Last week, as part of the emerging ‘Layla Coda’ moment around President Trump, I flagged this story about a nasty feud between Alina Habba and her erstwhile pal and Trump fixer Ric Grenell. Habba went to the White House with the explosive charge that her now-husband, a Turkish nepo-oligarch named Turhan Mildon, had given $6 million to Grenell for the Kennedy Center, then Trump’s top vanity/legacy project. But Grenell, she claimed, had siphoned the money off, presumably for himself. At the time Grenell was running the Kennedy Center. Mildon first came into the Trump orbit because he had major ties to the Maduro regime and major holdings in Venezuela. So he needed to get juice in Trump world so he didn’t lose his toys when MAGA started to dividing up the spoils after the US invasion. But now it seems Habba, now Alina Mildon after her marriage last month, may have bitten off way more than she and Turhan can chew.
After making the initial accusation, the Turhans have been talking much less than Grenell. Her story had also shifted around a bit, according to the initial Times report. The $6 million, or possibly $5.6 million, was to be carved out of a $17.6 million check for some other unspecified business deal. But when Habba, or rather her husband’s lawyers, presented the White House with the evidence for this transaction the source of cash was redacted.
I’m thinking this nephew guy has turned out to be a problematic figure … The story here is about a deal to sell arms to the police in Haiti and the company in question, Fencebridge, was founded by “Daniel Nozell, Parton’s longtime manager, and Bryan Seaver, one of Parton’s nephews who was also her head of security.”
A private security firm founded by two people close to late country music legend Dolly Parton is at the center of an unusually complex arms deal in Haiti that several sources with knowledge of the matter say was worked out with little due diligence.
The security firm, Fencebridge Strategic Risk, entered into a multimillion-dollar agreement about a year ago to supply the Haiti National Police with semi-automatic rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition, as the agency struggles to combat violent gangs that have claimed the lives of more than 25,000 Haitians since 2021.
Fascinating nugget of data from an Economist deep dive cross-referencing polling data with the location of datacenters: “Voters across the country are shifting towards Democrats, but for those living within 2km of a data centre the veer has been even sharper. Americans who live near a data-centre site are around six percentage points more likely to support the Democrats than those who live further away (see chart 2). Six months ago there was no such difference.” Link (requires sub).
One collection of data people obsess over in the weeks before a big election is the early vote – a relatively new feature of American elections. You can’t know who people voted for but you can know who is voting by different metrics and you can draw inferences from that. Take all this early vote data with a huge, huge grain of salt. On the one hand it’s just way to easy to interpret the numbers through the prism of one’s hopes. But there’s a bigger and more immediate reason for skepticism today. To understand what early numbers mean you need to have some theory of who is going to vote early and who late. And basically, I think, we don’t. Or not a good one.
Following up on the MAGA-under-pressure, intra-MAGA knife fights breaking out, whack everybody front. From this morning’s Politico Playbook …
PLAYBOOK IN PRINT:Natalie Harp printed a copy of yesterday’s Playbook about Susie Wiles’ future for President Donald Trump, according to two people with knowledge. It caused a “freakout,” as three people described it to Playbook. The president “blew up” over more bad headlines about his chief of staff, and Wiles and allies “burn[ed] up phones around town” trying to quell the situation.
Democrats’ prospects across the board look about as good as they have at any point in the 2026 election cycle, and about as good as could have reasonably been imagined at any point since late November 2024. House, Senate, governorships, state legislative races, really just about everything is looking pretty rosy. The point of this post isn’t to rain on any of that. But for the last week or so I’ve been wanting to write a post about just how close many of the frontline Senate races are, despite the fact that it’s plausible that Democrats could come out of this election with a majority in the low or even mid-50s. What I’m talking about here is no more than the inherent uncertainty around all polls and all elections. But it’s still worth absorbing.
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