Politics
Trump says hush money sentence means Democrats have lost the ‘Witch Hunt’
Donald Trump framed Friday’s sentencing hearing as a win, saying the sentence that will leave him unpunished for his felony conviction in the Manhattan hush money case means the “Radical Democrats have lost another pathetic, unAmerican Witch Hunt.” “That result alone proves that, as all Legal Scholars and Experts have said…
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Some battleground candidates are going viral for shooting from the hip. Jon Ossoff is doing it from a carefully controlled script.
Ossoff drew attention Sunday for calling out a little-known aide to President Donald Trump by first name on a Midtown Atlanta rally stage. It was part of a larger prepared speech that hammered Trump over the war in Iran — and part of a larger strategy to raise his profile in a critical Senate race, all while some national Democrats openly question whether he will mount a 2028 presidential run.
“He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar,” Ossoff said, referencing Natalie Harp, the president’s executive assistant. The comment, though just a brief remark in a 30-minute speech, drew over 5 million views on X and swift backlash from Republicans — including the president himself, who shot back Monday calling Ossoff a “Pee Wee Herman lookalike.”
It was just the latest time footage from an Ossoff campaign speech went viral.
Ossoff’s campaign appearances are marked by pithy stump lines that are prone to catch fire online and aggressive jabs at Trump and his Republican opponent that appeal to Democrats’ desire for fighter candidates. But behind his bold persona on the trail is a senator who is hands-on in all aspects of his campaign, including messaging.
Democrats in Georgia and beyond who have worked with Ossoff or seen him behind-the-scenes say he is meticulous about how he communicates and the details of his campaign’s work.
“He’s very, very involved in almost anything that kind of has his name on it or comes out of him,” said Seth Clark, a Georgia Democrat who has worked with Ossoff on statewide legislative priorities.
Clark recalled working with Ossoff on a letter to the Department of Interior last Congress, and “when it came back, you could tell he’d gone through every word himself.” That cautiousness has become a common part of his approach to politics, one that has carried through to his 2026 reelection battle.
Georgia’s is one of the most consequential Senate races in the country, and a misstep could carry enormous consequences. Democrats must defend a state that Trump won by just over two percentage points in 2024 in their uphill battle to flip the Senate.
“There are no decisions that get made that he doesn’t sign off on,” said a Georgia Democratic operative close to the Ossoff campaign, who like others in this article was granted anonymity to speak candidly about their private interactions. “He’s very focused, very intentional, always on message but always on the right message. He doesn’t want complacency because this could slip away from us. He’s seen Georgia’s Democrats lose elections they should have won.”
Ossoff’s campaign declined to comment. In an interview with MS NOW on Monday evening, when asked why he chose to invoke the president’s aide Harp by name, Ossoff said that Trump has “mired” the country in a “geopolitical disaster” and “retreats into this bubble of West Wing aides who are his security blanket to make him feel good about himself.”
Public polling shows Ossoff ahead of his Republican opponent, Rep. Mike Collins. But his profile has extended far beyond Georgia, fueled in large part by the series of viral clips and moments — even if he and his allies privately and publicly insist his focus is strictly on winning reelection and has no White House ambitions.
“The moment the national political organization gets a whiff that Jon Ossoff is thinking about running for president is the moment that [the] Senate campaign falls from under him,” said a longtime Democratic strategist.
However: “That doesn’t take away from the fact that … national leaders, national supporters are paying close attention to a guy who should be ahead by, you know, by one point at the most in a state like Georgia.”
Ossoff, for his part, has repeatedly dismissed the idea that he is entertaining a 2028 presidential bid, and is instead focused on the Senate race before him.
Ossoff’s team has also placed national ad buys in an effort to capture more attention and money: His campaign has spent over $1 million for ads on streaming platforms in New York City’s market, and has hit nearly $20 million in spending on digital advertisements according to an AdImpact analysis.
And while Ossoff’s viral moments can appear off-the-cuff, people who have worked with him describe a candidate who is anything but casual in his public presentation.
A national Democratic pollster who has worked with Ossoff on a prior campaign said his “team understands how to put him and clip him … but I also think that he’s the type of guy, from knowing him, who’s in control of his message.”
“His speeches are just really optimized for clipping,” said Michael Vainisi, a content strategist who has worked with a number of past Democratic presidents and senators. “Really any speech should be, because at the end of the day you’re talking about maximizing clippable sound bites. It’s almost what a cable news hit was, except now you can control a lot more of the scene and what you’re saying.”
National Democrats who have watched Ossoff’s recent rise say the combination of careful message control and ability to go viral has made him stand out at a moment when the party is looking for candidates who can break through.
