The Dictatorship

Wednesday’s Campaign Round-Up, 7.15.26: Maine Democrats to appear in hastily arranged debate

Published

1 hour ago

July 15, 2026

Wednesday’s Campaign Round-Up, 7.15.26: Maine Democrats to appear in hastily arranged debate

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.

* In the wake of Graham Platner’s candidacy in Maine, Democrats in the state are engaged in an unusual sprint to choose a new Senate candidate to take on the incumbent, Republican Sen. Susan Collins. Several contenders have thrown their hat into the ring but, given the compressed schedule, it seemed unlikely that the would-be nominees would have time to debate.

And yet, there’s going to be a debate anyway. Politico reported that eight Democratic contenders will share the stage tomorrow for a hastily arranged debate. The article noted, “News Center Maine, which is sponsoring the event, had initially invited three people who ran for governor — Troy Jackson, Shenna Bellows and Nirav Shah — as well as Jordan Wood, who ran for an open House seat. But the news organization later decided to invite everyone who has so far submitted the paperwork to run for the seat that opened when Platner was forced to withdraw.”

If all goes according to plan, the debate will run for 90 minutes and be televised statewide. Nine days after the debate, there will be a nominating convention in Bangor, ahead of the July 27 deadline for Maine Democrats to submit the paperwork for the new nominee.

As for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has played an active role in supporting candidates he sees as strong contenders, the New York Democrat has already said he intends to remain neutral as Maine Democrats prepare to choose a candidate.

* In Michigan’s closely watched Democratic Senate primarythe latest Detroit News/WDIV-TV found Rep. Haley Stevens leading Abdul El-Sayed, 48% to 41%. Primary Day in the Wolverine State is Aug. 4.

* Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo is facing a tough re-election fight in a battleground state, and it probably won’t help matters that when he was recently pulled over by a Las Vegas police officer, the Republican governor wasn’t ticketed after identifying himself.

* As this week got underway, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appointed late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s younger sister, Darline, to fill her brother’s Senate vacancy. A day later, she was sworn into officethough she is not expected to compete in the upcoming special Republican primary.

* Colorado’s messy Republican gubernatorial primary is over and ministry leader Victor Marx prevailed, though he’s apparently struggling to win over his former intraparty rivals, including state Sen. Barb Kirkmeyer and state Rep. Scott Bottoms, who described Marx as a “conman” and a “fraud” during the primary process.

* Speaking of messy Republican gubernatorial primaries, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who recently came up short against billionaire Rick Jackson, said this week that he hasn’t yet decided to endorse his former rival. “We’ll see,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

* And in Minnesota, which is also home to a competitive Republican gubernatorial primary, Donald Trump has formally thrown his support behind pillow salesman Mike Lindell. The president’s backing will likely help the notorious conspiracy theorist in his Aug. 11 primary, though Lindell is expected to struggle badly in a general election.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

The Dictatorship

ICE should permanently end vehicle stops

Published

1 hour ago

July 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Christmas. 15, 2026, 1:16 PM EDT

ByDavid J. Bier

Following two killings of motorists in two weeks in Maine and Texas, Immigration and Customs Enforcement briefly suspended most vehicle stops to retrain its agents. The suspension implicitly conceded the obvious — ICE could have prevented these deaths — but President Donald Trump quickly overruled the agency, ordering it to resume the stops.

The president posted on social media Wednesday that “we cannot give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” But he’s wrong. His own adviser, White House border czar Tom Homan, has admitted that vehicle stops are not an important enforcement tool, and that permanently ending them would better protect ICE agents, their targets and the public.

ICE agents appear to relish the car chases and often fail to stop the suspect before they drive away.

It’s true that ICE officers receive less training on vehicle stops. That’s because, before this administration, most arrestees came straight from federal, state or local custody, and when ICE had to go to the streets, it carefully planned operations — surveilling suspects to learn their routines, sometimes for weeksand working as a team of agents and creating a pre-enforcement action plan.

To speed up arrests, however, ICE reportedly eliminated the pre-enforcement planning last year as it started targeting areas more than specific people. “It’s hard to fill out a worksheet that just says, ‘Meet in the Home Depot parking lot,’” one former ICE official told NBC News. Enforcement went from targeted and planned to indiscriminate and opportunistic, which led to more chaotic interactions.

