’t vote for Trump, he backed the Green Party, which won nearly a fifth of the ballots in Dearborn, potentially depriving Harris of a victory. But Duhaini felt comfortable with making what he described as a “soft vote” for Trump. “Although I did not vote for Trump,” he told me, “I knew that my support for the Greens would help him, too. I met Trump, and I had a very fruitful meeting with him. He said that he would bring peace and prosperity to the region.”

Today, both Nemer and Duhaini plan to vote for El-Sayed. They believe many others in their community, disillusioned by the war in Iran and the affordability crisis, will do the same. 

In West Dearborn, where mosques and Islamic centers stand alongside churches, Arabic signs line the streets, and bars are few and far between, there is not a Trump sign in sight. House windows and porches are plastered with Abdul El-Sayed signs reading: “Money out of politics! Money in your pocket! Medicare for all!” and Democratic volunteers are picketing on every street corner. Were Trump to show his face again here, it’s doubtful that he’d receive the same warm reaction as he did in 2024. 

El-Sayed, a 41-year-old former public-health official, is vying to become America’s first Muslim senator. A progressive variously described as a Muslim Bruce Springsteen and an Arab Pete Buttigieg, he’s quick on his feet, adept at both soaring Obama-ian rhetoric and the polemical jab. One day he’s bantering with Fox News hosts about circumcisions, the next he’s sparring with audience members about Right-wing claims that he supports the Muslim Brotherhood (the only evidence for which seems to be tweets from his half-sister from more than a decade ago).

To his detractors, El-Sayed comes off as thin-skinned and condescending, which even Democratic strategist David Axelrod described as a “not appealing quality.” The RealClearPolitics polling average puts him 2.5 points ahead of Rogers, but some moderate Democrats believe an establishment candidate would be doing better in a political climate favorable to the Left. Some are even encouraging voters to leave El-Sayed’s spot on the ballot blank. 

“I support Abdul because he is America First,” Nemer told me. “It’s not just his position on Israel — he wants to fix our broken health-care system and address the cost-of-living crisis. Ending the war in Iran is a good place to start.” Despite still receiving death threats over her vote, Nemer says that she doesn’t regret supporting Trump. She frames it as a wake-up call for Democrats, who took the Arab-American vote for granted: “The Democrats treated us terribly in 2024 — Harris deplatformed us at the DNC convention. The party still needs to improve, but there has been a sea change in its approach and outreach since that election.”

El-Sayed may be doing well with Arab-Americans, but there are other groups with whom he has struggled to connect. During his fractious primary battle against moderate Haley Stevens, El-Sayed severely underperformed with Jewish voters, in part thanks to his campaigning with far-Left streamer Hasan Piker, his equivocal remarks about a Michigan temple attack, and his uncompromising stance in favor of ending foreign aid for Israel (and, to be fair, all other foreign states). His standing with this community has not improved in the general, and last month, a coalition of Michigan rabbis and Jewish leaders petitioned voters to withhold their support until he tempers his Israel rhetoric and policies.

Long-simmering tensions between the black and Arab-American community in Michigan have also hurt El-Sayed. The Democratic nominee has responded with a not-so-subtle pitch to black voters that includes late-night visits to gas stations to purchase Doritos and soda. He has also ordered fried chicken on a black-influencer podcast. 

If his rally in the majority-black city of Flint was anything to go by, El-Sayed’s outreach to this community didn’t seem to be landing. Most of the attendees were older and white, with Democratic Socialists of America and “AOC for President” badges pinned on their shirts. When he took to the stage, El-Sayed was met with raucous cheers as he lamented the money being spent to defeat him, imploring the audience to “choose between the many and the money.” He was most animated when attacking Rogers, his GOP opponent, whom he derided as a “non-playing character” (NPC) and a “human sock puppet, doing what Trump and the corporations want him to do.”

Trump and Rogers have made El-Sayed’s faith a centerpiece of the GOP campaign. The President regularly refers to him as Mohammed and “a Muslim Brotherhood guy,” while Rogers has more of a tightrope to walk. Wary of angering the state’s 350,000 or so Muslim-Americans, he has tried to distinguish between El-Sayed’s purported Islamist political ties and his faith. Out on the campaign trail, he tends to avoid the issue altogether. The GOP flyers handed out to Dearborn residents made no mention of El-Sayed’s Muslim background; all focused on his “radical” agenda.

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It would be wrong to suggest, however, that all voters switching from Trump to El-Sayed are Muslim-Americans. Stephania Messina, a Detroit resident, is a former Trump voter from a conservative Christian background. In 2016, she and her family were enamored with Trump and in particular his message on China. They saw Trump as the man who could bring back jobs from overseas after Michigan’s manufacturing industry was hollowed out by decades of offshoring. 

But over the last few years, she and other members of her community became disillusioned with Trump. “When you are confronted with the stark, visceral reality of Americans being murdered on the streets by ICE, that just cannot be written off as fake news,” she told me. These events “appalled” the evangelical Christians in her community, forcing them to reconsider their political allegiances. “Most of my family are evangelical Christians who voted for Trump. But in the last two years, my brother, my son, and his four friends have all denounced Trump. Nearly all of them are now voting for Abdul.”

