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Good morning,

I've never been one of those people who think their dreams are particularly unique or important. I had a shrink once who stopped me the second I started talking about something I had dreamt and said flatly: "Dreams are meaningless. It's just your brain taking out the day's trash." I always liked that line. But since I came out of anesthesia, I have been having the most intense, vivid — even cinematic — dreams. I just woke up from one in which I was playing wiffle ball with Pope Leo, Jalen Brunson and my high school girlfriend (who was dressed as the Virgin Mary???). The Minions were there, too, in some unclear capacity. It was a good dream; good enough that I was annoyed when my alarm went off and now I won't ever know how the game ended. 

Yesterday we talked a lil' Maine, where Graham Platner has indeed secured the Dem nomination for Senate and will now take on the incumbent Susan Collins in what is bound to be a messy general election. How many more skeletons will come tumbling out of this guy's closet over the summer and fall — and will it matter to Maine independent/swing voters? Keep in mind that Maine is a weird state, full of weird people. Great people. But weird. They're spinning around on their own planet up there, God bless 'em. So maybe there's only so much you can divine from these results.

Let's go cross-country now to Cally-fornia, where we are now eight days removed from that state primary and finally (!) starting to get some results. In the gubernational race, it will be the Democrat Xavier Becerra versus Republican Steve Hilton, with Becerra heavily favored to win even though he is perhaps the most uninspired candidate running for any statewide office this year. You may know Becerra as Joe Biden's HHS secretary who was such a lightweight that they didn't even let him manage any part of the pandemic response. I of course remember him from this classic Biden moment in which Sleepy Joe manages to both mangle his name while also appointing him to the wrong Cabinet position. He is likely to be the next governor, though the fact that a Republican (Hilton) managed to place is no small thing and will at least make the race interesting. Let's also pour one out for Tom Steyer, the billionaire progressive who made a fortune in private prisons (lol) and has now spent more than $550M of his own money between his 2020 presidential run and his 2026 governor's run. Half a bil to get zero delegates and a third-place primary finish. Impressive!

Down in LA, Spencer Pratt was eliminated in the mayoral race, which will feature incumbent Karen Bass against a progressive city councilwoman named Nithya Raman. I listened to a podcast interview Raman did and came away deeply unimpressed. I was riding with Pratt in this one, even though he is also a total lightweight who probably has no business running a city as big or important as LA. But I was hoping he would pull it out as a big F you to the entrenched Dem machine in that city — where no one in any position of power has been punished for either the dreadful Palisades fire response or the city's increasingly dire homeless situation, to say nothing of the gutting of the entertainment and production industry. At the municipal level, I will always lean toward supporting the candidate whose campaign is squarely focused on quality-of-life issues and government graft/corruption. Turns out Pratt was vapor; a social-media phenom who could not translate virality into actual votes. Too bad. Now that race will be a woke-off between Bass and Raman over who can distribute more needles to schizophrenic addicts or other such nonsense. Angelenos, you guys deserve so much better.

Because California takes so long to count its votes, it has naturally opened up the typical accusations of election fraud from the right. Enter President Trump, who has charged the "Dumbocrats" with "rigging" California's jungle primary. Unfortunately, when Trump starts doing his election fraud thing it immediately poisons the well because at this point everyone knows he cries fraud whenever an election goes the way he doesn't want it to. Probably one of his worst qualities, and legacies, will be this.

I had Ali Velshi of MS NOW on the pod yesterday — we'll drop that episode on Monday — and he was making the point that California's maddeningly slow vote-counting process means the system is "working" because the state goes to great lengths to ensure every vote is counted. I was annoyed at myself all night for not pushing back on him, because I feel that dismissive attitude is unfair to millions of Americans who have serious — and totally fair — questions about why certain elections take so long to be determined now. I am supportive of mail-in ballots and generally supportive of making it as easy as possible for citizens to vote in elections. But Democrats cannot be so hand-wavy of the real problems that such a permissive structure create. It becomes a breeding ground for distrust and conspiracy theories, and we really don't need more of that in our body politic right now.

