In an exclusive Raw America report, Republicans are becoming increasingly skeptical of Pete Hegseth after a top Pentagon official walked out the door this week. Federal prosecutors just charged an ICE officer with lying about a Minneapolis shooting. Ted Cruz gave a wild firsthand account revealing how Donald Trump blew up in the Oval Office after learning Elon Musk said he was in the Epstein files. And a respected election forecaster just gave Republicans a dire warning about the midterms.

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Scoop: Hegseth on ‘Shaky Ground’ as More Republicans Turn on Him

An increasing number of Republicans are now casting doubt on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s capability to lead the Pentagon following this week’s high-profile exit of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, Raw America can reveal.

The former part-time weekend Fox News host-turned-defense secretary has been publicly blamed for pushing out top generals and respected military leaders while America is in the midst of a war with Iran that doesn’t seem to be anywhere near its end. Hegseth is also now under new scrutiny following the bombing of a wedding in Iran, which came months after the missile strike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran that killed 150 people, including 120 young schoolgirls.

This week also marked the one-year anniversary of Hegseth’s bombings of boats in the Caribbean, which have killed more than 220 people to date. None of those people were ever publicly named by the Pentagon or charged with crimes before they were killed. The embattled defense secretary has also been shackled with blame for the deplorable conditions on board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, with many service members complaining of meager food supplies, inadequate laundry facilities, extensive internet outages cutting them off from the outside world and other factors that even led at least one sailor to attempt jumping overboard before others intervened to stop him.

“It’s amazing he’s lasted this long,” one former defense and intelligence official who served in the Obama administration told Raw America White House reporter Brian Karem.

Miles Taylor, who served as the Department of Homeland Security’s chief of staff in President Donald Trump’s first administration, told this outlet that while Hegseth was “on shaky ground,” it’s still “no shakier than it was when his nomination looked like it was in peril.”

“Trump’s orbit is always as chaotic as his own mind,” Taylor said. “Judging by the deleterious effects of aging, that’s only going to get worse.”

One unnamed Republican congressional staffer lamented to Karem that “there’s always something to deal with” when it comes to Hegseth. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who is not running for reelection, described Hegseth’s personnel decisions as “amateur hour at best and deadly at worst.” A separate congressional staffer said Driscoll’s exit was particularly devastating for troops, saying he “speaks on the behalf of a lot of veterans and those currently serving.”

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who is a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters this week he was also frustrated with the departure of Driscoll and other top Pentagon leaders. He suggested that his committee could soon question Hegseth after the Senate returns from its summer recess on September 14, saying the firings will be among “questions that we’re going to be asking when we get back.”

ICE Agent Hit with Federal Charges Over Minnesota Shooting

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent is finally being held accountable in a shooting case, though critics say it’s nowhere near enough.

Federal prosecutors have charged ICE officer Christian Castro with lying to investigators about a shooting back in January during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. Castro fired his weapon through a closed door and shot Venezuelan national Julio Sosa-Celis in the leg.

At first, the Justice Department charged Sosa-Celis with assaulting agents. Those charges were dropped once officials confirmed that the agents lied about the shooting. Castro claimed under oath that Sosa-Celis attacked him. Surveillance footage told a different story entirely.

Sosa-Celis’s attorney, Robin Wolpert, said the federal charges still fall well short of what actually happened. She argues the evidence supports additional civil rights charges and emphasized that her client wants full accountability.

Castro also faces state assault charges in Minnesota, though a federal judge in Texas recently ruled against keeping him in custody pending extradition, allowing for him to walk free. Texas officials say they’ll help facilitate Castro’s arrest.

This is all part of a larger pattern of impunity for ICE. Federal agents have shot at more than 20 people during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, including killing two U.S. citizens in Minnesota. Just un July alone, ICE agents killed two more immigrants in Houston, Texas and Biddeford, Maine. No agents had body cameras in either case.

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Trump ‘Went Off the Rails’ After Elon Musk Named Him in Epstein Files

Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas recently described the moment in which Donald Trump learned that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted that Trump was mentioned in the Epstein files. Cruz was in the Oval Office talking about school choice when Natalie Harp walked in.