Christian conservatives are, for the most part, still riding with Trump. But it is surely a worrying sign for the President that even members of this most loyal constituency are beginning to turn against him. That might sound like good news for Democrats, yet few of the people I spoke to expressed any real affection for the party, either. Add El-Sayed’s difficulties with two central Democratic constituencies — Jewish and black voters — and Michigan’s Senate race has become an unusually tangled contest of ideology, identity, and resentment. 

This race is defined as much by what voters oppose as by what they support: they are anti-Israel or anti-Muslim, anti-Trump or anti-Left. What many voters share, though, is a deep anger at the status quo, be it directed at the administration or the political system writ large. Whoever wins next week’s election — the Trump cipher or the hard-Left progressive — there is very little sign that that anger will dissipate anytime soon. As one Michigander told me after the Flint rally, “the whole country looks at Michigan when it’s an election. But it turns away as soon as it’s over.”

Diesel fuel trades in a global market. Gulf states usually provide 20% of this market, and Russia another 10%. Notwithstanding Donald Trump’s new plan to suspend sanctions on diesel imports from the latter, both these supplies have been severely disrupted. Yes, crude oil is now leaving the Gulf via pipelines, while a shuttle system of state-owned vessels, protected by the US Navy, ensures volumes very close to their pre-war level.

But shipments of refined products and petrochemicals have not recovered. Ukrainian drone attacks have damaged several Russian refineries, perhaps also explaining Trump’s rising anger with President Zelensky, whatever the truth of this latest “energy ceasefire”. China, for its part, has also prohibited the export of refined products in an effort to control domestic prices. Little wonder the rest of the world’s refineries are hard-pressed to meet demand. First of all, there are simply fewer refineries. In 2000, Britain had 18 refineries. Today it has four. Many of the closed refineries were too small to compete internationally, but high industrial electricity costs and environmental regulations also helped make them uneconomic.

Second, a barrel of crude oil contains a variety of molecules that refineries break down into different products: based primarily on their boiling points. Gasoline is a light distillate with a low boiling point. Diesel and jet fuel are middle distillates with higher boiling points, while marine bunker fuel is a heavy distillate. Most refineries are built to process specific types of crude and produce a specific mix of fuels. Separating the different segments of a barrel of crude oil is a complex process; refineries cannot always adjust quickly, even if demand shifts from one product to another.

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Another factor is the shipping industry, which uses 4% of global oil production. In 2020, the United Nations’ International Marine Organization dramatically shifted global energy demand, when it compelled the world’s ship owners to stop using heavy marine bunker fuel, and start burning more environmentally friendly fuels like marine gas oil. Unfortunately, marine gas oil comes from the same segment of the crude barrel as diesel and jet fuel. While the impact of this change was initially masked by Covid, which reduced oil demand, this has permanently increased demand for middle distillates. That, in turn, has raised the cost of all shipping, flying and heavy goods transport, and made diesel and jet-fuel prices more volatile.

Britain now produces only half of the roughly 500,000 barrels of diesel it consumes every day. The rest is imported. Since Russian supplies were suspended in 2022, most of those imports come from the US, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Middle East. All over the world, refineries that can produce diesel and jet fuel are operating at maximum capacity. In the US, capacity utilization has reached 98%, the highest utilization rate in a quarter of a century. The “crack spread”, which measures the difference between what a refinery pays for crude and what it sells product for, is now three times its historic average. If refineries could produce more diesel, they surely would.

The headline-grabbing news in the UK has been £2-a-litre diesel. However, the fuel’s retail price has actually risen by less than the price of crude oil. Dated Brent crude is up 70% this year, while the price of diesel has risen by only 40%. This is largely because, in the UK, two fifths of the price of diesel is tax: which does not vary with the price of crude. Moreover, dated Brent is a spot price that changes with the latest news, while refineries producing diesel operate on more stable long term contracts.

Things look very different in America. The United States is the world’s largest oil producer, and its largest diesel exporter. Most of those exports go to Latin America, not Britain. Nevertheless, diesel fuel prices in the US have risen by nearly 80%, compared with only 40% in the UK. In fact, while retail diesel prices in the UK have risen by a smaller percentage than the price of Brent crude, in the US the opposite is true.

With diesel prices reaching the equivalent of $200 per barrel in the US, and crucial midterms coming up, the Trump administration had ample motivation to act. America is exporting 30% of its diesel production into a global market. At the same time, America’s own strategic petroleum reserve is at its lowest level in 44 years. Between 2021 and 2025, the Biden administration drew down America’s reserve by 45% — or 245 million barrels — largely following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. During that same period, all the other G7 nations together drew down their own reserves by only 40 million barrels. In other words, the US government provided the global market with 85% of the oil used to calm markets after the Russian invasion.

Always a proponent of America first, President Trump concluded that other nations should now draw down their own stocks, rather than continue to rely on American reserves. Trump’s threat to ban US diesel exports has anyway been effective, resulting in a commitment by other G7 members to release 100 million barrels of oil over just four months. As a result of this agreement, diesel prices in both Europe and the United States have declined slightly. For his part, Trump has also signed an executive order granting fuel tax breaks, usually reserved for farmers, to truckers. This latest diesel-exporting agreement with Russia — while mattering more from a geopolitical perspective — is also perhaps intended to help drivers at the pump.

