Trump Border Czar Targets Boston Mayor in Bizarre Rant

On Wednesday, border czar Tom Homan, as he is wont to do, threatened a local elected Democrat on Fox News.

This time, Homan targeted Boston’s Democratic mayor, Michelle Wu, who has earned national prominence—and the ire of Homan and the White House—for spiritedly defending her city from incursions by the Trump administration.

Asked about Wu’s staggering primary victory as she seeks reelection in November, Homan said, “I don’t care who the mayor is.… They’re not going to stop us. They can stay on the side and watch us do their job. However, they better not step over the line. They better not impede our efforts. Or there’s going to be consequences.

“We’re coming,” Homan continued. “We’re going to be there tomorrow. We’re going to be there the next day. We’re going to be there next month. We’re going to be there next year. You’re not stopping [us] from what we’re doing.”

Last week, Trump’s Justice Department sued Boston and Wu over the Boston Trust Act, which limits local authorities’ cooperation with federal immigration enforcement agencies. The DOJ argues that the law illegally obstructs the federal government—though Boston University law professor Sarah Sherman-Stokes told the Associated Press it is well within the city’s “constitutional right to limit their involvement in enforcing immigration law.”

Wu, for her part, condemned the lawsuit as an “unconstitutional attack” by a presidential administration “intent on attacking our community to advance their own authoritarian agenda.”

“This is our city,” the mayor said, “and we will vigorously defend our laws and the constitutional rights of cities, which have been repeatedly upheld in courts across the country. We will not yield.”

Former Vice President Kamala Harris’s new memoir sheds light on her abbreviated presidential campaign, skewering Joe Biden’s decision to remain in the race as “recklessness” in the process. 

“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris wrote, in an excerpt from 107 Days, her first-person account of her sprint to Election Day, published in The Atlantic on Wednesday. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”

Harris comes off as more bitter and negative toward the Biden administration than ever before here, and with good reason. Biden maintained his candidacy for 2024 despite accruing years’ worth of mental slip-ups and gaffes, culminating in an absolutely disastrous debate performance that made it clear he was in no state–mental or physical—to run for a second presidential term. 

Even after that, it took nearly a month for him to officially step down. Harris wrote, rather transparently, that she stopped short of advising the president to step down because she felt it would make her look bad, and too self-serving.  

The former vice president also described feeling forced to constantly prove her loyalty to the Biden administration, particularly after she essentially called him a segregationist onstage at the Democratic primary debate in 2019. She also felt pigeonholed by the busywork and events she was tasked with, and abandoned in the face of her enemies when she took center stage as the candidate. 

“In Selma, Alabama … I gave a strong speech on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.… I reiterated my strong support for Israel’s security and called on Hamas to release the hostages and accept the cease-fire agreement then on the table,” Harris wrote. “It was a speech that had been vetted and approved by the White House and the National Security Council. It went viral, and the West Wing was displeased. I was castigated for, apparently, delivering it too well.” 

She continued, writing, “Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well.”

A constant theme in these pages is how Harris’s unwavering loyalty to Biden was constantly unrecognized and unrewarded, making her decision to stay so loyal (up until now, really) all the more questionable.  

“When Fox News attacked me on everything from my laugh, to my tone of voice, to whom I’d dated in my 20s, or claimed I was a ‘DEI hire,’ the White House rarely pushed back with my actual résumé,” Harris wrote. “Two terms elected D.A., top cop in the second-largest department of justice in the United States, senator representing one in eight Americans …  getting anything positive said about my work or any defense against untrue attacks was almost impossible.”  

On one hand, Harris has a right to feel slighted, and set up for failure. It sounds like senior members of the Biden administration had issues acknowledging her strengths and working with her, at the very minimum. 

On the other hand, it feels quite futile to hear Harris, who had multiple opportunities to differentiate herself from her predecessor, parrot the same talking points about Biden’s health that progressives were criticized for, well after the fact. Even if hindsight is 20/20, it might not do Harris any good in 2028. 

Her new memoir, 107 Days, comes out September 23. 

A special election in Virginia has put the House one step closer to releasing the Epstein files.

James Walkinshaw’s win in Virginia’s 11th congressional district on Tuesday night has given Democrats another vote in the lower chamber, shrinking a razor-thin Republican majority that has so far obstructed attempts to bring transparency to records related to the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.

