The Intercept

Eoin Higgins is the author of “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voice on the Left.” The day Graham Platner became Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee, he spoke behind a podium bearing his indignant campaign slogan: “They don’t know Maine.” But when sexual assault allegations against the candidate broke this week, supporters and political allies in the state were left wondering instead if they ever really knew Platner — and uncertain about what’s next for the movement...

In group chats of progressive activists and political operatives concerned with the state of the Senate race in Maine Wednesday morning, a link to an anonymous Google Doc was making the rounds.

The Trump administration’s phony ceasefire with Iran is over. Maybe. “To me, I think it’s over,” President Donald Trump said on Wednesday, referring to a preliminary truce inked in Islamabad, Pakistan, in June. That ceasefire, an American capitulation intended to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — a key oil and gas shipping route whose closure by Iran was wreaking havoc on the global economy — never quite took effect.

Alex Skopic is an associate editor at Current Affairs. His writing has also appeared in Protean and the Cleveland Review of Books, and has been selected for The Best American Essays 2026. The Democratic Party is rife with internal caucuses and factions. There’s the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Blue Dog Coalition, the “Squad,” and so on.

The Democratic Party is once again in upheaval as Graham Platner, its unconventional nominee to knock out longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, faces a rape accusation that threatens to end his once-powerful campaign and endanger Democrats’ chances of flipping a key seat in the November midterm elections.

In the early morning hours of June 29, federal agents from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security conducted a raid on home in Midlothian, Texas, in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area. The raid, which saw federal agents deploying flash-bang grenades and using armored vehicles, was authorized by a federal search warrant related to an ongoing federal investigation into an alleged bomb plot at a June 14 Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the White House.

A month after Donald Trump issued an executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist group, an intelligence unit inside the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office in Florida sent out a confidential bulletin. Trump’s announcement was widely criticized as a legally baseless attempt to criminalize his enemies on the left, but the Southeast Florida Fusion Center took it very seriously.

President Donald Trump regularly resorts to bluster and threats to get his way — from efforts to overturn election results to campaigning for international prizes — often with little success. But in FIFA, he has finally found a pliant partner to massage his ego and do his bidding. In a highly unusual move this weekend, the international soccer federation reversed a suspension of a top U.S. player after a personal intervention by Trump, undermining the integrity of the game, according to experts.

As democratic socialists toppled establishment favorites this midterm cycle, the old guard of the Democratic Party picked up a preferred cudgel against insurgents: These people were propped up by white, urban, coastal, educated electorates — not the ones the Democrats were trying to reach, and certainly not the working class.

Eoin Higgins is the author of “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voice on the Left.” When Maine Democratic Senate hopeful Graham Platner sealed the deal on his resounding primary victory in June, the oysterman turned political lightning rod sounded a note of defiance — one that resonated with another would-be candidate across the country.