Who Would You Vote For: Lindsey Graham or This Project 2025 Architect?

Paul Dans, the architect of the far-right plan Project 2025, will primary Republican Senator Linsdey Graham in South Carolina next year. Dans’s campaign muddies the ideological waters of MAGA, as he admonishes Graham for being a “swamp critter” while President Trump has already given Graham his endorsement.

Yet Dans and his campaign are parroting Trump-aligend talking points while running against the guy who Trump backs.

“What we’ve done with Project 2025 is really change the game in terms of closing the door on the progressive era,” Dans told The Associated Press. ”If you look at where the chokepoint is, it’s the United States Senate. That’s the headwaters of the swamp.”

“I want to run for our children,” he said Monday to NBC News. “I want to run to stop World War III. I want to run to make the American dream affordable for the next generation, but really to keep this great country in shape for another 250 years. This time, the patriots stood up and said, ‘Enough is enough.’ We need to have a government of, by, and for the people again. Not by swamp critters like Lindsey Graham.”

Dans also called Graham a “warmonger,” an increasingly common dealbreaker for MAGA Republicans, who want an “end to endless wars” (and have gotten nowhere with that thus far).

Dans left the Heritage Foundation last year after backlash to Project 2025 grew too overwhelming for him to bear and Trump unconvincingly washed his hands of Project 2025. Now he wants to join the Senate to be the Trump ally that he doesn’t think Graham truly is.

“There is no amount of lipstick that you can put on Lindsey to make MAGA fall for him, OK? That show is over. The jig is up. And it’s essentially ‘Sunset Boulevard’ for Lindsey at this stage,” Dans told The Post and Courier, referring to Graham being booed on stage in his home state in 2023 during a Trump rally.

Graham’s campaign doesn’t seem to feel threatened by Dans.

“After being unceremoniously dumped in 2024 while trying to torpedo Donald Trump’s historic campaign, Paul Dans has parachuted himself into the state of South Carolina in direct opposition to President Trump’s longtime friend and ally in the Senate Lindsey Graham,” Graham’s senior adviser (and former Trump senior adviser) Chris LaCivita said to NBC. “Like everything Paul Dans starts, this too will end prematurely.”

Donald Trump dodged an easy question Monday about his rift with alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

During a press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, the president was asked to explain what caused the “breach” between the president and his Palm Beach neighbor. Trump’s answer only skimmed the surface.

“That’s such old history. Very easy to explain, but I don’t want to waste your time by explaining it,” Trump said.

“But for years I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein, I wouldn’t talk, because he did something that was inappropriate. He hired help. And I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again,’” Trump said.

“He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He did it again. And I threw him out of the place,” Trump continued. “Persona non grata. I threw him out, and that was it. I’m glad I did, to tell you the truth.”

Trump’s supposedly “easy” answer isn’t all that easy to understand.

Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s alleged victims, has said she was recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell to become Epstein’s traveling masseuse while she was working at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in 2000. She was 16 at the time.

But Trump and Epstein reportedly didn’t have their falling out until four years later, when they fought over an oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach that they both wanted to purchase—with Trump ultimately winning out at auction, according to The Washington Post. Four months later, a woman filed a police report alleging that Epstein had paid her 15-year-old stepdaughter $300 to massage him while partially undressed.

Trump later claimed he’d banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago for misconduct, calling him a “real creep,” former Trump aide Sam Nunberg said in 2019.

During the press conference Monday, Trump weirdly said he’d “never had the privilege of going to [Epstein’s] island,” and that he’d turned down the offer in one of his “good moments.”

Trump’s defense of his friendship with Epstein has only gotten increasingly baffling since the Justice Department claimed at the beginning of the month that Epstein kept no client list—after previously promising to release such a list. In the intervening time, evidence has continued to mount that Trump and Epstein had a close relationship, as the president has maintained he was not involved in the sex offender’s alleged sex-trafficking ring.

But perhaps Trump’s defense isn’t as “easy” as he’s made it out to be.

In 2023, Epstein’s brother Mark said that he’d seen an unaired interview between Jeffrey and Steve Bannon, in which the disgraced financier claimed he’d “stopped hanging out with Trump when he realized Trump was a crook.”

And this is far from the first inconsistency. In 2016, Trump Organization attorney Alan Garten claimed that the two had no relationship: “They were not friends and did not socialize together,” he said of his boss and Epstein. But in August 2017, Epstein described himself as the president’s “closest friend” during an interview with biographer Michael Wolff.

Donald Trump on Monday suggested that he turned down invitations to travel to the late notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s island. “I never had the privilege of going to his island,” he told reporters.

During a press conference with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump continued his ongoing efforts to deflect attention from his past relationship with Epstein, as his administration faces criticism for its lack of transparency about the case of the disgraced financier.