“Democrats want to fight back, they want to stand for something, and they want to show that they can govern,” said a New York-based Democratic donor who is planning to attend an Ossoff fundraiser in the Hamptons this weekend. “And he embodies that.”
Alex Gangitano contributed to this report.
CANBERRA — When a new British prime minister speaks to their Australian counterpart for the first time, it’s a reset of Australia’s oldest and deepest relationship.
The agenda seems obvious: Intelligence sharing. Tariffs. Hot war and simmering conflict.
If the conversation turns to sport, cricket has often been the obvious choice.
But as Andy Burnham began his introductory calls to world leaders, he and Anthony Albanese got to rugby league.
On their July 23 leader-to-leader call, the two men talked animatedly about the sport they have each spent a lifetime inside.
Albanese told Burnham he would love to see the Kangaroos, the Australian national side, tour the United Kingdom soon.
“I used to love watching the old Kangaroo Tours to the U.K.,” Albanese told Blue Light News, reminiscing about “Mal Meninga’s try at Old Trafford in the green and gold” in 1990, in Burnham’s home town of Manchester, one of “those small grounds where the fans are right there on the tiny dead ball lines.”
By the end of the call, according to Burnham’s office, he agreed to support Albanese’s team, the South Sydney Rabbitohs. “I’m happy to barrack for Prime Minister Burnham’s Leopards in return,” Albanese said.
It wasn’t just small talk.
The AUKUS military alliance requires London and Canberra to operate at a level of trust that treaties and memorandums can’t manufacture. Delivering nuclear-powered submarines to Australia to ward off Chinese aggression will take decades of shared industrial secrets, shipyard schedules and nuclear technology.
Personal chemistry between leaders is not a substitute for institutional machinery, but it is the lubricant.
Burnham and Albanese have a shared, unfakeable claim to a working-class sport at exactly the moment both left-wing leaders are trying to hold onto working-class voters in the face of a right-wing populist challenge.
Burnham told Blue Light News that deep love of the sport is “one of the many reasons the friendship between our two countries runs as deep as it does.”
“In the North of England, rugby league is in our blood. It is played and watched week in, week out, rain or shine, and I know that is a feeling shared in communities right across Australia too,” he said.
The code of collective action
Burnham’s urgent political mission is to stem the flow of working-class voters who have switched from Labour to Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK, in many post-industrial Northern towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and nearby Cumbria and Cheshire, where rugby league is played.
Reconnecting with these communities is critical for Burnham’s hopes of saving Labour from defeat at the next U.K. general election, which is not due until 2029 but could potentially come sooner.
And the culture of rugby league is one that aligns closely with Labour’s left-wing history and its mission in these very same parts of the country: The sport only exists because of a fight about money and class
In 1895, clubs in the north of England broke from Rugby Union over the refusal of the sport’s authorities to compensate players for wages lost to injury or time away from work.
Wealthy players didn’t need the support, while working-class players decided their only option was to quit, and set up a rival code that allowed them to receive a wage for their efforts.
Players in Australia — formed out of British colonies and still firmly in the British Empire — soon followed suit, and the split never healed. Neither did the class coding.
Union, which was devised in a historic, prestigious private school, remains a fixture of British and Australian fee-paying schools.
Australia’s opposition leader, Angus Taylor, a Rhodes Scholar and former McKinsey consultant, plays Rugby Union. Albanese, who grew up with a single mother in social housing, played league.
Burnham’s Northern assets
League “has a very particular culture,” said Tony Collins, emeritus professor of history at De Montfort University and the author of several books on the sport. It understands itself, he said, as working-class, democratic and inclusive — and reflexively anti-establishment.
That is a useful thing for a politician like Burnham to be fluent in. Their League connections present them, he said, as ordinary blokes voters could have a pint with. “It’s the man in the pub thing,” Collins said.
Burnham’s northern identity is one of the few assets his party has that Farage cannot replicate.
The British leader has decades of involvement in the sport, serving as honorary chair of Leigh Centurions (Now Leigh Leopards), a team dating back to 1895. In 2018 he served as president of Rugby Football League, the sport’s governing body, an appointment he described as “one of the greatest honors I’ve ever been given.”
Burnham’s advocacy for greater investment in community-driven sport mirrors Albanese’s passion.
“Rugby league is about community. It’s about local identity,” Albanese said, and those who see the sport, its teams and its players as commodities to be traded or cut “don’t understand the sense of belonging it fosters.”
The pair talk about rugby league in the way Labor leaders were once able to talk about their own parties: mass movements marked by their sense of tightly-knit community.
