Nancy Pelosi Gets a Surprising New Primary Challenger

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ex–chief of staff has announced his intention to primary Representative Nancy Pelosi in an attempt to redefine the Democratic Party.

Saikat Chakrabarti, 39, who previously worked in the tech sector and for Senator Bernie Sanders before joining Ocasio-Cortez’s staff, announced his 2026 candidacy for California’s 11th congressional district Wednesday in an X post.

“I’ve got some news: I’ve decided to run against Nancy Pelosi to represent San Francisco in Congress. I know some of you might be surprised that Speaker Emeritus Pelosi is running again, but she is—for her 21st term!” Chakrabarti’s post read.

The former congressional staffer went on to describe the rift between the Democratic Party’s older, neoliberal leadership and its younger, progressive members.

“I respect what Nancy Pelosi has accomplished in her career, but we are living in a totally different America than the one she knew when she entered politics 45 years ago,” Chakrabarti continued. “In an interview with Ezra Klein after Trump’s victory, Pelosi said the Democrats don’t need to change. I disagree. When Democrats were about to appoint their star communicator—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—to chair the powerful Oversight committee to hold Trump and his cronies accountable, Pelosi personally intervened to block it.”

While Pelosi has yet to publicly announce her 2026 candidacy, she has filed the requisite paperwork to run. And even with the former House speaker’s age (she’ll be 86 in March 2026), Chakrabarti still faces an uphill battle in San Francisco, which Pelosi has represented for nearly 40 years in Congress.

“When Nancy Pelosi was first elected to Congress, you could buy a home on a single income. A summer job could pay for college. Republicans believed in climate change and respected election results,” Chakrabarti’s announcement said. “Now, the things that defined the American Dream—being able to afford health care, education, a home, and raise a family—are impossible for most people.… The Democratic Party needs to stop acting like it’s competing against a normal political party that plays by the rules, and it needs a bold vision for how to raise living standards, quality of life and security for all Americans.”

The winner of the district’s Democratic primary is almost certain to carry the general election as well, as Pelosi easily won reeelection in 2024 with 81 percent of the vote.

An ex-incarcerated organizer of the far-right Proud Boys has lofty aspirations for his future.

In an interview with Newsmax’s Greg Kelly, Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio pitched a run for office, boasting that he had already elevated himself from prison to Mar-a-Lago in a span of two weeks.

“Last time I was on, I told you that I was gonna take some time, and I was going to really think about what I was going to do,” said Tarrio. “And I think my future is in politics. I think I’m gonna take a serious look at running for office at some point in 2026 or 2028, and I believe that there is a path for that because it is my passion.”

Tarrio then went on to say that he had made up his mind to run for office, though he wasn’t sure exactly what office that would be.

“Is it gonna be local? Is it gonna be at a federal level? I don’t know, but I will tell you that I have made a decision,” he said.

Tarrio received a 22-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy charges over his role in the January 6 attack.

In 2021, a federal prosecutor, an FBI agent, and Tarrio’s own lawyer described Tarrio as an informant for local and federal law enforcement, helping authorities nab “more than a dozen people in various cases involving drugs, gambling and human smuggling” before he was arrested in 2012, according to Reuters.

In an interview with the network after Trump pardoned Tarrio alongside 1,500 other January 6 rioters, Tarrio said he was “jubilant.” Trump’s spontaneous decision to legally forgive his most ardent and violent supporters overrode his administration’s internal debate on the issue and amounted to little more than a “fuck it” moment for the president, according to a White House adviser who spoke with Axios.

Two weeks ago, in an interview with Alex Jones, Tarrio promised “retribution” against people who worked on prosecuting January 6 cases.

“We’ve got to do everything in our power to make sure that the next four years sets us up for the next 100 years,” he said.

Senate Democrats stayed on the chamber floor all night Wednesday to protest the nomination of Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025, to chair the Office of Management and Budget.

The Senate invoked cloture Wednesday afternoon with a vote of 53–47, a party-line split. In response, Democrats decided not to yield any of their allotted 30 hours of debate time, and kept the floor occupied through the night, scheduling speakers one after another.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer delivered a last-minute plea to his Republican colleagues, urging them to oppose Vought’s nomination.

