Politics

How Republicans plan to conquer Troy Jackson

Published

1 day ago

July 26, 2026

BANGOR, Maine — Republicans had months to research and rebuke Graham Platner. They now have exactly 100 days to sink his replacement.

Troy Jackson is like Platner but worse. He’s a socialist who’s flip-flopped on policy, a career politician who keeps losing, an insider who is also unknown. His nomination was illegitimate, he has anger issues, and he lacks “rizz.”

That’s just a sampling of the messaging the GOP plans to use to trounce Jackson, the former Maine Senate president who lost this year’s Democratic gubernatorial primary only to glide this weekend into the party’s nomination to challenge Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in November.

“Mainers already rejected Troy Jackson once this year after his failed campaign for governor. Now Democrats are asking voters to believe the politician they didn’t want leading Augusta belongs in the United States Senate,” the NRSC, Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, wrote in a “messaging guidance” document about Jackson, viewed by Playbook. “Jackson is a radical, ill-tempered career politician whose failed record and socialist agenda make him unfit to represent Maine.”

The stakes are high. Collins is the only Republican senator running for re-election this cycle in a state Kamala Harris won in 2024, and Democrats’ hopes of retaking the chamber track straight through Maine — a reality the NRSC admitted is possible in its new donor memo, shared first with Playbook, acknowledging that “Jackson is fully capable of winning this seat if we become complacent.”

Republicans’ first plan of attack is to link Jackson to Platner, with whom he campaigned and shares much of his populist platform. As soon as Jackson’s nomination became official yesterday, the Senate Leadership Fund, the Senate GOP’s super PAC, announced that it was launching asix-figure ad blitz that begins by depicting the two Democrats hugging on stage.

“Jackson is like Graham Platner but worse,” the ad says, citing reporting from WaPo, CNN and other outlets about Jackson’s alleged sharp temper and heated interactions with colleagues.

The NRSC yesterday posted a video on X depicting Platner literally transforming into Jackson — with the caption “No tattoo, same crazy,” a reference to Platner’s tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol. “Troy Jackson is all the baggage without the ‘rizz,” James Blair, who leads President Donald Trump’s outside political operation, said on X.

Jackson campaigned alongside Platner and stood by him through several scandals — until POLITICO reported earlier this month that a woman who dated Platner said he had sexually assaulted her, a claim Platner denies. In response, Jackson publicly disavowed Platner and said he had “lied to me.”

Jackson told reporters yesterday he has not spoken to Platner since then. Asked to respond to SLF’s ad, Jackson said “anyone that I may have argued with, that I might have went too far or got too passionate, I apologize to.”

The GOP’s second push is to brand Jackson as a “political insider” — a bid to undermine his populist bonafides at a time when voters from neither party trust establishment politicians. “We must act immediately to define him before national Democrats frame him as a populist outsider,” the NRSC memo said.

“Chuck Schumer forcefully removed Graham Platner from the ballot against the will of Maine voters, only to replace him with a deranged and scandal-plagued political insider,” SLF Communications Director Chris Gustafson said in a statement to Blue Light News.

Part of that strategy is to not only label Jackson as a longserving member of the establishment (Collins, for what it’s worth, has held her seat for nearly three decades), but as a political insider who has failed when seeking higher office. As state Senate president, Jackson was the second-highest ranking official in Maine — but he ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for Congress in 2014 and for governor earlier this year, a fresh wound Republicans are eager to pick at.

Compounding that insider image is the way Maine Democrats selected Jackson: While more than 200,000 Mainers voted for Platner in the primary, just 566 Democratic delegates actively chose Jackson at yesterday’s nominating convention — a fact Republicans hope to spin into a narrative that Jackson was coronated by party insiders. “Not one single vote was cast for Troy Jackson” in the Senate race, RNC Chair Joe Gruters said on X.

“Just one month ago, Troy came in third in the Democratic primary for Governor. Now he will run for Senate as the third choice of his party insiders,” Collins campaign spokesperson Shawn Roderick said in a statement to Playbook. He added, “in a process concocted by the Maine Democratic Party establishment, a 24-year Augusta insider was appointed to run for the Senate by fewer than three-tenths of one percent of its primary voters.”

