Ask the Editor in Chief: Maine Senate Updates, Mitch McConnell's Mystery, Trump's Pillow Guy Plug + More — 7/20/26
Ask the Editor in Chief: Maine Senate Updates, Mitch McConnell's Mystery, Trump's Pillow Guy Plug + More — 7/20/26Ron Filipkowski and Pablo Manríquez tackle the week's biggest questions from Meidas+ subscribers
Another week, another round of subscriber questions put directly to MeidasTouch Editor-in-Chief Ron Filipkowski, with DC correspondent Pablo Manríquez running the show. Thank you to all our subscribers who submitted questions as comments to Ron’s daily bulletin! Read below for a full recap of this episode and watch above! Let’s dive in. Is Troy Jackson Maine’s best shot at unseating Susan Collins?The first question dug into the chaotic aftermath of Graham Platner’s implosion and whether Troy Jackson is really the answer for Maine Democrats. Filipkowski explained his frustration with how the nominating process played out. What was supposed to be a thoughtful, delegate-driven convention got steamrolled when Jackson’s operation, stocked with former Platner supporters, engineered an online vote that handed him over 90% of the delegates within 24 hours. Every other candidate dropped out almost immediately. Still, Filipkowski landed on cautious optimism. Jackson is a legitimate labor guy with 25 years in Maine politics, a former state Senate president who’s actually won in Trump territory in northern Maine, unlike the coastal Democratic strongholds most of the party’s candidates come from. Filipkowski’s takeaway: Maine doesn’t need another polished candidate, it needs a brawler willing to get in the mud with Susan Collins, who has never once returned the favor of playing nice. Why won’t Andy Beshear push harder on whether Mitch McConnell is actually alive?This is where the segment got spicy. Filipkowski confirmed he’d chased down the viral rumor that James Carville is secretly steering Beshear’s shadow presidential campaign and telling him to lay off the McConnell situation and found zero sourcing behind it. Carville isn’t Beshear’s strategist, though Carville has separately said Democrats should leave it alone. But the substance of the criticism is fair, in his view. Beshear did the responsible thing by pressing McConnell’s office after receiving multiple reports that the senator had died and was being covered up — reports serious enough that his team demanded answers. Once McConnell’s office produced a single photo as “proof of life,” Beshear largely went quiet, aside from noting that a photo isn’t the same as video. Filipkowski sees this as a real test of Beshear’s spine on the national stage: Kentucky deserves to know whether it’s currently being represented by one senator instead of two, and if Beshear wants to be taken seriously as a future national candidate, hiding behind caution while Republicans potentially run out the clock on a health crisis isn’t going to cut it. He’d like to see Beshear bring in Jeffries and Schumer for a joint press conference and actually apply pressure instead of hoping the story quietly resolves itself. Will Thom Tillis actually meet with Epstein survivors, or was this all theater?Tillis drew a very public red line last week: no meeting with Epstein survivors, no vote for Kash-adjacent AG pick Blanche. Blanche scheduled a meeting almost immediately, and by every account it was a disaster — survivors left describing him as rude, dismissive, and interrupting them throughout. The question, obviously, is whether that meeting satisfied Tillis’s stated condition or whether it just proved his point. According to sources close to the survivors, including our own Aaron Parnas, a second meeting is now being arranged, this time directly with Tillis, and possibly John Cornyn, before any confirmation vote happens. Cornyn, notably, is a lame-duck senator who just got primaried out by Trump, giving him even less reason to play along. Filipkowski laid out the math: if Tillis and Cornyn team up with Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, Blanche’s nomination is dead. Whether Tillis actually has the spine to follow through after hearing directly from survivors who say Blanche treated them like garbage, or whether he caves and finds some face-saving justification to vote yes anyway, remains the open question. Filipkowski’s money is on the latter, but he’s not ruling out a surprise. Why is Trump throwing a fundraiser for Mike Lindell, of all people?This one earned some deserved mockery. Trump reportedly considered staying out of Minnesota’s Governor race entirely, or possibly backing former ESPN reporter Michelle Fulmore-adjacent candidates instead. Instead, he inexplicably went all-in on Mike Lindell, a man with no realistic path to winning, no functioning business empire left (RIP Bed Bath & Beyond partnership), and not even registered to vote in the state he’s running to lead. Lindell is currently registered in Texas and says he’ll switch his registration the day before Minnesota’s primary, which Minnesota’s own generous election-day registration laws technically allow. Trump didn’t just tweet an endorsement. He hosted a full Bedminster fundraiser this past Saturday that reportedly pulled in several million dollars, a slot plenty of legitimately viable Republican candidates around the country would have killed for, handed instead to a man the Minnesota Republican Party itself won’t even endorse. Filipkowski’s read: this isn’t strategy, it’s Trump finally getting worn down by the true believers in his orbit who still love Lindell, paying off a debt to a guy who bankrupted himself chasing 2020 election conspiracies on Trump’s behalf. It’s loyalty repaid with a fundraiser destined to go down as a historic waste of Bedminster real estate. Will Trump personally intervene to block the Tate brothers’ extradition?By far the most-asked question of the week. Filipkowski walked through the mechanics: extradition requests get an initial pro forma sign-off at DOJ, then go to a judge who determines treaty compliance, and finally land on the desk of the Secretary of State, who has ultimate authority to approve or override a judge’s finding. Given how deep the Tate brothers’ connections run inside Trump’s orbit — Barron Trump’s fandom, Don Jr.’s friendliness with them, Alina Habba publicly gushing over them on Fox — there’s real reason to expect pressure on Rubio to intervene. But Filipkowski thinks Rubio has every incentive to stay out of it: he has no personal loyalty to the Tates, he has actual presidential ambitions, and wading into an extradition fight for two men facing sex trafficking and rape allegations across multiple countries is the kind of decision that follows a person for the rest of their career. Notably, plenty of Republicans want nothing to do with the Tates either, reportedly avoiding them like the plague at a DC event over the weekend. Whether Trump personally leans on Rubio to override the courts is, in Filipkowski’s view, entirely plausible with this administration, but it would be a bad bet for Rubio’s future, even if Trump doesn’t care. Remember to keep checking Ron’s bulletin’s for your opportunity to submit questions. Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word!
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