On the menu today: California will be counting the votes — some slightly singed from fire — for a few weeks; the U.S. contemplates deploying nuclear weapons in eastern Europe; Trump names a spectacularly ill-equipped nominee to the next director of national intelligence, and Jill Biden insists that if her husband had remained in the 2024 presidential race, he would have won reelection. Read on.
Democracy, at Glacial Speed
Republican Steve Hilton currently has the most votes in the California gubernatorial primary; if he finishes in the top two, he advances to the runoff. He currently has 27.8 percent of the vote, or about 1.38 million votes.
Democrat Xavier Becerra — the “Cardboard Box Candidate” who even his fellow Democrats deemed a disaster when he was running the Department of Health and Human Services — is probably the man most likely to be next governor of the state. As of this writing, Becerra has 25.4 percent of the total votes counted, or 1.26 million votes.
The candidate currently in third place, billionaire former presidential candidate Tom Steyer, has 19.6 percent, or 978,000 votes.
But it’s not a guarantee that Hilton will make the runoff. California Republicans tend to vote earlier; California Democrats tend to vote later. A little after 7 a.m., the state of California had counted 58 percent of the votes in its primary. My back-of-the-envelope math suggests the state still has about 3.6 million votes to count.
The state’s glacial pace of counting votes is an embarrassment; yesterday, Nate Silver called it “failed state [stuff] and should be much more stigmatized. The fact that it’s tolerated is bad too; it’s a textbook example of learned helplessness.” (Hey, let’s make the governor of that “failed state” the next president, right?)
One of the reasons it takes so long to count the votes in California is that legitimate ballots can still arrive at election offices up until next Tuesday, June 9.
Until 2014, in California, officials had to receive mail ballots no later than Election Day. That year, the state altered the law allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day to be received up to three days later; in September 2021, governor Newsom signed into law an extension to seven days after Election Day. (In 2020, California temporarily changed its law to allow ballots to arrive 17 days after Election Day.)
Under California law, if a “vote-by-mail ballot identification envelope has no dated postmark, the postmark is illegible, and there is no date stamp for receipt from a bona fide private mail delivery service, but the voter has dated the vote-by-mail ballot identification envelope or the envelope otherwise indicates that the ballot was executed on or before Election Day and the ballot was received by the elections official in accordance with” the law, the ballot can still be counted.
Now, put aside your beliefs on how widespread voter fraud is. Do you think it is a good idea to have one uniform date for all ballots to be due? Or do you think it better to have in-person voting completed on the first Tuesday of the month, and mail-in-ballot collection completed the second Tuesday of the month? Why do states believe it makes sense to have different deadlines for different types of ballots cast in the same election?
California also uses drop boxes for collecting ballots; as of 2022, the state had 1,746 drop boxes, available in all 58 counties. Drop boxes — at least ones outside and accessible to the general public, 24-7 — are a terrible idea. If you want to put one in the lobby of a government building — with locked doors at night and security, that might be more justifiable. You may recall in 2024 several malcontents setting fires to drop boxes in Washington and Oregon. It happened again this year:
AIR7 video captured video of the ballot box, which is located near the Civic Center in Downtown L.A. Election officials discovered a small number of vote-by-mail ballots with fire damage in the drop box on Sunday morning and filed a report with the Los Angeles Police Department.
Speaking of Los Angeles, by around 7 a.m. this morning, the city of Los Angeles has counted 63 percent of the votes in its primary.
As our Brittany Bernstein reports, incumbent Democrat Karen Bass will advance to the runoff. As of this writing, Bass has 34.8 percent of the vote, Spencer Pratt has 30.4 percent, and even-further-left-wing city councilwoman Nithya Raman has 22.3 percent. Pratt’s margin is currently about 41,000 votes. My back-of-the-envelope math suggests there are about 291,000 votes left to count.
Could We See U.S. Nukes Stationed in Eastern Europe?
During my two-week reporting trip to Eastern Europe, I tried to illuminate A) Russian “gray zone” warfare against the NATO countries that neighbor it and Belarus is getting significantly more aggressive, dangerous, and reckless and B) while Finland, the Baltic countries, and Poland are more than carrying their weight, the factor that really intimidates and truly effectively deters Russia is the United States and its military. This is why the cancellation of the planned rotation of the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division — more than 4,000 soldiers and associated equipment — to bases in Poland deeply disappointed and unnerved the Polish government, and why President Trump’s subsequent announcement that he was “sending an additional 5,000 Troops to Poland” was so enthusiastically cheered by the Poles.
Well, again, credit where it is deserved to the Trump administration, at least tentatively. When this administration’s Pentagon wants to deter a hostile state, it has some significant tools in the toolbox.
U.S. officials are engaged in NATO-internal discussions about the possibility of deploying nuclear weapons to new countries within the alliance, a new report says, in what would be a remarkable proliferation in nuclear sharing.
The Financial Times was the first to report the discussions on Tuesday, citing three unnamed people “briefed on the discussions.” The conversations were reportedly focused on the forward deployment of what Washington calls dual-capable aircraft – military jets that can carry out either conventional missions or drop nuclear bombs.
