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A protester was shoved under an 18-wheeler and had his leg crushed. An AP reporter was also reportedly injured.
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Ask the Editor-in-Chief: 2028 Race, Data Centers, Delaney Hall+ More – 6/1/26
MeidasTouch's editor in chief and Capitol Hill reporter tackle six subscriber questions on presidential politics, Senate scandals, ICE detention, and the slow-motion disaster of Trump's "Freedom 250"
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The latest edition of Ask the Editor brought MeidasTouch Editor in Chief Ron Filipkowski together with Capitol Hill reporter Pablo Manríquez to work through six questions submitted by Meidas+ subscribers, covering everything from a rising Democratic star to a festering human rights crisis in New Jersey, with a detour through Trump’s increasingly embarrassing attempts to throw himself a birthday party on America’s 250th.
Thank you to everyone who submitted questions for this week’s episode! To have your questions considered for next week, look out for Ron’s call-to-action in his daily news bulletins.
Read below for a full recap of this episode and watch above! Let’s dive in.
Is Jon Ossoff Running for President?
The episode opened with a topic on a lot folks minds after yet another powerful speech over the weekend: Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff and whether he’s building toward a 2028 presidential run.
Filipkowski has been watching Ossoff closely and came away genuinely impressed, not just by the senator’s record, but by something harder to quantify. Unlike virtually every other Democrat currently floated as a presidential contender, Ossoff doesn’t seem to carry any particular liability that alienates a meaningful chunk of the party. He’s won statewide in Georgia, multiple times, including runoffs, as a Jewish Democrat, which speaks to both his political skill and his broader appeal. He keeps a low profile by Senate standards, avoids cable news grandstanding, and comes across as someone actually focused on governing.
What’s gotten people’s attention lately are his stump speeches. Filipkowski noted that Ossoff gives what appears to be a genuinely fresh speech nearly every week and not the same set of applause lines rearranged with a topical tweak, which is how most politicians operate, including Trump, who has essentially been giving the same rally speech for a decade. Ossoff reads as someone writing his own material and delivering his own thoughts, and the cadence reflects it. He waits for the audience, lets moments breathe, reads the room. Filipkowski invoked both Obama and Reagan as examples of politicians who possessed that intuitive connection with a crowd, and placed Ossoff in that company.
Manríquez added important texture. Ossoff came to the Senate as a first-time father and has structured his entire tenure around being home with his family. He’s not doing the D.C. social circuit, not doing the fundraiser treadmill, and is reportedly difficult to schedule even for interviews because he prioritizes being present as a parent. Manríquez connected Ossoff’s documentary filmmaking background to the way he constructs and delivers speeches, with an eye toward how the moment will look and feel, not just what it says.
On the question of Israel, often a political minefield for Jewish candidates within the Democratic coalition, Ossoff has been consistent in his independence, voting against arms sales. That removes what has sidelined other candidates.
The comparison to 2006 Obama resonated with both of them. Nobody would have bet on Obama then either, and yet the momentum built almost on its own. The consensus: if Ossoff wins his reelection and decides to run, he will be a serious candidate. The main variable isn’t political viability. It’s whether he wants to put his family through it and whether or not the political map makes sense.
Filipkowski, a Mainer, Talks Platner
Filipkowski, who lives in Maine, has been watching the state’s presumptive Democratic Senate candidate with a mixture of hope and dread for nearly a year. Platner, a former Marine and oysterman, has been plagued by a rolling series of revelations: tattoos, Reddit posts, an elite prep school background that contradicted his public image, and now the latest round of controversies around his online behavior.
The core concern is less about any single scandal than about the pattern. Every few weeks, something new surfaces. The Republicans haven’t even started yet. This has all been driven by media reporting. And the worry is that they’re holding ammunition in reserve.
Maine’s electorate skews older and more female, demographics that are not well-served by the particular nature of Platner’s issues. Susan Collins, despite being more vulnerable than she’s been in years, may end up benefiting not from her own strengths but from her opponent’s self-inflicted damage.
Data Centers as a Political Flashpoint
Filipkowski has been ahead of the curve on this one. Over the past year, he’s watched a grassroots resistance movement build in rural communities across the country, not among progressive activists, but among exactly the kinds of voters Democrats have been losing for three decades: rural, working-class, often loyal Trump supporters.
