WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Markwayne Mullin’s exit from the United States Senate has enabled Tommy Tuberville to emerge as the nation’s dumbest senator, a jubilant Tuberville confirmed on Monday.

“People are gonna try to cheapen this victory by saying I only got it because Waynemark (sic) left,” the Alabaman said. “But like we used to say on the football field, a win’s a win.”

“People need to realize, I had to compete with 99 other senators to win this title,” he said. “And even if you subtract Mullin, that still leaves 95.”

Tuberville said that the media had not given him “enough credit” for becoming the nation’s dumbest senator, noting, “I beat Ron Johnson.”

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, saw its shares slide over 7% on Friday after the company capped withdrawals from one of its private credit funds, sending its stock to a low point not seen since May 2025.

- The firm’s stock closed down 7.2% on Friday to $955.45, continuing a string of losses that began last week.

- BlackRock shares are now down 10.7% since the start of the year, when the firm’s stock traded around the $1,085 mark.

- BlackRock’s HPS Corporate Lending Fund, which acts as a private lender for large companies, said Friday shareholders can only redeem 5% of their shares after the fund received requests to redeem 9.3% of its shares in its latest quarter.

- The total value of the shares requested would have been around $1.2 billion, according to Bloomberg, which noted investors will receive about $620 million held by HPS by year’s end.

- Major private credit funds are experiencing heightened levels of redemption requests lately as investors have become increasingly concerned about limits on redemptions and their ability to exit their positions.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Since being nominated to replace Kristi Noem as head of DHS on Thursday, Senator Markwayne Mullin has suddenly found himself romantically linked to her former chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski.

After receiving a barrage of late-night texts from Lewandowski, a flustered Mullin reportedly told associates, “This isn’t what I signed up for.”

At the White House, Donald J. Trump said that Mullin needs to give the relationship with Lewandowski “some time,” adding, “Corey can be a little rough around the edges, but Markwayne will learn to love him.”

The purpose of Trump’s war in Iran is to deflect our attention, especially from two big things Trump wants banished from the headlines and erased from the our collective consciousness. Which means we need to focus on them like lasers.

1. The affordability crisis. It’s worsening.

Prices were rising even before Trump and Netanyahu invaded Iran — which was one reason for him plunging America into war. He wanted to remove “affordability” from the news (he called it a “Democratic scam”). But Trump’s war is causing prices to rise even faster.

About 20 percent of world oil and gas production passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which is now essentially closed to shipping. This means higher prices at the pump. As of this morning, oil prices were approximately $15 to $16 a barrel higher than they were in mid-February, which will add roughly 40 cents to the price of a gallon of gasoline. If the war continues for a month or more, oil (and gas) prices could go much higher.

... [snip] ...

2. Epstein

The other thing Trump wanted to deflect our attention from is the Epstein files. But it won’t go away, either.

After the Wall Street Journal earlier this week identified more than 40,000 files that appeared to be missing from documents posted to the Justice Department’s website, a Justice Department spokeswoman today admitted that “47,635 files were offline for further review” and “should be ready for re-production by the end of the week.”

Further review? Sure looks like a cover-up. The withheld files include F.B.I. notes on a series of interviews a woman gave to agents in 2019 in which she alleged sexual misconduct by both Trump and Epstein when she was a minor in the 1980s. ...

Even House Republicans are becoming upset about this, presumably because the Republican base wants it cleared up. “AG Bondi claims the DOJ has released all of the Epstein files. The record is clear: they have not,” House Republican Nancy Mace wrote on X. She continued:

“The Epstein case is one of the greatest cover-ups in American history. His global sex trafficking network is larger than what is being revealed. Three million documents have been released, and we still don’t have the full truth. Videos are missing. Audio is missing. Logs are missing. There are millions more documents out there. We want to know why the DOJ is more focused on shielding the powerful than delivering justice.”

As Kristi Noem is consigned to the gravel pit of history, TBR takes one last look at her storied career. Enjoy!

Kristi Noem first won election to Congress in 2010, when the Tea Party ushered in such other luminaries as Marco Rubio and Mike Lee. (Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party’s Senate candidate in Delaware, flamed out amid allegations that she was a practicing witch.) Though not a card-carrying Tea Partier, Noem courted the group’s members, who enjoyed brandishing protest signs featuring Barack Obama with a Hitler moustache.



During her early years in Congress, Noem seemed like a garden-variety right-winger, but after the 2016 election she heeded the call of opportunism and became an angry drunk karaoke version of Donald J. Trump—much like her partner in toadying, Elise Stefanik. But Noem didn’t try to be as sociopathic as her death-cult’s leader—she tried to be more sociopathic. And her success demands that we stand back and marvel.

Consider, for example, the two politicians’ speeches at the NRA’s 2023 meeting in Indianapolis. “With me at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, no one will lay a finger on your firearms,” Trump vowed, drawing predictable applause. Noem, by contrast, shared this nugget about her one-year-old grandchild, Addie: “She already has a shotgun and she already has a rifle and she’s got a little pony named Sparkles, too.” Kristi’s homespun yarn about her granddaughter’s lethal weaponry brought down the house—because, as everyone knows, the only thing that stops a bad one-year-old with a gun is a good one-year-old with a gun.

It's also illuminating to compare Trump’s record in office with Noem’s—specifically, during the pandemic. It was hard to outdo Trump, whose leadership mainly consisted of urging us to ingest bleach, but Kristi managed. In 2020, she scorned the warnings of scientists and invited bikers from across the country to a motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. At her beckoning, half a million pathogenic hosts arrived on their thundering hogs. Steve Harwell, whose band Smash Mouth entertained at the superspreader event, whipped up his audience by shouting, “Now we're all here together tonight. And we're being human once again. Fuck that COVID shit.”