Whether any of this will bring down prices enough to benefit Republican election prospects next month remains to be seen. What may be more long-lasting is the damage done to public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans increasingly view European governments as freeriders: unwilling to meet their Nato defense commitments, but quite happy to use America’s strategic petroleum reserve and diesel exports to keep their own fuel prices down. As for the Europeans, they see a transactional Trump administration extorting its allies for domestic political purposes. Both sides have a point. Either way, the old political adage remains true: if loyalty is a sentiment, leverage is a fact.

Though he’s running as an independent, Osborn is so far the most promising of the progressive-backed, working-class coded candidates whom the Left hopes will take seats from Republicans in the midterm elections. Incumbent Sen. Pete Ricketts is still widely perceived to be the frontrunner in the Cornhusker State, but Osborn is polling in a dead heat at 46.9%, according to Flipr, Nate Silver’s polling site, perhaps in part due to his refreshing perceived distance from the culture wars. He’s maintaining that distance — or the pretense of it — despite audio leaked this month from three separate private meetings that revealed him assuring progressives behind closed doors that he’s campaigning as a social conservative and border hawk only in order to win votes. 

I explain to Osborn that if gender identity is included as a protected category under Title IX, as was decreed by executive order by the Obama administration, though subsequently suspended by President Trump, it means biological boys in girls’ sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms. “I can’t see myself voting for that,” Osborn answers easily. “I don’t really understand it. I certainly don’t focus on that. I mean, as far as education concerns, that’s at the very bottom for me. We’ve got to teach civics in school. We should be teaching our kids finance.” 

Osborn is a 51-year-old Navy veteran who worked as an industrial mechanic for the Kellogg’s plant in Omaha, and became president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers Union Local 50G. He first appeared on the national political radar while leading a 77-day strike at Kellogg’s in 2021. Following that, he ran for Senate against incumbent Republican Deb Fischer in 2024 — and shocked the Beltway by winning 46.5% of the vote, despite getting very little attention from the chattering class.

Of the many red-state candidates Democrats have tried to promote in the Trump era, Osborn has long stood out as the most genuine. Unlike John Fetterman and Graham Platner, he actually is an Average Joe with no pedigree to speak of. Strategists are betting that the pros of being a regular guy will outweigh the cons of his lack of polish.

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In our discussion, Osborn quickly pivots to quality rather than ideology in education. “We are definitely falling behind,” he contends. “They had a record amount of people apply to be a plumber at the Union Plumbing Local 16 in Omaha, and over half the kids that applied failed the math test. I think that’s what we should be talking about.”

This is a savvy example of the balance Osborn needs to strike: agree with the Right on the underlying policy, but downplay its importance to remain palatable to the Left. Nobody else is doing it quite like he is, because he’s actually representative of the median Nebraskan independent voter, who is paying an average of $4.33 for a gallon of gas, isn’t supportive of the Iran War, and is unconvinced by socialism but is looking for some reprieve.  

These frustrations make 2026 fundamentally different from his failed campaign in 2024, Osborn says. Blanket tariffs, an unpassed farm bill, competition from Argentinian beef imports, and the war are major frustrations now bubbling up in conservative ag communities. “I’m starting to see a significant change in rural Nebraska,” he says, “specifically anybody that’s agriculture adjacent.” 

Such voters, he believes, will be responsive to the pitch he shares with me about punching a clock for 20 years, going to work “sick and sore … because that’s what you got to do for your family” and so on. “You know you’re always an injury away from going into the red,” he says. “It’s about being able to connect with the people throughout Nebraska who have the same shared experience through work, hard work.”

Such voters, however, also have plentiful reason to mistrust him. 

Incumbent Ricketts, a multimillionaire businessman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Daddy Warbucks, has successfully branded Osborn “Democrat Dan.” A national GOP operative with knowledge of the race explains Ricketts’s strategy this way: “the main point is always to get back to ‘Dan is a Democrat,’” for two reasons. First, “it’s true,” and second, because it calls attention to him being “wishy-washy” and “untrustworthy.”

On Sept. 1, Nebraska’s The Plains Sentinel published a report based on a leaked recording that showed Osborn pushing back on demands for him to go Left on trans sports. “The state is made up of 50% Republicans, 26% Democrat, and 24% Independents. So my win numbers, mathematically, I need to get 10% to 15% of Republicans to win this race…. How am I going to do that, by fucking saying, ‘Oh, I love trans people, and they should be able to play in sports?’”

Then Politico obtained audio of Osborn telling Democrats that Donald Trump’s border wall is “a symbol of racism” and “does nothing.”

“I knew the wall — it’s a joke. It’s a symbol of racism, really, is what the wall represents. It does nothing, you know,” Osborn told a questioner. Pressed further, he added, “There’s the campaigning side to get elected, and then there’s once you get into office, what are you going to do?” 

Shortly thereafter the Omaha World-Herald got its hands on another leaked recording. This time, Osborn appeared to be denigrating Trump voters. “Billy Bob in fucking Red Cloud, Nebraska, who lives next to the fucking Trump store as you pull into town and is waving the flag, all he knows is that he’s on the winning team,” Osborn said on the tape, later adding, “[Trump’s] been so effective at taking Billy Bob and his wife Mary Jane or Mary Jo and telling them … you’re on the winning team. And that’s all they care about, because their lives probably suck so fucking bad.” Team Ricketts immediately tried to frame the recording as Osborn’s “deplorables moment.” 

The GOP operative I spoke to said the sports recording is proof Osborn is a “fake independent.” 