Harp is known as Trump’s human printer, because of her habit of handing him articles and social media posts throughout the day. Cruz said on a recent podcast appearanceHarp handed Trump a printed copy of Musk’s post. He described watching Trump’s knuckles turned white while he read the post.

The Texas senator said he had no idea what was on the page until he saw Trump’s furious reaction. Cruz joked that he learned curse words that day he didn’t even know existed. The school choice discussion was over as soon as Trump saw the post, and the president reportedly spent the rest of the meeting venting about Elon Musk.

Trump has been dogged by the Epstein issue since of May 2025, when then-Attorney General Pam Bondi privately told Trump his name appeared numerous times in the Epstein files. Both Bondi and Todd Blanche, who was deputy attorney general at the time, both said they had no plans to release the documents to the public.

That changed last November, when Congress voted almost unanimously to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump then signed into law. But the DOJ missed the law’s statutory December deadline to release all of the files, prompting a federal judge later to rule the Trump administration directly violated the law. Litigation to release the remainder of the Epstein files — which includes handwritten FBI notes from an interview with a woman who accused Trump of assaulting her when she was a teen — is still playing out in the courts.

Top Election Forecaster Predicts Armageddon for GOP in Midterms

Election forecaster Charles E. Cook of the Cook Political Report is out with new midterm predictions that are among the roughest yet for Republicans.

Cook says Republicans face three possible scenarios that he categorizes as, “Bad,” “Really Bad” and “Truly Horrible.” His most likely outcome has Republicans losing 26 to 35 House seats and four to five Senate seats, both of which are enough to hand control of both chambers to Democrats. Even in Cook’s more optimistic scenario — which assumes that aggressive Republican gerrymandering efforts will keep some seats in GOP hands — Cook still has Democrats picking up significant gains in November.

In every version of Cook’s forecast, Republicans lose the House of Representatives.

Cook also made the argument that Elon Musk’s ownership of X is likely distorting how journalists and political forecasters perceive the country’s ideological positions, since Musk’s algorithm is tilted in favor of the far right. He added that platform culture can make a fringe, extreme opinion feel like a mainstream one shared by the majority of Americans.

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Think about why you had to come to Raw America to read half of these stories. Not only did we bring you exclusive quotes from Capitol Hill sources about how Pete Hegseth is in hot water, but we also covered how an ICE agent is now facing potential jail time for lying about shooting a man in Minnesota. These stories don’t fit the desired narrative of MAGA billionaires like David Ellison want at CBS or that Jeff Bezos wants at his Washington Post. But Raw America answers only to our readers, meaning we don’t have anyone forcing us to bury the truth.

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Donald Trump’s super PAC is sitting on more than $400 million while Republicans wonder if he plans to spend any of it to help them in the midterms. Texas Republicans are locked in an intense game of chicken with Trump with each waiting on the other to spend money to help Ken Paxton’s floundering campaign. Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine showed visible symptoms of the tremor condition she covered up for decades during a lengthy new interview, all while dodging questions about whether she’s still capable of doing her job. And a Missouri Republican candidate is now facing federal charges after allegedly trying to plant cocaine on his own political opponent.

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Republicans Fear Trump Will Keep $400 Million War Chest for Himself

Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC is currently sitting on more than $400 million. Early voting in key midterm races is about to kick off in several states. And Republicans are increasingly worried that the president has no plans to help stop a Democratic wave.

For months, Trump’s team assured party leaders they would get an infusion of cash before Labor Day. But now, people close to the talks are saying Trump may intend to keep most of it.

Nobody around the president seems to know exactly how he plans to spend the money. Some think he wants to protect his influence over the 2028 presidential primary by giving it to his handpicked successor. Others think he coud be holding onto it to fund legal costs, post-presidency travel or dedicating it to legacy projects like his presidential library in Miami, which is already projected to cost more than $1 billion.

Others are proposing Trump and his team expect the donor spigot is dry up in the event a Democratic Congress renders him to be little more than a veto pen, so he wants to hold onto what he’s already raised while he can.