“Maybe somehow you’ll realize how damaging Russell Vought is. Maybe you’ll say to yourselves, despite the fact that you might have President Trump angry with me, you’re doing the best thing for him by voting down Russell Vought ultimately, politically. Maybe. Unlikely. Forlorn hope. I always try to be an optimist. But maybe,” he said.

Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey posted on X shortly before 1 a.m. to say that he’d be taking one of the late-night shifts.

“Just got back to the Capitol past midnight as I prepare to speak during an all night marathon session to control the Senate floor and keep the focus on this assault on our Constitution,” he wrote. “We have to raise the alarm to the American people.

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said his “voice was shot” after his speaking shift.

“Just finished 3 hours of speaking on the floor—I took the 2-5am shift in Democrats’ effort to hold the floor all night in protest over OMB nominee Russel Vought,” he wrote on X.

Despite the Democrats’ efforts, Vought will likely be confirmed at 7 p.m. Thursday.

Last week, Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee boycotted a meeting to advance Vought’s nomination over the OMB’s effort to “illegally freeze trillions of dollars” for federal funding for grants and loans, which seemed born from Vought’s intention to use “impoundment” to allow the president to pause, or even outright refuse to spend, the full amount of federally mandated funding that Congress has appropriated.

The U.S. Department of Education chose to kindly let employees know that Donald Trump’s “buyout” offer for federal employees, should they accept it, may be yanked away from them at any moment.

Last week, the president announced that he’d be giving federal workers the option of full-time in-office work or quitting with a buyout and severance pay through September 30. This is a key strategy in his effort to completely transform the federal government’s bureaucratic apparatus.

However, three Department of Education officials told NBC News on Wednesday that there were some massive caveats to this policy. The department’s new chief of staff, Rachel Oglesby, and Jacqueline Clay, its chief human capital officer, told employees that the secretary of education could nullify the agreement or the government could simply stop paying, as employees would waive their right to legal claims if they take the buyout deal. Employees have until Thursday to make a decision.

“It sounded like a commercial for a used car dealership, like, ‘Act now, one day only,’” one department official who was at the meeting said.

The Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management, the agency responsible for managing federal employees, has pushed back with a memo that claims to assure the government’s accountability on payments. That memo includes a sample agreement that gives the “sole discretion” to waive the buyout to the “agency head” and “waives all rights to challenge the resignation before the Merit Systems Protection Board or any other forum.” More than 40,000 of the two million–plus federal government employees have accepted the buyout as of Wednesday.

Donald Trump is continuing to push his crazy plan for the United States to take over Gaza, even after the idea was soundly rejected by world leaders. In a post on Truth Social Thursday morning, the president said the “Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting.”

“The Palestinians, people like Chuck Schumer, would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region,” Trump said, showing his true regard for the Palestinians by using them to insult the Senate minority leader.

“They would actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free. The U.S., working with great development teams from all over the World, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth. No soldiers by the U.S. would be needed! Stability for the region would reign!!!” Trump’s post said.

The post flies in the face of White House officials’ attempt to clarify Trump’s harebrained idea, which he first mentioned during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday evening. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday that Trump only intended to “temporarily” transfer the 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza to neighboring countries, such Egypt and Jordan.

The “greatest development teams from all over the world” Trump referred to in his post presumably would be real estate developers, as opposed to humanitarian organizations who help displaced people rebuild their lives and homes. The president is trying to end America’s humanitarian initiatives by trying to close the U.S. Agency for International Development, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner is a real estate developer who sees Gaza’s destruction as an opportunity for profit.

While Trump promises not to use any U.S. troops to transfer Gaza’s population, sending Israeli troops to do the job would reignite the conflict, which continues to simmer despite a more than two-week-old ceasefire. Palestinians have universally rejected the plan, as have America’s Arab allies, who presumably would be taking them in. How, then, does Trump intend to carry out his scheme?

Donald Trump wants CBS to do more than pay the price for conducting a sit-down interview with Kamala Harris before Election Day.

