Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your roundup includes: Missouri now has two congressional maps, two court orders, and one Secretary of State, who has been invited to appear before the state supreme court tomorrow morning to explain which order he is disobeying; the New Yorker profiles a Democrat campaign strategist who can’t vote, can’t donate, and is packing for Spain ahead of a deadline that isn’t quite what the New Yorker thinks it is; and Iceland summons the U.S. ambassador over a Truth Social map, proving that a JPEG can now cause a diplomatic incident.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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Yesterday I told you to get the popcorn ready. I was right, but under-equipped: Missouri’s election officials now need the popcorn, a hard hat, and a laminated card explaining which court order they are supposed to risk violating first. Yesterday, the New York Times dramatically reported, “Dueling Court Rulings Leave Missouri’s Congressional Races in Chaos.”
“Conflicting court orders issued on the same day threw the congressional elections in Missouri into chaos on Tuesday,” the Times said, “two months before an election in which a handful of races could decide control of the House.” Wait till you hear this.
Last September, Missouri Republicans passed a new congressional map —House Bill 1 (HB1)— as part of the mid-decade redraw President Trump wanted before the 2026 midterms. The point was one more House seat: Missouri sends six Republicans and two Democrats, and the new map carved up 81-year-old Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City district to make it seven-and-one.
Democrats, who for obvious reasons preferred the old map, complained about “tyranny.”
As I mentioned yesterday, Democrats attacked the HB1 map using a citizen referendum process, and on Thursday the Missouri Supreme Court pulled the plug by ordering the HB1 map to be frozen, and to revert to the 2022 map for the midterm elections. The twist was that 1.2 million Missourians voted in the August primary on the new map lines, so it was chaos, though not the chaos the NYT focused on.
So, over the weekend, Republicans filed and briefed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court— which has had to implement a pager system to handle all the emergency requests. Yesterday I said the high court could rule any moment, and later in the day it did— in a curt, one-sentence order signed by Justice Kavanaugh rejecting the emergency stay application and denying consideration of the matter altogether.
But before Democrats could begin celebrating came a surprise: plot twist. “But soon after Justice Kavanaugh acted,” the Times reported, “word spread that Stephen R. Clark, the chief federal judge in St. Louis, had separately ordered the state to use the map that Missouri Republicans drew last year.” Boom.
It seems one of the candidates affected by the flip-flopping maps, Bob Onder (R-MO-3), had also raced into court, but into the local federal court, and asked District Chief Judge Clark (Trump appointee) for an emergency 14-day stay, which he granted as a hard-to-appeal TRO. Judge Clark suggested the Missouri Supreme Court violated the U.S. Constitution by restoring the 2022 map. He said his order was meant to prevent “havoc.”
Judge Clark’s order then ordered Missouri’s Secretary of State Denny Hoskins to use the 2025 HB1 map for the upcoming midterm elections.
Uh-oh! On one side, Missouri’s Supreme Court had ordered Hoskins, a Republican, to use the 2022 map. But now Judge Clark has told him he must use the 2025 HB1 map. “I believe that the federal court does trump the Missouri Supreme Court,” Mr. Hoskins announced, and emailed Judge Clark’s order to all local election supervisors in the state. That quip caused the Missouri Supreme Court to order Hoskins to appear before them in person tomorrow and show cause why he should not be held in contempt of court.
The Missouri Supreme Court told Hoskins to be ready to answer three tough questions. The Missouri Independent quoted the order’s pointed inquiry:
🍿 Behold, chaos! Local officials are starting to pick sides and Democrat ones are claiming they don’t know which map is correct. “I think they’re probably not sure what map they should use, and they need to talk to their lawyers about that,” the lawyer for the group opposing the newer HB1 map, Chuck Hatfield, said. Missouri’s election is now a Choose Your Own Adventure. Both choices end in contempt.
Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon explained, “We have diametrically opposed issues because we’ve got the Supreme Court of Missouri saying that we have to use the 2022 map; otherwise we’ll be in violation of their order. And then we have the federal court saying that we can’t use them; otherwise, we’ll be in violation of the federal court.” Catch-22!
A House seat hangs in the balance. It is a tale of three courts. Missouri’s highest court ruled 7-0 that the state constitution requires all laws —including election maps— to be frozen if a valid citizen referendum gets enough signatures. Nobody’s arguing against that. SCOTUS —court number two, the highest US court— then declined to stay Missouri’s supremes, without giving a reason. Then the Missouri District Court —third, and the lowest court in the bunch— ruled that going back to the 2022 map after the primaries disenfranchises voters in a federal election, and called his ruling Purcell in reverse.
What happens now? Who knows! Judge Clark’s decision is surely headed back to the U.S. Supreme Court, which just sniffed at the appeal from the state supreme court. It could take a pass again, like it did the first time, or it might accept the case on its second try, since it’s now a federal issue with different parties, and it’s not just a matter of interpreting a state constitution.