“It blows up this whole narrative that he’s an independent guy who’s going to vote for Nebraska in the Senate,” the source said.

Republicans have a point on this. Osborn has run twice against GOP candidates, and was recruited into politics by high-profile progressives tied to Bernie Sanders. He’s been advised by political strategist Morris Katz, known for his work with Zohran Mamdani and Graham Platner. Osborn’s campaign also received contributions from Democrats like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Montana Sen. Jon Tester. 

“I’d like to thank the banks, big tobacco, foreign lobbyists, and chemical manufacturers funding Ricketts’ campaign for not donating to mine…. The only money I accept is from those who support working people and are tired of the partisanship in Washington,” Osborn says, though he admits that it’s “frustrating” to explain this heavy support from the Left to voters who want to make sure he’s really independent. 

“I would love to see certainly more funding come in from the people who lean to the Right,” he tells me. “Actually, one of my biggest individual donors is a Republican business owner in Nebraska. Both he and his wife have double-maxed to the campaign on my stance on right to repair.”

“It’s not about Republican or Democrat,” he insists. “I happen to be running against a Republican. If I was in New York and I was running against a Democrat, most of my money would probably be coming from the Right.” Osborn argues that he’d be raising gargantuan sums like State Rep. James Talarico (D-Tex.), currently the Democratic nominee for Senate in the Lone Star State, and Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), currently running for reelection, if he actually were a Democrat.

This is also true. Osborn’s $5.7 million cash haul pales in comparison to fundraising by Talarico and Ossoff, according to Open Secrets data. 

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Regardless of the gotcha tapes, there is still a lot of daylight between Osborn and the Democrats. On immigration, he says that we need reform that won’t “undercut American workers.” There isn’t a Democrat in the country that would lead off that way.

“I saw it firsthand at Kellogg’s when we went out on strike. They immediately tried to replace us and we had some very strong suspicions and some evidence that a lot of these folks were undocumented workers from Texas, and that shouldn’t happen,” he emphasizes. This, of course, is not the best way to rack up donations on ActBlue — if that’s your goal. Osborn mitigates his stance by describing himself as a “humanist” who believes “we’re all human beings just trying to get through our days in some semblance of peace.” 

“It’s just about having some dang common sense and not using this as a political football,” he says.

Such is the life of a Left-leaning independent trying to prove that the political elite can be toppled by a union mechanic in a state Trump won with 60% of the vote. Osborn clearly isn’t Mamdani and he clearly isn’t MAGA. That means he’s like a lot of Americans, a record number of whom — 45% — now identify as independents. 

Most people aren’t trying to decide whether they have the politics of Pete Ricketts or the politics of the Democratic Socialists of America. They’re trying to decide who’s going to bring down gas prices and healthcare costs while maintaining a sense of normalcy in the culture wars: no open borders, no boys in girls’ sports. 

When all is said and done, Osborn sounds like a guy who’s still trying to figure that out himself.  All while navigating the choppy waters of America’s expensive and messy electoral process. The leaked recordings don’t exactly reveal that Osborn is a secret Brooklyn barista so much as that he’s dealing with economic populists who also demand fealty on cultural issues. Unfortunately, it’s hard to say where Osborn stands on those issues apart from the reality that he’s clearly not a puritan and is clearly very frustrated.

So is he a relatable character torn between the divisive forces of corruption tearing American politics apart or a progressive sleeper cell trying to seduce MAGA into giving up a vote in the upper chamber? That’s for the voters of Nebraska to decide — and Osborn, too. 

And so, right on cue, here come the “accusations.”

What are these “accusations”? Good question. “Accusations” would seem to overstate the case, because it’s exceedingly unclear what Platner is even being accused of doing. But since the non-accusatory accusations have been dramatically unveiled by the The New York Times, all keen political watchers must now hold their breath and brace for the fallout. 

The Times’s Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer boast that they “spent months” doggedly reporting on the “complicated history of Platner’s relationships with women.” OK, then — after months of this intrepid investigative journalism, what did the journalists come up with? Reputedly that Platner’s relationship with various ex-girlfriends has at times been “emotionally wrenching.” The dynamic of these relationships, dating back to his 20s, is said to have been “volatile” and even “toxic.” And his behavior? “Unsettling.” 

These are the fruits of a New York Times enterprise project to canvass Platner’s ex-girlfriends, already a creepy enough initiative in its own right — and the worst they could uncover is that a handful of ex-girlfriends use vaguely unflattering adjectives to describe their subjective emotional recollections of certain interactions with Platner, stemming from consensual adult romantic activity a decade or more ago. 

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One ex, Lyndsey Fifield, alleges that Platner grabbed her roughly and, in one instance, “yanked her out of a cab” in the course of “altercations.” Fifield happens to be a long-time Republican operative, having served in multiple GOP political action committees and currently listed as a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative think tank. Her affiliations are alluded to by the Times, which notes that the paper “could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s account.”

If this is what we’re really doing now, why doesn’t somebody go and canvass the ex-boyfriends of Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer? They evidently deem it newsworthy that former love interests of Platner claim to have endured “emotionally wrenching” relationship travails. Given the prominent perches Glueck and Lerer enjoy at the New York Times, certainly they rank high enough on the all-important “power dynamic” pyramid that the public would be similarly entitled to know if anything “emotionally wrenching” or “volatile” might have occurred in their own private lives when they were in their 20s. 