Such DCAs are integral to the NATO nuclear sharing architecture, which currently has forward-deployed U.S. nuclear bombs at air bases in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the U.K.
Countries at the eastern flank of NATO, particularly Poland and the Baltic States, were the most vocally interested in hosting U.S. dual-capable aircraft, the Financial Times reported its sources as saying.
This morning, international visitors at the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia — an event nicknamed “Putin’s Davos” — were greeted by the site of Ukrainian drones causing fiery explosions at the city’s oil terminal and oil storage facilities. At least the Russian hosts can say that their energy industry is… booming. Perhaps they can invite former ESPN sportscaster Dan Patrick to declare that the Russia’s energy infrastructure is “en fuego.”
At some point, Russia is going to end its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, although no one knows if that will occur this year, next year, or in 2028 or 2029. When Russia ends that war, it will lick its wounds and likely be desperate for some sort of face-saving move; NATO planners have worried about Putin or some future Russian leader sending troops into Narva, a city on the Estonian-Russian border, and daring NATO to respond. A French defense policy think tank noted:
Since the beginning of March 2026, an unusual narrative has been circulating in the Russian-speaking digital sphere. On Telegram, VK and TikTok, several accounts have referred to the emergence of a so-called “Narva People’s Republic”, modelled on the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. Imaginary flags, stylised maps, pseudo-military insignia and political memes make up the iconography of a fictional state whose contours immediately recall the separatist entities that have emerged across the post-Soviet space since the end of the Cold War. At first glance, the affair could appear almost amusing: a few hundred subscribers, visuals that are sometimes ironic and a deliberately provocative aesthetic. Yet here, geopolitical fictions are taken seriously in the era of the war in Ukraine.
NATO jets from various countries regularly perform “Air Policing” missions over the Baltics from Ämari Air Base in Estonia.
Now, attempting to annex a city or region in a NATO member state would be extremely provocative, a declaration of war, and exactly the sort of scenario that NATO’s Article Five was designed to deter or handle. But attempting to annex a city or region in a NATO member state that hosts military jets armed with U.S. nuclear weapons? Even the most reckless Russian leader would have to think twice about that, and you must wonder how eagerly Russian military leaders would comply with such a potentially catastrophic order like that one.
That’s the good news on the national security front. As for the bad news…
At This Point, Should We Even Have a Director of National Intelligence?
I wasn’t the biggest fan of Tulsi Gabbard, but that’s all moot now; may God give the Gabbard family nothing but good news in the days, weeks, and months ahead.
For a longtime opponent of U.S. military actions against Venezuela and Iran, she did her job with loyalty and dedication. But even if you disagreed with Gabbard, you could cringe when the president said on camera “I don’t care what she says” or when Trump administration staffers joked that when it came to important meetings on national security and foreign policy, the acronym “DNI” stood for “Do Not Invite.”
Ideally you would want a director of national intelligence that the U.S. president thought deserved his attention and whose advice he found valuable.
Trump may like Bill Pulte better, but that may be his only strength for the job. As our Andy McCarthy writes:
As director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), Pulte has demonstrated himself to be a loyalist whose main task has been to peruse the database in search of contradictory statements in filings that the Trump Justice Department has tried to inflate into fraud cases against Trump political enemies, such as Letitia James, Lisa Cook, and Adam Schiff. Pulte is a Trump donor with a journalism degree. It appears that he has no security, intelligence, or legal experience.
Even more bizarrely, in the Truth Social post announcing Pulte’s announcement, President Trump wrote, “during this period, he will remain Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and Chairman of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac.”
These are all full-time jobs. We all enjoy the Marco Rubio memes, but there’s at least some overlap between the duties of the secretary of state and national security advisor. The guy running the government-created entities that “provide liquidity, stability and affordability to the mortgage market” cannot be the same guy overseeing the U.S. intelligence community.
This is the kind of appointment you make when you don’t really care who is doing what job.
President Trump reportedly doesn’t pay much attention to his intelligence briefings – which are supposed to be daily, and has them much less frequently than his predecessors. In this light, it is not surprising to hear that the Pentagon repeatedly warned the president that in the case of war, “Iran would deploy mines, drones and missiles to close the world’s most vital shipping lane,” and Trump dismissed the warnings, convinced Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait.
ADDENDUM: Yesterday on MS NOW, former first lady Jill Biden said she believed that if her husband had stayed in the 2024 presidential race, he would have beaten Donald Trump. The polling strongly indicates otherwise.
I realize that when you’re a television show host, and you get the call, “the former first lady, who hasn’t spoken much publicly in a year and a half, wants to do an interview,” you most likely book her immediately. But I’m starting to wonder what the value is in the whole country watching a 75-year-old woman insist that her husband, who was falling apart before our eyes, was always a campaigning Hercules and could have won a race he was losing badly. Yes, she’s delusional. We all have known she’s delusional for a long time. All this book tour is telling us is that she’s still delusional.
And if watching Joe Biden campaign for reelection while being unable to remember his Secretary of Defense’s name and calling him “the black man” felt like a form of elder abuse . . . watching Jill Biden make bonkers claims doesn’t feel all that different, now, does it?