Susan Collins Ditches JD Vance as He Campaigns for Her

Vice President JD Vance has made two trips to Maine to stump for Republican Senator Susan Collins as her midterm election against Democrat Troy Jackson approaches. Yet Collins has been a no-show for each visit, leading to speculation that she is deliberately avoiding the vice president and the greater Trump administration.

In his latest visit to Maine on Monday, Vance heaped praise on Collins during a rally at defense technology manufacturer Compotech.

“Whenever I’m in the great state of Maine … I gotta give Susan a little bit of crap,” Vance said at the rally. “Susan is the most independent member of the United States Senate, and as the president of the United States Senate, she sometimes makes my job just a little bit harder. But she makes it harder because she is coming to work every single day and fighting not for a political party.... She fights for the great people of Maine.”

Vance also mentioned that Collins had been to his house about six times.

It’s no surprise Collins didn’t show up to the rally. President Trump has a nearly 60 percent disapproval rating among Mainers as of last month, and nothing indicates any future improvement. The vast majority of Mainers don’t think their state is affordable, and Maine business has suffered significantly due to the most recent 50 percent tariff trade war the Trump administration started with Canada.

Collins has made a point to distance herself from Trump on his new tariffs threat against Canada, saying that they would be a “mistake.” She also drew a line in the sand against the administration’s attack on mail-in ballots, which she called “very important to the people of Maine,” particularly seniors.

Collins was called out by Jackson the morning of the rally.

“How ‘bout fuel prices going through the roof because of the war on Iran? How ‘bout ICE murdering people here in Biddeford? Let’s give a shoutout to Susan Collins about how poor of a job she’s doing for the state of Maine. I’m sure JD Vance loves her because she’s doing everything that he wants for her,” he said. “But she’s not doing it for Maine people.”

Jeanine Pirro, President Trump’s handpicked U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, messed up the prosecution of two accused MS-13 gang leaders earlier this year.

CNN reports that in April, Pirro, a former Fox News host, failed to get a jury to convict Moises Rivera-Luna, who is accused of ordering murders on U.S. soil from a Salvadoran jail cell more than 10 years ago, or his co-defendant Tokiro Rodas Ramirez, who was reportedly a local MS-13 leader in D.C.

And it wasn’t the first time she struggled to secure a conviction: A jury failed to reach a verdict on the two men less than five months earlier.

Trump celebrated bringing Rivera-Luna to American soil in March 2025, making the failed conviction all the more embarrassing. Under Pirro’s leadership, D.C. federal prosecutors keep running into problems with jury trials, securing convictions in only four of eight federal cases in 2026 prior to Rivera-Luna’s mistrial in April.

It didn’t get better for the Justice Department after that either. The D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office has tried close to a dozen more criminal cases in federal court, only to have four trials end with deadlocked juries and two other defendants acquitted. It’s a highly unusual pattern, according to several investigators, unnamed former former prosecutors, defense attorneys, and other legal experts who spoke to CNN. The conviction trial rate in federal criminal trials is around 90 percent.

One factor could be that Washington, D.C.’s jury pool doesn’t have a lot of confidence in the Trump administration or the DOJ, and that D.C. federal prosecutors, already stretched thin by firings and resignations, are stuck retrying cases weeks or months after their original verdicts.

“This is not a political case. I think this is a failure of proof and a stubbornness born of desperation on the part of the prosecutors’ office,” Robert Feitel, a defense attorney representing an MS-13 defendant, told CNN.

Pirro’s office got a lot of negative attention when they charged Olympic canoeist David Hearn with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool when the pool was clearly damaged by botched renovation efforts. That case quickly fell apart, and the charges were dropped despite President Trump’s anger and insistence that his efforts were sabotaged. But it seems that her office can’t even handle seemingly straightforward criminal cases.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright claimed last week that the United States helped move 15 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday. He also claimed that the average daily oil exports were more than eight million barrels over a seven-day period.

But a consistent gap has emerged between the Trump administration’s claims and industry firms’ findings, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Kpler, a ship-tracking firm, estimated that the U.S. moved a daily average of roughly 2.3 million barrels of crude and oil products in August. Huax, another tracker, placed average daily exports at between two million and five million barrels. For context, before the U.S. attacked Iran, an average of 20 million barrels of oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz every single day.

Vortexa, another tanker tracker, found that a seven-day average peaked at 9.2 million barrels—a number far closer to the administration’s claims. But its 28-day average was roughly six million barrels. Clearly, the number can vary greatly depending on what specific dates are selected.

Wright has claimed that private data firms are undercounting the number of ships passing covertly through the strait, but one expert explained why that’s not likely.

Rory Johnston, a founder of Commodity Context, an oil-market research firm, told The Wall Street Journal that the firms tracking tankers had all found similar numbers. “You’d expect someone to have figured out a way to validate the White House numbers if there was a way,” Johnston said. “As of yet, I haven’t seen anyone do it.”