Robust reportorial resources should thus be devoted to explore this harrowing possibility, with any resulting material reframed and reinterpreted many years after the fact to comport with whatever news-cycle imperatives might arise on a given week. New York Times readers have every right to evaluate whether their own unreported romantic histories might be exerting undue influence on their 2026 midterm election coverage. 

God forbid either journalist be alleged by some disgruntled ex to have exhibited behavior that could be retroactively characterized as “toxic.” And if Glueck or Lerer wishes to dispute that characterization, perhaps for a lack of context or any other mitigating factors they may wish to cite, they’re plain out of luck, because everyone knows it’s a lose-lose situation to be rehashing dirty relationship laundry in the pages of The New York Times. The more you talk, the worse you look, regardless of what the truth happens to be.

If by any chance either female journalist has ever had an “off-and-on long-distance relationship” with old boyfriends who may have less than flattering memories of the experience, this is now to be considered straightforwardly reportable information, given the new Platner standard they’ve opted to set forth. Any relevant anecdotes would need to be fleshed out with ambiguously motivated remembrances of the journalists’ past emotional traits, since this is the kind of psychobabble that litters the Platner exposé. (For reference, Katie graduated from Northwestern University in 2012 and Lisa graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, so those are some decent leads to start with for any shoeleather reporters out there looking to better inform the public about contemporary power dynamics in America.)

Fifield, the flagship “accuser” in this Times story, doesn’t appear to be accusing Platner of anything in particular (though she has since taken to the X app, formerly Twitter, wielding the A word, “abuse”). Lacking anything more tangible to report, the Times is reduced to relaying Fifield’s assessment that Platner is “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions” — whatever the hell that means — which Fifield has extrapolated based on having sporadically dated Platner from 2013 to 2015. 

Seeing his recently discovered archive of Reddit posts, she claims, has “reminded me of just how much he hated women.” Left unexplained is why she apparently dated someone who “hated women” for two years. Or why, after the relationship apparently broke off by 2016, friends sent texts encouraging her to “move on,” implying that she was disinclined to “move on.” Nor do the Times sleuths probe whether her apparent knowledge that Platner was simultaneously seeing other women during their relationship might have been a key factor in generating her negative feelings toward him. Or what she precisely meant in a post-breakup diary entry, purportedly shown to the reporters, in which she wrote that Platner was “the most toxic literally abusive man on earth who destroyed my life.” 

How did Platner destroy her life, exactly? What is the definition of “toxic” in this context? (That word can seem to be quite malleable.) What kind of alleged “abuse” is she talking about here — emotional, physical, or something else? And by any chance, are there additional sentences or paragraphs surrounding the curiously truncated excerpt that might shed additional light on her psychological state at the time, or further elucidate what Platner is even accused of doing wrong, which again remains exceedingly unclear, despite months of intensive investigation by a team of seasoned reporters? 

According to one of her friends in the DC-conservative-blackslapping network, the podcaster and opinion columnist Bethany Mandel, Fifield had already spent the past “many months” on a political mission to inflict maximum political damage against Platner — first by calling attention to his purported “Nazi Tattoo,” which had apparently never alarmed her enough to cease dating him. Then, when that proved insufficient to sink Platner, Fifield went in for the kill with a standard slate of “accusations” pertaining to nebulous intimate-partner improprieties. 

Though, again, to even call these “accusations” wouldn’t be exactly accurate; Platner is accused by no woman in the Times story of doing anything self-evidently illicit. Instead, the article assembles an impressionistic collage of what the Times theorizes is a pattern of “unsettling” behavior. Surely, a stronger adjective would’ve been used for the headline, should any reportorial finding have supported it. Perhaps most bizarre is that Glueck and Lerer, scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel at this point, deem it journalistically crucial to grant anonymity to yet another ex-girlfriend, whom they “asked to sum up how he treated her.” This source said she felt like “collateral damage to the world that is his.” What does this mean? Sounds quite rueful and poetic, sure, but whatever “accusation” it’s supposed to correspond with is shrouded in mystery.

Speaking of the supposed “Nazi tattoo” that is now said to be a singularly defining mark of Platner’s allegedly foul character, it seems rather doubtful that a great many of his fellow Marines circa 2007 — when Platner says he got the tattoo while on leave in Croatia — would have been steeped enough in esoteric pagan iconography to identify the symbol as intrinsically linked with National Socialism. Because to the naked eye, it could easily just appear like a generic “skull and crossbones” symbol that a certain type of military guy in his early 20s would probably think looks cool. Perhaps going forward, all US service personnel should be required to consult the Anti-Defamation League’s “hate-symbols” database before they ink themselves with anything improper. Better yet, they can fax their proposed tat design to Susan Collins for pre-approval.

Earlier this week, a crew of doofuses affiliated with the National Republican Senatorial Committee thought it would be hilarious to gallivant shirtless around Washington, DC, wearing nothing but a white bath towel. This was done to heckle Platner for the supposedly incriminating mirror selfie of his that recently surfaced, in which, yes, the Democratic candidate is pictured shirtless and with a towel around his waist. If that was the extent of the GOP stooges’ stunt, it might’ve been loutish and lame, but forgettably harmless. In the current political climate, however, they of course had to ratchet things up to the most rabid extreme, and wave signage proclaiming Platner a “pedo” — based on absolutely nothing other than that he had apparently maintained a personal account on an app called Kik, which is thought to be inherently disreputable, given the purported connotations of what the app is typically used for. 