I'm talking about the phenomenon of the "red mirage," where the proportion of votes counted for D candidates increases as votes continue to be tabulated. If you're glued to Election Twitter all day long, you understand how this works. But for plenty of normal people, it looks like the count is being rigged. Same with ballot harvesting, which both sides do but Dems tend to be much better at especially in states like California. Ballot harvesting sounds like a Fox News conspiracy, but it's a real thing in which third parties like unions and NGOs collect and return large batches of ballots on voters' behalf, which result in these big dumps of votes for a single candidate. In CA, this is completely legal. Fine. But don't get bent out of shape when the average person has some questions  — because it sounds shady as hell!

As far as the claims from Trump and others that the LA mayoral primary is rigged, they don't make sense on their face. Bass and the Democratic machine would way rather face Pratt in a general election than Raman, who will be a harder candidate to beat in such a blue city. But waving off the concerns that this whole process is kind of crazy and ridiculous and, frankly, third world-ish, is not fair either. This is the USA, we should be able to generally know the outcome of our elections within a few hours. If that is not possible because of mail-in deadlines and whatnot, then at the very least no results should be announced until the very last vote is tabulated. That would suck for us in the media, who depend on making the vote-count process into a dramatic story unto itself, but it would go a long way in making our elections feel more secure.

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Carlo Versano is Newsweek's Director of Politics and Culture. He has in-depth knowledge and experience covering a range of topics and stories over a 20-year career in the news business. Carlo joined Newsweek in 2024 after a stint at The Messenger. Before that, he was an Emmy-winning producer at NBC News. He is a graduate of the University of Richmond and the New School. You can get in touch with Carlo by emailing [email protected].

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Reports of a growing divide between President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are gaining momentum amid the drawn-out U.S.-Israeli war against Iran and its regional allies. The rift is real.

I feel for Gianni Infantino. The FIFA strongman has done everything he can over the past year to court President Trump, from joining Cabinet meetings and traveling to economic forums to even backing his Nobel Prize nomination, only for the organization of the tournament to leave him with embarrassing situations such as the Somali referee denial and the Iranian team nearly being barred from entering the United States. But today, a new story broke that makes the situation even more embarrassing.

For the past year, FIFA has leased an office on the 17th floor of New York's Trump Tower that has sat largely empty. Back in 2025, I was in the lobby of Trump Tower when FIFA made the splashy announcement alongside Eric Trump and a group of former players who looked more like mascots than ambassadors. Infantino said he was grateful for the office space, but it seems the people who arranged the deal were the ones who benefited most from it.

Paying rent to the Trumps was Gianni Infantino's choice, The New York Times reported today. A FIFA spokesman said the organization was paying "market rent" for the Trump Tower office and that it would be used during the World Cup. Spending thousands of dollars to stay in the president's good graces certainly makes sense from that perspective.

That makes me wonder what Infantino's real endgame is. Having a close relationship with the president makes sense if you're a national leader, but for FIFA? Infantino says he is doing it to secure the best possible arrangements for all the nations that make up the organization. The question everyone is asking, however, is: at what cost?

“You’re going to see a lot more anti-establishment candidates winning too. Voters are sick of the bullshit.”

—Progressive operative Rebecca Katz to Politico, on Graham Platner’s win in Maine.

Carlo is joined by Dylan Ratigan to tackle one of the left's favorite questions: Should billionaires exist? The two break down the distinctions between creative and extractive qualities of extreme wealth, explore the revolutionary potential of AI and investigate the weirdest economy we've had in decades.

Watch the latest episode here. ⬅

Newsweek is part of the Trust Project, which focuses on honesty, accuracy and fairness in journalism. Read more about our best practices. To get in touch with our newsroom with suggestions on how to point out possible errors, please contact us at [email protected].