Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) formally launched his reelection on Tuesday, after he appeared to rule out a 2028 presidential run. 

In a roughly two minute long announcement video, Moore contrasts himself with President Trump. Moore accuses the president of “bending over backwards for billionaires and big corporations.” 

“I’m not from that world and y’all know I’m a person of action,” Moore says. “We are moving forward fast across this state and across party lines to prove to a dysfunctional Washington that there is a better way forward.”

Moore, an Army veteran, was first elected in 2022. He previously had not held elected office. According to a Maryland Now poll released last month, Moore holds a 50 percent approval rating in the state. 

Moore’s reelection launch comes days after he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he will not run for president in 2028. 

“Yes, I’ll be serving a full term,” Moore told NBC’s Kristen Welker. “I’m excited about reelection. I’m excited about what I’m going to be able to do for the people of Maryland.”

“Do you rule out a run for president, governor?”

“Yeah, I’m not running for president,” Moore responded.

“You rule it out?” Welker asked.

“Yes, I’m not running for president,” he said.

Moore has consistently been floated as a potential 2028 Democratic contender. The governor stoked speculation earlier this year visiting the battleground of Pennsylvania and the early primary state of South Carolina. Additionally, Moore has gone toe-to-toe with Trump on crime amid the president’s threats to deploy the National Guard to Baltimore.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Global warming in the U.S. is amping up the country’s sweet tooth, a new study found.

When the temperature rises, Americans — especially those with less money and education — drink lots more sugary beverages and a bit more frozen desserts. It amounts to more than 100 million pounds of added sugar (358 million kilograms) consumed in a year, compared to 15 years earlier, according to a team of researchers in the U.S. and United Kingdom writing in Monday’s Nature Climate Change.

“Climate change is shaping what you eat and how you eat and that might have a bad effect on your health,” said study co-author Duo Chan, a climate scientist at the University of Southampton.

“People tend to take in more sweetened beverages as the temperature is getting higher and higher,” Chan said. “Obviously under a warming climate that would cause you to drink more or take in more sugar. And that is going to be a severe problem when it comes to health.”

A little added sugar every day adds up

By tracking weather conditions and consumer purchases, the researchers found that sugar consumption rose as temperatures moved between 54-86 degrees Fahrenheit (about 12 and 30 degrees Celsius). And the warmer it got, the more sugar was consumed, until appetites began to lessen when it grew warmer than 86 degrees.

The daily difference from higher temperatures doesn’t amount to even a single candy bar for the average person. But it adds up over time and has a big effect, said University of California San Francisco endocrinology professor Dr. Robert Lustig, a specialist in pediatrics and obesity who wasn’t part of the study.

Lustig wrote in an email that among poorer Americans, just one added can of sugary soft drink per day increases diabetes risk by 29 percent — and temperature-related thirst plays a big part in America’s obesity epidemic.

The U.S.’s average annual temperature has gone up about 2.2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since 1895, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

To chart the impact on sugar consumption, researchers compared it to the American Heart Association recommendations: limiting daily intake to 36 grams for men and 25 grams for women.

The team then compared wind, precipitation and humidity records to the detailed purchase records of 40,000 to 60,000 American households from 2004 to 2019, not using any data after the pandemic hit. Then they looked at the nutritional information of the items bought. That allowed them to eliminate other factors to make a causal link and come up with a calculation for how much extra sugar is consumed per person per degree, said lead author Pan He, an environmental scientist at Cardiff University.

Researcher He said she started thinking about the study when she noticed that people in the U.S. tend to grab sugary soda when they are thirsty: “From a perspective of nutrition science or environmental science, that could be a problem,” she said.

Sugar consumption can vary with gender, income and education

The researchers found that men consumed more sugary soft drinks, and that the amount of added sugar consumed during hot weather was several times higher for low- and very low-income families than for the wealthiest, the study found.

People who work outside drank more sugary drinks than those who work inside, and the same went for families where the head of the household was less educated. White people have the highest added sugar effect, while Asian Americans showed no significant change in added sugar in the heat.

Lustig said sugary drinks are marketed and priced in a way to attract the poor, and in many disadvantaged communities the water tastes funny because of chemicals in them. Poor people are also less likely to have air conditioning and are more likely to work outside and need more hydration, Lustig and He said.

“It should concern us that the rate of the impact is larger in households where people make less money or are less educated,” said Dr. Courtney Howard, vice chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance. “These groups tend to have lower baseline health status, so this is an area where climate-related changes appear to magnify existing health inequalities.”

Howard, an emergency room physician, was not part of the study.

The amount of sugar consumed is likely to soar in the future with more warming, Chan said.

