Wednesday, July 01, 2026
Left-Wing Insurgent Ousts 15-Term Congresswoman in Colorado
Left-Wing Insurgent Ousts 15-Term Congresswoman in Colorado
“ Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, defeated 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette in a Democratic primary for a Colorado congressional seat. Kiros, an immigrant and first-time candidate, campaigned on addressing the affordability crisis and opposing U.S. support for Israel. Her victory, expected to be confirmed in November, reflects the growing influence of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, unseated Representative Diana DeGette in a Democratic primary to represent the Denver area.
Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, defeated Representative Diana DeGette on Tuesday in the Denver area, according to The Associated Press, in a show of force for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
The triumph by Ms. Kiros unseats a 15-term incumbent and further propels the insurgent coalition that swept a series of congressional contests last week in New York.
Ms. Kiros, an immigrant and first-time candidate, was born the year after Ms. DeGette, 68, took office. Her victory in the solidly Democratic district all but ensures her election in November.
A lawyer and doctoral student in public affairs, Ms. Kiros cast herself as a political outsider capable of addressing the affordability crisis that she argued the Democratic establishment had failed to resolve. Her opposition to U.S. support for Israel was also a cornerstone of her campaign and central to her political identity.
Her grass-roots campaign overcame a fund-raising advantage held by Ms. DeGette, who was helped by a last-minute influx of spending from outside groups. Early Wednesday, Ms. Kiros was leading by nearly 10 percentage points with more than 90 percent of votes counted.
In her campaign biography, Ms. Kiros highlighted the fact that the Manhattan law firm where she once worked had fired her in 2023 after she refused to take down a letter that raised questions about Israel’s historical legitimacy, defended pro-Palestinian campus protesters and challenged the firm’s response to activist law students.
She has faced criticism for declining to call antisemitic a fatal firebombing attack in Boulder, Colo., on people who were marching in support of Israeli hostages.
Her victory “is part of a pattern of our democratic socialist politics resonating across the country,” said Ashik Siddique, a co-chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Ms. Kiros is a member. “It just shows that Americans want politicians who are going to address the cost of living with universal policies that apply to everybody.”
If she prevails in November, as she is expected to do, Ms. Kiros will join a growing group of left-wing Democrats in Congress who want to see universal, single-payer health care, bans on corporate donations to political campaigns and an end to American support for Israel. Her campaign was bolstered by an endorsement from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
A longtime progressive, Ms. DeGette leads a powerful subcommittee overseeing health care and had said she would push to pass “Medicare for all” if Democrats retook the House. She campaigned heavily on her liberal credentials, running a TV ad that featured Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York praising her support of universal health care. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez did not endorse anyone in the race.
But Ms. DeGette appeared to find herself increasingly at odds with her own district on issues including American support for Israel and the acceptance of corporate donations to her campaign.
Ms. DeGette in the past has called herself a “strong supporter” of Israel. Her campaign got a boost from late spending by outside groups, including some with connections to pro-Israel PACs. Ms. Kiros argued that those donations made her opponent beholden to special interests rather than to her own constituents.
Denver and its suburbs are far younger and more diverse than they were when Ms. DeGette first won the seat in 1996.
Emily Davies is a political correspondent for The New York Times.“
Trump Pulled in at Least $2 Billion After Returning to the White House
Trump Pulled in at Least $2 Billion After Returning to the White House
“President Trump’s financial disclosure for 2025 reveals he earned at least $2.2 billion, a significant increase from the previous year. His cryptocurrency ventures, particularly World Liberty Financial and the $TRUMP memecoin, were major contributors to this wealth. The report also highlights potential conflicts of interest, as Trump’s role as a major crypto operator and top policymaker raises ethical concerns.
The release of a mandatory financial disclosure for 2025 shows that the Trump family’s holdings, particularly the president’s crypto businesses, were stunningly lucrative.
President Trump reaped a stunning windfall in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses, a new filing shows.
All told, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets. That compares to a minimum of $622 million his enterprises pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.
One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.
Mr. Trump also collected hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens.
The results, detailed in Mr. Trump’s mandatory financial disclosure report for 2025 and released on Tuesday, pulled back the curtain on the president’s business operations. His crypto ventures, the report shows, are now some of his most lucrative enterprises, a remarkable turnabout for a man who once slammed crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.