Whatever Trump has planned for his super PAC cash, Republicans are becoming increasingly nervous about their midterm chances. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told local reporters in his home state of South Dakota that there’s a real possibility Democrats sweep back into power in both chambers of Congress.

Meanwhile, The MAGA Inc. super PAC’s first midterm ads of the cycle dropped this week. And instead of attacking Democrats, they’re featuring glowing footage of the president hyping his record. In one of the ads, UFC CEO Dana White is seen praising Trump on egg prices and an extension of Trump’s tax cuts that were geared toward the rich. One Republican consultant mocked the strategy, pointing out that Trump’s is historically unpopular with approval rating is stuck in the mid-30s.

Democrats are cautious about celebrating before the votes are counted. They fully expect both Trump and Elon Musk’s super PACs to eventually flood the airwaves this fall. Musk’s America PAC has already started running ads aimed at helping Republicans in marquee Senate races in states like Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire and Texas.

For now, though, there’s $400 million of money that Republicans could really use sitting untouched in a bank account, all while Democrats are preparing for a blue wave.

That's the world the Supreme Court built when it ruled in Citizens United that corporations and billionaires could pour unlimited money into our elections. Four hundred million dollars sitting untouched in one man's super PAC is exactly the kind of unaccountable power that ruling unleashed on the rest of us.

Republicans Say Trump to Blame if Democrats Flip Texas

That uncertainty over money is currently playing out in Texas, which was considered a safe Republican stronghold up until this year.

Attorney General Ken Paxton cruised to victory in the Republican Senate primary over longtime incumbent Senator John Cornyn thanks to Trump’s endorsement. But Paxton has since been significantly out-raised by Democratic state representative James Talarico, and Republicans are reportedly fuming at Trump for so far refusing to step in.

Senate Republicans are effectively in a game of chicken with the president. They notably left Texas out of their midterm ad spending plans in a gambit to force Trump’s hand in covering the gap. Republican Senator John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana recently went on Fox News to call out Trump for sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars, and challenged him to spend a big chunk of it in Texas.

John Thune has also done the same, making it clear to Trump that his money will decide whether Republicans even have a chance of holding onto the Senate in November.

Whenever Paxton is asked about the race, he doesn’t waste any time pointing out that he’s way behind in fundraising. Trump has promised to help and that he’ll campaign for Paxton in Texas, but he has yet to commit to any actual dollar amount.

While Republicans fight over money, GOP infighting has intensified. Congressman Troy Nehls suggested Cornyn of quietly hoping Paxton loses so he can say he was right about him being a poor general election candidate. Cornyn is denied that accusation, but he’s also notably said Paxton is a lazy campaigner who’s bad at raising money.

Conservative commentator Erick Erickson has also gone out of his way to attack Paxton’s character, prompting a direct rebuke from Fox primetime host Laura Ingraham. Erickson then accused Ingraham of hypocrisy, reminding his audience that Fox personalities like Ingraham and others were caught in private communications disclosed in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit making fun of Trump’s stolen election claims.

Paxton’s polling isn’t looking good for Republicans. Multiple recent surveys show him losing independents to Talarico by a significant margin, including by more than 40 points in some cases. Nearly 60 percent registered voters told one pollster that they believe Paxton lacks the character to serve in the Senate.

Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat to a statewide office in more than three decades, so Republicans still view the Lone Star State as safe territory regardless of money issues. But with the clock steadily ticking down to November, Texas Republicans don’t seem especially confident that Trump is going to swoop in and fix everything.

Texas Republicans have seen this kind of intraparty knife fight before. Back in 1948 a mysteriously discovered ballot box handed Lyndon Johnson his Senate nomination by just eighty seven votes, and the state's political machine shrugged it off because winning mattered more than how you won it. That same old instinct is what's keeping real money out of Ken Paxton's campaign right now.

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Health Condition Susan Collins Covered Up for Decades on Full Display in New Interview

Senator Susan Collins finally disclosed back in May that she has a what’s known as a benign essential tremor, which she says she’s actually had during her entire Senate career. She argues that while the condition is inconvenient, it doesn’t impact her ability to be a senator.

