The Senate's no-good very bad week

Graham Platner, Maine’s now-former Democratic nominee for Senate, dropped out of the race after a POLITICO article detailed allegations of sexual assault against him. Platner has denied the allegations, and his campaign said they were meant to drive him out of the race. But POLITICO reviewed correspondence from one of the women quoted in the story, including messages describing him as “consensually careless” years ago. Previous reporting from The New York Times also quoted women who described other “unsettling” behavior from Platner.

This story matters because we should all care whether we’re elevating those accused of rape to positions of power. It also matters for democracy at large. Democrats need to pick up four Senate seats to take control of the upper chamber, although Democratic control of the Senate doesn’t necessarily mean surefire protections for human rights. Just look at their capitulations on issues like healthcare and their continued support for arms shipments to Israel amid its genocide in Gaza.

The party had hoped Maine would be an easy state to win, since Kamala Harris won the state by seven points in 2024. Now, Democrats have a murkier pathway to beating Republican incumbent Susan Collins, who overwhelmingly supports President Donald Trump’s agenda despite making headlines for breaking with him occasionally.

What happens next? Maine Democratic Party leaders voted to hold a nominating convention to pick a new nominee. The Bangor Daily News, a local newsroom serving a city with an International Cryptozoology Museum that is now definitely on my bucket list, reported that county committees will elect 500 delegates to go to the convention. The party has a July 27 deadline to pick another nominee.

The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2024, a Facebook post warned women against dating Platner, calling it “one of many signs overlooked by a set of upstart political activists who recruited Platner and ran his campaign.” The same article asserts that this “shows the challenges facing a theory of politics” that leftist activists should challenge Democratic party leaders, as if voters can’t support progressive policies and condemn sexual assault at the same time.

But the specific activists who got Platner to run do merit a closer look. Political strategists Dan Moraff and Leanne Fan found Platner and recruited him. Moraff specifically asked for a faster and cheaper background check on Platner, according to The Wall Street Journal’s sources. Had his strategists sprung for a more comprehensive background check instead of a SparkNotes version, they may have learned about his Nazi tattoo and heard from the women who are now coming forward.

Platner, notably, was not an organizer before this race. He reportedly just said lefty things sometimes and didn’t look like other politicians, which two political strategists felt was an asset. (I’m a 5’6” curly haired man who whines about capitalism all the time, but that doesn’t mean I’m qualified to run for the United States Senate.) Those same strategists then went on to rack up complaints about how they treated women on the campaign staff. So is this really about “challenges facing a theory of politics” asserting that people should act when they feel betrayed by their leaders? Or is it about how the way we treat people needs to reflect what we claim to stand for?

A widely-circulated photo of Senator Mitch McConnell lying in a hospital bed connected to several tubes was AI-generated. You can tell by running it through AI detection tools. There are also visual cues, like inconsistencies in two different but similar pictures that spread online. A far-right influencer began spreading claims that McConnell was “brain dead” after he was hospitalized. His staff won’t confirm or deny if it’s true. But other Republican leaders have said they’ve spoken to McConnell recently.

Amid a vacuum of reliable information, rumors and conspiracies about McConnell’s condition are spreading. Yes, it feels weird that his staff won’t affirmatively say their boss isn’t brain dead when I can list off all of my non-brain dead bosses right now. And yes, it’s probably smart to not take Republican leaders at their word when they have previously lied about everything from environmentalists colluding with Russia to Obama banning farm kids from doing basic chores. But we still can’t go around saying the guy died. We don’t know if it’s true.

This brings us to our media literacy tip from our friends at MediaWise! It’s getting harder to tell whether something is AI, and you can’t expect yourself to verify everything. But you can verify things that feel important.

Last week, a referee gave a US soccer player something called a red card. To my understanding, this is the jock equivalent of disinviting somebody from your “X-Men ’97” viewing party. The card was given to a player named Folarin Balogun, who is a US striker. Much like the news outlets we left that refuse to call out fascism by name, a striker’s job is to run down the middle. And the red card meant that Balogun wasn’t allowed to come out and play anymore because FIFA was mad at him.

Trump then called FIFA three times to ask them to reverse their decision. In fairness, calling someone three times in less than one week and begging them not to reject you is one of the more relatable things President Trump has done. Then, FIFA reversed the red card. Now, a rights group is filing an ethics complaint against FIFA president Gianni Infantino for that decision.

FIFA was no stranger to controversy before this. The organization’s officials were previously found to have voted for World Cup host countries in exchange for money, and officials have been arrested on corruption charges. Infantino has also repeatedly cozied up to Trump by supporting his attacks on the press, dining with him, attending political events at the White House, visiting Mar-a-Lago, and giving the president a FIFA Peace Prize after he asked for a Nobel Peace Prize. Same energy as my parents giving me a deck of Pokemon cards when I asked for a live Pikachu as a kid to get me to stop crying.

Second Lady Usha Vance has a podcast called “Storytime with the Second Lady.” It features children’s books for young audiences and a rotating cast of guests who, along with the host, often appear as though they have never interacted with another human being before in their lives.

Last week’s episode featured Trump giving his own version of a presidential history lesson as he read through a book called “Presidents Play!”, a 2020 book published by the White House Historical Association. The book runs through how past presidents stayed physically active.

After calling the Oval Office “the most powerful piece of real estate, probably, in the world,” and describing it as a Twilight Zone setting where “everything starts here, ends here, starts again,” the president said he mostly reads stories about himself. Don, if you’re reading this, I hope our transparency and ethics pledge below gives you some ideas.

Trump’s review of past presidents in a nutshell, as of his appearance on “Storytime with the Second Lady”: he likes Bill Clinton but does not like running, thinks Usha and JD should walk like Harry Truman, said “a lot of people got [President Richard Nixon] into trouble” before conceding that “he got himself into trouble, I guess,” said Barack Obama’s middle name like it’s a slur before doubting his athletic abilities, and he mentioned the ballroom he plans to build where John Quincy Adams is pictured swimming in this book.