Washington, D.C., City Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, a democratic socialist, has won the Democratic primary for mayor, NBC News projects, putting her in line to manage the capital city and its relationship with President Donald Trump.
With three-fourths of the expected vote tallied, Lewis George led Kenyan McDuffie, a former city councilmember, 53% to 37%. McDuffie had conceded the primary to Lewis George Thursday morning.
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“Earlier this morning, I called Councilmember Janeese Lewis George to congratulate her on her victory and wish her success as she prepares for the general election,” McDuffie said in a statement.
Lewis George, who has held a council seat stretching from the northern corner of the city since she was first elected in 2020, also faced five other Democratic hopefuls who received single-digit support.
Lewis George is on course to be a heavy general election favorite in the deep-blue city, and the primary marks another major advance for democratic socialists in municipal politics around the country.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is in his first year in office after a swift and surprising rise in his city, while Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman advanced to a runoff earlier this month in the race for mayor there, where an early Los Angeles Times poll indicates a close race against current Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who is also a Democrat.
In Washington, current Mayor Muriel Bowser is retiring after three terms defined in part by Trump and his time in the White House. Bowser has had a more conciliatory relationship with the president during his second term. When Trump deployed National Guard troops to Washington last year in a bid to lower crime rates, Bowser opposed but accepted the move, which also happened in other cities around the country.
Trump commented on the race earlier this month, telling reporters at the White House that “we won’t put up with it” if Lewis George won and that he would consider a federal takeover of Washington.
“Threatening Home Rule because you do not like how residents vote is an attack on democracy itself. The people of D.C. elect the mayor of D.C. And they want someone who will stand up to Donald Trump,” Lewis George said in a statement responding to Trump’s comments.
While Trump loomed over the race, local issues took center stage, as the candidates discussed plans to lower crime and promote affordability, especially with regard to housing.
This was Washington’s first mayoral race since voters passed a ballot measure instituting ranked-choice voting, though it didn’t figure into the Democratic mayoral results. The system applies when no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes.
Now, instead of victory going to a candidate with a plurality, support from lower-performing candidates is reallocated to those voters’ next choices until one candidate receives a majority of the vote.

Just after midnight in Tehran earlier this week, a motorcade speeding to the airport came to a sudden stop. Qatari officials emerged from their cars and huddled on the side of the road. Yet another last-minute crisis had come up in the marathon Iran talks, and the Qataris had clear instructions from their leadership not to leave without an announced deal.
In Washington, President Trump was getting ready for a birthday dinner. International mediators believed the birthday — and the U.F.C. cage match scheduled for Sunday night — could put Mr. Trump in the mood to sign the agreement on that day.
In Israel, officials were already grappling with a humiliating setback, in what appeared to be their closest ally’s imminent separate agreement with Israel’s archenemy. The deal appeared on track despite Israel’s decision to attack a Beirut suburb that day without consulting with the United States.
But on the Tehran roadside, the Qataris were dealing with disagreements about the phrasing of the announcement. Finally, after more calls, the Qataris got back in their cars and headed for the airport. Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, announced the deal at 12:45 a.m. Monday in Tehran and Mr. Trump confirmed it minutes later, revealing a good-will gesture to the Iranians: the United States would lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports immediately.
Last weekend, four months of war and 47 years of confrontation between the United States and Iran came to a head in an extraordinary diplomatic rush that repeatedly threatened to spiral into more bloodshed. Negotiators were wrangling over issues with wide significance for the world economy, Mideast geopolitics and U.S. domestic politics.
Mr. Trump sought a deal he could sell as making good on his promise to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon, even though the establishment of specific protections was being kicked to a later negotiation. Iran was determined to avoid giving up what it says is its right to enrich uranium, while maximizing what it could extract in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
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BOGOTÁ, Colombia (AP) — The memories of Colombia’s six decades of armed conflict are still like open wounds etched on its victims’ bodies and minds.
For Blanca Nubia Monroy, it’s a black-and-white scale of justice tattooed on her forearm, identical to the one used to identify her 19-year-old son’s body after he was kidnapped and killed by Colombian soldiers in 2008.
For Sigifredo López, it’s flashbacks from the seven years he was held captive by guerrillas in the South American country’s dense jungles and the trauma of surviving after his companions were massacred in 2007.
Both have radically different views of who should win Colombia’s presidency on Sunday, with Monroy throwing her support behind peace activist Iván Cepeda and López backing Trump-endorsed Abelardo de la Espriella, who has promised a scourge on crime.
But their fear is the same: Returning to a more violent past.