Reflecting this lack of planning, both of the immigrants shot and killed in the past two weeks were not the individuals ICE agents were originally looking to arrest, according to lawmakers who spoke to officials. A similar situation played out in Minnesota earlier this year, when ICE agents mistook a DoorDash driver for their target before shooting him after he ran into his home. (That officer was charged after video evidence from a city traffic camera contradicted his account.)

Even when pre-arrest surveillance of a specific suspect is conducted, ICE agents appear to relish the car chases and often fail to stop the suspect before they drive away. One Department of Homeland Security supervisor described the attitude to The New York Times as “we’re adrenaline junkies who want action, foot chases, car pursuits.”

In October 2025, for instance, agents waited outside the home of Carlitos Ricardo Parias, a TikTok influencer, whom ICE was particularly interested in arresting. But rather than leap immediately into action, they let him get into his car. This led to a vehicle stop at which an ICE agent shot Parias, and the bullet ricocheted into a U.S. marshal.

On Fox News Tuesday, Homan admitted that there’s no downside. “I hear a lot of noise right now, ‘this will affect ICE arrests.’ It’s not going to,” he said.

Another shooting in California in April 2026 followed the same pattern. ICE did the surveillance but let the suspect get into their car. This appears to have been intentional. In June, surveillance video captured what appears to be a targeted ICE arrest in Milwaukee, in which officers allowed the suspect several minutes to get a snack and re-enter his vehicle before the team moved in for the arrest.

When stops do happen, as a Wall Street Journal investigation found earlier this yearICE agents commonly use tactics that place themselves in unnecessary risk: failing to tell drivers to turn off their engines, grabbing cars when they start to move, placing their bodies — rather than vehicles — in the way, and then shooting at uncooperative drivers.

DHS’ use-of-force policy already gets most of these issues right. It prohibits officers from “intentionally and unreasonably placing themselves in positions in which they have no alternative to using deadly force.” It bars shooting drivers unless there is an imminent risk of serious bodily harm.

Outside of a terrorist attack where the car is the weapon, shooting the driver does not lessen the threat; it enhances it. After an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot Renee Good, the car didn’t stop. It accelerated until it crashed. In Maine, ICE officers had to try to grab the car on foot to stop it after the injured driver lost control, and the car circled blindly. Eventually, an ICE agent used his vehicle to stop it.

ICE’s suspension of most vehicle stops would force agents to spend time learning new tactics, but doing so would have gone a long way to protect agents, targets and bystanders. Rather than a temporary reprieve, in fact, ICE should have made it permanent.

On Fox News Tuesday, Homan admitted that there’s no downside. “I hear a lot of noise right now, ‘this will affect ICE arrests.’ It’s not going to,” he said. “Before he gets into the car, you can arrest him then. You can wait until the vehicle gets to its destination,” he said — unless the target is a violent criminal. He added, “If we can take that 2-ton ‘weapon’ away from them, that’s good.”

Homan is admitting what the record shows: ICE has been endangering its officers and others for no enforcement benefit. Ending vehicle stops won’t end all the problems, or even all the deaths. But continuing them means more danger for ICE personnel and the public.

David J. Bier

David J. Bier is the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute.

The Dictatorship

If recent history is any guide, Trump’s primetime address won’t be a success

Published

1 hour ago

July 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

If recent history is any guide, Trump’s primetime address won’t be a success

Donald Trump hasn’t exactly been shy about the point of the prime-time speech he intends to deliver Thursday night. During an appearance on Newsmax this week, for example, the president peddled familiar, tiresome nonsense: “Our elections are crooked, and we’ve got to straighten them out.”

A day later at an unrelated White House event, he said he didn’t want to go into a lot of detail about what would be included in his address, though he did tell reporters“What we’re going to be talking about Thursday is, it doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.”

The president neglected to mention that Americans already have a country, as well as free and fair elections.

But while the public waits to hear Trump’s latest conspiratorial pitch, it’s worth appreciating the fact that the format he has chosen has not exactly served him well.

In recent decades, prime-time presidential addresses are generally reserved for major announcements about pressing matters of great significance. Trump’s prime-time presidential addresses, however, tend to be duds.

Consider some of the more notable examples.

