Good morning and happy Thursday! Democrats just flipped a Trump +18 seat in rural Butler County, Pennsylvania — the very same county where Trump’s ‘assassination attempt’ took place. We’ll get into that, plus:
The Natalie Harp saga keeps getting stranger
Moderna and Merck just made a cancer vaccine that works
Minnesota sues Texas to extradite ICE agent shooter
Trump’s deportation ploy blows up in his face
Demand Democrats pass TERM LIMITS for the Supreme Court
And: How Trump turned the presidency into a $2.2 billion personal ATM
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1. Democrats flip a Trump +18 Pennsylvania seat — and the math for November just changed
Democrat Brandon Dukes won a Pennsylvania state House special election in Butler County by fewer than 100 votes, ending a 26-year Republican stranglehold on a district Trump carried by 18 points in 2024 — and in the same ruby-red county where his ‘assassination attempt’ took place.
CNN's Harry Enten flagged the result as evidence of a significant drop in Trump's support among core Republican voters — the kind of voters who were supposed to be the firewall.
It’s the first time a Democrat has held this seat since the '90s, and it adds to a string of Democratic overperformance in special elections.
Special election results in off-cycle races are the closest thing we have to a live approval rating — and the donor class can spin this one however they want, but Democrats just won a seat nobody expected them to win, in a place nobody expected them to win it.
2. The Natalie Harp saga keeps getting stranger — and Jon Ossoff is not backing down
The story of Trump's 35-year-old personal aide Natalie Harp — the "human printer" who shadows the president, prints his news stories, and helps write his Truth Social posts — took a turn this week when CNN reported she once rode in the trunk of Trump's motorcade SUV after being told there wasn't room.
The New York Times also published letters she wrote to Trump, including one apologizing for "being an embarrassment" while running alongside his golf cart in Scotland, signed "with all my heart."
Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, who referenced Harp at a Sunday rally in Atlanta, responded to MAGA outrage by torching back.
Even Jesse Watters declined to defend Trump, noting on air that the president has said "much more sleazy" things himself — which is the most honest thing Watters has said on television possibly ever.
3. Moderna and Merck just made a cancer vaccine that works
Merck and Moderna just dropped a major result that could reshape how cancer gets treated: their personalized mRNA vaccine, combined with Merck's immunotherapy drug Keytruda, significantly reduced the return and spread of skin cancer in a trial of more than 1,000 patients.
The trial met both its primary goal of reducing cancer coming back and its secondary goal of keeping it from spreading to other parts of the body.
Unlike chemo or traditional immunotherapy, the vaccine — called intismeran autogene — trains the immune system to target mutations specific to a patient's own tumor.
This is the first randomized Phase 3 trial to definitively prove a personalized cancer vaccine can work. The companies are now filing for approval and have trials underway for lung, bladder, kidney, and pancreatic cancers, with results expected over the next two years.
Moderna's stock soared 177% yesterday. Trump bought the stock in March.
4. Minnesota sues Texas to extradite the ICE officer charged in the Minneapolis killings
Minnesota has filed suit against Texas Governor Greg Abbott to compel the extradition of an ICE officer charged in connection with the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.
Abbott has said flatly he has no intention of complying with Minnesota's extradition requests — a sitting governor openly defying another state's legal process to protect a federal agent charged with killing American citizens.
This is what nullification looks like in 2026: not a constitutional crisis in the abstract, but a governor running interference for a shooter while a state tries to hold someone accountable for killing its residents.
5. Trump has turned the presidency into a $2.2 billion personal ATM
Donald Trump pulled in $2.2 billion in 2025 revenues while serving as president — and Congress has done exactly nothing about it. Law professor and former FEC general counsel Larry Noble told the Guardian it already looks like "the most openly corrupt administration in our history."
At least $1.4 billion came from cryptocurrency alone — while roughly a million investors in one of his crypto projects lost nearly $4 billion as their holdings collapsed. Wealthy foreign nationals are pouring money into Trump family hotels and golf resorts. His media company now wants to charge $100,000 for early access to his social media posts — posts that move markets.
Two-thirds of Americans polled by CNN say Trump doesn't put the country's interests over his own. His approval rating has cratered to 33%, per a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.
He told the New York Times in January that his "own morality" is the only thing that can stop him.
⚠️ Today’s Call to Action: Pass TERM LIMITS for the Supreme Court!
Nobody should have power for their entire lives — but that's exactly what Supreme Court justices enjoy with their lifetime appointments, allowing radical right-wing judges to impose their ideological agenda on us.
Trump has been allowed to stack the court with right-wing extremists that could hold power until at least 2065. That is beyond unacceptable!
Demand Democrats pass TERM LIMITS for the Supreme Court once they take back power!
KEPT OUT OF YOUR FEED
What the algorithm buried:
Trump’s deportation ploy blows up in his face
Rosie skewers Trump’s Strait of Hormuz claims: ‘The moron-a-thon continues’
A Fox Business guest just compared Trump's economy to the summer before Black Monday
Trump gave the press a tour of his White House renovations while the debt hit $40 trillion
Fox News aired a false graphic about gas prices and was forced into a rare on-air correction
Trump has been calling Maggie Haberman a "hag" and "Maggot" for years — but she told CNN his attacks on female reporters just got a lot worse
Alaska just held a primary, and Mary Peltola's Senate race isn't the only wild story coming out of it
Mike Lindell lost by 45,000 votes and now wants to pay for a recount — even though he’s very behind on his taxes
Zohran Mamdani got called out for riding without a helmet, and what he did next is breaking people's brains
Trump's Treasury is hemorrhaging staff at a historic rate
A Florida Republican who was suspended on child sexual abuse charges had previously been a vocal supporter of the death penalty for child sex offenders
Rep. Cory Mills — accused of assaulting a woman and threatening to release nude images of another — lost his Florida Republican primary
NOTICE POLLING
Last week, we asked, Can a Democratic Socialist win a Senate seat in Florida?
92% OF YOU SAID YES:
““Absolutely. People are tired of the same old crap. They're ready for a change that will help them.”
- annaflorin99
“The tide is turning, fast!!!! We need strong people to take down this corrupt administration and save our democracy.”
- twoasps
“We The People are waking-up, finally (albeit too slowly). But Kudos to the women who are showing the way!”
- leoandscorpio
“Throughout the country people are tired of establishment politics that only cater to the billionaires and corporations. We are sick of our elections being bought by the rich. The only way to get out of this mess is to elect progressive candidates that work for the people, and eliminate the electoral college and citizens united.”
- turtlejack
“NO — FL is still a conservative state with many retired members of the military, once again the Dems are shooting themselves in the foot with yet another fringe candidate”
- lawolanskyj
That’s all for today — thank you so much for reading. We will see you tomorrow!
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