“It all takes a toll, both physically and emotionally,” said López. “Emotionally, there’s the fear that still simmers deep down, something you don’t openly express, the fear that everything we’ve already lived through could happen again.”
Polarization “brewing for decades”
In Colombia’s most polarized presidential election in years, voters will choose between de la Espriella and Cepeda – two candidates with sharply different visions for how to find peace in a country long marked by war.
The armed struggle between Marxist guerrillas, Colombian military forces and right-wing paramilitaries has resulted in more than 10 million people — one in five Colombians — becoming victims of conflict, according to a government registry documenting killings, kidnappings, forced displacement and more.
The trauma of war and the fight for peace are embedded in Colombian politics. Despite a 2016 peace pact with Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, conflict rages in many parts of the Andean nation, becoming a defining theme in Sunday’s vote.
Polarization within Colombian society over how to handle violence has “been brewing for decades,” said Elizabeth Dickinson, Bogotá-based deputy Latin America director of International Crisis Group.
“Increasingly on both sides, there’s an us and a them. That’s very dangerous in a country like Colombia with a long history of political violence. … The spark could light at any moment.”
On one side is Cepeda, who has pledged to continue Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s “total peace” agenda of negotiating peace pacts with a range of criminal groups, from drug mafias to insurgent fighters. That strategy sought to rewire how Colombia deals with conflict, but has largely failed, stoking a rebuke as armed groups have taken advantage of ceasefires to grow in strength.
On the other is de la Espriella, a lawyer who has promised an all-out offensive on crime, echoing El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s war on gangs. While Bukele’s crackdown has drawn attention across the region for sharply cutting homicide rates, it also fueled allegations of human rights abuses.
Fears of state violence
The 67-year-old Monroy is reminded of the civilian toll from past military offensives every time she thinks of her son, Julián Oviedo Monroy, or looks at the tattoo on her arm.
Her son, who had dreamed of joining Colombia’s military to lift his family out of poverty, disappeared in 2008 along with other poor young men on the fringes of Bogotá. Months later, his body was unearthed in a clandestine grave in the conflict-torn northeast. His body was identified by his tattoo.
“It’s like still having him here,” she said, looking down at the tattoo she got as an homage to her son and his photo that she keeps in her wallet.
Monroy’s son became one of 6,402 victims in one of the worst atrocities of Colombia’s conflict. Colombian military officers carried out extrajudicial executions against civilians in a scandal known as “false positives” carried out largely between 2002–2008 under ex-President Álvaro Uribe. Officials then falsely said the murdered civilians were enemy combatants killed in the war with FARC rebels.
Around a dozen high-ranking security officers later acknowledged they killed Monroy’s son and asked for forgiveness in a peace tribunal established after the 2016 peace pact to unearth the ugly truths of the war — a court that de la Espriella has promised to dismantle.
Monroy criticized the mounting violence under incumbent president Petro, saying Cepeda would have to come down with a heavier hand on criminal groups.
But what outweighed her criticism was fear of the military campaign promised by de la Espriella, who has vowed to wipe out “anyone who I’ve declared a military target like cockroaches, like rats.”
“God willing, this man doesn’t come to power, because ‘false positives’ will become a reality again,” she said of de la Espriella.
“Colombia is being kidnapped”
For López, 62, the fear is returning to the “hell” he lived in for seven years from 2002-2009 when he was kidnapped by FARC guerrillas and held captive in the jungles they controlled.
López was working as a local assemblyman in western Colombia at a time when the rebels had declared politicians military targets. They kidnapped him and 11 other lawmakers.
López was being held in solitary confinement in 2007 when his companions were massacred by rebels. He heard the gunshots echo over the rebel camp, a memory that haunts him. The case turned López into a symbol — a survivor of the FARC’s kidnapping of over 21,000 people over five decades of conflict.
Now in Cali, the city where he was kidnapped, he lives with a state-appointed security detail because of threats against his life. He’s watched with fear over the past four years as violence has mounted. Because of that, López, a self-declared leftist, said de la Espriella has his support.
“Colombia is being kidnapped,” López said. “I’m with Abelardo because his priority is to restore safety to Colombians. He understands ‘total peace’ isn’t won by negotiating with criminals, but by exercising the legitimate force of the state.”
Under current president Petro, armed groups have used weapons like drones to wage war, bombings have racked up a civilian toll and one presidential candidate was assassinated in June 2025. In May, the International Red Cross said the impact of armed conflict on civilians in Colombia over the past year had reached the worst point in a decade.
