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.

President Trump thinks starving Gazans should take time from their ongoing genocide to say thanks to him.

“Getting people fed right now … that’s the number one position. Because you have a lot of starving people, you have people that—you know the United States recently, just a couple weeks ago, we gave $60 million, that’s a lot of money,” Trump said on Monday, taking questions after a meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Kier Starmer. “No other nation gave money. I know the prime minister would have if he knew about it. And he really knows about it now ’cus we’re gonna be discussing it. But, we gave $60 million, nobody said even thank you, you know, thanks. Somebody should say ‘thank you.’ But other nations are gonna have to step up.”

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have been either bombed, shot, beaten, or starved to death by the Israeli military for the last two years. The IDF is massacring people at aid distribution sites. And the United States has funded the vast majority of that suffering. Meanwhile, Trump wants to turn it into some beachfront resort once Israel is done razing it. No one has anything to thank him for.

Trump’s tone on Monday was reminiscent of the one Vice President JD Vance took with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in February, when Vance admonished the leader like a child when he asked for more U.S. support against Russia’s invasion.

Republicans are losing their grip on Donald Trump’s latest Epstein cover-up.

Speaking with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham tripped up a supposedly “new” development in the Russian collusion investigation, suggesting that more evidence had emerged tying former President Barack Obama to the nearly 10-year-old national security scandal.

Amid rising intraparty tensions over Trump’s apparent ties to pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, the president wildly suggested last week that Obama had interfered with the results of the Trump-Russia investigation, claiming that it was actually Hillary Clinton who received aid from the foreign power. But Graham carried the torch over the weekend, reiterating the president’s theory on air while claiming that National Security Director Tulsi Gabbard recently found that Obama had forced investigators to “keep looking” after initial findings had pointed to no collusion.

“I think somebody needs to look at what we found,” Graham said. “So what we’re looking at is what role did Obama play in 2016 that changed the narrative that resulted in 2017? I’m not alleging he committed treason, but I am saying that it bothers me, it’s disturbing.”

But then host Kristen Welker played back a montage of Graham’s previous comments, proving that Graham originally agreed with the findings of the intelligence community—long before Trump tried to opportunistically rewrite history.

“Senator, are you now saying that you don’t believe Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 election?” Welker pressed.

Apparently getting frustrated, Graham again stressed that new evidence had emerged that changed his opinion.

“Hold on, Senator, as you know, former President Obama has weighed in through a spokesperson,” Welker interrupted. “He says that’s just patently false. I actually spoke to Susan Miller, who’s a former senior CIA officer who helped oversee the 2017 intelligence assessment on Russian interference. She says it’s completely false that Obama or anyone else asked them to change or sway their investigation. She says, and she’s a Republican, that they all would have quit if that happened.”

And then Welker asked the million-dollar question: “Senator, are you trying to rewrite history to distract from the Epstein matter, Senator?”

“I’m trying to let you know, and the media know, that we found something we didn’t know before,” Graham insisted, continuing to defend Trump. “At the end of the day, I’m not calling for a prosecution against President Obama for treason, but I am calling for an investigation.

“The only people colluding with the Russians were the Hillary Clinton campaign,” Graham continued.

But Welker wasn’t having it.

“Senator, you’re saying there’s something new,” Welker replied. “This report goes back to 2020. It’s five years old. There’s actually nothing new in this report and nothing that changes any conclusion.”

“Whatever,” Graham responded.

The Mueller report was published in 2019. The 22-month investigation found that Russia did interfere with the 2016 election, but did not find sufficient evidence to prove that the 2016 Trump campaign had coordinated with Russia to undermine the election results. The report did not take a clear stance on whether Trump had obstructed justice.

Donald Trump is once again claiming that windmills are making whales go crazy.

Trump’s long-awaited EU trade deal announcement went off the rails Sunday as the president detoured into yet another lengthy and far-fetched diatribe against wind energy.

“And the other thing I say to Europe: We will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States,” Trump said. “They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery. Our valleys. Our beautiful plains—and I’m not talking about airplanes, I’m talking about beautiful plains.”

Before he started ranting about wind energy, European Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen had been attempting to discuss immigration. But after briefly lying about his massive, inhumane deportation scheme, saying, “We have nobody coming in, and we have hundreds of thousands of people being taken out—and the bad ones first,” Trump changed the subject to wind turbines.

“When they start to rust and rot in eight years, you can’t really turn ’em off, you can’t bury ’em,” Trump claimed. “They won’t let you bury the propellers, you know, the props, because they’re a certain type of fiber that doesn’t go well with the land, that’s what they say. The environmentalists say you can’t bury them, because the fiber doesn’t go well with the land.”

Windmill blades, which are made of fiberglass and plastic, can be buried in landfills at the end of their 20-year life cycle. To counter the growth of these wind turbine graveyards, scientists have even developed recyclable blades. But Trump doesn’t actually care about any of that—moments after deferring to environmentalists in his argument, he called them “political hacks” who wanted to hurt the United States.

Trump was far from done. The president went on to complain that wind energy was more expensive than other alternatives. In reality, wind energy has emerged as a competitively priced energy alternative.

“You need subsidy for wind, and energy should not need subsidy. With energy you make money, you don’t lose money,” Trump claimed.

The president then immediately admitted that he didn’t actually care about the cost.