Jackson, for his part, appears committed to maintaining his image as a populist who, as has become his campaign motto, comes neither from the left nor the right, but “from the bottom.” He’s more eager to bring up being a fifth-generation logger than his decades of experience in state politics — and at any mention of his relationship to Platner, he’s quick to pivot to his role as part of a broader pro-worker movement. And his campaign is staying laser-focused on attacking Collins.

“Only Susan Collins could spend nearly 30 years in Washington voting with Donald Trump 96 percent of the time and taking millions from corporate special interests, then call a fifth-generation logger from Allagash a ‘party insider,’” Jackson campaign adviser BJ McCollister said in a statement to Playbook. “Mainers know who Troy Jackson is—and they know exactly who Susan Collins works for.”

Asked yesterday to respond to the GOP messaging shortly after clinching the official nomination, Jackson told reporters that he attributes Republicans’ attacks to “Senator Collins trying to make sure that she can win re-election on a really bad record.”

“I’ve been in the legislature for 20 years,” he added. “I do believe I’ve been vetted. I’ve been tested. People know exactly what I’m fighting for. They know that I’ve had their back, and they know they can trust me.”

Andrew Howard contributed to this report.

Politics

A forced-labor crackdown or an end-run around Congress? Dissecting Trump’s new tariffs

Published

5 hours ago

July 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

NEW YORK (AP) — The Trump administration has imposed double-digit tariffs on more than 60 countriesusing a legal justification that permits the president to levy import taxes and other sanctions against countries found to engage in “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable” or “discriminatory” trade practices.

The new tariffs announced in recent days take effect just as temporary 10% worldwide tariffs expiredand critics say they are less about cracking down on forced labor than they are a way to replace those tariffs. The expired tariffs were themselves a temporary replacement for worldwide tariffs the Supreme Court struck down in February.

The tariffs were levied on countries that the U.S. says either don’t have or don’t effectively enforce a forced-labor import ban. The affected countrieswhich account for 99% of U.S. imports, were quick to protest, calling the Trump administration’s claims unfounded and arbitrary, as nations with vastly different records on forced labor received the same tariff level. The U.S. spent four months investigating but gave few details on how it arrived at the tariff rates, which are either 10% or 12.5%.

Sidestepping Congress

The tariffs were levied under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 on countries that the U.S. determined had failed “to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor.”

During President Donald Trump ‘s first term, he cited Section 301 to impose sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports amid a dispute over the sharp-elbowed tactics Beijing was using to challenge America’s technological dominance. The U.S. is also using 301 powers to counter what it calls unfair Chinese practices in the shipbuilding industry.

“The 301s allow a permanent tariff without going to Congress to settle the dispute,” said Barry Appleton, a law professor and co-director of New York Law School’s Center for International Law. “That’s what all of this is about. The president doesn’t want to knock on the front door of Congress, so he’s trying every side door and every unlatched window to get in.”

Little evidence that countries failed to enforce import bans

The office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) said it consulted with all 60 economies under investigation and held two rounds of public hearings, elicited more than 2,100 public comments, and had “engagement” with its trading partners about what they were doing to combat forced labor bans.

It didn’t detail its talks with the countries, saying those were confidential. Experts say it is fairly straightforward to investigate whether a country has a ban or not, but it is difficult to determine the government’s exact rationale for each country’s failure to enforce import bans.

“There’s not a lot of hard evidence there,” said Scott Lincicome, vice president for general economics and trade policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “It’s pretty laughable on its face to think that a country like the ones in Europe or in Norway or Switzerland aren’t doing enough to police forced labor.”

And even if countries do enact and enforce the forced-labor import bans the U.S. wants, they would still need to prove that they’re enforcing them to Washington’s satisfaction before the tariffs would be removed, said lawyer Patrick Childress, a partner at Holland & Knight and a former U.S. trade official.

“This suggests that no short-term path for countrywide relief from the new Section 301 tariffs will be available,” he said.

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Countries and industries reject the forced labor argument

Many countries have pushed back against the Trump administration’s findings.

Brazil, which faces a 12.5% forced-labor tariff, called the U.S. move “arbitrary and unjustified.” The U.S. “chose to manipulate an issue of great importance to human rights and the struggles of workers worldwide in order to accuse 59 countries and the European Union of unfair practices,” it said in a statement.

Australia also questioned the justification for its 12.5% tariff.

“We believe that amongst all of the countries in the world, Australia does take the issue of slavery, modern slavery, seriously, and will continue to do that,” Trade Minister Don Farrell told reporters in Adelaide.

