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There are several elections on Tuesday in the U.S., but one major one is a Kentucky House race that has proven to be the most costly in history ($32 million). On the ground, Republicans are voting on whether to retain Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has been a thorn in the side of President Donald Trump in the past year. One MAGA voter was all in on Massie, despite their feud.

CNN national affairs correspondent Jeff Zeleny said that the election is for Massie, but it might as well be about Trump.

"It's a loyalty test for President Trump. And Thomas Massie has long been on the list of the White House as the top Republican who infuriates the president more than anyone else," said Zeleny. "Why is that? Of course, Thomas Massie led the charge to release the [Jeffrey] Epstein files. He has also voted against some key pieces of legislation, and he's been a critic of the Iraq War. Otherwise, he largely votes the conservative line. There's no doubt that Massie has a contrarian libertarian streak. That is one of the things that voters here say they like about him a lot, actually."

Trump, on the other hand, is "fixated" on Massie, Zeleny continued. He's been willing to throw as much money as necessary to go after Massie and tear him down.

"But as we've been talking to voters here in northern Kentucky, they're viewing this race through a different lens," he explained.

Kentucky voter Rob Barkley said he voted for Trump in 2016 but didn't support him recently. Now that it has come between Trump or Massie, Barkley said he's against Trump.

"I voted for Massie because he's pretty much against — he's on the Republican side. So he does have a conservative mindset, but he's not as far leaning right as the trump politics and basically a voting against Trump, honestly," the GOP voter said.

"You voted against Trump?" Zeleny asked.

"I did not vote for Trump in the previous election. I voted for him the first time, and then I went against him the second time. But on this one, it's predominantly around just his — the stuff he does," said Barkley.

President Donald Trump took time on Tuesday to share with the press pool precise details about the ballroom he is having built where the East Wing of the White House once stood.

Trump “is currently giving the pool an in-depth presentation on the new ballroom construction, down to the location of the AC units and thickness of the glass,” reported Wall Street Journal White House reporter Meridith McGraw.

The ballroom is “going to be something incredible — you see the quality of it,” he said, standing on the construction site. On the ballroom’s roof “we’re going to have the greatest drone empire that you’ve ever seen, and it’s going to protect Washington.”

“They’re building a hospital,” he added. “It’s a military hospital. They’re building all sorts of research facilities, also meeting rooms and rooms that go hand-in-hand for the military.”

“The ballroom is really a shield and protecting all of the things that are built here.”

He said the construction goes “six stories deep.”

Trump discussed the two facades the building will have, one facing the Washington Monument, the other, the Lincoln Memorial.

He said, “the roof is a barrier. It’s a shield, because it’s made out of the side walls of steel, impenetrable steel, and also impenetrable glass. The glass is approximately four inches thick. And yet, it’s amazing, you can see through it as though it didn’t exist. It’s amazing. And it can stop just about anything. Just about anything.”

“On the other side of the glass,” he continued, “we have steel and concrete. So that the glass is very powerful, what’s holding the glass is equally as powerful.”

“All of these columns, they go directly right to the roof of the building,” he said. “And again, we call it a drone port. It’s set up for unlimited numbers of drones.”

“When this is finished,” he said, “my term ends shortly after that. This is really for other presidents, this is not for me. This is my gift to the United States of America. I’m going to be able to use it very little.”

“This is all my money and donors’ money,” he said. “This is tax free.”

While Trump said that he and other benefactors will be paying the cost of the ballroom, reportedly $400 million, he has been pushing Congress to spend $1 billion for security enhancements apart from the ballroom itself.

Democrat Chuck Rocha cautioned that President Donald Trump is putting himself in an awkward position with GOP leaders who might lose in primaries yes still hold office through the end of the year.

"Lame ducks" are typically called that because their influence wanes as it comes closer to the end of their time in office. In this case, however, there is still more than six months left for these Republicans to flex their power and cause trouble for Trump with no repercussions.

Sen. Bill Cassidy lost his primary race last week and voters in Kentucky will decide on Tuesday whether or not Rep. Thomas Massie (R) will remain as well. Massie has been a thorn in the side of Trump for the past year as he works to uncover the specifics about the Jeffrey Epstein files.

"Let me say this real quick," Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha said in his thick Texas accent during a CNN panel discussion. "You think about these primaries and you think about — I make light of it. But if Massie was to lose tonight, he's still in Congress till the end of the year. The Louisiana senator who just got beat in his primary, who dared to go against Trump, he's still going to be there till the end of the year."

Trump has been celebrating his victory in Indiana, where his aides worked to remove a slate of Republicans from their state legislative seats after they refused to support his redistricting effort in the state.

"Watch these folks who are all out of give-a-damns who have already lost a race. They're going to be a spur in the side of all these folks in Congress," Rocha added.

The narrow Republican majorities in the House and Senate give both Cassidy and Massie enormous power, particularly if they don't have anything to lose.

Cassidy, for example, chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee with Sen. Bernie Sanders, and he has the power to run a scorched-earth strategy. The committee is made up of progressive Democrats and a number of moderate Republicans, including Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who could lose her seat in November. Cassidy doesn't have much to do for the next six months, so he could begin calling hearings to hold people in Trump's Department of Health and Human Services accountable.