Since the interview aired in September, the president has insisted that the network had selectively edited Harris’s answers to a question regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a detail made all the more confusing since CBS’s 60 Minutes and Face the Nation cut and aired different portions of her answer on different days.

“CBS and 60 Minutes defrauded the public by doing something which has never, to this extent, been seen before,” Trump posted on Truth Social early Thursday. “They 100% removed Kamala’s horrible election changing answers to questions, and replaced them with completely different, and far better, answers, taken from another part of the interview.”

CBS has maintained that the interview with the Democratic presidential candidate was only edited for time but that both clips were cut from the same extended answer to the question.

Trump sued the network for $10 billion after the interview, claiming that the different clips were tantamount to “election interference” and merited CBS losing its broadcast license. Trump also argued, at the time, that Harris should drop out of the presidential race over the GOP-baked scandal.

After a review of the interview, the Federal Communications Commission released a transcript Wednesday revealing that the two answers were in fact cut from the same cloth and had both been provided by the former vice president during an extended 21-second response.

Anna Gomez, a Democratic commissioner on the FCC, said that the raw footage of the interview provided “no evidence” that CBS violated broadcasting guidelines.

“Having now seen these materials, I see no reason to continue pursuing this investigation,” Gomez said in a statement. “The FCC should now move to dismiss this fishing expedition to avoid further politicizing our enforcement actions.”

Still, the company’s apparent innocence is backdropped by a decision from Paramount, its parent company, to pursue a settlement with Trump as it rushes to close a merger with SkyDance. Trump’s new Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has said that the editing controversy would “likely arise” in his review of the deal.

“Each excerpt reflects the substance of the vice president’s answer,” 60 Minutes said in a statement Wednesday. “As the full transcript shows, we edited the interview to ensure that as much of the vice president’s answers to 60 Minutes’ many questions were included in our original broadcast while fairly representing those answers. 60 Minutes’ hard-hitting questions of the vice president speak for themselves.”

Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States will take over Gaza and ethnically cleanse the area for new developments is such an extreme and grotesque idea, even his own people can’t conceal their disgust.

Trump announced Tuesday that he wants the U.S. to become the steward for the territory it funded the devastating destruction of for more than a year, and develop it into the “the Riviera of the Middle East.” All they needed to do is find some “beautiful area” to relocate its Palestinian residents—an ethnic cleansing by any definition. 

During an appearance on Fox News’s The Five, host Jessica Tarlov explained the widespread criticism of the president’s “untenable” plan.  

“If he’s such a humanitarian then you take those two million people and you bring them here to the U.S., which is the country you are in charge of, and you resettle them. I’m just saying, you can’t force them down other people’s throats,” Tarlov said.

“If you want to know how crazy the idea is, though, you have to look no further than Susie Wiles’s face as he said it,” Tarlov said, referring to a photograph of Trump’s White House chief of staff looking particularly horrified as the president announced his plan to ethnically cleanse all the Palestinians in Gaza.

Tarlov explained that Wiles’s wide-eyed face seemed to telegraph, “Oh my God, what is he saying?”

Trump reportedly unveiled his plan to take over Gaza just two hours before announcing it on live television.

Donald Trump openly speculated about paying himself millions to build a ballroom in the White House while signing an anti-trans executive order Wednesday.

Trump was signing the “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order in the White House’s East Room and, as he is prone to do, went off on a tangent, remarking how the room was so full that many people couldn’t get in.

“This room is packed. You know, I offered to build a ballroom, I’m very good at building ballrooms. I build beautiful ballrooms, and I actually offered to build a ballroom for the White House. I was going to build it right there,” Trump said, pointing behind him.

“I was going to build a beautiful, beautiful ballroom like I have at Mar-a-Lago, as beautiful as it can be. It was going to cost about a hundred million dollars. I offered to do it, and I never heard back,” Trump added to laughter, noting that he made the offer to the Biden administration. “So, I’m going to try and make the offer to myself, you know, because we could use a bigger room.”

While Trump added that such a project “would cost nothing,” and “I’ll spend the whole thing myself,” he has a reputation for charging the government (and taxpayers, by extension) exorbitant amounts of money.

