Politics

Hochul turns on the sarcasm for Mike Lawler

Published

11 months ago

August 6, 2025

With help from Amira McKee

Gov. Kathy Hochul is pushing ahead on her plan to redraw the state's congressional lines to benefit Democrats as red states make similar moves.

🚨 🚨 — “Trump Weighs Getting Involved in New York City Mayor Race,” by NYT’s Nicholas Fandos, Jeremy W. Peters, Maggie Haberman and Katherine Rosman: “President Trump may have moved out of New York City, but he has privately discussed whether to intercede in its fractious race for mayor to try to stop Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, according to eight people briefed on the discussions.” (More below)

CRY ME A RIVER: Even as Gov. Kathy Hochul doubles down on her Democratic gerrymandering plan, she said she’s feeling overcome with despondency for New York Republicans who could lose their seats when she tries to redraw New York’s maps to boost her party.

“I feel really sad,” Hochul said today, when asked if she had a message for any GOP reps who might see their seat erased if she pushes through a full-fledged gerrymander.

Hochul and California Gov. Gavin Newsom sprinted to the front lines of the mucky redistricting war and have vowed to redraw their own maps to add more Democratic seats ever since President Donald Trump called on Texas to abruptly redraw its Congressional maps to add 5 more GOP seats.

Luckily, Hochul noted, there’s a way out.

His name is Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, and, she said, he has the political power and sway in Washington to end partisan gerrymandering with his forthcoming federal bill that would ban the practice nationwide.

“He has so much enormous power in Washington,” Hochul said of Lawler.

Sike! She was kidding. She doesn’t feel sad. She doesn’t think Lawler has any juice in D.C. and she definitely doesn’t seem to be slowing down her push to gerrymander the hell out of New York in what she says is a response to Texas’ efforts.

On Tuesday, Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin indicated he’s encouraging other Democratic governors to consider redrawing their maps too. And the red state of Missouri, which has two GOP House seats, could be Republicans’ next gerrymandering target.

As the redistricting war looks to be going nuclear, Hochul is daring Republicans like Lawler to loudly call for an end to their party’s redistricting effort in Texas.

“Tell them to call the president of their own party and say, ‘Stand down in the war with New York and California and other Democratic states,’” Hochul said. “If you want to stop what you’re doing in Texas, I’ll stand down. You started it. You end it.”

“This is a guy who’s now saying, ‘I’m going to introduce a bill to get it changed,’” she said. “The same guy who promised a full restoration of the state and local tax deduction comes back far short from that and spins it as a win that everybody’s buying. He has no power. He won’t get it done. And I’m not sympathetic because he was silent.”

Lawler’s office noted that the increases in state and local tax deductions he fought with Trump for during the creation of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act provides relief for most of his district, with only the top 10 percent of taxpayers not getting a tax cut.

“Kathy Hochul is not just the worst Governor in America, she’s also the dumbest,” Lawler said in a statement. “After years of calling for the SALT cap to be fixed, she’s now attacking the solution because Democrats weren’t the ones to get it done, my New York GOP colleagues and I were. No one believes a word she says. Her own colleagues in the State Legislature mock her at every turn. What a pathetic excuse for a leader of New York State.” — Jason Beeferman

President Donald Trump is reportedly considering getting involved in the already tumultuous race for New York City mayor.

TRUMP EYES NYC MAYOR’S RACE: Trump is “very interested” in the New York City mayoral race, said Republican billionaire John Catsimatidis, who is friendly with both Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Eric Adams. Catsimatidis said he dined Friday with Trump.

“He’s a New York guy, he grew up in New York,” Catsimatidis told Playbook. “He loves New York. He wants to make sure there’s proper accounting in New York, that the quality of life goes on in New York and that we don’t lose any more population.”

Trump hasn’t committed to a role in the race, though, and Catsimatidis said he wants the president to hold off — for now.

“I asked him to put off decisions on anything until September,” Catsimatidis said.

The New York Times reported on the president’s interest earlier today.

The Times also reported that during a closed-door meeting with Lawler last month in the White House, Trump discussed the mayor’s race with the Hudson Valley congressman.

A person familiar with the meeting told Playbook that Trump did not express a specific preference for any of the mayoral candidates, but rather was interested in who has the best shot at winning.

Trump’s involvement would come as Cuomo’s pushing for the field to coalesce around the strongest challenger to Mamdani by mid-September — a dynamic that currently favors the former governor, according to most polls.

“The president runs the country and what is said to him at the dinner party is, ‘We saved America, we saved the free world, now it’s time to save New York,” Catsimatidis said. “I’m pretty sure he agreed with it.” — Nick Reisman and Jason Beeferman

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has posted 17 times on X since Monday.

ANDREW CUOMO, THE REPLY GUY: If you haven’t been on X in the last 24 hours (lucky you) you’ve missed Cuomo’s furious — and curious — barrage of posts and replies.

Since Monday, Cuomo has expressed gratitude to someone with the username “Andrew Cuomo is a Sex Pest.” He called on Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani to “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” his property in Uganda — a country, he noted, “that murders LGBTQIA+ people.” And the former governor even responded earnestly to someone else who told him to “Give it up grandpa.”