Albanese’s 118-year grudge
Named for hawkers who walked Sydney’s streets selling wild rabbits to those too poor to afford other meat, Albanese’s Rabbitohs were founded in 1908 by working men from the city’s factory belt.
The club went on to win 20 premierships between 1908 and 1971 — still a record — the year Albanese’s mother took her starry-eyed 8-year-old son to watch the sport’s Grand Final.
Albanese played the sport for practical reasons: he could reach the training ground at inner Sydney’s Redfern Oval by bus — his family could not afford a car.
His days ended after school as he climbed the Labor ranks, becoming one of its youngest officials and an MP from his early 30s. Then came Rupert Murdoch.
In 1996, the newly-elected Albanese rose in the House to condemn a Federal Court decision clearing the establishment of Super League, a breakaway Murdoch-funded competition.
Calling it a battle between the community history of the game and the “private domination of this game by an individual,” Albanese risked his political career in labeling Murdoch’s venture “un-Australian”.
Famous for brow-beating Labor politicians, Murdoch’s newspapers controlled more than 70 percent of Australian news print circulation and set the daily agenda.
While Super League eventually collapsed back into the non-profit National Rugby League, the Rabbitohs did not survive the wreckage. Administrators cut the club in 1999, seeking a leaner competition and clubs with bigger fan bases and deeper pockets.
Albanese used his office to cultivate a backlash that became the largest sustained sports protest in Australian history.
As a Rabbitohs board member, Albanese tabled motions in Parliament, helped organize rallies and joined nearly 100,000 people marching through Sydney demanding their team back.
“This debate goes to the very heart of the alienation which people are feeling about our society,” he told the House in Nov. 1999. He was in the Federal Court in 2001 when it ordered the Rabbitohs readmitted to the competition, finding their exclusion breached the Trade Practices Act.
Authenticity dividend
While many would find it hard to outdo life membership of their favorite team — an honor Albanese received in 2013 — he took his fandom a step further: marrying a Rabbitohs fan who shouted the club’s battle cry from the audience during a speech by Albanese.
A first date with pension fund executive Jodie Haydon followed just before Covid lockdowns, and the pair married in 2025.
Businessperson Peter Holmes à Court in 2006 bought a 75 percent stake in the Rabbitohs with actor Russell Crowe, with Albanese’s blessing. He argues the prime minister’s obsession is the rare kind voters detect as genuine.
“His love for the Rabbitohs is absolutely authentic,” Holmes à Court told Blue Light News. Instead of seeing a politician looking for photo opportunities, with Albanese his team pride is “like an organ, another arm.”
Albanese’s fandom occasionally overwhelms his official role.
In March 2026 he joined an on-field invasion draped in club colors after the Rabbitohs’ Alex Johnston broke the NRL’s all-time try record, telling Nine Television “it was worth it to be part of history.” In July he told comedian podcaster Nikki Osborne that a Souths win is “always a good aphrodisiac.”
“Anti-snobbery is the new movement, right? You can’t be too woke, but you also can’t be too elite in a populist revolutionary world,” Holmes à Court said.
Albanese rallies to the defense of his sport at the dispatch box on the floor of Parliament, and promises to use his relationship with Burnham to “discuss getting more kids off screens and onto sporting fields in our two great countries.”
Burnham keeps it similarly practical: “Together we are delivering good jobs through our AUKUS programme, ensuring young people get a good start in life, and driving down the cost of living. I know as two progressive Labour leaders we have a close friendship ahead of us.”
Albanese won’t be getting his desired Kangaroos tour of the U.K. this year.
England’s team is headed Down Under instead, for the Rugby League World Cup, beginning Oct. 15.
Sen. Bernie Sanders says he can’t be everywhere at once — even though some of his allies want him to be.
Democratic socialist Francesca Hong lost by less than 4,000 votes in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary, an outcome several high-profile progressives are blaming on Sanders and other top national progressive leaders for staying out of the race. Some said his endorsement alone could have helped bring in badly needed resources for Hong. Others said the Vermont senator has a responsibility to play widely across the battle map.
Sanders, in an interview, touted a series of progressive wins Tuesday night and brushed off the criticism.
“My response is that we have limited resources and capabilities, and there are a lot of really great candidates who have run for office who we have not endorsed,” Sanders told Blue Light News on Wednesday.
“We can’t endorse every single candidate,” he added. “So, you know, we have to pick and choose and I think that Hong ran a very, very great, and very strong, grassroots campaign, got a lot of people involved and I applaud her for that.”