The grievances are concrete: noise, water contamination, air pollution, and electricity costs that spike because massive data facilities are draining local grids. These facilities are being built in rural Republican areas because GOP state-level politicians greenlighted them without public input — no town halls, no hearings — often in explicit service to AI billionaires who, in turn, bought Trump’s deregulatory agenda wholesale. Trump, who likely couldn’t have described what a data center does before this administration, simply signed off in exchange for large checks. The result has been total federal deregulation of the AI industry, combined with active efforts to block states from filling that void.
Filipkowski sees this as a rare political opportunity, an issue where Democrats can credibly stand with rural communities against a class of oligarchs who happen to own the Republican Party. The problem, as Manríquez confirmed through his own Capitol Hill reporting, is that many Democratic lawmakers were still asleep on the issue until recently. Some in states with heavy data center presence have their own vulnerabilities.
Both agreed the issue is going to grow. As summer heat escalates energy demand and communities near these facilities experience the downstream effects more acutely, the politics will sharpen.
Freedom 250
Trump’s attempt to commandeer the bipartisan America 250 celebration and rebrand it as a personal victory lap is going about as well as most things he touches. The original lineup of acts, including the Commodores without Lionel Richie, Poison featuring only Bret Michaels, and Milli Vanilli minus one of the two guys who didn’t actually sing, quietly collapsed after artists realized they’d been misled about whether they were performing at a nonpartisan bicentennial event or a Trump rally with a fancier name. They were not. They backed out.
What remains is a scheduling void that MAGA’s entertainment bench — Kid Rock, John Rich, Lee Greenwood, and an aspiring country singer who happens to be the FBI director’s girlfriend and is now suing NBC News — cannot convincingly fill. Notably, Alexis Wilkins filed a defamation suit against NBC’s Ken Dilanian and Joyce Vance this week over reporting about alleged misuse of FBI security resources.
The prognosis: Trump will probably just give a speech. He prefers events that are about him anyway, and this one was always more about attaching his brand to American history than celebrating the country. The alternative, watching an 83-year-old Lee Greenwood or a Vanilla Ice encore, apparently holds limited appeal even for the man who booked Vanilla Ice to play Mar-a-Lago’s New Year’s party and made him perform “Ice Ice Baby” three times in a row.
The Delaney Hall Crisis Grows
Manríquez walked through what’s been building at Delaney Hall, a privately run ICE detention facility in New Jersey operated by the GEO Group, one of the two dominant for-profit prison companies in the United States. Detainees there, some of whom cannot be deported to their home countries for legitimate safety reasons, went on hunger strike over conditions that include spoiled food, maggots, and unclean drinking water. There have been deaths at the facility.
ICE’s response has been force-feeding or transferring detainees to more remote facilities in states with less legal infrastructure and less media visibility. Protests have grown outside the facility, and the situation escalated sharply when New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, deployed state troopers who have joined ICE agents in using force against demonstrators. A protester was shoved under an 18-wheeler and had his leg crushed. An AP reporter was also reportedly injured.
Sherrill’s attempt to position herself as opposed to both ICE’s tactics and the protesters isn’t holding up well on either side. Filipkowski, who spent years as a criminal defense attorney visiting private detention facilities, noted these are for-profit enterprises where medical care, food quality, and basic conditions are reliably worse than publicly operated facilities. The situation is likely to escalate.
What Happens to Mike Johnson?
The final question looked ahead to the midterms. If Republicans lose the House majority, what becomes of Speaker Johnson?
Historical precedent is fairly consistent: speakers who lose their majorities generally step down from leadership, and many leave Congress entirely. Gingrich, Hastert, Ryan — all gone. Pelosi is the notable exception, staying on as a rank-and-file member.
Johnson’s situation may be worse than the historical average. Speaker votes are conducted by public ballot, which tends to suppress dissent. Minority leader elections are secret ballots, which is a different environment entirely for someone who has accumulated enemies within his own caucus. Filipkowski’s assessment is that Johnson probably knows he couldn’t survive a secret ballot and would likely step aside before being pushed, perhaps staying in Congress like Pelosi did, but not in leadership.
The next Republican minority leader would more likely be Tom Emmer, Steve Scalise, or, in a scenario that would say something about where the party is, Jim Jordan, who has tried to take the leadership position before.
We are so grateful for your support of MeidasTouch and the Meidas+ Substack. If you are enjoying this bonus content, please consider helping us spread the word. You can even gift memberships if you are able. Your support makes our work possible. We sincerely could not do this without you.
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