In the 2024 presidential election, there were two very different types of Donald Trump voters. Trump's hardcore MAGA voters were behind him from the get-go, while many independents and swing voters — some of whom had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 — were feeling frustrated over the economy, especially inflation, and were willing to give Trump a chance. And those swing voters, according to GOP pollster Frank Luntz, will decide the outcome of the 2026 midterms.

Luntz told National Public Radio (NPR), "How they vote is how America will vote…. This 7 percent of America that goes back and forth and not just back and forth between Republicans and Democrats — they'll vote for an independent candidate and they may not even vote. And that is the margin of success in the states and districts that matter."

According to NPR's Tamara Keith, two Biden-to-Trump voters in the Atlanta suburbs — both Black men — underscore the complexities of the midterms.

Brothers Gerald and Wally both voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024. But while Gerald is very happy with Trump and gives him an "A++" for his job performance, Wally is bitterly disappointed and gives him an F.

Wally told NPR, "Like, what do we have that we can hang our hat on right now? We have higher gas prices."

Keith reports, "Gerald and Wally are among a dozen swing voters in swing states who have agreed to regularly speak with NPR over the next three years as part of a project we are calling Swing Shift…. The participants live in swing states and don't always vote for the same party. Most of them voted for Biden in 2020 and then Trump in 2024. A couple swung in the other direction. At some point in the past decade, they have all voted for Trump…. In a polarized country, these are the people who help decide elections."

The NPR reporter adds, "The goal is to really get to know these voters and how the issues dominating the national political conversation are playing out in their daily lives. Their stories are the stories of a critical piece of the electorate…. Gerald and Wally are the first Swing Shift voters we visited at home. Their reasons for supporting Trump and their views of his performance now couldn't be more different."

The Trump administration previously claimed that conditions in the sky were "friendly" when two Air Force crafts collided over Iraq, killing six service members, but now, according to The Atlantic, "Initial intelligence reports told a different story."

The incident took place on March 12, less than two weeks after the start of President Donald Trump's war with Iran, and involved two KC-135 Stratotankers, which are used for midair refueling jobs and can carry roughly 200,000 gallons of jet fuel. Following the collision, one craft landed safely after sustaining damage to its tail, while the other crashed, killing the six individuals on board.

The U.S. Central Command claimed in a statement issued later that same day that the collision took place in "friendly airspace" and that it was not the result of hostile fire. Now, however, initial reports about the incident have emerged that paint a notably different picture than the Trump administration's official story. The Atlantic was able to view these reports and relayed their contents in a piece published Tuesday.

"Initial intelligence reports told a different story," the report stated. "They indicated that the U.S. government had detected anti-aircraft fire by Iran-backed militias in the area around the time of the collision and that the pilots may have been forced to take evasive actions. The reports, which haven’t been previously made public, were described to us by two current officials and one former official. But Centcom’s leaders, citing different, more highly classified information, were convinced that those initial reports were mistaken."

It continued: "Militias had never fired surface-to-air missiles that could have threatened the aircraft, according to their assessment. The initial reports may have picked up instead on launches of missiles aimed at ground targets. That’s why the Pentagon statement asserted that no hostile fire was involved and that the skies were friendly. An Air Force–led investigation is expected to conclude that the disaster was an 'avoidable mishap' by pilots operating in congested airspace, military officials told us."

This situation, the report argued, "fits a Trump-administration pattern" whereby key details are omitted from public statements that might create a more nuanced and complicated impression of events. Particular effort has also been put into curating stories so that the U.S. military's strength is accentuated, while the "resilience of Iranian forces and their armed proxy groups across the Middle East" is downplayed.

"The contrasting accounts of what preceded the crash point to the confusion of a crowded battlefield, as well as to the serious threat that Iran’s proxies in neighboring Iraq pose to the U.S. and Israeli war effort 23 years after President George W. Bush ordered Iraq’s invasion in pursuit of Saddam Hussein," the report continued.

It added: "President Trump said within hours of the start of the Iran war that one of his goals was to 'ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces.' But those groups remain a potent force: Iran-sponsored militias have pounded U.S. facilities across Iraq with relentless rocket and drone attacks since the war began, forcing a near-total evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad."

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche faced angry lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Tuesday who demanded to know specifics about a fund that the Department of Justice created to who claim they were mistreated by the Joe Biden administration Justice Department.

When it was time for Ranking Member Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the senator hammered Blanche on the "outrageous, unprecedented slush fund," and demanded to know whether Jan. 6 insurrectionists who beat or otherwise harmed Capitol police officers would be compensated. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) similarly asked Blanche in a later segment whether Blanche would commit not to give millions in settlements to members of militia groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.

In both cases, Blanche refused, saying instead that a panel of five people would be set up to decide who would receive the settlements. There would be no oversight by the courts or any branch of the judiciary, unlike all other funds set up in the past and approved by a federal judge.