Hong ultimately lost to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, a major victory for establishment Democrats who worried she wouldn’t be able to win a general election in a top battleground. It was a notable blow for the far left that overshadowed progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan’s win in the Minnesota Senate race the same night.
Sanders and other progressive leaders “have a responsibility, whether they like it or they don’t,” to help steer candidates in the movement, said Cenk Uygur, a progressive activist who co-founded the Young Turks and Justice Democrats. “If they endorse people, it makes a difference. If they don’t endorse people these days, sometimes it makes a bigger difference. Because there’s a certain expectation, and when they don’t deliver on that expectation, it gives people pause. So it feels like, to some degree, they’re shirking their responsibility.”
Uygur also criticized Sanders for saying on a podcast ahead of the primary that he was “not that familiar” with the Wisconsin race.
“I love Bernie, but that’s not true. Sorry, brother, but you have a giant team. Of course somebody on your team knows who’s running for governor in Wisconsin.” Uygur told Blue Light News on Thursday.
One Democratic operative working on progressive campaigns, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the electoral dynamics, also rejected Sanders’ argument, noting the senator won Wisconsin’s presidential primary in 2016.
“He knows Wisconsin very well,” the operative said, adding: “What resources? You’re not cutting checks. [Sanders] endorsing somebody raises the money.”
Sanders in the interview noted primary wins from Flanagan, Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin’s 3rd District and Matt Little in the crowded race for Rep. Angie Craig’s Minnesota seat — all Democrats he endorsed.
“Needless to say, I’m feeling really very good,” Sanders said. “The American people are catching on that we have an economy that is rigged, the very rich are getting richer while working families are struggling.”
But the Wisconsin governor primary result Tuesday exposed a critical vulnerability for a movement that has largely relied on Sanders and a handful of other headline-grabbing stars, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), to help seal the deal in contentious races as progressives look to prove they can play in competitive seats. The underdog wing of the party, some progressives argue, can’t be selective about where it’s playing if they want to take on a vast and well-funded establishment.
The bulk of the blame is being laid at Sanders’ feet in part because the movement he turbocharged in 2016 has struggled to land on a clear successor. Some progressives argue there’s an overreliance on Sanders and leaders such as Ocasio-Cortez.
Our Revolution, a group born from Sanders’ 2016 campaign but that the senator no longer associates with, blasted the broader progressive ecosystem for not doing more for Hong in a post early Wednesday morning, as the returns in Wisconsin showed Crowley was poised to defeat Hong. Several groups that have backed insurgent progressives in other races declined to join Our Revolution in getting involved in the governor’s race.“We cannot build progressive power while gatekeeping our own movement through the eyes of the establishment,” the group posted.
Sanders pushed back: “Our Revolution is an organization I’ve not had any interaction with, any participation with … for I think nine years,” he said in response. “They do what they want and they say what they want. They have nothing to do with me.”
Our Revolution declined comment on Sanders’ remarks and on its post.
Nina Turner, a former Our Revolution leader and Sanders 2020 co-chair who had backed Hong, said support from “more well-known, more popular, actively elected progressive types … probably would have” made a difference in Hong’s race. She declined to call anyone out specifically for not getting involved.
“The progressive movement is going to have to reckon with how we continue to win around certain personalities,” Turner said. “I don’t think the movement should put all our hopes and dreams on certain personalities to come out or to not come out, because it is their choice and they have a right to their choice, even if I don’t agree with it.”
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) was one of the few national progressive figures who had endorsed Hong. He has employed a far more aggressive endorsement strategy than Sanders this primary season and said he sees an advantage to backing candidates early, despite the potential headwinds facing long-shot contenders, as long as they align with him on policy.
But he wasn’t willing to play the blame game in the aftermath of Wisconsin’s primary, saying in a text message that: “We have so many candidates running and I believe progressive leaders have been doing an extraordinary job lifting them up.”
A spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez, who has also faced criticism for not backing for Hong, declined to comment.
Not everyone on the left believes Sanders and other progressive stars could have swung a race in which several other factors were working against Hong. The candidate did very little traditional advertising. She faced a barrage of negative press over controversial past social media comments that put her on defense over everything from public safety to Thanksgiving. Several candidates likely siphoned away votes from both Hong and Crowley — including two who dropped out after voting began: Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes.
Dillon Sheehan, the chapter secretary for the Madison Area Democratic Socialists of America, which endorsed Hong, said “it’s entirely possible” big-name progressives like Sanders could have “put her over the edge.”
But “we need candidates who can win without Bernie’s endorsement, he’s not going to be able to endorse forever,” Sheehan said. “I think what this shows is that even without his endorsement, without Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement, [Hong] did fantastic.”
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