The most significant fact that none of the stories reported is that Justice Kavanaugh could have passed on the case because he knew the TRO was pending in Judge Clark’s courtroom. Kavanaugh entered his short order at 4:30pm that day, and Judge Clark entered his TRO twenty-eight minutes later at 4:58pm.
Catherine Hanaway, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, noted, “Never before in American history has a court overturned a congressional map after a primary and before a general.” She’s mostly right. There’s a lot happening these days that has never happened in American history before. Keep on popping.
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One of 2026’s wildest stories appeared in a magazine-style feature in the New Yorker, which reported, “A Political Operative on the Verge of Self-Deportation.” The subheader explained, “Daysi González, who works to elect Democrats, is gearing up to leave the U.S. as soon as this month. She wants her own party to pay attention.”
The article, penned by Jesús Rodríguez, explained that Daysi, 31, is not a U.S. citizen. She cannot vote. She can’t legally contribute money to campaigns. She is Salvadoran and is living in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status. The Trump administration appears to have ended Salvadoran TPS, effective today. The New Yorker called the date a brick wall of a deadline. “That’s when I sell my house, I sell my car, I buy a ticket, I pack everything I own, I get rid of everything I can’t take with me,” Daysi told the news mag.
“Temporary” protected status for Salvadorans began in 2001 following double earthquakes. Apparently it took twenty-five years for the earthquake to finish its paperwork. Trump tried to cancel Salvadoran TPS during his first term, but a court blocked it. Then, during his last week in office, Biden extended the ‘temporary’ program again, through September 9, 2026 (today)— and the Administration now seems to have declined to further extend it. Presumably DHS feels the earthquake situation has improved.
“Temporary Protected Status is exactly that – temporary,” a DHS spokesperson recently told CBS News. “For too long, TPS has been allowed to function as a de facto amnesty program despite Congress not intending it to be permanent.” Several outlets reported that DHS has not officially announced it will let Salvadoran TPS expire, but it doesn’t sound like it’s happening. LA Times, this morning:
To date, the Trump 2.0 Administration has ended or declined to extend TPS for: Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, Nicaragua, South Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. Things aren’t looking too good for anxious Salvadorans. Bad odds.
🔥 According to the story, the Salvadoran femme exile is super interested in US politics. She loves it! As a political consultant who helps 1st- and 2nd-generation Americans get elected, Daysi “has a job that puts her in rooms with powerful people.” She “tries to help Democrats win some of the most consequential races in the country, including James Talarico’s campaign for Senate, but also smaller names in red districts trying to flip the House.”
I’m not an immigration law expert, but 11 C.F.R. §110.20(i) bars any foreign national (including TPS holders) from “directly or indirectly participating in the decision-making process” of any person’s election-related activities, “such as decisions concerning the making of contributions, donations, expenditures, or disbursements.” She can’t even be in the room. DHS, take note.
Over the years, when she could spare the time, Daysi sometimes tried to get a green card. One lawyer suggested she marry her boyfriend, but she didn’t want to. Now that it is down to the wire, her boss at the political consulting firm, Chuck Rocha, is trying to help. He “has many friends in Washington.” But Chuck pulled his strings to no avail. “You mean I can’t call a senator? I can’t call the chairman of the Hispanic Caucus and just fix this sh-t?” he said, raising his arms incredulously. “No matter how many important people you know, no matter how much money you think you have, that you’ve made at this little firm—none of that matters.”
Thank goodness. Chuck is furious because those calls used to work.
Incidentally, Chuck Rocha, who’s buddies with so “many important people” and runs a top Democrat political consulting firm, was convicted of embezzlement in 2013 and served 24 months of federal probation. In other words: On-brand.
🔥 President Trump has scrambled traditional politics so much that Democrats aren’t even talking about immigration, which frustrated Daysi the most. “House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries,” the article complained, “didn’t even mention immigration in a recent press conference announcing an agenda of Democratic priorities should they retake the majority.” Daysi also complained about her politician clients, who say they can’t help her. In an italicized sentence dripping with sarcasm, she mocked, “And that’s why I want to win and fight for immigrants.”
The New Yorker interviewed Andrea Flores, who worked in the Obama Administration and was a Biden border official. Flores explained the problem: the public is against them. “There may not be an immediate electoral gain in prioritizing immigration,” she told the reporter, or in “allowing the Republican Party to continue to weaponize that dysfunctional system against Democrats.”
Translation: Republicans’ “weapon” is a broken system packed with criminals and fraudsters that voters can see with their own eyes, which is getting awkwardly hard to neutralize using the old tricks, like making bizarre emotional appeals to rescue well-paid political activists by favor-trading in Washington.
Rafael Collazo, who runs a ‘Latino civil-rights’ activist group, groused that “the people that claim to be more progressive on immigration issues—the Democratic Party, Democrats in Congress—they haven’t done enough. None of them have done enough.” TAW.
As well she might, when commenting in an article destined for national publication, Daysi told The New Yorker she is considering self-deporting. She explained she’ll return briefly to El Salvador, then emigrate to Spain, where it is easy for Latin Americans to apply for citizenship. “It’s like a sort of reparations program,” she laughed.