The Virginian’s blowout victory will push the party breakdown to 219 Republicans and 213 Democrats in the House, a margin so tight that House Republicans will only be able to lose two votes on any legislation they hope to pass through the chamber. But three other vacancies—in Arizona, Texas, and Tennessee—threaten to further erode a conservative grip on the House.

Two of those special elections are almost certain to be Democratic victories. They include the races to fill seats left by Texas Democratic Representative Sylvester Turner, who passed away March 5, and Texas Democratic Representative Raul Grijalva, who died just days later, on March 13. Walkinshaw, who will replace Gerry Connolly, was the first Democrat to win a special election since Donald Trump returned to office in January.

So far, House Speaker Mike Johnson has blocked bipartisan attempts to make the Epstein files public. But if supporters of the movement can muster 218 votes in the House, they can circumvent Johnson altogether, sending the motion to the Senate.

Some notable House Republicans have already joined hands with dozens of their Democratic counterparts in a bipartisan effort to make the Epstein case files publicly available.

Introduced by Republican Representative Thomas Massie, who has a habit of actually standing up to Trump, the bill aims to “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Attorneys’ Offices” relating to Epstein and his longtime girlfriend and sex-trafficking associate, Ghislaine Maxwell.

The text of the bill specifies the release of flight logs, travel records, the names of individuals and government officials connected to Epstein’s “criminal activities, civil settlements, immunity or plea agreements, or investigatory proceedings,” the names of corporations or organizations tied to Epstein’s trafficking networks, potential immunity deals or sealed settlements, as well as “internal DOJ communications.”

Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Elijah Crane, Tim Burchett, Nancy Mace, and many others have already signed their support for the bill.

Falling short of condemnation, President Donald Trump is acting completely clueless about the more than a dozen Russian drones that entered Polish airspace.

Writing on Truth Social Wednesday morning, Trump didn’t attempt to conceal his confusion. 

“What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!” he wrote.

But Trump is going to need to come up with a better response to Russia’s latest incursion than, “Huh?” Poland has invoked Article 4 of the NATO treaty, meaning that the alliance—including the United States—must consult about the latest security threat.  

For the first time in NATO’s history, alliance fighter jets engaged enemy targets in allied airspace, as forces scrambled to shoot down the foreign drones, according to The New York Times. The drones were part of a larger-scale attack across the border in Ukraine.

Trump refused to answer a question about what Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called a “large-scale provocation” Tuesday night, after a disastrous foray to a restaurant in downtown Washington, D.C. 

The president has previously used social media to create the impression that he is criticizing world leaders that he privately cozies up to, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But Trump’s latest statement falls short of public condemnation, portraying ignorance—and for once, it’s seemingly on purpose!

Russia’s latest move has reignited long-held concerns that Trump’s toothless approach to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has emboldened Moscow to expand its efforts to other neighboring states. 

Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina is dead set against the prospect of federal agents being deployed in Charlotte.

Due to the fatal stabbing of a Ukrainian refugee in the city last month, Charlotte has garnered increased attention in recent days, particularly among conservatives who blame the incident on supposedly soft-on-crime Democratic officials.

In remarks published online Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump decried the incident, tying it to a purported scourge of blue-city crime, which he’s cited in his federal takeover of Washington, D.C., and his musings over sending National Guard troops elsewhere.

“It’s time to stop this madness,” the president said. “The people of our country need to insist on protection, safety, law, and order. We have proven that it can be done, because we did it right here in D.C.”

Asked by NOTUS on Tuesday about the possibility of the Trump administration sending troops to Charlotte, Tillis said that other cities are in greater need of attention. “I hope that people don’t amplify this into something.”

Tillis said he hasn’t heard that Trump will target Charlotte, and noted, “If they do, it’ll be a problem for me.”

The senator has previously been critical of Trump’s D.C. crackdown, telling CBS last month that the Trump administration “is micromanaging local governments, and I don’t know how any limited-government conservative can reconcile supporting that with a limited-government ideology.”

On Tuesday, another North Carolina Republican came out against a federal takeover of Charlotte, as Charlotte City Council member Edwin Peacock III observed on Fox News that crime is actually “statistically down” there—though he claimed there is a “growing” crime problem. To Newsweek, Peacock expressed confidence in local police leadership “and the partnerships we already have with federal agencies.”

But not all elected Republicans in the Tar Heel State are against stationing troops in its largest city.

MAGA Senator Ted Budd told NOTUS that he’s in favor of “whatever it takes” to address crime there, apparently including federal intervention.