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It’s of course possible that Platner has done disreputable things on this app — his wife did report to his campaign operatives that he exchanged sexually explicit messages with at least six women earlier in their marriage — but that’s preposterously far removed from Platner doing anything that could be remotely labeled “pedophilic,” besides some vague supposition that the app is populated with minors who circumvent age-verification protocols. There is zero evidence of Platner engaging in any conduct that could conceivably make him a “pedophile.” If the only criteria for earning such a sick designation these days is using a social-media app on which minors might be present, there’s no necessary reason why that wouldn’t also apply to X, on which much of the recent hectoring of Platner has taken place. 

More broadly, it seems to have been collectively decided that in 2026, flippantly declaring one’s political foes to be pedos, or pedo-adjacent, or pedo-complicit, is just standard procedure, with any evidentiary requirement a relic of the past. In addition, certain Republicans have clearly been laboring with pent-up frustration at how Democrats gamely operationalized the Jeffrey Epstein saga against President Trump, who now also gets routinely taunted as a pedophile, despite a similar dearth of credible evidence. 

As such, vengeful has-beens like Ari Fleisher have proposed an inventive new angle of attack for their all-hands-on-deck offensive to preserve a slim Republican Senate majority: “Platner is Epstein without the island,” the former George W. Bush press secretary proclaimed. Why? Because, again, a selfie has emerged of Platner wearing a bath towel, and the selfie appeared on an app that Fleisher and others claim is “targeted to teens,” though they cite no empirical basis for this inference — much less any basis for assuming that Platner himself has “targeted” anything untoward at any teen. 

But it doesn’t matter anymore. American political conflict is now a rolling cacophony of everyone and their mother calling each other a pedophile. Republicans, cruising for a midterm bruising, should at least be thankful that Platner’s improbable ascent has enabled them to savor a moment of temporary catharsis, as they pretend to be enthusiastic about re-electing Susan Collins to a sixth dreary term.

So why does it seem that Democrats are fumbling a winnable midterm cycle?

Two recent developments within the past few weeks reveal the party’s fundamental problems leading into the fall. The first demonstrates the real limits of Democrats’ ability to fight back against Trump. And the second shows that the party’s refusal to admit its mistakes prevents it from unifying around a coherent strategy to win.

Consider how badly Democrats lost the redistricting war with President Trump over federal congressional seats. Last year, Trump coordinated a sweeping national redistricting effort designed to lock in Republican control of the House. In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger decided to “fight fire with fire” by gerrymandering their own states to counterbalance Republican gains in places like Texas. But this response made things worse.

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In Virginia, the state supreme court struck down the new Democratic map, ruling it violated the 2020 voter-approved redistricting reforms. Worse, Newsom’s California plan — which could create five new Democratic-favorable seats — gave Republicans exactly the rationale they needed to escalate their own gerrymandering efforts in states where the GOP initially showed reluctance to do so. North Carolina Republicans explicitly cited Newsom’s redistricting as justification for their own maps, saying the Golden State was “blocking the efforts of blue state Democrats to take control of Congress.”

The math is daunting. As of now, Republicans stand to gain roughly 13 House seats from their gerrymandering efforts nationwide. Democrats, thanks to Newsom, may gain five. That is a net gain of seven seats for Trump. In sum, Democrats’ attempt to fight back didn’t stop Trump’s redistricting efforts. Rather, they normalized a sleazy policy and gave hesitant Republican-led states the push to escalate the effort.

If Trump’s redistricting efforts hold, Democrats could fail to retake the House this fall. Without at least one chamber to create institutional leverage, Democrats would be unable to access critical tools to reach voters before the 2028 presidential election, such as investigative power, subpoena authority, and a platform for high-profile hearings. Instead, they would be forced to continue their symbolic protest and opposition for the remainder of his term. 

But the real fumble of Democrats leading into 2026 and 2028 comes not from losing the redistricting fight or any of the other defeats to Trump, but from the party’s ongoing refusal to honestly examine why it lost the 2024 election. 

This institutional failure has come into focus with the Democratic National Committee’s recent release of its much anticipated 2024 election post-mortem, a report that was supposed to answer hard questions about why the party lost, but instead highlights the insularity and self-protective tendencies of the small professional class of Democratic operatives who influence the party.

The timeline of the report’s suppression and eventual release illustrates this problem. In February 2025, Ken Martin, the then chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, won the election to become the next DNC chairman. He defeated Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party chair, who had the backing of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and other top Democratic leaders.

Martin’s strategy to win the most votes from the 448 DNC members, the majority of whom are state party representatives, was straightforward. He promised a “50-state party strategy,” pledging to invest more money in state parties across the country, including the least competitive ones. This stood in contrast to Wikler, who wanted to concentrate resources on media and battleground state elections. Not surprisingly, the candidate promising money to more of the voting constituency beat the candidate advocating for strategic spending focus.

But Martin had to do more than promise money to win. He also had to appease the numerous Democrats angry about the 2024 election defeat. Many of these critics weren’t voting DNC members, but their voices and donations mattered. For them, he promised an independent autopsy conducted by an outside auditor that would rigorously examine why the party lost and tell the truth.

But something changed once he got into office. 