April 1, 2026: The president delivered remarks on the war in Iran, though once it was over, no one seemed to have any idea what the point of the speech was. He presented no plan. He offered no coherent vision. Trump meandered from dubious point to dubious point and peddled a contradictory message about a possible endpoint, leaving many viewers even more concerned about the war. The New York Times’ Helene Cooper summarized“Trump has concluded speaking after 19 minutes. … This was a rehash of his Truth Social posts over the past month.”

The speech had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.

Dec. 17, 2025: Trump delivered a prime-time address, ostensibly to talk about how great the first year of his second term was. What he presented, however, was 18 minutes of combative presidential blame-shifting and excuse-makingpackaged in the unsubtle desperation of a man who didn’t seem to understand why so much of the public failed to appreciate his systemic failures and embarrassments.

The speech also had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.

March 11, 2020: As the Covid-19 pandemic started to wreak havoc in the United States, Trump delivered a weird Oval Office address in which he flubbed his own policyprompting White House officials to spend the rest of the evening clarifying that the president didn’t exactly mean what he said.

The speech also had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.

Jan. 8, 2019: In the middle of a government shutdown he was responsible for, Trump delivered an Oval Office address for no apparent reason. Over the course of nine minutes, he presented no plan, offered no material, endorsed no solution and had no factsas evidenced by the avalanche of falsehoods he peddled to the nation. Rachel Maddow asked as part of MS NOW’s live coverage, “Why did he just do this? … Why did this just happen?”

The speech also had no discernible effect on public attitudes or his approval rating.

Taken together, it’s hard not to wonder if this just isn’t Trump’s best format.

A member of the president’s team told Axios this week that he wants to do prime-time speeches because they “give a sense of importance to what he’s saying.”

I don’t doubt that this is the idea behind the addresses, but as Hearst columnist Philip Bump explainedTrump and his team apparently haven’t figured out “that he’s dragging the gravitas down rather than it lifting him up.”

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

The Dictatorship

Is there a single Republican on Capitol Hill today willing to speak up to Trump?

Published

1 hour ago

July 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Is there a single Republican on Capitol Hill today willing to speak up to Trump?

Christmas. 15, 2026, 1:02 PM EDT

This is the July 15, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter.Subscribe hereto get it delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.

In his final speech as president, Ronald Reagan talked about the importance of immigrants to America’s heritage.

“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

Johan Sebastian Guerrero came to America from Colombia. The 25-year-old husband and father worked two jobs to support his wife and 3-year-old daughter.

On Monday in Biddeford, Maine, ICE agents shot him dead through his car window. His wife knelt weeping over him in the street as their daughter watched.

Johan wasn’t even the person they were looking for.

The young father’s killers were whisked away, like King George III would have protected British troops who gunned down colonists 250 years ago.

Now as then, no body cameras, no investigations, no justice.

Source: Gallup poll of 1,001 U.S. adults, conducted June 1-15, 2026, margin of error: ±4 percentage points

INFLATION DOWN, BUT NOT OUT

Wednesday’s June inflation report can be read two ways: Since May, prices fell — driven by the drop in oil and gas. But compared to a year ago, prices are still 3.5% higher, which is exactly how much wages have risen over the same period.

In other words, consumers have not achieved any “real” growth in purchasing power over the past year.

Watch Steve Rattner break down the numbers below.

WHAT THEY SAID

John Heilemann on GOP politics

“The last things Ken Paxton and Susan Collins want to talk about are mass deportation and ICE on one hand and election fraud on the other. Yet those are the two issues in the headlines in Texas, in Maine, and all across the country. Donald Trump is bringing Republicans a political nightmare heading into November.”

Sen. Chris Coons on Maine ICE shooting

“Hearing the account of Sebastián’s widow and 3-year-old wailing by the side of the car after he had been shot point-blank is just heartbreaking. All of us need to step up and do a better job of holding accountable those to whom we give the power of life and death. This is a fundamental challenge to civil liberties and to justice in our nation.”

Lisa Rubin on Todd Blanche

“I knew Todd Blanche briefly when I was in private practice, and I witnessed the adoration firsthand. He was liked for many reasons. He was a regular guy, the paradigmatic lawyer that jurors would want to have a beer with. The guy that I see on our screens growling from the podium at the Department of Justice is entirely inconsistent with the person that I briefly knew.”