Since the beginning of the war, industry firms have struggled to monitor the passage of ships that are forced to “go dark” and silence their marine radio tracking systems. Still, the numbers the Trump administration is presenting aren’t supported by any information from the companies that are actually loading the ships.

The London Stock Exchange Group estimated the amount of crude and oil being loaded onto ships in the Persian Gulf was about 1.9 million barrels a day—down from 4.4 million barrels a day in July.

Wright has also insisted that the United States has gained full control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Donald Trump made some eyebrow-raising changes to his stock portfolio in June.

The president reshuffled his investment accounts, rotating between stocks and bonds in exchanges that totaled between $78.1 million and $263.1 million, according to a financial disclosure released August 22.

The disclosure does not reveal the true value of Trump’s portfolio, as it does not list the rates at which Trump bought or sold stock, or the quantity that he owns. However, it does indicate that the president made numerous investments in multiple companies that are currently in business with his administration.

Trump made more than 1,000 stock trades in June, according to the filing. The single largest transaction was an offloading of shares of a Vanguard exchange traded fund, totaling between $5 million and $25 million in a June 22 sale.

The other major expenditures were related to financial institutions. Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million of Berkshire Hathaway, and similar amounts in credit card companies Visa and Mastercard, as well as Cintas, an Ohio-based business supply firm.

He bought between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of SpaceX some 11 days after its initial public offering, despite the fact that the Elon Musk–led company is teed up to make billions of dollars through government contracts for satellite production.

Trump spent between $250,000 and $500,000 on Boeing stock, the same day that the Navy awarded the aerospace manufacturer a multimillion-dollar government contract for its P-8A training system.

The president also invested in Palantir (which earlier this month won a $10 billion Army software contract), Meta (whose subsidiary Scale AI was awarded $500 million from the Pentagon in May), Broadcom (which received $970 million in March to support the military’s cloud services), and Nvidia (which is projected to make more than $1 trillion in revenue from its electronic chip trade this year after Trump green-lit its sale in the Chinese market in January).

The White House has repeatedly rebuked ethical concerns surrounding Trump’s expenditures. In May, spokesman Davis Ingle told CNBC plainly that there “are no conflicts of interest,” and that Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children.

“President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public—which is why they overwhelmingly reelected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media,” Ingle said at the time.

Gary, Indiana, has been without electricity for nearly two weeks after a powerful storm hit the area, closing businesses, closing schools, ruining food, stopping gas pumps, and causing food lines.

“We’re at day twelve, and twelve days is too long for families to be without power,” said the city’s Mayor Eddie Melton in a video message Sunday. He’s urging the Northern Indiana Public Service Company, or NIPSCO, to restore power to all of the city’s residents by the end of Tuesday, he told residents.

“Twelve days is too long for parents to worry about their children, and for businesses to lose revenue, and for families to wonder when the relief is finally going to come. Today, I want the people of Gary to know this. I want you to know that I share their frustration,” Melton said.

At one point, there were nearly 374,500 power outages in the area, The Guardian reports, with that number dropping to 14,500 by Sunday and 10,187 by Monday. Gary has a population estimated at 67,289, with its metro area estimated at 680,661 according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

While most schools reopened in the city Monday (Gary started school on August 6) after a nearly two-week break, they opened on a two-hour delay. Melton said that “NIPSCO has so much more work to do. We’ve pushed them to do more and do it faster.” Local residents have sued the utility provider, blaming it for failing to trim trees that disabled power lines.

“This situation was predictable. It was obvious and it was preventable,” Otto Shragal, an attorney with the Allen Law Group, told The Guardian. Indiana Governor Mike Braun also blamed NIPSCO, telling Inside Indiana Business that the utility “needs to pick up the pace, because we’ve given them National Guard help, all of our agencies.”

One-third of Gary’s residents are under the poverty line, and have endured these conditions since August 11. The city is majority-Black in a state where Republicans control the legislature and governorship, and have long neglected the city by giving it meager state funding and blocking measures that would have expanded the municipality’s tax base.

Braun said on Friday that he “formally requested an expedited major disaster declaration for individual and public assistance for 54 counties from FEMA,” which, if granted, would “mean significantly more resources to accelerate Indiana’s recovery from the recent severe weather.” A state fund is reportedly providing emergency aid grants of up to $5,000, and last week, President Trump declared a state of emergency for Indiana counties affected by the severe storms.

Local celebrities Keith Lee, a food critic, and Indiana Pacers player Tyrese Haliburton are co-hosting an event to distribute relief supplies, along with the Salvation Army, ACE Hardware, and Gary officials, outside of the city’s Roosevelt Pavilion Monday, joining several other local aid efforts. Hopefully, all of those along with full restoration of power can ease residents’ difficulties in the short term, as cleanup and repairs could take many months.