Instead of an independent process, Martin put one of his close friends, Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, in charge of the report. Then, in December 2025, Martin announced that the DNC would not release the final report after all. He justified the decision by saying it would distract from the party’s 2025 wins and take focus away from the midterms.

It was only when CNN was preparing to expose details of the report’s drafts in late May that Martin abruptly changed his position, releasing the complete report on May 21, 2026.

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Much of the fallout has focused on the draft report’s shocking lack of quality, which included factually incorrect claims and missing sources. But the real problem is what the report deliberately avoids. Most strikingly, the report never addresses the simplest, most obvious explanation for why Harris lost: the Biden administration’s record was unpopular, and Harris was not a credible alternative. On immigration, inflation, and governance more broadly, voters rejected the first Biden term. By the time Harris launched her campaign, President Biden’s approval rating had collapsed to 36%, and Harris was unable to credibly distance herself from his record. The autopsy avoids both of these truths.

Instead, the report downplays Harris’s responsibility for the loss, arguing that she was not properly armed for victory. Its key finding: “the White House did not effectively support Vice President Harris over three and half years to improve her standing before the candidate switch.” This is absurd. It was never the plan for Harris to run in Biden’s place during his first term, nor was it the plan when he announced his withdrawal from the race abruptly in July 2024. The White House had no obligation to spend four years grooming Harris as a successor, because Biden was supposed to be running for reelection. Any lack of preparedness of the Vice President should be blamed on herself and the dozens of Democratic operatives who opportunistically asserted her name as the natural successor to Biden in the hours following his announcement, thus shutting down the efforts of former President Obama to create a process for new candidates to be selected by the party (and of course, to avoid having Harris be the nominee). A former prosecutor, attorney general, and senator ought to be able to demonstrate her capability to be an effective leader without the handholding of an entire team. If Harris needed more prep time to be a good presidential candidate, it means she was unfit for the position. 

And the reality is that many Democratic operatives knew this simple truth about Harris and either endorsed her bid or hid their hesitation and got behind her. But what can be said about the judgment and character of the Democratic operatives who did this, knowing full well of her ineptness and dysfunctional managerial style, one that resulted in a 91.5% staff turnover rate while she was vice president? They all knew about it but looked the other way. This includes Ken Martin, who was a vice chair of the Harris-Walz campaign before running for DNC chairman.

For many Democrats, the autopsy’s silence confirms their suspicion that a small network of operatives is suppressing a report that would examine their own conduct. Many of these same operatives ignored or hid President Biden’s cognitive decline while prioritizing their own positions over the risk to the country and party. They then helmed a campaign so financially chaotic that it blew through $1.6 billion in roughly 100 days and left the party $20 million in debt. And now they are using the DNC chair to ensure that the most obvious truth about the 2024 election is not stated by the party itself. Namely, that it was the Democratic professional operative class that were the primary drivers for creating a disastrous first term for Biden, and choosing an unfit replacement candidate to succeed him.

Ken Martin was installed as DNC chair to keep this problem from being named. Instead, he and many Democrats want to pretend the party’s current leadership ecosystem is capable of mounting a serious effort in 2026 and 2028, without acknowledging the role many of these operatives played in hiding Biden’s decline, downplaying Harris’s unfitness, and suppressing honest examination of the party’s candidate selection. 

A party that cannot be honest about its own mistakes is destined to repeat them. And in both the gerrymandering fight and the handling of the election autopsy, the party chose to do the expedient thing rather than the right thing — both decisions that have been disastrous. Democrats know these truths about themselves. Until they admit them, they will keep losing winnable elections. 

Earlier this week, House Republicans moved a motion which would have put off a vote on Trump’s tariffs. Three of their members, however, crossed party lines to join all their Democratic colleagues to block the motion. The Democrats will now be to table motions to roll back the tariffs and, in fact, did so promptly, passing a resolution the next day to terminate the ones imposed on Canada. And while the measures are unlikely to succeed — Trump can simply veto the resolutions, even if the Senate can be persuaded to back them — the Democrats will keep jabbing at this fissure like a boxer targeting an opponent’s eye’s wound. They won’t stop driving home the message that Republicans are on board with Trump’s trade war.

It therefore seems likely that more Republican dissidents will surface in the months ahead — the total already rose to six on the Canadian vote — because the tariffs are becoming a political albatross. With polling suggesting that a large majority of Americans, and even a quarter of Republicans, oppose tariffs, the future of Trump’s trade policy is undecided.

The risk that the Republicans would lose their slender majority in November’s House elections was always high. But until recently it was considered a near impossibility for the Republicans to lose the Senate majority. Now, though, the betting markets give Democrats a better than one-in-three chance of seizing the upper chamber too, and the odds have been slowly narrowing. Amid this febrile atmosphere, a growing number of Republicans caught between the monster of Trumpian wrath and the whirlpool of an angry electorate are opting to take their chances taming the latter.

Quite apart from the fact that Trump’s tariffs overturn decades of the party’s free-trading principles, Republicans are also uneasy with them for the simple reason that they’re not doing what they’re meant to. If the President has always held one belief consistently, it’s that tariffs could make the American economy great again — reducing the gaping trade deficit, returning manufacturing jobs to America and boosting workers’ wages, all while costing Americans nothing, since foreign producers eager to sell to America would have to pay them.