The president’s finances, which had been something of a mystery, highlight a conflict in his crypto business: Mr. Trump is a major crypto industry operator and its top policymaker.
It is hardly the only issue to arise from having a businessman serve as president. The president’s family business, the Trump Organization, has also capitalized on Mr. Trump’s popularity in certain parts of the world, licensing the Trump name to properties in countries that are crucial to U.S. foreign policy interests, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Those two deals alone generated more than $14 million for Mr. Trump last year, the filing shows.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, though in the past, Mr. Trump has noted that he is exempt from federal conflict of interest laws.
Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a recent statement that Mr. Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public,” and that “there are no conflicts of interest.”
Although the report released on Tuesday offered revenue figures for Mr. Trump’s crypto and real estate ventures, it did not reveal whether all of the businesses turned a profit or a loss, which is consistent with his previous filings.
The report also offers little clarity on the president’s net worth, much of which is tied to estimated property values and the fluctuating paper worth of crypto assets and his stock portfolio. For his largest assets, including cryptocurrency and real estate, Mr. Trump reported a minimum valuation of $50 million with no upper limit.
Revenue from select ventures
The president’s shares in his own publicly traded social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, are worth about $875 million, according to other public filings, representing one of the single greatest sources of the president’s net worth. (Those shares have plummeted over the last year, eroding some of his net worth.)
But it was Mr. Trump’s crypto business that proved to be a top revenue stream.
Once an outspoken skeptic of crypto, Mr. Trump embraced the industry on the campaign trail in 2024 and started a series of ventures that have reaped enormous sums.
With his three sons, he helped create World Liberty, a crypto firm that sells a digital currency called $WLFI.
Last year, World Liberty marketed its coin to investors around the world, with 75 percent of each sale allocated to a Trump business entity, after the deduction of certain expenses, guaranteeing the president would make money even if the value of the token declined. The president received about $500 million from those sales last year, according to the filing, compared with $57 million in 2024.
World Liberty enriched the Trump family in other ways, as well.
In January 2025, days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, an investment firm tied to the government of the U.A.E. bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty, raising a slew of ethical concerns. Soon the Emiratis struck a deal with the Trump administration — over the objections of some national security officials — for the export of valuable computer chips that power artificial intelligence.
The filing released Tuesday did not explicitly refer to the deal, but it mentioned unnamed investments that generated more than $200 million for Mr. Trump.
The other major source of Mr. Trump’s crypto wealth was his memecoin, a novelty currency known as $TRUMP that he started selling days before his inauguration. He earned more than $600 million from sales of the coin, according to the filing.
The coin’s price shot up briefly, before plummeting, with its price recently hovering around $1.67, a roughly 80 percent drop from a year ago.
The Trump family also continued to pull in chunks of money from real estate branding deals, the new report showed, including some in the Middle East that generated a minimum of $35 million in revenue last year. Deals in Vietnam and Romania, as well as older ones in India, Turkey and Indonesia, combined to bring in at least another $20 million.
And the president’s major real estate holdings in the United States, like Trump National Golf Club near Miami, pulled in $122 million in revenue, while his Mar-a-Lago club generated a total of $77 million for him, the report said.
Now that Mr. Trump is flush with cash, and now that he has eliminated some of his long-running legal problems, he has reduced the liabilities on his balance sheet, including after an appeals court overturned a nearly half-billion-dollar legal judgment stemming from a civil fraud case in New York.
The disclosure report shows that Mr. Trump still owes more than $50 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of sexually abusing and defaming her. The Supreme Court on Monday declined the president’s request to review one of the judgments Ms. Carroll secured against him.
The financial disclosure captured several other legal wins for Mr. Trump, including payouts he collected from media and technology giants like ABC News, Paramount and Meta. ABC settled a defamation lawsuit, while Paramount agreed to pay him over the editing of an interview on the CBS News program “60 Minutes.” Meta settled a lawsuit he filed over the suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
The disclosure also captured gains in Mr. Trump’s investments in the financial markets. While these numbers appear in wide ranges, making it difficult to decipher meaningful trends or specific amounts, they suggest that Mr. Trump continues to get richer as president.
At the end of last year, the disclosure shows, he held investment assets of at least $857 million, compared with a minimum reported value of $236 million the year prior.
Ben Protess is an investigative reporter at The Times, covering President Trump.
Andrea Fuller is a data journalist at The Times, using data analysis to make sense of complex topics.