“But more important than that, it ruins the landscape, it kills the birds, they’re noisy,” Trump continued. “You know you have a certain place in the Massachusetts area that over the last 20 years had one or two whales wash ashore, and over the last short period of time, they had 18. Because it’s driving them loco. It’s driving them crazy. No, windmills will not happen in the United States.”

Trump had previously claimed that offshore windmills were driving whales “crazy” and causing them to wash up on shore, dead, in 2023. However, there “is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Three years later, and the president still can’t stop spreading absurd misinformation about wind energy. “People oughta know, these windmills are very destructive, they’re environmentally unsound,” he claimed.

After seeing some windmills during his Lynchian golfing expedition in Scotland, it seems that the president just can’t get wind energy off of his mind. During a press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer Monday, Trump continued to rave about windmills claiming that they kill birds, which they do, but no more than fossil fuel operations—or house cats.

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s culture-warrior superintendent of public instruction, is a self-avowed opponent of pornography in education—so much so that he’s accused schools of “pushing pornography” for containing decidedly nonpornographic books like The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.

Now he’s under investigation after allegedly displaying a pornographic video on a TV in his office during the closed-door portion of a Board of Education meeting last week.

According to Oklahoma politics site NonDoc, board member Ryan Deatherage noticed the video on a screen in Walter’s office while a parent discussed appealing a district transfer denial. Deatherage says the video featured “multiple nude women” and “some sort of ‘chiropractic table.’”

As Deatherage considered how to broach the subject, fellow board member Becky Carson—the only other person with a view of the screen—spotted it too. “I was like, ‘What am I seeing?’” Carson told NonDoc. At first, she wondered, “Is that woman naked?” before thinking that “she’s got a body suit on.” After noticing nipples and pubic hair, she realized, “That is not a body suit.”

Both board members described the footage as “retro,” and said it did not feature intercourse.

Carson confronted Walters, telling NonDoc she asked what was on the TV, with Walters acknowledging that “he saw it.” “Turn it off. Now,” Carson recalls saying. Walters asked, “What is this? What is this?” and fumbled to turn it off while saying, “I can’t get it to turn off. I can’t figure out how to turn it off.”

Lawmakers in the state’s legislature have called for an investigation, reports The Oklahoman, with Republican House Speaker Kyle Hilbert saying Walters should “unlock and turn over all relevant devices,” and Republican Senate President Pro Tempore Lonnie Paxton saying Carson and Deatherage’s accounts “paint a strange, unsettling scene that demands clarity and transparency.”

Walters’s response to the new incident has been all but graceful. A spokesperson told NonDoc their story was “a junk tabloid lie,” telling a reporter to “get a job at” a different independent publication “and let us know when you are going to write a real story.” Walters told Fox 25 the accusation was “blatantly dishonest” and politically motivated.

On Sunday, Walters shared a statement on X, calling the accusations “categorically false” and adding, “I have no knowledge of what was on the TV screen during the alleged incident, and there is absolutely no truth to any implication of wrongdoing.”

Walters went so far as to say the story amounts to the “tactics of a broken establishment afraid of real change.” In confronting him for displaying pornographic content during an official meeting, he claimed, “They aren’t just attacking me, they’re attacking the values of the Oklahomans who elected me to challenge the status quo.”

Remarkably, this is not the first time Walters is accused of subjecting unsuspecting Oklahoma lawmakers to porn.

In March 2023, he emailed several pornographic images to state legislators, claiming he was supplying them with evidence they’d requested of inappropriate material in Oklahoma schools. But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were left confused and upset, as the email was entirely devoid of context, containing no mention of schools that allegedly had the material.

The Washington Post reports that President Trump is infuriated that the Epstein files are still dominating headlines, even as he throws distraction after distraction to the public.

Two sources close to the president also told the Post that the rift between the Justice Department and the FBI is just as bad as it looks.

“This is a pretty substantial distraction,” said one person close to the situation. “While many are trying to keep the unity, in many ways, the DOJ and the FBI are breaking at the seams. Many are wondering how sustainable this is going to be for all the parties involved—be it the FBI director or attorney general.”

This is all of course completely self-inflicted, as the Trump administration has failed to deliver on massive promises on the Epstein files and then angering its base even more as it attempts to cover its tracks.

“They completely miscalculated the fever pitch to which they built this up,” former Reagan Justice Department official Stephen A. Saltzburg told the Post. “Now, they seem to be in full-bore panic mode, trying to change the subject and flailing in an effort to make sense of what makes no sense.”

In the midst of the chaos, Trump is hesitant to fire people like Attorney General Pam Bondi or Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, even as both have badly contradicted themselves on Epstein, because he “does not want to create a bigger spectacle by firing anyone,” a source close to the situation said.

The diversions have been clear and obvious. A rushed Martin Luther King Jr. files release against the will of his family, a trade deal with the European Union, unsubstantiated accusations of treason lobbed at his ultimate nemesis, former President Obama—none of which have succeeded in actually getting his base off the trail of one of their most important issues.

“We had the Greatest Six Months of any President in the History of our Country, and all the Fake News wants to talk about is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax!” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week, one of many questionable posts he made about the deceased sex offender and financier with whom he was close with.

The wagons are beginning to circle now, as the House is expected to subpoena the Epstein files when they return next month, and have already subpoenaed imprisoned Epstein accomplice Ghilaine Maxwell to testify before Congress in August.