That condition — which causes uncontrollable tremors in her hands, face and voice — was on full display this week during a lengthy sit-down with Politico at a lobster shack in Maine. Cameras caught Collins shaking as she ate chowder and drank from a glass. She notably didn’t try to crack open the lobster in front of her.

Doctors say Collins’ benign essential tumor isn’t a symptom of cognitive decline, and that it’s different from debilitating conditions like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. However, medical experts caution that the shaking in patients with a benign essential tumor are known to get gradually worse over time.

During the interview, Collins was asked about public concerns over the how many members of Congress are in their seventies and eighties. The Maine Republican pinned the blame on former President Joe Biden, telling Politico that he was primarily responsible for so many voters becoming worried about gerontocracy (defined as rule by the elderly).

Colins also left the door wide open to running again in six years, when she’d be 79 years old, despite having promised during her 1996 campaign that she’d only serve two terms in the Senate.

The septuagenarian is running against Democrat Troy Jackson, a 58-year-old logger and former president of the Maine Senate. Most political forecasters say the race is a toss-up, though some are giving Jackson the edge. Collins has agreed to four debates against Jackson, while the Democrat says he prefers a town-hall debate format where regular attendees, rather than moderators, ask candidates direct questions.

Woodrow Wilson's aides hid his stroke from the American people for months while his wife quietly ran the basic functions of the presidency in his place. It took decades and a constitutional amendment just to catch up with that kind of concealment, and we still haven't figured out how to be honest with voters about the health of the people holding power over their lives.

Republican Faces Federal Charges for Allegedly Planting Cocaine on Opponent

Thomas Ross, a Republican candidate for the Missouri House of Representatives who narrowly won his primary for by just 32 votes, is now facing federal charges for conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance.

Court documents reveal that Ross allegedly asked his campaign manager to plant a mixture of cocaine and Adderall on his GOP opponent, Louise Secker. Federal agents say the campaign manager went behind Ross’ back, bringing a black nylon glove to the Joplin Police Department, informing officers that Ross gave it to him. The glove contained a bag of white powder that tested positive for cocaine. Investigators believe Ross mixed the cocaine with a capsule from his own Adderall prescription.

The FBI later equipped Ross’ former campaign manager equipped with a recording device. During a meeting at Ross’ home, the campaign manager was reportedly recorded telling Ross he still had “the bag and addies” if Ross wanted him to go through with the plan. Ross greenlit the scheme, and the two allegedly discussed calling in an anonymous tip to law enforcement claiming Secker had drugs in her car. When asked directly if that’s what he wanted done, Ross affirmed that if it could be done, that his campaign manager should execute the plan.

Ross is now being held in the Joplin City jail while he awaits his transfer to federal custody. Missouri Republicans are now calling on him to withdraw from the race. No hearing date in Ross’ case has been scheduled as of this writing.

Congress passed the Federal Corrupt Practices Act back in the 1920s because lawmakers understood that a democracy doesn't survive if campaigns get to win by any means necessary. A candidate accused of trying to frame his own opponent with drugs is a pretty stark reminder of why laws like that had to exist in the first place.

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Here are some stories you may have missed:

• Trump White House Withholding Billions in Medicaid Money from Texas Hospitals. On Monday, Texas hospitals started losing $27 million per day due to the Trump administration withholding Medicaid funds from the state. While there is no current disruption in services for Medicaid patients, advocates are warning that the longer delays continue, the likelier it is that services could be disrupted for patients and providers alike. The Office of the Texas Health and Human Services Commissioner is reportedly in talks with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to reinstate the funds.

• Elon Musk’s Super PAC Unleashes First Wave of Ads in Key Senate Races. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s America PAC recently announced an $800,000 spend across ahead of the November midterms in several states including Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas. That money is expected to help bolster Republicans’ chances in races viewed as essential in order for the GOP to maintain control of the U.S. Senate. $247,000 of that money has been allocated for Texas, where Republican Ken Paxton is behind Democrat James Talarico in the latest polls. Musk is the world’s richest man wit an estimated net worth of $925 billion as of Thursday.

