Politics

Trump endorses John E. Sununu in New Hampshire Senate race over Scott Brown

Published

5 months ago

February 1, 2026

President Donald Trump on Sunday endorsed former Sen. John E. Sununu in New Hampshire’s open Senate race, boosting a longtime critic over one of his former ambassadors, Scott Brown.

Trump hailed Sununu, who Republicans see as their best chance to flip the blue Senate seat, as an “America First Patriot” in a Truth Social post Sunday afternoon. And Trump said Sununu will “work tirelessly to advance our America First Agenda.”

“John E. Sununu has my Complete and Total Endorsement — HE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN — ELECT JOHN E. SUNUNU,” he posted.

Sununu, a moderate who has opposed Trump across his presidential runs, thanked him in a statement and quickly pivoted to talking about his priorities for New Hampshire.

“I want to thank the President for his support and thank the thousands of Granite Staters who are supporting me,” Sununu said. “This campaign has and always will be about standing up for New Hampshire — every single day.”

Trump’s endorsement further tips the scales in an already pitched GOP primary between Sununu and Brown, who represented Massachusetts in the Senate before moving to New Hampshire and running unsuccessfully for Senate there in 2014. He served as Trump’s ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa in his first term, and has been presenting himself as the more Trump-aligned candidate as he courts the MAGA base.

Brown vowed to fight on. And he took a veiled shot at Sununu, accusing him of not being sufficiently dedicated to the MAGA movement.

“I am running to ensure our America First agenda is led by someone who views this mission not as a career path, but as a continuation of a lifelong commitment to service,” Brown said in a post on X. “Let’s keep working.”

The two are competing to take on Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas for the seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. Pappas issued a simple response to Trump’s endorsement of Sununu: “I’m Chris Pappas, and I approve this message,” he wrote on X. His campaign manager, Rachel Pretti, said in a statement that Trump’s endorsement “confirms” that Sununu “will sell out Granite Staters to advance his political career.”

Trump’s support for Sununu once would have seemed unfathomable. The scion of a moderate New Hampshire Republican dynasty, Sununu served as a national co-chair of former Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s 2016 presidential campaign and joined his family in backing former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley for president against Trump in the 2024 GOP primary.

Ahead of New Hampshire’s 2024 presidential primary, Sununu penned an op-ed lambasting Trump as a “loser.” (Trump went on to win by 11 points). And he later derided Trump’s 2020 election conspiracies as “completely inappropriate.”

Republicans initially were bullish about flipping an open seat in purple New Hampshire that’s already changed hands between parties twice this century — Sununu defeated Shaheen to win the seat in 2002, then lost it to her in 2008 — and coalesced quickly behind the moderate Republican as their best option against Pappas. Sununu received instant backing from the GOP’s Senate campaign arm upon his launch last October and has wracked up endorsements from the majority of Republican senators. He’s also won support from Republican leaders in New Hampshire — all of which Trump noted in his Truth Social post Sunday.

Trump also initially supported Sununu’s younger brother, former Gov. Chris Sununu, running for the Senate seat. Chris Sununu, also a vocal Trump critic, declined to launch a bid, prompting GOP interest in his brother.

But some in Trump’s Granite State MAGA base quickly rejected his endorsement of Sununu, calling it a “slap in the face to grassroots supporters” long loyal to the president.

“The Sununu family openly mocked, degraded, and worked against the America First movement, the President himself, and the policies that energized New Hampshire voters,” a group of MAGA activists wrote on X. “We will continue and intensify our campaign opposition to the Sununu operation.”

Sununu holds a wide lead over Brown in polling of the GOP primary. The latest, a University of New Hampshire online survey of likely primary voters from mid-January, showed Sununu up 48 percent to 25 percent with 26 percent of likely voters undecided. But Pappas is ahead of both Republicans in hypothetical general-election matchups, leading Sununu by 5 percentage points and Brown by 10 percentage points in the UNH poll. The survey of 967 likely GOP primary voters had a margin of error of +/-3.2 percent.

Pappas also outraised both Republicans, bringing in $2.3 million last quarter and amassing a $3.2 million war chest heading into the year. Sununu hauled in $1.3 million and had $1.1 million in cash on hand in his primary campaign account while Brown raised $347,000 through his main account and had $907,000 in the bank.

Politics

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

Published

52 minutes 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

1 hour 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.

Politics

Envoy’s pharaoh well party

Published

1 hour ago

June 26, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Egyptian Ambassador Motaz Zahran and wife are hosting an informal farewell party tonight for close friends and family at his Washington, D.C. residence tonight, according to an attendee, hours before Egypt faces off against Iran in a closely watched game in Seattle. Ambassador Mohamed Hamdy Mohamed Mokhtar El-Molla will replace Zahran as the new Egyptian envoy to the U.S.