“No grandkids yet- but I’ve got the experience and the ability to get things done,” Cuomo wrote.

The mayoral hopeful and failed primary candidate has posted over 35 times on X over the past two days, mostly with a new, direct tone that would’ve been unbecoming of the highly-coordinated primary campaign he was running just two months ago.

It’s a new social media approach from the 67-year-old and his campaign after his millennial foe Mamdani successfully utilized the medium to handily beat him in the Democratic primary and surge the under-30 turnout.

So is Andrew himself behind the account?

“We hired this really smart kid named A.J. Parkinson,” Rich Azzopardi told Playbook, an apparent tongue-in-cheek reference to a fictitious character Cuomo’s father first brought to life and quoted frequently in the early ‘80s.

Coincidentally, Parkinson emerged around the same time Cuomo took his last nap — a fact we now know because he told us so in one of his many replies on X this afternoon.

MAGA influencer Laura Loomer loves it.

“W,” she wrote in response to Cuomo’s call for a Uganda-centric BDS movement.

Mamdani’s campaign did not comment on Cuomo’s new online approach. — Jason Beeferman

NO MATCHING FUNDS FOR ADAMS: The New York City Campaign Finance Board denied Adams millions of dollars in matching funds for the tenth time this morning — and suggested in a strongly worded statement that Adams will not be getting a penny anytime soon, POLITICO reported today.

The regulatory body denied Adams the public funding he’s seeking for his general election bid on two grounds: His campaign has not submitted required paperwork, and the board has reason to believe the campaign violated the law.

The board’s decision escalates a long-simmering standoff with the incumbent and hobbles Adams’ ability to compete at a time when he is already at a severe disadvantage. The mayor dropped out of the Democratic primary after the controversial dismissal of a federal bribery case against him. He is now running in the crowded general election as an independent.

Fellow independents Cuomo and Jim Walden are hoping to take down Mamdani, a democratic socialist who has solidly staked out the left lane in the general election. So is GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa.

Cuomo’s base overlaps with Adams’, as does Sliwa’s, although to a lesser degree. Should the multimillion-dollar hole in his war chest persist, the mayor will be forced to continue the time-consuming process of fundraising long after his opponents, placing yet another obstacle in the way of his longshot comeback bid.

Adams’ campaign did not immediately comment on the board’s latest decision. — Joe Anuta

— PAC CASH: The pro-Adams PAC, Empower NYC, has raised $1 million in support of the mayor’s long-shot reelection bid, including from crypto industry donors. (City and State)

— NUCLEAR OPTION: Hochul’s administration wants to continue subsidizing New York’s aging nuclear facilities until 2050. (POLITICO Pro)

— RYDER’S LAW: The death of a New York City carriage horse has renewed calls for City Hall to phase-out horse-drawn carriages. (CBS News)

Missed this morning’s New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.

Politics

World Cup match collides with Florida GOP bash

Published

23 minutes ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

HOLLYWOOD, Florida — Colombia and Portugal’s World Cup match in Miami Gardens won’t be the only major draw pulling crowds to South Florida this weekend: Florida’s Republican grassroots are heading to Hollywood for their “Sunshine State Showdown.”

The GOP’s event at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino is one of the state party’s biggest of the year. The GOP sold more than 800 tickets, with the party’s most devoted volunteers and many donors coming in from all over the state to get revved up for the midterms, gameplan their messaging and hear directly from top candidates.

The shindig will feature speeches from Sens. Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, as well as gubernatorial candidates Rep. Byron Donalds, former Florida House Speaker Paul Renner and Lt. Gov. Jay Collins. It will also include two congressional debates.

Several “Showdown” attendees said they were thrilled about the convergence of their party’s bash with a World Cup match. South Florida has already seen a huge economic boom in recent years, and the Magic City is poised to become even more prominent given Miami is set to be home to Donald Trump’s future presidential library and will host the G20 in December. “Miami is again at the center of the universe,” observed Miami-Dade County GOP Chair Kevin Cooper.

Several prominent Republicans said they see the international event as an opportunity to showcase the state. State Rep. Dean Black of Jacksonville, who also chairs the Republican Party of Florida’s fundraising committee, said he’d enjoyed seeing fans from abroad show appreciation over social media for American culture. “They have fallen in love with the greatness of America,” Black said. “By being exposed to the Republican Party event, they will learn just how that greatness came to be.”

Collins’ team said that while the lieutenant governor wasn’t attending the game, he was “happy the state of Florida is hosting so many fans from across the world experiencing the beauty of our state.”

Former Fox 35 Orlando anchor Ryan Elijah, a GOP candidate for Congress who’s attending the showdown, said he would be checking his phone regularly for World Cup updates.

“What a night for Florida to see the biggest names in Florida politics and World Cup soccer be just miles apart!” he said in a text. “It’s a dream night for tourism numbers and local businesses!”

But the packed weekend also risks turning into a logistical headache. The Hard Rock Hotel is one of the pickup points offering shuttle services to Miami Stadium. It’s less than 9 miles away from the big game.