• Zohran Mamdani Announces Ban on Generative AI for New York City Public Schools. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) announced this week that his administration would be banning the use of generative AI in all city public schools for one year. The AI ban would affect all students between kindergarten and eighth grade. Mamdani said students “need to develop ​skills alongside their peers, build relationships with educators and ​wrestle with tough problems on their own.”

Donald Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security recently suggested that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents could not only show up at polling places this November, but also make arrests on site. Newsweek has obtained internal ICE records showing nearly 150 agents are under internal investigation for alleged crimes ranging from sexual assault to drug smuggling. Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine hired a former member of a group known for helping to orchestrate the January 6 insurrection. And Republicans are charging Trump supporters almost $90,000 dollars for a photo with the president at next week’s midterm convention in Dallas.

Before we go further, independent media needs your help. Our content is being throttled on Mark Zuckerberg’s platforms like Facebook and Instagram because we’re one of the only media outlets willing to call him out for bowing down to Trump. Now, he’s making it even more difficult for our content to reach our own followers. The best way to break through is by upgrading your subscription, as your voice becomes one more the billionaires can’t silence. And we’re now making it easier than ever to upgrade with a flash sale of 35% off on an annual subscription and 20% off on a monthly subscription. If you’ve been waiting for the best time to upgrade, today is the day.

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Trump’s DHS Chief Says ICE Can Make Arrests at Polling Places

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin suggested to reporters that ICE agents could not only enter polling places this November, but also arrest people. He tried to walk it back by saying ICE “isn’t there to patrol the polling places,” But then he went on to justify them showing up anyway, saying if the DHS was serving a warrant they would go wherever the person they were tracking down was headed.

That second part is the key. It’s one thing to threaten sending agents to a polling place. But executing an arrest warrant on someone who happens to be voting is the exact kind of scenario federal law was written to prevent.

There’s an actual statute in place aimed at stopping armed federal agents from appearing at a polling place. Federal law makes it a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. The only exception is if those agents are there to repel an actual armed enemy of the United States. The Justice Department has interpreted this law to mean FBI agents can’t investigate at polling places on Election Day, and that deputy U.S. marshals can’t be stationed there because they’re armed.

Senate Democrats warned Mullin this summer that sending armed federal agents to polling places would be a direct violation of that law. And so far, senior Trump administration officials are refusing to rule out having ICE at the polls.

Aside from Mullin, Attorney General Todd Blanche has also declined to rule out sending federal agents to voting precincts. Before he became attorney general, Blanche balked at the prospect of people objecting to having ICE at polling places. He later told a reporter he wasn’t even sure why it was considered a risk for Border Patrol or ICE to be at polling places.

When Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota asked Mullin whether he understood why armed ICE agents at the polls might could be seen as a form of intimidation, Blanche said he wasn’t aware of any concern.

Republicans seem to be taking their cues from the administration. Maine’s GOP nominee for governor says he wants border czar Tom Homan to send both ICE agents and U.S. marshals to polling places. A Republican Senate candidate in Michigan proposed having retired police officers stand in as poll watchers who could flash a badge if they felt it was necessary.

Maine’s Democratic Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows, observed that both U.S. Constitution and federal law prohibit ICE from being stationed at polling places, and said she won’t stand for what she called a lawless and reckless suggestion. More state election officials need to take after her and be ready for Trump’s DHS this November.

Sponsored Kalshi Question: Will a GOP member of Congress call for Trump’s impeachment?

Leaked Documents Confirm Dozens of ICE Agents Under Investigation for Serious Crimes

Newsweek obtained internal ICE records through a Freedom of Information request, and the numbers suggest a deep moral rot within the agency. There are currently 148 open allegations against ICE agents from the last three fiscal years, covering both the Joe Biden and Donald Trump administrations. The allegations include various serious crimes including alleged sexual assault, bribery, domestic violence, drunk driving and even drug smuggling. There are also ten incidents involving agents firing their service weapons, five of which resulted in either death or serious injuries.

Barack Obama’s former acting director of ICE director told the outlet that the raw numbers don’t necessarily mean misconduct is getting worse, but said the fact that many of these cases are still open is most worrisome. That suggests ICE may not actually be resolving these investigations, but rather just letting them sit while these alleged criminals roam the streets with a badge, a gun and a green light from the federal government to act with impunity.