Carve-outs have riled some industries. The National Council of Textile Organizations (NCTO), which describes itself as the voice of the American textile industry, protested a mechanism that exempts the Section 301 tariffs for textile and apparel imports from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia based on those countries’ imports of U.S. cotton and textiles.

“No other industry has been more disadvantaged by forced labor than the U.S. textile industry, which employs 453,000 workers and has lost 41 plants over the past two plus years,” NCTO chief executive Kim Glas said in a statement. “We remain strongly concerned that USTR’s textile mechanism will harm the very domestic manufacturers the administration seeks to help.”

US forced-labor bans don’t always work

The U.S. has two major pieces of legislation related to forced-labor import bans. The Tariff Act of 1930 gave Customs and Border Protection the authority to seize shipments where forced labor was suspected and to block further imports. But it had a big carve-out: If there was “consumptive demand,” meaning there wasn’t sufficient supply to meet domestic demand, imports were allowed regardless of how they were produced. The Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act that took effect in 2016 eliminated that loophole.

In 2021, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was passed. It blocks imports from China’s Xinjiang region unless businesses can prove the items were made without forced labor.

But goods made with forced labor can still make it into the U.S. In 2015, an Associated Press investigation found that slave labor was used in the fishing industry in Southeast Asia. The seafood they caught made its way to supermarkets and pet food providers across the U.S.

An investigation by The Associated Press in 2020 into the $65 billion palm oil industry found labor abuses among an invisible workforce consisting of millions of men, women and children in Asia. The fruit they harvested made its way into the supply chains of major companies, including Unilever, L’Oreal, Nestle and Procter & Gamble.

Calls for a more comprehensive approach to combat forced labor

During hearings on the tariffs this month, National Retail Federation vice president Jonathan Gold, who was representing the business coalition the Joint Association Forced Labor Working Group at the hearing, said that in order for the import bans to work, they would have to be much more extensive.

He said there need to be “clear, measurable benchmarks” tied to tariffs for countries to hit, and that the U.S. should help countries build enforcement programs.

Kenya Davis, a partner at the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm, said an effective ban needs a “comprehensive approach” that provides transparency about what the investigations consisted of, along with programs that provide countries aid in enforcing bans.

Politics

El-Sayed comes under fire for ‘ogre on a pike’ leaked comment

Published

6 hours ago

July 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing backlash from within his own party after using controversial rhetoric to describe the stakes of his victory in a recent donor meeting.

“You put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different,” El-Sayed said, describing how his win could propel the progressive movement, according to audio of a Zoom meeting obtained by POLITICO.

On Monday, several Democrats were quick to slam his comments, which they took as direct reference to his Senate primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens. El-Sayed had not explicitly mentioned Stevens in the portion of the call Blue Light News reviewed.

“Calling your female opponent an ogre you want to put on a pike is not beating the rap that this race has some serious sexism,” Neera Tanden, a centrist Democrat and president of the Center for American Progress, posted on X. Melissa Byrne, a former staffer for Sen. Bernie Sanders, called the remark an “unforced error” that is “really bad and beneath the progressive project.”

El-Sayed’s leaked comments and the reaction to them amount to another flashpoint in a tense primary that is dividing the progressive and moderate wings of the party, and at times has been defined by accusations of racism and sexism.

“Abdul continues with personal insults and making this race about his personal political ambitions and the other 49 states,” said Arik Wolk, spokesperson for the Stevens campaign. “Haley is focused on getting things done for Michigan, and only Michigan.”

Republicans also immediately jumped on the comment, and some leaned into stereotypes of El-Sayed’s religion as a Muslim. “Michigan Islamist discusses beheading his opponents,” said Steve Guest, a former staffer for Sen. Ted Cruz, on X.

An El-Sayed campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the backlash. A spokesperson had previously told Blue Light News that the candidate was “speaking metaphorically” about his intention to support a primary against Sen. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania.

This is not the first time El-Sayed has used — and defended — aggressive political rhetoric. “When they go low, we don’t go high,” the progressive said while speaking at a campaign rally earlier this year, riffing on a famous line from former first lady Michelle Obama. “We take them to the mud and choke them out.”

He and Stevens will face off in their final Democratic Senate debate Monday night, and the results of the Aug. 4 primary could have major consequences for the party as it grapples with its ideological tack ahead of the 2028 presidential election.