This week, the country’s largest guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), announced a temporary ceasefire in order to not interfere in Colombia’s elections. Other criminal groups made no such promises.
With the wave of violence, López said, “victims are being revictimized.”
Just as Monroy fears what could come from a sharp swerve to the right, López worries about what could happen if Colombia continues on its current path.
“My fear is for the new generation, that the same thing that happened to me could happen to them if the country keeps being handed over to guerrillas and organized crime,” López said.

Daniel Cormier maintains that his Twitter account was hacked.
On Sunday, Cormier became the center of controversy in the MMA world after a Tweet sent from his account posted alleged screenshots of an interaction with Eric Trump, where the President’s son appeared to ask Cormier about the possibility of fixed fights at the UFC White House event. The tweet in question was deleted, with both Cormier and Trump denying that anything of the sort had actually taken place.
On Wednesday, Cormier addressed the situation, explaining where he was when he found out and what was going on from his side of things.
“I get to the UFC on Sunday,” Cormier said on his YouTube channel. “Two of the UFC social media people are telling me, ‘We were just talking about you.’ I said, ‘About what?’ They said, ‘You and Eric Trump.’ I said, ‘What about me and Eric Trump?’ Guys, this is at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday night. I go to the event, and they’re telling me, talking to me about something that I have no idea that is going on. I have no idea how long it was up. I had no idea how long it had been taken down.
“Now, whoever did this, whoever hacked my Twitter, they posted and took it down, because they think that people are going to believe stuff like that. At the end of the day, I would never do anything like that. I would never engage in those conversations. I would never go to Twitter and post that after engaging in those conversations. I just wouldn’t do that. That’s not what I do.
“So, then I go and look at my Twitter account, and I see all these comments on the next thing that I ended up posting about it. Or on my Instagram channel, people are asking me why I deleted a Tweet. I had no idea what was going on. …
“I’m still just barely getting into my Twitter account this morning,” Cormier continued. “For the last two and a half days, I have been trying to work with Twitter to get me back into my account, because during the show, they told me to change the account. I’m trying to broadcast this historic event, and in the middle of it all, I’m trying to change the password to my Twitter account, to try and make sure people are doing and posting crazy things from the account, as I’m trying to broadcast one of the biggest broadcasting moments of my entire career.”
Cormier went on to argue that the entire situation was so patently absurd on its face that nobody should have believed it in the first place.
“I don’t think he’s stupid enough to do that,” Cormier said of Eric Trump. “I don’t think anybody would be dumb enough to do that to somebody they just don’t know. He doesn’t know me! And, logic! Twitter, for as long as Twitter has been around, in order to have conversations with someone, you and that person have to follow each other to direct message. We don’t follow each other on any social channels. … If I’m being completely honest, I met Donald Trump Jr. on Saturday, and I mistook him for Eric Trump. I don’t follow politics that closely. I just don’t. …
“With me, it’s all logical,” Cormier continued. “I would never do something like that, first off, because I just wouldn’t do it. It doesn’t make sense. And secondly, not as you get ready to go and try to broadcast the biggest night of your entire career. Because had I done that, and I’m getting ready to go to the octagon, all of a sudden, I’m around all the people that I’m trying to expose. Doesn’t make sense. It really does not make sense.
“Not only that, but I have a family. In any situation, you start attacking any type of situation like that, where we’re guests on the White House lawn, and you attack the family that’s in the White House right now, you run the risk of losing your job. What about my children? What about my family? And I doubt that would happen, but it just doesn’t make sense.”
Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped the internet from running with the story. Even on Cormier’s response video, there are numerous comments suggesting he’s not telling the truth, and the salaciousness of the original Tweet is resulting in Cormier having to deal with a lot of backlash, regardless of him not sending it.
“It’s become an issue for me,” Cormier said. “Not with the UFC, but with sponsors. I’ve had more conversations with sponsors than I’ve had in years, because every company that’s come into contact with me, they generally are happy with the way that the relationship goes. So there’s no need to contact me unless I’m working. But now I’m getting contact from sponsors about this thing. And it’s just not true. So I get annoyed, and I get frustrated, because I don’t understand how it’s not true, and I’m telling you it’s not true, and people just don’t seem to want to believe it.”
But whether or not people will believe him, Cormier is unequivocal in stating that all of this is the result of someone hacking his account.
“There was nothing to it,” Cormier said. “My Twitter got hacked. Someone got into my shit and started posting stuff. … Anybody that knows me knows I don’t speak like that.”