All of this comes as ICE has seen its ranks swell from roughly 10,000 agents to approximately 22,000 in less than a year, and as its agents have been linked to a string of high-profile deaths, including deadly shootings in Minneapolis, Minnesota; South Padre Island; Houston, Texas and Biddeford, Maine.

Democratic Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who is the ranking member of the House Homeland Security, said he’s deeply disturbed by the rise in criminal allegations against ICE agents, and noted the current Republican-controlled Congress has shown no interest in conducting any oversight of the agency. Democratic Congressman Seth Magaziner of Massachusetts said the lack of discipline is a clear message to ICE agents that the administration won’t hold them accountable no matter how violent they are.

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Susan Collins Caught Hiring Former Member of Extremist Group Behind January 6 Insurrection

Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine is having a pretty rough stretch as she battles in a tight reelection race for a sixth six-year term.

Collins is still reeling from the fallout of a new report about her campaign has taken significant amounts of money from donors linked to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s network. She’s also been dogged with criticism after her campaign sent emails to supporters hitting them up for gas money. Now, she has a new headache.

The Daily Beast is reporting that Wayne Erkkinen, her hand-picked town chair in Greenville, was a member of the Oath Keepers. You may remember that group as one of the ket organizers of the January 6th attack on the Capitol that resulted in several police officers losing their lives, and hundreds of others injured by Trump supporters trying to violently overturn a lawful election.

Erkkinen said he joined the Oath Keepers in 2010, thinking it was a group for military veterans and members of the law enforcement community. He added that he left the group several years before January 6th. That may well be true. But it could also be argued that Collins is posturing as a moderate while being surrounded and advised by some of Donald Trump’s most extreme supporters. In a year widely viewed to be a banner year for Democrats, this is one more fire Collins now has to extinguish.

Trump Charging Supporters Almost $90,000 for a Selfie

The Republican National Committee is holding its midterm convention in Dallas next week, and the price tags for access to Donald Trump will raise your eyebrows.

A roundtable with the president on September 9th will run donors a $250,000 per person. Want a photo with him instead? That’ll run you $88,600. Vice President JD Vance’s roundtable the next day costs $75,000 to attend, with photos with the vice president going for $35,000 a pop.

Republicans are hoping all of their star power will translate into more cash and momentum heading into November, especially in tight races like the Texas U.S. Senate race, where Democrat James Talarico has out-raised Republican Ken Paxton by tens of millions of dollars. Trump’s super PAC is sitting on more than $400 million, which some Republicans haven’t been shy about criticizing for failing to put real resources behind Paxton’s campaign.

The one big question no one in the GOP seems capable of answering is whether any of that of it can move the needle in a midterm election defined by widespread opposition to a deeply unpopular president, his ill-conceived new war in the Middle East and a cost-of-living crisis that no one in the Republican Party seems capable of solving.

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The pro-Trump oligarchs who own major media outlets like CBS, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times want to be the sole deciders of what you get to know. But Raw America is determined to cover the stories they want buried, like ICE agents being allowed to roam the streets while being investigated for sexual assault and the president whose campaign they donated to charging people almost $90,000 for a photo. But because Raw America has no billionaire backer, we can bring you these stories without fear of being censored by a wealthy owner or a corporate parent.

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I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Once again, please take a moment to click the ❤️ and restack this video if you haven’t yet. And thanks again for supporting independent media. We’ll see you tomorrow.

Here are some stories you may have missed:

• 90% of Americans Say Government Corruption Is Widespread. Almost no Americans have any confidence in the integrity of the federal government, according to a new Gallup poll. Between May and June, Gallup asked 1,000 Americans whether they believed corruption was widespread, finding 90 percent agreement. 83 percent of self-identified Republicans answered affirmatively, along with 90 percent of independents and 91 percent of Democrats. That 90 percent figure is a two-decade high, with previous surveys finding roughly 72 to 73 percent of respondents believing government corruption was widespread.