But University of Washington health and climate scientist Kristie Ebi, who wasn’t part of the research, said as temperatures increase with human-caused climate change “there will be other issues of more importance than a small increase in sugary beverages.”

Writing about the Jeffrey Epstein saga has the feeling of using an air horn. It calls a great deal of attention to oneself, produces unpredictable and intense results in its audience and really should be saved for moments when it’s absolutely necessary — scaring off a charging bear, preventing a maritime disaster, being Pitbull, etc. 

Then you read something like this: “[Speaker Mike Johnson] went on to say, ‘[President Trump] was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.’” And you find yourself pulling open the junk drawer in the kitchen and rummaging for that air horn you bought as a stocking stuffer last Christmas.

When the Speaker then clarified that he was only “reiterating what the victims’ attorney said” — the part about how Trump had cooperated with investigators during the first Epstein prosecution but not the part about how the president had done an “about-face” — then you’ve got to push that little red button.

It would be one thing if the Speaker had a reputation as a liar, but even his fiercest enemies would have to acknowledge that Johnson is known to be a very honest man. Or if Johnson were stupid, it might be reasonable to think that he didn’t know how police informants work. But Johnson, a lawyer and law professor, has proven to be a lot smarter than most in Washington. He keeps passing bill after bill despite having a majority thinner than the ones that ate his three immediate Republican predecessors alive.

The most obvious and unpleasant explanation for why Johnson would say that Donald Trump was undercover for the FBI trying to bring down an international ring of pedophiles is that somebody told him it was true. The list of people who might tell Johnson something like that and whom Johnson would believe well enough to repeat the claim is very, very short. Maybe even just one name long, signed with a flourish…

The obvious part of why it’s not pleasant to write (or read) about the Epstein case is the luridness of all of it. That, of course, is also the largest part of why this story, more than any of the other similarly ripe scandals of the second Trump term, has persisted. The wild buckraking that the president and his family are doing is no less active or ethically profane than it was when the Qataris gave him a jumbo jet and his family was holding soirees for foreign crypto patrons this spring. But sex sells, and the more taboo and shameful the better.

Gen Xers will nod and think of l’affaire du Lewinsky, but even a whiff of sex scandal can turn a boring old corruption story into a scandal with legs. Teapot Dome 100 years ago wouldn’t have wrecked the Harding administration the way it did if it had just been about oil leases. The tawdry behavior of Harding’s Ohio Gang in Washington and the poorly kept secret of the president’s many infidelities let every story about bribes and kickbacks be suffused with a prurience that could really sell newspapers. 

Aside from not wanting to to be selling sex, the other reason that Epstein coverage feels distasteful is the degree to which Democrats have glommed on to the story. As Mark Leibovich argued in a recent piece: “The distraction drumbeat not only dilutes the seriousness of Trump’s actions; it also exemplifies the Democrats’ own lame efforts to communicate a potent opposition message.” 

Yup.

I’m all for partisans trying to score points and win elections. It’s their job, after all. But I don’t like adding my air horn to either side’s klaxons. And yet, this, like most durable scandals, seems to be more about how it divides the party in power than how it energizes the opposition. Just making a president a lame duck, a scandal isn’t something that the other side does to you. It has to be about how it exercises the home team. 

If the Obama administration had run an undercover operation that put illegal abortion pills into Mexico, it would have infuriated Republicans but drawn shrugs from Democrats. But because it was illegal guns that found their way south of the border, enough Democrats joined the opposition to make the administration take notice.

There are a number of reasons why the Epstein story gets so far into the brains of Republicans and why, unlike all of the rest of the scandals with which Democrats and the press have tried to nuke Trump, so many in the GOP are sticking with the story despite the many incentives to put it in the memory hole.

One is that other Republicans have skin in the game here. This is the first of the Trump scandals since the Jan. 6, 2021, sacking of the Capitol that contemplates a post-Trump political world. There’s no more elections for Trump to win, and how his fellow Republicans conduct themselves around this issue will matter not just for the coming midterm elections but in the 2028 primaries.

Not unlike Hillary Clinton during the whole Benghazi debacle, the interests of the current administration are in tension with the folks hoping to be the next ones at bat. And that tension in the Epstein case is understandable because of the centrality of the issues of sex trafficking and pedophilia to the current Republican Party. 

In the same way that the Iran-Contra scandal undercut a core strength of the Reagan administration — the release of the American hostages held in Tehran and a we-don’t-negotiate-with-terrorists attitude — Trump’s very shady behavior around the Epstein case hits hard for a movement that celebrated “Sound of Freedom” and frequently labels political enemies as “groomers.” 

I will still be sparing in the use of the Epstein air horn, but one gets the feeling that it’s going to have to stay out on the counter for a good while longer.