For example, during his first term, he reportedly charged the Secret Service “300 percent or more above the authorized government per diem” for accommodation at his hotels, and his political work has also resulted in millions of dollars going to his personal coffers. Trump will likely bring up his ballroom idea again, and in all likelihood, it won’t be the last far-fetched, exorbitant project he proposes.

One of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s most devoted cheerleaders, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, may have an ulterior motive for supporting the vaccine skeptic’s nomination to head the Department of Health and Human Services, according to a new report from The American Prospect.

Soon-Shiong has seemingly gone out of his way to boost Kennedy’s bid to head the U.S. health agencies.

In December, Soon-Shiong reportedly blocked the publication of an op-ed criticizing Trump’s Cabinet choices, including Kennedy, TAP reported.

Last week, LA Times contributor Eric Reinhert accused the legacy newspaper of making significant edits to a piece of his that was largely critical of Kennedy, recasting his warning about Trump’s pick to head HHS with a more optimistic tone. The edited version suggested that the virulent anti-vaccine advocate could help assuage the American public’s poor opinion of the health care industry. The New Republic published the original version of Reinhert’s piece here.

When Kennedy’s nomination was narrowly advanced on Tuesday, Soon-Shiong posted on X to cheer him on. “Yay!!!! The transformation of healthcare begins,” he wrote.

But it looks like the billionaire scientist’s support is ultimately self-serving. As Kennedy’s confirmation advances, ImmunityBio, Soon-Shiong’s biotech firm, has three pending drug applications in front of the Food and Drug Administration.

Soon-Shiong founded ImmunityBio in 2014, just four years before he bought the LA Times. The firm’s first commercial drug, Anktiva, which treats a form of bladder cancer, hit the market last April after it was initially rejected the year before. The snafu led Soon-Shiong to infuse an additional $400 million into the company to keep things moving, according to the LA Business Journal.

By ensuring his new buddy secures the position overseeing the FDA, Soon-Shiong can possibly avoid hitting the same expensive snag a second, third, and fourth time.

Soon-Shiong is listed as ImmunityBio’s executive chairman and global chief medical and scientific officer, and in December, his ownership share of the company was around 80 percent.

The far right, including Elon Musk, are pushing a conspiracy theory that the U.S. Agency for International Development secretly funds several mainstream media outlets, including Politico, the Associated Press, and The New York Times.

The conspiracy hatched on Tuesday after a technical glitch prevented Politico’s employees from receiving their paychecks. MAGA influencers, including Benny Johnson, Dana Loesch, and Rob Smith, all saw this as a direct result of Donald Trump suspending USAID’s programs. Johnson fueled the unfounded belief by posting screenshots from USASpending.gov showing that the federal government paid Politico $8.2 million last year, and wrongly assumed that it all came from USAID.

However, in reality, that money appears to come from Politico Pro subscriptions, which are targeted at business executives, lobbyists, and government workers, and cost more than $10,000 each. It also was the total amount of money from all government agencies, not just USAID. The service tracks legislation, votes, and lawsuits, and includes niche reporting and analysis about news from within the federal government.

Right-wing commentators then found what they claimed was evidence that USAID funneled money to the Associated Press, although much of that is due to syndication agreements between the AP and government media outlets such as Voice of America.

Ian Miles Cheong then got in on the conspiracy-mongering, posting screenshots claiming that The New York Times is being funded by the U.S. government, prompting Musk to post, “NYT is government-funded media.” The right-wing panic quickly made its way to the floor of Congress, where Representative Lauren Boebert falsely claimed during a hearing that Politico was laying off staff due to USAID’s funding being cut.

Even the Trump administration weighed in, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt telling reporters at a briefing that she “can confirm that the more than eight million taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayer’s dime will no longer be happening.”

“The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now,” Leavitt said.

As ludicrous as this false narrative is, the right is not likely to listen to evidence that goes against its “findings,” especially as media outlets continue to report news from the Trump administration that it dislikes. The expenditures it is decrying are a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars in the federal budget, and go toward subscriptions and advertising. But all the right sees is an excuse to go after the media outlets that criticize it, even if some conservatives, like Johnson, took money from the Russian government.