Donald Trump wants to know: When are you people going to shut up with your “opinions” about the “quality” of his Iran deal and just let him cook?

“Don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever,” the president fumed on Truth Social shortly after 1 a.m. this morning. “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out in the end - It always does!” Happy Monday.

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Is This Platner Scandal Different?

by Andrew Egger

Graham Platner, oysterman, veteran, and presumptive Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, has for months faced a steady drip of embarrassing stories about his personal life: from the Nazi-logo tattoo he got while a young meathead Marine to his post-service history of basically unhinged anonymous social-media posts.

Until recently, these stories didn’t seem to be landing with Maine voters, who had adopted a frame of Platner that accounted for those rougher edges. For them, Platner’s whole story was that he got older, wiser, and more politically engaged after struggling mightily with post-war disillusionment. The young dumb soldier simply wasn’t the same person as the one they now supported politically.

But now comes a Platner scandal that threatens to upset that accommodation. This weekend, multiple outlets reported on Platner’s recent turn as an extramarital sexter. When Platner launched his bid for Senate last year, his wife Amy Gertner, whom he married in 2023, told a top campaign aide about a possible skeleton in his closet: She had found explicit texts with a number of other women on his phone in early 2025.

Platner has pushed back on the story—attacking “gossip” from “establishment media outlets” and trying to spin the real villain as the ex-staffer who leaked it. But he hasn’t denied the texts. In fact, he and Gertner have both acknowledged them, saying they worked through the issue in marriage counseling.

That may be enough to survive politically. But I, for one, am not so sure. This story is different from the others: Platner running around on his wife while in his late 30s can’t be written off as a youthful idiocy he later grew out of. And the attempt to redirect the story is silly: Infidelity is bad, speaks poorly of your judgment and character, and is the sort of thing that has caused problems for politicians who get caught doing it from time immemorial. Susan Collins was born, it seems, under a lucky star.

For a certain type of anti-anti-Trump conservative commentator, Platner has long been a favorite conversation piece. Chronically grumpy over all the nonsense Trump makes them swallow, they’ve leapt at the opportunity to use Platner to press the same critiques they regularly receive against their Democratic critics: Look who’s eager to overlook character defects in their candidate NOW!

But to me, the closest cross-party parallel for Platner isn’t Trump. It’s some of the Republican candidates that cropped up in the years preceding Trump’s rise, when anti-establishment sentiment in the Republican base had already hit a fever pitch but before Trump came along as its perfect vessel.

During the Obama years, Republicans were in many ways psychologically where Democrats are now: Licking their wounds after incredibly painful electoral losses, seething with rage at what they saw as out-of-touch party leaders, ready to fall in love with pretty much anyone who was willing to reflect that rage back at them.¹

The problem—for Republicans then and for Democrats now—is that the machinery of the major parties was and is still best in class at ferreting out people’s old baggage and filtering out candidates who had too much of it to win. A world where iconoclastic outsiders routinely beat up on establishment-approved types is a world where unvetted candidates with big personal skeletons in the closet see those skeletons revealed during the general election rather than being quietly revealed before the primary.