Angie Wong, Republican executive committeewoman in Miami-Dade, attended Wednesday’s match between Scotland and Brazil. She said her family paid $200 for parking near the stadium and that it took more than an hour just to get out of the parking lot.

“We were lucky — we actually left before the game ended,” she said.

Yet this year’s “Showdown” is a more scaled-back affair than in the recent past. It won’t, for example, feature a dinner like in previous years. But that’s probably good news for any attendees who don’t want to miss the soccer match — or who are just trying to get back home without getting stuck in traffic. And it doesn’t have any major Trump administration officials attending, in comparison to last year, when the event prominently featured White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and now-former deputy chief of staff James Blair, who is currently running Trump’s political operation for the midterms.

Florida’s GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis — who remains highly popular with the state’s grassroots — won’t be speaking at the “Showdown” this weekend and his office didn’t reply to an inquiry about whether he’d attend Saturday night’s game. The governor was in the Miami area during the last couple of days, including hitting the Brazil-Scotland game on Wednesday night and holding a press conference at the former Alligator Alcatraz immigration detention center on Thursday.

Evan Power, chair of the state party, had already arrived at the Hard Rock Hotel on Wednesday night and said he got to watch a Brazilian victory parade happening right outside the restaurant where he was having dinner. He added he hadn’t had any issues getting in and out of the events center and that Republicans sold out their room block, “so I think we were able to get in before the craziness.”

“In our room block, people are happy because they’re not paying the market rate that is out there,” Power said. “Seeing some of the prices — they’re crazy now.”

Politics

A drag queen, a rainbow festival and a game FIFA can’t control

Published

2 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

SEATTLE — FIFA has not endorsed the Seattle host-city committee’s “Pride Match” designation, which will not be part of the official branding when Iran and Egypt meet tonight at Lumen Field.

“I think they’ve always been aware of what we’re doing,” said Louise Chernin, who as chair of the organizing committee’s Pride Match Impact Council began planning for the day nearly a year and a half ago.

Chernin began her match day at Rough & Tumble, a women’s sports bar in Ballard, a historically Scandinavian neighborhood where a crowd had gathered to cheer on Norway against France. The bar was notably free of FIFA’s commercial imprint: The World Cup posters on the walls and the merchandise for sale were all drawn by local artists without any official logos.

It all reflected the extent to which the “Pride Match” has become a gentle challenge not only to FIFA’s record of clamping down on some expressions of LGBTQ+ rights but also the corporate monoculture it creates in host cities through its restrictive sponsorship rules.

“If there’s going to be revenue spent, let us bring it to LGBTQ-owned businesses,” said Chernin, a longtime head of the Greater Seattle Business Association, an LGBTQ+ chamber of commerce.

Just down the street, fans had gathered at a “regnbue” street festival — the word is Danish and Norwegian for “rainbow” — organized by a local Ballard business association. The Norway-France match was being shown on an oversized screen, but when halftime hit attendees did not listen to any of the ads on the Fox broadcast.

Instead DJ SummerSoft took the stage as Sativa the Queen, a local drag performer, vamped through the break.

Politics

The world’s not big on the US. The World Cup might help.

Published

2 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

America’s stint hosting the World Cup is drawing mostly positive reviews to date — and it couldn’t come at a better time.

According to a new report from the Pew Research Center, views of America across the world are worsening and confidence in President Donald Trump’s leadership is dropping.

Pew surveyed 42,000 people across 36 countries between February and May, and found that America has a largely negative impression on the global theater. Only 23 percent of surveyed adults expressed confidence in Trump’s leadership — eliciting less confidence than Chinese leader Xi Jinping (34 percent) and Russian President Vladimir Putin (31 percent).

Foreign policy is the biggest pain point for Trump’s international critics, who take issue with his handling of tariffs, Gaza, Iran, Greenland and the Russia-Ukraine war, according to Pew’s findings.

Meanwhile, fewer countries — and longtime allies — believe the U.S. is a reliable partner. In Canada, where 83 percent of respondents described the U.S. as reliable in 2022, that number is now down to 35 percent.

In 2023, 60 percent of Germans said the U.S. considers international interests in its foreign policy decisions. That share has now dwindled to 23 percent — Germany’s public opinion of the U.S. is “now similar to or more negative than what was measured during George W. Bush’s presidency, when many people in Europe and elsewhere strongly opposed the war in Iraq and other major elements of U.S. foreign policy,” writes Pew.

There are only seven nations where a majority rate the U.S. well — Israel leads the pack, with 81 percent of respondents viewing America favorably. Some of the country’s lowest ratings come from predominantly Muslim publics, “such as Malaysians, Pakistanis, Turks, and Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

Over the past decade, Pew’s polling has found growing concerns about the health of American democracy. A 2013 Pew survey, just as Barack Obama entered his second term, an all-time high of 75 percent of respondents in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, the Philippines, South Korea and the U.K. said the U.S. respects its citizens’ personal freedoms.

Since then, declining shares of world respondents believe the U.S. respects its citizens’ personal liberties — and this year, 56 percent of respondents said the U.S. does not.