We Found Her: The Most Absurd General-Election Candidate in America
Hey guys, it’s Andrew. This is a truly wild newsletter, involving one of the craziest campaign stories I’ve ever covered—it has alleged fraud, carpetbagging, fake-ish identities, and a candidate I’m 95 percent sure is straight-up gaslighting me. This newsletter is free, but if you like what you read and want to keep supporting it, please consider joining Bulwark+. We’d love to have you along for the ride. It was a close call, but it sure looks like Donald Trump is going to get his East Wing ballroom, at least for now. Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that construction could continue. The Court declined to rule on the actual legality of Trump’s decision to tear down the East Wing, but held that the historical preservationists who had brought the suit to stop it lacked the standing to sue. Sure seems we’re hearing that a lot these days! Happy Tuesday. Join Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger for Morning Shots Live today at 10:00 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.
Florida (?) Womanby Andrew Egger Republican House candidate Te Mayonna Brown is fighting an uphill battle. Florida’s 24th Congressional District, where she took the Republican nomination after running unopposed last month, is one of the bluest in the state. But that’s not the only hurdle she appears to be facing. Before getting involved in the FL-24 race, Brown lost a different Republican House primary this year—not in Florida, but in Illinois. Oh, and there’s this: Back in Illinois, she appears to be under indictment for felony wire fraud. Per publicly available court documents, her trial is set to begin just weeks after Election Day. I am saying “appears” here a lot, because Brown denied it. Not just that she did the things she’s been accused of, but that she’s been accused of them at all. When I reached her by phone yesterday, she flatly insisted—despite clear photographic, social-media, and campaign-records evidence to the contrary—that she, Te Mayonna Brown, wasn’t the Tedora M. Brown who ran for Congress in Illinois or the Te Dora Brown named in a federal indictment. She then asked if I was with law enforcement before hustling off the phone. Politics attracts strange characters. But few seem to match this. The tale begins in March 2023, when federal prosecutors in Illinois indicted one Te Dora Brown of Palos Park on thirteen felonies, accusing her and her husband Christopher Scott of fraudulently obtaining hundreds of thousands of dollars in COVID relief money by applying for federal loans on behalf of phony employees at companies that turned out not to exist. Prosecutors alleged Brown and Scott spent the money on themselves—making splurge buys at Tiffany, Nordstrom, and Saks Fifth Avenue, buying Uber Eats, and withdrawing huge sums in ATM cash. Scott pleaded guilty; Brown decided to fight the charges. She also decided to run for office. When she threw her hat in the ring last year for Illinois’s 11th District, Tedora M. Brown (as she now styled her name) was suddenly calling herself a “former lifelong Democrat” who was “waking up to what the Democratic party was doing to her community and her country.” And she wasn’t hiding the criminal charges. “They came after me because I’m a Republican and I’m an American Black woman,” Brown told a local paper. “If I was guilty, why would I run for Congress? Why would I put myself in the limelight? It just doesn’t make any sense.” On March 17, Brown came in fourth in her primary, picking up just 5.7 percent of the vote. One month later, a “Te Brown” popped up in Florida business records, incorporating a new company: TM Brown Incorporated. Was this the same person? It appears so. The company was registered in the name of Brown’s former campaign treasurer, Dratonyai Ratcliff. The same records named the company president as “Te Brown,” listing her under a Palos Park, Illinois address. A few weeks after that, Ratcliff filed new paperwork on behalf of “Te Brown”—this time with the Federal Election Commission. The campaign was headquartered at the same Aventura address where TM Brown Inc. had just been incorporated; Ratcliff was listed once more as treasurer. Brown was running for Congress again, in Florida’s 24th District. And this time, she lucked out: Nobody else jumped into the race on the Republican side. The primary was canceled and she advanced by default to face Democrat Oliver Gilbert in the general election this November. Again, I should stress that Brown disputed this entire account. On the phone yesterday, she repeatedly insisted she is not Te Dora Brown or Tedora M. Brown of Illinois. When I pointed out that the same Dratonyai Ratcliff had filed the paperwork for both of Te Brown’s campaigns, she suddenly swerved: “Wait, hold on, is this—are you the police?” Moments later, she begged off the call: It was a busy day, she said, and she needed to prep for “an exclusive interview that I’m doing tomorrow with NBC.” She promised to call back the next day—this morning—at 6 a.m., but she never did. The evidence linking the indicted Te Dora Brown, Illinois candidate Tedora M. Brown, and Florida candidate Te Brown goes well beyond the Ratcliff tie. Brown’s Illinois congressional website, taken offline but still available in archived form, writes out her full name as “Te Dora Mayonna Brown”; her current Florida website gives her name as “Te Mayonna Brown.” An X account under the name “Te Mayonna Brown” regularly shares inspirational quotes and updates on her Florida campaign. But the account’s handle, @TeamLSAcademy, is an apparent shoutout to Brown’s former company Little Shepherd’s Academy, Inc.—one of the allegedly fraudulent businesses named in the federal indictment against Te Dora Brown. That same X account also points in old tweets to an Instagram account, @missbrownalways. That account’s bio listed Brown as the president of two companies, Scottland Construction and Women in Construction of Illinois. Both companies appeared in Tedora M. Brown’s biography on her Illinois campaign website. After I pressed Brown on this connection yesterday, both companies suddenly vanished from the @missbrownalways Instagram bio. Here it was before:
And here it was after:
That account’s profile picture was plainly taken during the same photo shoot as this picture, formerly displayed on the Illinois campaign website of Tedora M. Brown:
And here, for comparison, is a photo taken from the Florida campaign website of Te Brown:
Perhaps aware that it was inconceivable that there might be two Te Browns running for office in the same cycle, Brown’s campaign manager, Karin Dennis, gave me a call literally minutes before we sent this newsletter. Unlike Brown, Dennis acknowledged that this was, indeed, the same person. But she insisted that the charges had been dropped—something that Brown herself has been saying since at least April 2025. Told there was no evidence of that in electronic court records, Dennis suggested it would be there shortly. We will wait and see and update if needed. I’m disappointed that it was Dennis who called and not Brown because I wanted to know what her endgame is here. She has little shot of winning this deep-blue seat. And it doesn’t appear she’s trying very hard. She’s done little apparent campaigning or press. Nor has she raised much money: She’s brought in just over $7,000 in contributions as of her latest filing. Most of her campaign has been financed by $306,000 she loaned it herself. In Illinois, Brown seemed to be following a familiar playbook for accused white collar criminals: Proclaiming herself MAGA to paint herself as the victim of a political witch hunt. But if her goal was to run as a victim of Biden-administration weaponized justice to get on the PardonQuest radar of a president with a soft spot for fraudsters, it’s not clear why she’s suddenly trying to keep that indictment hushed up. It’s not like federal prosecutors have forgotten who she is or where to find her. That trial’s coming right up. Whatever the reason, none of this exactly screams “healthy democracy.” Gerrymandering, partisan polarization, and the death of local media have put us in a strange place: Only a handful of districts are nationally important any given cycle, which means only a handful of districts’ candidates can expect to get a whole ton of scrutiny. Anywhere else, you’re liable to find some true oddballs on your November ballot—even if few are quite as strange as Te Brown. There’s a Bear in the Arcticby Cathy Young Vladimir Putin has sometimes delved into medieval history to justify his imperialist war in Ukraine; now, he’s switched to biology. In a meeting with faculty and students at a teachers’ college ahead of the start of the school year, the Kremlin dictator reacted to a teacher’s mention of a trip to the Arctic by launching into a bizarre monologue about killer whales eating huge polar bears “like minnows”: “They just pounce in a pack and—BOOM—tear them to pieces,” Putin narrated with creepy little grins and hand gestures. “It’s all very interesting. Oh yes, oh yes—it’s the food chain.” As his audience listened with awkward laughs, Putin got to the point: “Children need to be told about this too, so they understand what kind of world we live in and why we’re conducting a special military operation.” The surreal weirdness of this riff is heightened by the fact that Putin’s biology is about as good as his history: No, killer whales don’t actually eat polar bears. (Maybe they could in theory, but there are no such recorded incidents; Putin may have been misled by AI-generated videos.) And in any case, which one is Russia supposed to be? If it’s the bear, in keeping with traditional symbolism, then Putin’s metaphor seems to say that if Russia doesn’t itself go on the attack, it’s going to get jumped and ripped to pieces by a pack of predators (NATO?). The larger point, according to expatriate Russian journalist Olga Romanova, is that the world is governed by the law of the jungle—or in this case, the Arctic: “The strong have the right to devour the weak,” and it’s eat or be eaten. This isn’t the first time Putin has told animal stories to make political points. Sometimes, he’s invoked Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, comparing Russia’s Western critics to the craven jackal Tabaqui and opposition activists to the chattering bandar-log monkeys. In his address to the federal assembly in December 2014, a few months after the Crimea annexation, he compared Russia to “a bear guarding his taiga,” or boreal forest. Sometimes, Putin revealed, he ponders that “maybe our bear should just sit there quietly,” eating “berries and honey” instead of “chasing piglets” around the forest. (Wait, what?) But no, Putin concluded, “they” will always try to chain up the bear and then declaw and defang it. And who can forget Putin’s recollection, in a 2000 interview, about chasing after a rat on the stairs of his apartment building as a boy, only to have the cornered rat lash out and start chasing after him? (The moral being, “don’t ever try to corner anyone.”) The horrifying part, commented exiled Russian political satirist Viktor Shenderovich, is that this man who “has never left the animal kingdom” is at the head of a great country. True enough, but here’s another depressing thought: There’s another world leader who exhibits a very similar mix of sheer weirdness and “might-is-right”-ness. Can’t you just see Donald Trump, bored of reciting “The Snake,” rambling about killer whales and bears at one of his rallies, as an explanation for everything from repelling the immigrant “invasion” to the war in Iran? AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsA MOVIE DEAL IN EVERY POT: Did we say yesterday that Congress has no big legislative hopes left this year? Apparently, Donald Trump has other ideas. Congress needs to pass a new spending bill to avoid a shutdown, and Trump hasn’t stopped flogging the SAVE America Act. But last night, Trump threw a new legislative demand on the pile: After meeting with his “Hollywood Ambassador” Jon Voight, Trump now wants to see a legislative rescue mission for Hollywood. “Jon, and many others in the Industry, are suggesting we do Federal Tax Incentives in order to Make our Movie and Television Production Business GREAT AGAIN, perhaps GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE,” Trump enthused. “I am going to suggest that Republicans and Democrats get together, and immediately craft Legislation to save the Movie, Television, and Entertainment Business in America. Congress should approve, immediately, a Federal Production Incentive to create Entertainment Jobs in America.” A federal jobs program for Hollywood showbiz types might not be exactly the sort of forgotten-man populism that Trump’s base thought they were getting when he returned to office. But at least Trump’s found something to care about beyond his DOA elections bill and his ballroom renovations. Cheap Shots
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