Eric Lipton is a Times investigative reporter, who digs into a broad range of topics from Pentagon spending to toxic chemicals.“
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Supreme Court Lifts Spending Limits on Political Parties and Candidates - The New York Times
The Supreme Court Just Gave the G.O.P. a New Midterm Edge
(This horrible decision is huge! The Supreme Court right wing majority is owned and controlled by the mega wealthy who use race and immigration to divide the rest of us!)
"The decision, which allows parties to spend more in coordination with candidates, is likely to further expand the power of big money in American politics.
Shane Goldmacher is a national political correspondent who has covered the intersection of money and campaigns for years.
Just days before the 2022 midterm elections, as Democratic candidates were drastically outspending JD Vance and other Republicans running for the Senate, the future vice president and the Senate G.O.P. campaign arm filed a lawsuit to try to change the rules of the game.
They knew it was too late to affect that year’s elections. The lawsuit was part of a longer-term gambit to tilt the financial playing field in future elections in the Republican Party’s favor. The goal was to unshackle political parties from existing limits on what they could spend in coordination with the candidates they were supporting.
The plan paid off on Tuesday, when the Supreme Court rolled back decades-old restrictions on political party spending, further expanding the power of big money in American politics.
It couldn’t have come at a better time for Republicans: Their party committees are flush with cash, and they can start spending that money immediately on midterm battlegrounds that will determine control of Congress.
For years, Republican candidates had faced a persistent disadvantage. Their Democratic counterparts had raised far more money, primarily from small-dollar donors online. And candidates qualify for cheaper advertising rates than political parties do. Republicans wanted to close that gap by letting parties — which can be funded by six-figure checks from wealthy donors — spend as much as they wanted in coordination with candidates. In the process, the parties would also qualify for those lower ad rates.
The lawsuit was the brainchild of Ryan Dollar, then the general counsel of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The Supreme Court had been loosening campaign spending restrictions for years, and Mr. Dollar spied an opportunity to loosen them some more.
“We had our eyes on SCOTUS from Day 1,” Mr. Dollar said in an interview.
In a 6-3 decision on Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled limits on coordinated spending violated the constitution’s First Amendment.
“For nearly 200 years after the ratification of the First Amendment, parties could spend freely to support their candidates during campaigns and could do so in coordination with the candidates,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion. He cast the decision as returning to that era.
Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court’s liberal justices, wrote a dissent lamenting that while donations to candidates are now limited to $7,000, donations to parties can be “as much as half a million dollars.”
“The Court ushers back in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check,” she wrote.
The ruling in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission is widely expected to usher in the biggest shift in how campaigns are funded since the aftermath of the Citizens United decision in 2010, which lifted limits on corporate expenditures and laid the groundwork for the current era of big-spending super PACs.
The decision is the latest in a series of Supreme Court rulings in recent years that have struck down limits on political spending using the argument that spending money amounts to protected speech. The ruling also suggested the court’s willingness to further dilute such limits in the future.
In the short term, the case is likely to benefit Republicans. The Republican National Committee entered June with $125.5 million in the bank, while the Democratic National Committee carried more debts than cash on hand.
“The R.N.C. is playing with nuclear weapons and the D.N.C. has one of those Wile E. Coyote guns with a flag that says ‘Bang!’” said Sean Cooksey, a former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission and a former general counsel to the vice president, in a social media post.
Both parties expected television stations to to give the expanded universe of coordinated spending by political parties the discounted ad rates but how exactly that will work with the new expanded spending was unclear.
“It will be a massive advantage for our party,” said Mike Ambrosini, a top party strategist and chief of staff of the Republican National Committee.
Tim Persico, who served as the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 2022 cycle, said the midterm elections just became instantly more challenging for Democrats. “It just makes it harder,” he said.
“Democrats have figured out how to leverage our grass-roots support so we can compete with billionaires and corporations,” Mr. Persico said. “This is another example of this Supreme Court undermining the voices of the many for the voices of the millionaires, billionaires and corporations.”
In the long term, Democrats could adjust their fund-raising and spending strategies to try to push the playing field back in their favor. Few advantages become permanent in the ever-changing world of money in politics.
But this much is clear: The new landscape will result in a greater concentration of power within both national parties, which may now buy unlimited ads on behalf of the candidates they are supporting, all while coordinating directly with them.
