Wyoming businessman Reid Rasner formally launched a bid for Congress this week. It’s his second bid for public office.

Rasner, a fourth-generation Wyoming native and Omnivest Financial CEO, previously wanted to buy TikTok when it was up for sale and to bring the headquarters to the Mountain West.

“I’m a Wyoming businessman. I’m not a career politician,” Rasner said in an interview with the Deseret News. “Why I’m running is because Washington wastes money, drives up costs for families and businesses, and Wyoming truly deserves representation that knows how to cut waste and grow an economy.”

Rasner is set to face off against Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray in the Republican primary.

Current Rep. Harriet Hageman announced she run for the Senate with hopes of replacing Sen. Cynthia Lummis, who is retiring.

President Donald Trump gave Hageman his “Complete and Total Endorsement,” something Rasner is also looking to earn, calling himself a “100% Trump Conservative Republican.”

Asked how he feels competing against someone already holding a statewide position like Gray, Rasner said the race isn’t about “politics or personality,” but rather about results. He highlighted his long history of being a successful businessman based out of Wyoming, beginning when he bought his first company at 18 years old.

Rasner put forward a hefty bid to buy TikTok when it was up for sale, as it was required by U.S. law for ByteDance to divest from the popular social media app. After months of delay, and Trump extending the deadline several times, Rasner said he knew the chances of being the app’s owner were dwindling.

“When we realized that TikTok was unwilling to sell the algorithm, we knew that we just couldn’t make a deal, because that’s what the bulk of our bid was … preserving the algorithm for American sovereignty,” he said.

With that tech opportunity for Wyoming gone, Rasner said he hopes to be elected to Congress as the state’s lone member of the House to bring a different kind of economic change to the state.

“Wyoming needs a do-er, not another politician, and someone that knows how to run and operate businesses and budgets and can actually get this done and make life more affordable for Wyoming, and deregulate industries, bringing in really good businesses and business opportunities in Wyoming, like TikTok, like our nuclear opportunities that we have recently lost in Wyoming,” he said. “I want to create a fourth legacy industry in the state revolving around finance and technology and I think this is so important to stabilize our economy.”

Rasner put $1 million of his own money toward his campaign, and now, he said, outside donations are coming in.

It’s his second political campaign, after previously challenging Sen. John Barrasso in the 2024 Republican primary. He said this time around, he’s hired FP1 Strategies and a “solid team.” He has a campaign that is “fully funded” and he is going to continue to fundraise, Rasner said.

Rasner shared that if elected he’d be enthusiastic about being on the energy, agriculture and finance committees in the House. They are some of the strongest committees for Wyoming, he said.

“I’m running to take Wyoming business sense to Washington, D.C., and make Wyoming affordable again, and make Wyoming wealthy,” he said. “It’s so important that we get business leadership and someone who knows what they’re doing outside of politics in the real world to deliver that message in Washington.”

Influencer Trisha Paytas released multiple videos over the past week noting that she is considering a run for the U.S. Congress in California.

Paytas, known for flamboyant and zany content, said in a video filmed in her car, “I don’t mean it as a joke, and I know it sounds so crazy, like to me too, but I think it’s so doable,” she said. “I really would love to run for House of Representatives. Here in California, we have 52, and I would really love to run.”

She went on to note, “They have an election this year, Nov. 3, 2026, and I do have some bills I would like to present to Congress. So I’m working on that. I really want to be able to, like, truly make a difference, because I see so much horrible stuff happening in the world and right here in California as well, and I’m like, ‘Oh, there’s nothing I can do.’ No — there’s something I can do. I can run. I can run for office. And I wholeheartedly really want to give my all for that.”

People magazine reported that she revealed her political slogan, “California could be good,” commenting, “Just need to figure out a better system for everyone and everything.”

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In the podcast episode she had filmed that day, she said one of her policies would be requiring people to be 25 years old before they can do adult film/sex work like OnlyFans. She also knocked the “old men and old women” who currently serve in politics, saying they prioritize issues such as, “like, starting wars and stuff.”

In a follow-up podcast on Thursday, she noted that she has seen some outrage about the prospect of her running for Congress, but will consider the run anyway.

“Y’all, I’m scared, the Congress thing went to the wrong side of the internet. I need to just wait a minute,” she said. “[I] loved it and then got scared.”

Even so, she said that she is still in the exploratory phase of seeking out information to test the waters before launching an official bid. Failing that, she noted that she might also consider other avenues of political change. 

“Still wanna make a difference, trying to figure out a way to do it without people just coming for me,” she said. 

“Let’s put a pin for now. We don’t have much time. I’ll decide in the next few weeks because we have until like Feb. 9, I guess, to just start getting those votes, or at least signatures,” she said. 

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According to People magazine, Paytas has a politically mercurial past. “In 2012, she threw her support behind the Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, posting a since-deleted video to her YouTube channel where she called him ‘super hot.’ She shared her support for Donald Trump in 2016 — but later released a since-deleted video in 2019 titled ‘I do NOT support Trump’ in which she admitted she had ‘never voted’ and knew ‘literally nothing’ about politics.”

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San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie told CBS News Friday that he was able to convince President Trump in a phone call several months ago not to deploy federal agents to San Francisco.

In a live interview with “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil, Lurie, a moderate Democrat, said that the president called him while he was sitting in a car.

“I took the call, and his first question to me was, ‘How’s it going there?’” Lurie recounted.

In October, sources told CBS News that the president was planning to surge Border Patrol agents to San Francisco as part of the White House’s ongoing immigration crackdown that has seen it deploy federal immigration officers to cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and most recently, Minneapolis.

At the time, the reports prompted pushback from California officials, including Lurie and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

However, shortly after that report, Mr. Trump announced that he had called off the plan to “surge” federal agents to San Francisco following a conversation with Lurie.

“I spoke to Mayor Lurie last night and he asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post on Oct. 23. The president also noted that “friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with the surge.”

“I told him what I would tell you,” Lurie said Friday of his October call with Mr. Trump. “San Francisco is a city on the rise, crime is at historic lows, all economic indicators are on the right direction, and our local law enforcement is doing an incredible job.”

Going back to the pandemic, San Francisco has often been the strong focus of criticism from Republican lawmakers over its struggles in combatting crime and homelessness. It was voter frustration over those issues that helped Lurie defeat incumbent London Breed in November 2024.

Lurie, however, acknowledged that the city still has “a lot of work to do.”

“I’m clear-eyed about our challenges still,” Lurie said. “In the daytime, we have really ended our drug markets. At night, we still struggle on some of the those blocks that you see.”

An heir to the Levi Strauss & Co. fortune, Lurie also declined Friday to say whether he supports a proposed California ballot initiative that would institute a one-time 5% tax on the state’s billionaires.

“I stay laser-focused on what I can control, and that’s what’s happening here in San Francisco,” Lurie said. “I don’t get involved on what may or may not happen up in Sacramento, or frankly, for that matter, D.C.”