Blanche said he has no power to make these decisions, but Van Hollen said he's appointing the members of the panel overseeing the fund. Van Hollen also said that since this fund has no judicial oversight, it could very easily make a rule to bar people who violently attacked a police officer from having a settlement. Similarly, he could make rules to guarantee that no members of militia groups would also be given millions in settlements.

Van Hollen then hammered Blanche on his excuse that the fund was set up using the model in the Keepseagle case, where Native American farmers who filed a significant class action lawsuit against the U.S. government on the grounds that they were denied farm and ranch loans as a result of discrimination. The U.S. agreed to a settlement using a fund that would be started to pay out such settlements to victims. A federal judge then approved the case.

"I think you know full well that in that case, the settlement agreement was approved by a federal judge, including the payments to people who were not originally parties to the lawsuit," Van Hollen said. "No federal judges approved this have they Mr. Attorney General?"

Blanche agreed that no judge had.

"That's a big difference between this and the case you compared it to," Van Hollen continued. Blanche tried to claim that they weren't different but Van Hollen stopped him. "Did a judge sign off on this case?"

Blanche again was forced to agree that none did.

"Of course," there is a difference," Van Hollen said. "It allows for an independent person to look at it rather than a ham-handed person. There was a judge who looked at it and signed off on it [the previous case]. So, to compare that taste of this one is incredibly deceptive."

Republican lawmakers are desperate to pass the blame to anyone but President Donald Trump for their increasingly despised gerrymandering crusade, with The Hill reporting that they are now attempting to claim that Democrats started it.

Republican-controlled red states have been pursuing an aggressive redistricting agenda at Trump's urging, creating new House district maps that favor GOP candidates in the hopes of hanging on to their slim majority. Efforts by Democrats to fight back have, meanwhile, been stymied by court rulings.

According to a report from The Hill on Tuesday, voters are not happy about this gerrymandering push, citing polling which found that 64 percent of Republicans and independents would support a ban on redistricting that is not tied to a new census, as has traditionally been done.

In the face of yet another Trump initiative that has become toxic with voters, The Hill noted that several Republicans have begun putting the blame on Democrats, arguing that red states are merely responding to preexisting blue state maps that lack any Republican-majority districts, such as Massachusetts.

“This started because we had some of our blue states that got overly aggressive trying to displace Republican representation,” Rep. Beth Van Duyne, a Texas Republican, told the outlet. “When you look at New England, 40 percent of their voters are Republican voters, and yet they have zero representation in Congress.”

Trump himself once cited Massachusetts as a supposed example of corrupt Democratic gerrymandering, wondering how it could have no GOP representatives, despite the fact that he won, "I think, 41 percent of the vote."

The Hill's report pointed out the reason that Massachusetts's map is a poor basis for making this claim, explaining that it is a "complicated story" about state demographics versus political geography. Even if there was a will to do so, the report explained, it would be very hard to carve out a Republican-leaning district in the state.

"The difficulty in a state like Massachusetts is that, while there are plenty of conservative voters, those voters are spread out across the state in such a way that it’s virtually impossible to create a contiguous district that would send a Republican to Congress — a dynamic highlighted by Nate Cohn, the data guru at The New York Times," the report detailed.

It continued: "Indeed, the current Massachusetts map was bipartisan, signed into law in 2021 by then-Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican. A year later, a group of researchers used computer models to crank out 5,000 possible House maps for each state. In Massachusetts, only three of those maps included a district that would have sided with Trump in 2024, when in reality not a single county in the Bay State voted for the president."

When President Donald Trump and his allies dropped their $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), there was a condition: the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) would create a $1.7 billion fund to settle claims by people who say they were wrongly targeted for "lawfare" during Joe Biden's presidency.

Democrats on Capitol Hill are attacking the fund as a "slush fund," but Democrats aren't the only ones speaking out. The conservative National Review's editors are vehemently critical of the fund in a blistering editorial.

"Donald Trump has dropped his $10 billion damages lawsuit against the IRS," the Review editors write. "What he's doing instead may be even worse…. Immediately on the heels of the dismissal of the IRS suit, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that, as part of a deal to settle that case, DOJ is creating an 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' of $1.776 billion. This is reportedly designed to establish 'a systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare' under Joe Biden, potentially including defendants in January 6 prosecutions."

The conservative Review editors continue, "Blanche's letter explains that the obviously symbolic $1.776 billion figure 'does not represent the value of any claim by Plaintiffs, but rather is based on the projected valuation of future claimants' claims.' Tellingly, the new fund is designed to expire 'no later than December 1, 2028,' so all the money will be dispensed by the current administration."

The Review editors go onto argue that "hard-to-supervise slush funds aimed at financing well-connected political allies are exactly the sort of thing a populist presidency is supposed to end."

"It also represents a favored tactic of the left: gain control of an institution, 'apologize' for what its former leaders did, and use the apology as an excuse to loot the Treasury to pay 'reparations,'" the editors write. "That's no more justifiable when the right does it. This may be legal, in the sense that Congress created and funds a permanent Judgment Fund for settling lawsuits against the United States, rather than requiring such settlements to gain case-by-case legislative approval, as was true in the early republic. But there is also nothing in the Constitution that requires Congress to passively let this sort of thing happen."