Inside the R.N.C., Mr. Ambrosini said, the planning for the ruling began early last year. His internal mandate was to conserve as much cash as possible, so the party could be ready to spend heavily on ads in tandem with congressional candidates if a favorable ruling landed and granted the parties those lower TV rates.
The effect will magnify the importance of the G.O.P.’s huge cash advantage.
“It’s one of the main reasons that anyone that is a Republican should not write our obituary in June,” Mr. Ambrosini said.
The specifics of why the ruling matters are as technical as they are important.
Political committees have previously faced strict limits on coordinated spending between parties and candidates. The result has been a logistical headache. Parties have had to erect internal firewalls in order to run ads for House and Senate candidates. Those making the party’s ads could not talk to the campaigns they were trying to help.
That amplified the value of the small donations pouring into Democratic campaign accounts. Not only was that money controlled by the candidate’s own team, but it stretched further because of a federal law entitling candidates of both parties to the cheapest available ad rates.
The upshot: Republicans relying on outside money have been paying much more than Democrats for similar ad time.
“In some of these races that get really intense and competitive, it can be 10 and 20 times as much,” said Jason Thielman, who served as executive director of the Senate Republican campaign arm in the 2024 elections.
In 2022, a 30-second TV ad during a football game in Nevada cost one Republican group $150,000; the Democratic candidate paid $21,000.
Tuesday’s ruling threw out that disparity.
“This is about as significant as a game changer and leveler we could see,” Mr. Thielman said.
Take North Carolina’s Senate race in 2026.
Roy Cooper, the Democratic former governor, entered April with $18.5 million in the bank. His Republican opponent, Michael Whatley, a former R.N.C. chairman, had less than $2 million after accounting for debts.
Before, a Republican super PAC would have to spend $50 million to $100 million to purchase the same amount of ad time that Mr. Cooper could buy with his funds. Now, Republican Party committees may qualify for candidate rates for TV ads, offsetting Mr. Cooper’s cash edge.
Mr. Dollar, who had been at the N.R.S.C. in 2022, is now the general counsel at the House Republicans campaign committee, which took over leading and funding the case last year. The chairman of the both party committees, Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, issued a joint statement cheering the ruling on Tuesday.
“By striking down these unconstitutional caps on coordinated spending, the court has restored core political speech and ensured parties can compete on a level playing field,” they declared."
Monday, June 29, 2026
Sunday, June 28, 2026
We Need Plot Twists’: Behind the Scenes of Trump’s Second Term
We Need Plot Twists’: Behind the Scenes of Trump’s Second Term
“In “Regime Change,” New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan chronicle the first 14 months of Trump’s second term, highlighting his family’s financial gains and the enabling of his actions by sycophantic supporters. The book delves into Trump’s reality-distorting world, revealing his impulsive decisions and the fusion of reality and show business in his presidency. Despite Trump’s belief in his constant victories, the authors expose the consequences of his actions, hinting at the eventual downfall of his hubris.
In “Regime Change,” two New York Times journalists offer a riveting chronicle of the weird fusion of reality and show business in the White House.
By Fintan O’Toole
Fintan O’Toole is the author of “We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland” and the advising editor of The New York Review of Books.
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
REGIME CHANGE: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
In January 2026, The New York Times asked Donald Trump why, having told his family not to make new business deals in foreign countries during his first term as president, he was permitting them to do so now. He answered: “Because I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to.”
In “Regime Change,” the New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s riveting and richly textured narrative of the first 14 months of Trump’s second term, the authors include this reply as part of a coldly devastating account of how the Trumps have added more than $1 billion to the family fortune.
By “nobody,” as Haberman and Swan make clear, Trump meant those who enable his impunity: the sycophantic courtiers with whom he has surrounded himself; the Republican majority in Congress that abandoned its duty to check executive power; the tech moguls who rushed to pay homage to him; the MAGA base that venerates him. So long as none of them publicly objects to his actions, he has permission to do whatever he wants.
All this presents a profound challenge to journalism. The profession is shaped by an assumption that has been around at least since the Greek tragedians: Revelation is followed by reversal. When Oedipus’ (or Richard Nixon’s) crimes are exposed, he must fall from power. But not so Trump. With a few notable exceptions, he relies on a collective shrug of indifference from those in his support system, and defies exposure. What can journalists do in a world where there is no shame and, apparently, no consequence?
