Trump used his OWN STAFF as human shields

Francesca Hong lost the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary by a hair — roughly 2,600 votes out of over 700,000 votes cast — in a gut punch for progressives.

Hong was favored to win — ahead in polls by 22 points as recently as last week — but the story isn't over. A democratic socialist coming within a few thousand votes of the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin governor, against a candidate backed by the outgoing governor and the full establishment, is itself a proof of concept. The race moved the Overton window.

And she it without AOC. She did it without Bernie. Both withheld their endorsements from Hong's campaign.

“She got clobbered by the national media, didn’t respond as deftly as Abdul and didn’t have time to build a counter-narrative,” Cenk Uygur, the Young Turks founder, told Politico. “The negative publicity of the last two weeks seems to have taken its toll.”

Hong addressed supporters Tuesday night while ballots were still being counted. "The fight continues no matter what," she told the crowd.

Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota's lieutenant governor, defeated Congresswoman Angie Craig in Tuesday's Democratic Senate primary, and this one wasn't close.

The race was defined by immigration — specifically, the Trump administration's winter ICE surge in Minnesota, which left two residents dead. Flanagan ran as an unapologetic progressive against a moderate incumbent, in a state that has now become a case study in what happens when the Democratic Party stops triangulating and starts fighting.

This is the latest in a string of progressive primary victories over moderates, a pattern that is no longer an anomaly — it is the trend. Flanagan now faces the general election. The anti-establishment wave the party establishment keeps hoping will crest, has not crested.

The story that broke Monday night keeps getting worse. While Trump was smuggled out of Air Force One in a catering cart, his journalists and White House staffers flew on the decoy Air Force One — unknowingly.

Facing a credible Iranian assassination threat, Trump was quietly rolled off the plane in a catering cart and flew to England on a third military aircraft — while reporters and some staff stayed aboard, told nothing, serving as decoys.

The journalists we’re not surprised about. But Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller were on the decoy flight that Trump himself called “probably dangerous.”

The man who spent years calling other politicians weak used the people who work for him as bait — without telling them — so he could slip out the back.

Trump had already raised suspicions when he announced a last-minute switch away from the Qatar-gifted Boeing. Now we know why: a covert Secret Service operation was already in motion, and the staffers boarding Air Force One had no idea they were the decoy.

A MAGA media figure pitched Trump on using a national emergency declaration to intervene in the November midterm elections, and Trump is reportedly entertaining it.

This lands the same week a federal judge in Boston expanded her earlier ruling to fully block Trump's executive order directing the Postal Service to restrict mail-in voting — a ruling that now covers the whole country, not just the 23 Democratic-led states from her June order.

And the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel separately argued this week that Trump has the right to assert executive privilege over private conversations with advisers and citizens. The infrastructure of a stolen election doesn't build itself all at once.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Monday that ICE will spend between $10 million and $20 million on devices called the G.L.O.V.E. — Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter — gloves that deliver painful electric shocks.

Surprise: the contract will be awarded on a no-bid basis, which, given the recent track record, likely means Trump or someone around him is benefitting.

This is happening while more than 60 congressional Democrats, led by Senators Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth, and Richard Blumenthal, are demanding an investigation into ICE and the Pentagon collaborating to detain and deport military spouses, veterans, and their families — while military recruiters are still promising those same families immigration protections. The administration is simultaneously promising to protect military families and planning to quite literally electrocute the ones it already caught.