Her boss, the well-connected Chuck Rocha, offered to let her keep working remotely, but Daysi isn’t sure that will work for her. She’s made no firm plans.
🔥 One question the article did not answer is why a non-citizen is so interested in U.S. politics at all. Especially considering that she cannot vote, register, or donate to campaigns. Yet she affiliated with a major political party and built a career advising Democrats on how to win U.S. elections. “There is always a fix that no one else has thought of, a loophole to be discovered,” the story explained, referring to Daysi’s political problem-solving skills.
Apparently she couldn’t find the loophole this time. Imagine: Democrats without loopholes. That’s like toddlers without the word, “why?”
One obvious reason Daysi is so fascinated with American politics on the blue side of the aisle is self-interest. After all, Democrats kept extending her TPS status; Republicans wanted to end it. So helping more pro-immigration Democrats win is a natural move for a resident non-citizen. (Cough, like illegally voting.) But that doesn’t explain everything. According to the story, Daysi is so politically minded that she left the Mormon church, where she’d been raised, because too many Mormons are MAGA.
She traded one religion for another.
She’s also probably feeling glum about going back home to El Salvador, which is currently led by one of the most energetic conservative leaders in South America. Remember Nayib Bukele? He set up that CECOT hypermax prison. You’d think Daysi would enjoy the record-low crime rates and the wide-open opportunity to advocate for Salvadoran socialists. (But no. Too much MAGA. Hence, her potential plans for Spain.)
Daysi’s active Instagram account does not disclose a firm departure date. But she is all over corporate media. She’s quoted in a CBS story from six days ago, where she called her options “self-deport or risk everything that I’ve built here”— suggesting she might risk it. Meanwhile, she has been busy giving heart-rending interviews to all the alphabet networks, which mainly described her as a “Virginia homeowner.”
There’s so much wonderful material here. Immigration reporting has become so tone-deaf it just jumped the shark. Self-deportation is going mainstream. Democrat political activists are going bye-bye. The political influence of non-citizens is draining away . TPS is finally ending for one country after another. (Sorry, blackpillers.) Let’s pause and wonder about this: how many other Daysi Gonzalezes are out there? Whatever the number, it is too many.
Calling this “progress” hardly does it justice. Mega progress.
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The laughs kept coming yesterday. The New York Times ran a breathless story about the latest Trump-trolling diplomatic crisis headlined, “Iceland Summons U.S. Ambassador Over Provocative Trump Map” Oh, boy. Get this: the article prudishly omitted the “provocative Trump map” advertised in its own headline, presumably to avoid triggering and further offending progressive readers. But I will! Here it is:
Apparently Iceland was hardest hit. Prickly Prime Minister Kristrun Frostadottir (say that three times fast) of Iceland was not amused. She snapped, “There is nothing funny or normal about making fun of the sovereignty of states.” Well. Some people thought it was funny.
Nor was the Times amused. Its reporters took the graphic deadly seriously. Reporters even refused to look directly at the image, since a single glance could detach their retinas. They had to use mirrors, or look at it out of the sides of their eyes. But they raced to the phones. “The American Embassy in Reykjavik declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s post or Iceland’s response,” the article somberly said, “and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.” Imagine that. The Oval Office didn’t immediately respond to a question about a joke tweet.
Iceland’s foreign minister Thorgerdur Katrin Gunnarsdottir (gosh), summoned U.S. Ambassador Billy Long to ‘express’ what her ministry called a “clear message that the image was wholly inappropriate.” No joking around. “This is not a joke in my opinion,” she unnecessarily explained. “And if this is supposed to be a joke,” she added, “it’s a bad joke.” Speak for yourself.
The world waits anxiously to discover whether Iceland, stung by the mortal insult, will declare World War III and mobilize its entire icebreaker fleet (of one), the country’s terrifying (unarmed) ship Frosty McIceFace.
The Times did not report that Mexico, Greenland, Cuba, or even ultra-polite Canada had summoned their ambassadors to lodge official diplomatic complaints. Presumably, through repeated exposure therapy, over time, those countries have become immune to being triggered by Trump’s random Truth Social posts.
Short of summoning ambassadors, Iceland could have struck back, by tweeting an image of North America covered by Iceland’s flag. That would show us! Or it could have gotten a sense of humor, assuming woke progressives are allowed to have those now.
Trump plays the media and the Euroweenies like they are an electronic drum set. And I, for one, am here for it. Keep drumming.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! Coffee & Covid will be back tomorrow, with even more snarky news and caffeine-fueled commentary.
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Red guards in black robes are destroying our justice system and civilization. The illegal should move to Ceuta to experience the cultural enrichment of open borders. Good news is that Lonnie Bunch, the DEI hire who ran the Smithsonian, has resigned. Time to curate an exhibit of his woke reign: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/woke-smithsonian-museum-exhibit
As a Yukoner transplanted to Alberta, I love Trump's trolling of the leftards.
I'd caution him, though, to think twice about Quebec. I'm sure it's not worth the hassle.