LA voters HUMILIATE Spencer Pratt

A Republican reality TV star has all but lost his spot in the LA mayoral race to a progressive councilwoman, and the right is handling it exactly how you'd expect.

Nithya Raman, the first South Asian councilwoman in LA City Hall history, has erased a massive deficit and overtaken Spencer Pratt — yes, the reality TV “star” turned Republican shill — for second place in the Los Angeles mayoral primary.

She did it with mail-in ballots. Hundreds of thousands of them, still being counted, steadily closing what looked like an insurmountable gap and flipping the race while the political establishment watched.

The losing side responded exactly how you'd expect. Trump took to his failing social media platform to cry stolen election over "very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS." This is especially rich coming from a man who votes by mail himself in Florida.

Raman didn't need to respond. The ballots did.

More than 368,000 mail-in ballots are still outstanding, and the trend has been running decisively in her direction. Every new batch narrows the gap between Raman and the top of the ticket.

Mayor Karen Bass is already treating the primary like it's over. She's gone on offense against Raman, framing her as the general election opponent — a signal that City Hall sees what the numbers are showing.

That might be a miscalculation.

Bass is betting she can define Raman early, but the ground is shifting under big-city mayors right now. In New York, Zohran Mamdani's progressive insurgency has upended the mayoral race and demonstrated that left candidates can build real coalitions in massive, complicated cities. Raman's trajectory is starting to rhyme.

Donald Trump sat down with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press Sunday and stormed out mid-interview after she declined to simply accept his claims that the 2020 election and the California governor's race were both "rigged." His exit line — "You're either crooked or you're stupid" — was delivered to a woman who had committed the professional offense of citing verifiable facts.

Trump's post-interview explanation attributed the tantrum to the weather. He also used the interview to clarify that he never actually promised no new wars — he just said it, repeatedly, at every rally, for two years. Mary Trump, watching from the sidelines, called it a full exposure of "one of Donald's favorite myths about himself." The myth being, apparently, that he can sit through an interview.

Trump told Meet the Press he was "about to call Bibi right now and tell him not to respond" to Iranian missile strikes. Israel struck Iran anyway, launching airstrikes targeting central and western Iran early Monday morning. The campaign Trump claimed was not coordinated with the U.S. is now straining what remains of any ceasefire framework, while the U.S. continues downing Iranian drones over the Strait of Hormuz. The president who won office promising to end wars in 24 hours is now watching two of them expand simultaneously, in real time, on television — which he just walked out of.

Ro Khanna endorsed Graham Platner for Maine Senate this weekend — calling his past actions "shameful" in the same breath — and did it anyway, because Platner is running to unseat a Republican incumbent in a race that actually matters. It is the kind of move the national Democratic Party almost never makes: weigh in early, pick a side, say the uncomfortable part out loud, and then still show up. Khanna's qualified endorsement — not a blank check, just a clear "this is the fight and I'm in it" — is a model for how you compete in purple terrain without pretending your candidate is perfect. Maine is a genuine pickup opportunity in the 2026 cycle, and someone with national reach just made it harder for the party to sleepwalk past it.

Scott Pelley's bombshells from the weekend are now being backed up by Lesley Stahl. The CBS legend said publicly that Bari Weiss's purge of her longtime colleagues was the "worst experience" of her career. Pelley went further, accusing Weiss of trying to get 60 Minutes to falsely report that a police shooting victim was "driving toward" an officer — changes that were directly contradicted by video evidence. And now Trump's FCC attack dog Brendan Carr is piling on — not against Weiss, but targeting Pelley himself, calling fired journalists "completely out of touch."

The message is unmistakable: the government is actively backing the corporate takeover of a major newsroom, and punishing the journalists who resisted.

A federal lawsuit filed by a veteran and civic groups is seeking to halt the UFC fight card scheduled for the White House South Lawn this Friday — timed to Trump's 80th birthday and the 250th anniversary of the country he is using as a backdrop for a pay-per-view. The plaintiffs describe it as "fundamentally a private, commercial, corrupt use of our most sacred national monuments for private gain." The White House's response to the suit was not available, possibly because they were busy planning a rally featuring an 83-year-old Lee Greenwood.

That’s it for today. We’ll see you tomorrow!