As the third leg of NBC’s Sunday Night Football crew alongside play-by-play man Al Michaels and the tart-tongued analyst Cris Collinsworth, Michele Tafoya was a paragon of deference and neutrality for 11 years as an NFL sideline reporter, dutifully relating boilerplate tactics, talking points and injury updates when she wasn’t nodding along to softball interviews or fumbling through hammy production gimmicks for viewers who might have been too offline to get the bit.

She was almost pathologically committed to not doing anything to draw attention to herself or her gender in an era when sideline reporting was a fast track to national celebrity. Even her football takes hewed to the middle. (“New Orleans doesn’t want to lose to Atlanta twice in a season …”) Anyone who says they saw the 61-year-old emerging as a rightwing firebrand was watching a different game.

And yet here we are. Last week, Tafoya was the decisive winner of Minnesota’s US Senate Republican primary, earning the party’s nomination for November’s general election. Even more striking: she beat back eight challengers, not least Adam Schwarze, the party-endorsed pro-gun, pro-military ex-Navy SEAL, and Royce White, the anti-leftist, anti-trans NBA flameout currently testing WNBA gender norms.

During his presidential campaign in October 2024, Donald Trump staged a photo op at a McDonald’s franchise in Pennsylvania, where he was briefly taught how to work the fryer and drive-thru window at the closed restaurant, while making several unsubstantiated claims about Kamala Harris’s past summer job at McDonald’s.

The posturing around McDonald’s garnered significant publicity, as Trump and Republicans capitalized on an affordability crisis triggered by high inflation that occurred globally due to the Covid pandemic.

Now, as Trump’s promises to “end inflation” and bring down prices have fallen flat, a real former fry cook is hoping affordability will help him flip Colorado’s eighth congressional district, a swing district narrowly won by the Republican Gabe Evans in 2024. The district is rated a toss-up by the Cook Partisan Index, and affordability is front and center in Democratic nominee Manny Rutinel’s congressional campaign.

Donald Trump on Wednesday posted that he intends to inflict on Iran “the MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY!”

“This will be Economic Warfare and Isolation on an unprecedented scale,” the president said.

On Thursday, Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s minister of foreign affairs posted on X screenshots from various news outlets reporting that the US national debt had reached $40tn for the first time in history.

“The so-called ‘Economic D-Day’ is a diversion from America’s own crisis: unprecedented debt and surging interest costs,” Araghchi said. “Doubling down on failed policies will only bring further defeat — and enmity of Iranians. US economic terrorism threatens global economy and sovereignty worldwide.”

Hello and welcome to our live coverage of US politics.

The US gross national debt reached $40tn for the first time on Wednesday, the highest in US history.

The government deficit doubled over the past decade, with government spending growing under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden – Trump approved $8.4tn worth of debt during his first term, with a large chunk going to Covid-19 relief spending, while Biden approved $4.3tn worth of debt.

In fiscal year 2026, which began in October 2025, $1.8tn has been added to the debt so far.

Both Democrats and Republicans responded to the milestone with outrage, with Democrats placing the blame on Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress for the uptick in spending.

“The President said he’d pay off the debt in his first term. Well we all knew that was a lie. Instead he ran it up to $40 trillion while he and his family made billions,” Mark Kelly, a Democratic senator from Arizona, posted on X.

“Republicans ran up the tab, handed billionaires another tax break, and now wanna lecture working families about ‘fiscal responsibility’. You can’t max out the card AND pretend you’re the accountant. Pick a struggle,” Jasmine Crockett, a Democratic congresswoman from Texas, said.

“The Republican One Big Ugly Bill adds over $4 trillion alone—all to shamefully give tax breaks to billionaires and corporations,” Jason Crow, a Democratic congressman from Colorado, posted on X.

Crow is referring to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will increase the deficit by $3.3tn. After Republican senator Rick Scott posted on X that “Congress needs to get spending under control”, netizens were quick to add that he had voted to pass this bill.

Republican congressman Thomas Massie, who regularly clashed with Trump and his own party as well as with his colleagues across the aisle, has long worn on his suit jacket a debt badge, a three-inch-long pin he created that updates the national debt in real time. “When I invented the debt badge, the national debt was just over $31 trillion,” he posted on X.

“$4,000 per year per American. That’s how much interest we are paying on the debt to banks & foreign countries every year. A family of four owes $16,000 per year for nothing but interest on the debt!” Massie said. “I lost my re-election because I voted against the policies that caused this.” In May, the seven-term incumbent lost the House primary to keep his seat to Ed Gallrein, a retired Navy Seal and farmer who was recruited into the race by Trump.

Stay with us for more reaction.