Haberman and Swan have spent more than a decade covering Trump’s political career and the events they portray are in themselves well known: the excesses of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the chaos of Trump’s tariffs, the vampiric return of Jeffrey Epstein, the militarization of American cities, the unleashing of ICE on migrant communities, the abuse of the justice system to go after Trump’s perceived enemies, the assault on the independence of the Federal Reserve, the headlong stumble into war on Iran.
What the authors add is the vivid detail that makes these events feel actual. They wrest reality itself back from the distorted world of entertainment, illusion, fantasy and denial that Trump has generated around himself. It is this flood of provocation, atrocity, self-dealing and fabrication that makes Haberman and Swan’s counternarrative so vital.
In an hourlong interview with the president in March 2026, Trump reflects on his legal battles and presidential campaigns and tells the authors, “Essentially I won every fucking time,” but then complains, “And I’m tired of winning and winning and winning and just getting bad fucking press. It’s about time that you tell the truth. Okay?”
T.S. Eliot wrote that “human kind/Cannot bear very much reality,” and in this at least Trump is all too human. Here is a man who, as Haberman and Swan report, employs an aide, Natalie Harp, to immerse him in “a fresh stream of positive news stories and social media comments that she would often read aloud.” Harp, the authors note, “wrote Trump adoring letters that she left in his personal spaces, including one that read, ‘You are all that matters to me.’”
Triumphant Roman emperors are said to have had an enslaved attendant whisper in their ears that they were, after all, merely mortal. Trump, even as he is planning to mark his own immortality with a colossal triumphal arch in Washington, has his ears filled with constant trills of adulation.
In this bath of self-glorification, even imperial conquest seems easy: Haberman and Swan write that, alongside his public desire to annex Canadaand Greenland, Trump privately “told several associates that Venezuela could be America’s 51st state and that he would appoint a governor to run it.” The success of the daring raid on that country in January 2026 and the capture of its president, Nicolás Maduro, reinforced Trump’s certainty that he could reshape the world quickly and painlessly.
Haberman and Swan burst all these bubbles. “Regime Change” is that good old-fashioned creation: a chronicle. And chronicles have never been more necessary — or more countercultural. The “constant stream” of positive stories that Trump’s aides feed him is recycled into the posts he pumps out on his own social media platform, sometimes nearly all night long. (Haberman and Swan report that when the United States appeared to be joining the Israel bombing campaign against Iran in June 2025, reporters seeking comment from the White House “were directed to Trump’s Truth Social feed.”)
Moreover, the authors depict the weird fusion of reality and show business in the White House. “We need plot twists,” Trump tells a “startled ally” as he muses on the possible appointment of his vanquished rival, the Florida governor Ron DeSantis, as defense secretary. “I’m not a big fan of Ukraine,” he announces at a high-level Oval Office meeting. “Except their women. They keep winning Miss Universe.” He nominates John Ratcliffe as C.I.A. director because, “if you were going to cast a guy to play C.I.A. director, that’s who you’d pick.”
He also declares his scandalous public dressing-down of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, in February 2025, “great television” and “better than ‘The Apprentice.’” And his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, keeps Trump supplied with gruesome video footage of the bloody effects of drone strikes on human targets, described by one official as “Hegseth’s snuff films.”
There are episodes in “Regime Change” that read like satire. Trump, worrying about his own envisaged arch, calls the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to ask him whether there is a viewing deck on the Arc de Triomphe and, if so, whether it is dangerous: “What do you think, Emmanuel, do people jump off it?”
In ordinary times, the authors’ exercise in almost instant history might seem premature and precipitate. But if these crazy times are not to become ordinary — if we are not to be habituated to the recklessness of autocratic misrule — we cannot afford to wait for the archives to be opened.
The plot twist that Trump will not relish is that by the end of this saga of unrestrained hubris, there are intimations of the nemesis that must follow: the war on Iran throwing the Strait of Hormuz into chaos, the rising cost of livingmaking a mockery of his promise to control inflation, his popularity slumping to new lows. Trump will not want to read this book because it shows him, not winning and winning, but gradually losing it as reality has the temerity not to bend itself to his whims. Will anyone whisper in his ear that Haberman and Swan have done what he demanded and told the truth?
REGIME CHANGE: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump | By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan | Simon & Schuster | 464 pp. | $34“
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