“By the way, I never went to the island,” Trump said, while noting alleged trips by notable figures such as former President Bill Clinton.

“And many other people that are very big people, nobody ever talks about them. I never had the privilege of going to his island,” the president said. “And I did turn it down. But a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island. In one of my very good moments, I turned it down. I didn’t want to go to his island.”

Observers on social media were swift to question Trump’s characterization of such trips as a “privilege.” The seemingly sarcastic but extraordinarily tactless choice of words comes as Trump frantically tries to escape the mounting Epstein scandal—yet, with each public remark, only becomes further mired in it.

Moments earlier, for instance, the president offered details about his falling out with Epstein in the mid-2000s, which culminated in the financier being banned from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. However, the president’s story cut against his administration’s recent insistence that Trump booted his former friend “for being a creep.”

Instead, Trump claimed that the relationship soured because Epstein repeatedly poached Trump’s employees. “He did something that was inappropriate,” Trump said. “He hired help. And I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He did it again. And I threw him out of the place.” (Past reports, meanwhile, indicate that they had split over an oceanfront property in Palm Beach for which Trump outbid Epstein.)

Then there are the president’s comments about convicted Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell—who has met Trump’s deputy attorney general in much-scrutinized closed-door meetings last week. Trump conspicuously refuses to rule out pardoning Maxwell, simply telling reporters that he is “allowed” to do so, which he reiterated on Monday.

Pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell is an option that’s apparently still on the table.

Donald Trump refused Monday to shut down speculation that he might legally forgive the convicted associate and longtime girlfriend of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, telling reporters at his Scottish golf club that no one had formally “approached” him yet about the controversial idea.

“Would you completely rule out a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell?” asked a reporter. “Is that something you would ever consider?”

“Well I’m allowed to give her a pardon,” Trump said. “But nobody’s approached me with it, nobody’s asked me about it. It’s in the news, about that. That aspect of it. But right now it would be inappropriate to talk about it.”

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse at the hands of her millionaire boyfriend. As president, Trump can dole out pardons for anyone convicted of a federal offense. But why he would choose to extend one to Maxwell prods at a more unsettling possibility.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—Trump’s former personal attorney—met with Maxwell late last week, reportedly peeling 100 names from her in a potential pardon quid pro quo. After her second day with Blanche, Maxwell’s team laid their cards on the table: They wanted a pardon from the president.

The interview followed weeks of mounting pressure on Trump from his base, who have clamored for the release of more documents from the Epstein files after the Justice Department contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of the pedophile’s supposed client list.

In a last-ditch effort to quell the bubbling discontent and make the forthcoming Maxwell alliance more palatable, conservatives and Trump allies have attempted to make a martyr out of Maxwell, suggesting that the well-documented sex criminal could have been wrongly convicted and was unduly serving the sentence warranted to a deceased Epstein (Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence for aiding in the victimization of hundreds of girls).

“She deserves to be out,” Alan Dershowitz, Epstein’s former lawyer, told Newsmax last week.

Meanwhile, Americans are increasingly disturbed by Trump’s handling of the entire fiasco. A poll published by Emerson College Polling on Friday found that just 16 percent of Americans approved of the way Trump was managing the Epstein scandal, while more than half of polled Americans—51 percent—disapproved.

The spin is particularly humiliating for MAGA Republicans, especially those invested in QAnon. After years of their heralding Trump as a supposed messiah, believing that he would dish the dirt on a secretive, international web of sex traffickers, the administration now seems hell-bent on covering up its own ties to Epstein’s island and the crimes committed there.

Social media users are ridiculing President Donald Trump for appearing to cheat at golf during his trip to Scotland.

Trump’s ongoing trip—which will cost taxpayers nearly $10 million—includes visits to his two Trump resorts, and a ribbon-cutting ceremony to inaugurate a new 18-hole course at his resort in Aberdeenshire.

Just as the trip shows Trump disregarding the line between presidential duties and both pleasure and self-promotion, footage from his trip appears to show Trump flouting the rule that golfers “play it where it lies,” according to critics online. In the video, as the president slows to a stop in a golf cart, two caddies walk out in front of him, one of them discreetly tossing a ball behind him for Trump to play.

Many critics seized on the clip as evidence of Trump’s lack of integrity, on and off the golf course.

Among them was sportswriter Rick Reilly, whose 2019 book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump is an indictment of Trump’s golf game.

“Well I’m just personally very disappointed in him,” Reilly wrote on X in response to the video, adding, in another post, “His caddies also tee him up in the rough, toss his ball out of bunkers, and roll back six footers to him. How else is a 79-y-o fat guy supposed to win championships?”

Meanwhile, conservative users on X over the weekend heaped praise on Trump’s golf swing.