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But none of these things have happened yet. Assessing the state of the US’s trade deficit isn’t straightforward, since the figures can vary from month to month, not least when trade policy is as volatile as it has been since last April’s Liberation Day. However, the US’s most recent figures suggest the trade deficit isn’t improving.

The same is true of the employment situation. Plainly put, manufacturing jobs show no sign of coming back. On the contrary, manufacturing employment continued falling through Trump’s first year back in office while in the wider economy, good jobs are getting harder to find. As Wednesday’s employment report revealed, in all of 2025 only 181,000 new jobs were created in the US, a monthly average that would have translated into a rapidly rising unemployment rate were it not that Trump’s immigration crackdown has removed so many workers from the workforce.

That, the administration retorts, is just the point — the deportations are reserving jobs for Americans and thereby boosting their earning power. But in fact, instead of workers seeing gains, the labor share of income has fallen to an all-time low. Wage growth slowed throughout 2025; especially for workers at the lower end of the income scale, the sort of voters who played such an important role in bringing the MAGA coalition to power, it is now barely keeping pace with inflation.

Most ominously, there’s no reason to expect a manufacturing renaissance will come at all under existing policies. For all the White House’s grandiose boasts about the massive investments other countries have pledged in the US — the amount varies but most recently Trump offered a figure of $18 trillion — construction of new factories is currently declining, with no end in sight.

As for being costless, ever since Liberation Day the administration has pointed to a steady inflation rate as proof that the critics were wrong, Americans aren’t paying higher prices for their imported products. It’s true that since Trump started his trade war, consumer price inflation hasn’t got worse. But as the recent producer price index revealed, businesses are paying higher prices. Research by the Kiel Institute has shown that almost the entire cost of tariffs has been absorbed by businesses, with foreign exporters paying an average of a paltry 4% of the cost of tariffs. Federal Reserve economists have come up with a similar estimate.

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It makes sense that businesses should have chosen to absorb the tariffs rather than pass them on to their customers. When the Liberation Day tariffs were first announced, importers rushed to frontload shipments before they took effect, building up good stocks then running them down over the next several months. Thereafter, given the legal challenge to the tariffs before the Supreme Court and Trump’s frequent flip-flopping, with postponements, carve-outs and changes to rates amid trade deals, businesses were reluctant to raise prices and lose market share to rivals, only to find their own tariffs were later lifted.

However, the longer the trade war persists, and that it grows apparent the tariffs are here to stay, the pressure on businesses to pass costs onto consumers will rise. Ironically for the administration, a heads-they-win-tails-we-lose logic may now apply here. As things stand, working Americans have borne the brunt of tariffs not through price increases but through wage growth that has trailed the booming asset gains of richer Americans. The effect has shown up in retail sales that appear to be weakening, all while consumer credit is rising, suggesting ordinary Americans are feeling stretched.

But amid stronger-than-expected job gains in the most recent employment report, some (if not all) economists now think 2026 may finally see an improvement in the earning power of working Americans. But if such came to pass, it seems likely that businesses would feel more confident to raise prices, secure in the conviction that consumers will be better able to afford them.

We might then expect consumer inflation to begin rising in the coming months. This wouldn’t come as a surprise to everyone. Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute for International Economics has consistently maintained that it would take about a year for tariffs to work their way into consumer prices and if they do, whatever workers gain in better wages may get eaten up in higher prices. What would make such inflation especially fraught is that the inflation rate on the basket of goods consumed by working Americans is higher than that on their wealthy compatriots, who are benefiting disproportionately not only from comparatively lower inflation but from rising stock markets.

Donald Trump’s remarkable achievement was to build a political coalition that united two classes once seen to be in conflict — owners and workers. Owners with deep pockets powered the Republican Party’s fundraising edge, which currently sees the party raising twice the funds of the Democrats. Meanwhile the working class, and especially the white working class, which traditionally was a Democratic constituency, were won over by his populist pledges and provided the bedrock of Republican support.

The owners are as happy as ever — why wouldn’t they be? Their asset values and profits rise by the day and their taxes are falling. But workers appear to be growing disgruntled. What may yet save the Trump coalition is that the attachment of the white working class to the Republican Party appears to be as much cultural as economic, so voters may be willing to swallow their discontent. On the other hand, Trump’s success owed also to his ability to motivate low-propensity voters, and rising discontent at their economic lot could cause many of them to just stay home in November.

If the Republicans consequently lose control of Congress in November, Trump’s entire agenda will get bogged down in inquiries and legislative obstruction. When Bill Clinton lost Congress in the 1994 elections, his political program largely came to an end, and he was forced to govern as a soft Republican. Trump wouldn’t likely shift towards the other side, but he would find his room for maneuver, particularly on the home front, constantly reined in. Democrats could de-fund ICE, launch impeachment proceedings against administration members, block his appointments and pass anti-tariff resolutions.

Along with immigration, trade was to be a signature policy that defined the second Trump administration. At the moment, he appears to be losing control of both narratives, with polls suggesting growing disapproval of his performance on both immigration and the economy. He has less than nine months to turn that around, and for that to happen his policies will need to deliver on the pledges he made. When it comes to tariffs, he needs manufacturing employment to pick up, wage gains to grow and inflation to stay low. Right now, the omens don’t look good for him.

But then, if a week is a long time in politics, nine months could feel like an eternity — for better, or for worse.