Washington, D.C., mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George looked at a teeming crowd Tuesday evening and issued a proclamation about her candidacy as a democratic socialist: “If there were any doubt, let it now be laid to rest,” she said. “It is the people of D.C. who elect the mayor of D.C.”
Flanked by supporters after early Democratic primary results showed her with a significant lead, she continued: “Tonight, D.C. made its demands.”
Her remarks came days after President Donald Trump had warned that he could attempt a federal takeover of Washington if Lewis George, a City Council member, rose to power.
“We won’t put up with it,” Trump warned in comments to reporters.
But he already has. In some of the United States’ most powerful and populous cities, including its financial hub and now potentially its political center, politics are shifting further left — and some say it is in direct response to Trump and his policies.
Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani spectacularly rose to prominence to lead New York City in last year’s elections, offering free bus rides and rent stabilization.
In Los Angeles, democratic socialist Nithya Raman advanced to the mayoral runoff, in which she’ll face off against incumbent Karen Bass, a fellow Democrat.
In Seattle, democratic socialist Katie Wilson assumed office this year after having risen as a leader and an advocate in the Transit Riders Union.
In Chicago, far left-leaning Brandon Johnson — who, unlike the others, is not a self-described democratic socialist but is an acolyte of Bernie Sanders and was backed by the organization Sanders founded, Our Revolution — is closing out his first term as mayor and is likely to seek another.
Now, Lewis George could claim power over the nation’s capital when Trump is pushing the limits of power in the executive branch and residents are increasingly feeling the squeeze of higher rent, higher transportation costs, higher unemployment and low wages. At the same time, the nation’s richest people are attaining wealth by leaps and bounds.
“More people are having to work multiple jobs or just more hours to make ends meet, just to deal with those costs. Meanwhile, people see what the federal government is doing: investing more in militarism, giving trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the already wealthiest,” said Ashik Siddique, a national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. “So when we have people who are running on credible platforms of expanding public services to be universal and high-quality for everybody and taxing the rich to do it, that message really resonates. People are really hungry for an alternative to the status quo.”
Progressives say the phenomenon is an evolution of a movement that began with Sanders’ presidential run 10 years ago, which inspired a new generation of leaders. Democratic socialism grew under his rise, with major groups like DSA and Our Revolution recruiting and supporting candidates for local offices. In most cases, DSA mayors and mayoral candidates held previous positions on city councils or county commissions or in local unions.
Lewis George ran on what she called a “people first” platform focused heavily on the cost of living. She said she would seek universal childcare, caps on rent and stabilization of utility prices. As of Wednesday, with ballot counting still underway, she had about 53% of the vote, with her nearest rival, former City Council member Kenyan McDuffie, at 37%. Ranked-choice voting will come into play to determine the primary winner if she falls below the majority mark.
Ironically, the rise of the far left mirrors the economic populism Trump originally tapped during his 2016 run. His MAGA movement grew out of promises to tear apart the status quo and “drain the swamp” in Washington. It helped him win over some blue-collar white voters who had voted for former President Barack Obama.
But economic strain has dominated Trump’s second term in office, and there is evidence he’s losing ground with those same voters.
Today, poll after poll shows Americans are distraught over the economy amid rising gas prices and grocery costs, as well as growing inflation.
A recent NBC News poll, sponsored by the nonpartisan, nonprofit group More Perfect and taken in advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary, found that 78% of American adults believed the “American Dream” was more difficult to attain now than it was a generation ago. The survey found that the sentiment was consistent across demographic groups.
“It’s a reaction to Trump. Trump has attacked major cities, which have a higher concentration of Democratic voters. He’s infiltrated them with ICE and National Guard troops. He’s cut off funding,” Our Revolution Executive Director Joseph Geevarghese said. “It’s a part of a larger trend. … The cost of living is just unaffordable, and so you’re seeing a referendum not just on Trump but also on this Democratic establishment in their governance of these cities.”
Whether Trump will follow through with his threats to attempt a federal takeover in Washington should Lewis George win remains to be seen. Trump made similar remarks amid Mamdani’s rise last year, only to later sing his praises from the Oval Office.
And groups on the left say that if Trump were to attempt a militarization of Washington, he would expect it to be met with the kind of wide-scale protests and resistance that eventually drove a large immigration enforcement operation out of Minneapolis this year.
“There was massive organizing at every level of society … that helped push them out and let them see that there’s just massive resistance from the public,” Siddique said. In Washington, he continued, there’s a storied history of pushing back against power grabs. He forecast the same would happen if Trump tried to take that route.
“There are a lot of people in D.C. who will stand with somebody who’s a mayor who really represents all those organized people,” he said.