• Advocacy Groups Launch ‘Vote Safe’ Program to Counter Federal Agents at Polls. Several groups preparing for the Trump administration to potentially deploy armed federal agents to polling places in violation of longstanding federal law are already organizing to protect voters on Election Day. The National Action Network, the American Federation of Teachers and the Save America Movement have launched the “Vote Safe” initiative, which they describe as a nonpartisan effort to have trained community members present to monitor any efforts by federal authorities to intervene in the voting process. The groups are focusing their efforts in battleground states like Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Ohio.

• Florida Republicans Fear Little to No Gain from Last-Minute Gerrymander. Even though Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature was one of several Southern states to carve up congressional redistricting maps earlier this year, Republicans are now reportedly pessimistic about ay potential political gain from the new maps. GOP consultants told Politico that while the had hoped to flip four Democratic-held congressional seats in their favor, there’s a possibility they may not only fail to flip any of those seats, but could potentially lose ground in the U.S. House of Representatives depending on voter turnout in November.

House Republicans are ditching Donald Trump’s midterm convention one by one, with some even calling it a “waste of time.” GOP leaders in Congress have all but given up on passing Trump’s agenda before November, punting on everything from government funding, money for the Iran war and mass surveillance into what’s shaping up to be a chaotic lame-duck session. Multiple state election officials are now saying the Trump administration’s restrictive new mail-in voting rules are impossible to put in place in time for the midterms. And while the Trump White House is publicly proclaiming Republicans will keep their majorities, behind closed doors they’re bracing for Democrats to sweep back into power and lawyering up for future investigations.

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Republicans Bailing on Trump’s ‘Waste of Time’ Midterm Convention

This month in Dallas, President Donald Trump is headlining a midterm convention that’s being referred to as “Trumpapalooza,” which he’s hoping will fire up Republicans before November. However, it seems to be having the opposite effect.

At least 45 Republican candidates and incumbent GOP lawmakers say they’re skipping the event. Dozens more haven’t indicated one way or another if they’ll attend. Some are claiming campaign scheduling conflicts, while others are balking at the $25,000 entrance fee that candidates would rather spend on their own campaigns.

One unnamed House Republican confided that trying to rally the GOP base this late in the campaign cycle doesn’t make sense. They say what matters now is turning out independent voters — many of whom aren’t exactly thrilled about the job Trump is doing.

Republican Congressman Tom Barrett of Michigan, who’s running for another term in a competitive House seat, said he prefers to be back home with his family and his constituents than in Texas. He added that while he can’t control what Trump says onstage, he can at least control where he spends his time between now and Election Day.

The House Republican Conference has real concerns that Trump will use his keynote speech to ramble about vanity projects like the $400 million White House ballroom, rather than focus on rising prices for basic needs like groceries and gas. Republicans are also keenly aware that voters aren’t feeling Trump’s war with Iran, and they know it’s a near-certainty that Trump won’t stay on message.

House Speaker Mike Johnson continues to insist that turnout will be decent, though even he admitted that early voting means many lawmakers will be back in their districts battling to keep their seats. Additionally, Republicans seem to have forgotten that both nights of the midterm convention are competing with the highly anticipated first games of the NFL season. A University of Texas researcher said the timing of the convention was ill-conceived and added this half-cocked convention seems more like a panicked response to what is shaping up to be a Democratic wave election rather than a genuine effort to excite Republican voters.

In 1912, Republicans gathered in Chicago and tore their own convention to pieces, and what looked like a squabble over delegate credentials was really a fight over whether the party belonged to its voters or to one man. When a party's own candidates start calculating they're safer at home than standing on a stage with their leader, that isn't a scheduling problem, that's an answer.

Republicans Give Up on Passing Trump’s Agenda Before Election

Republicans in Congress have all but conceded the fight to pass Trump’s agenda before the midterms.

While the House passed a short-term funding bill to keep the government funded until December, they’re punting on much bigger fights like funding for Trump’s war with Iran up until the holidays.

An anonymous senior Senate Republican staffer told the Hill that there’s a lot being shoved into the post-election window. Senate Democrats have already rejected the White House’s request for $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon, rightly calling the ratio compared to non-defense spending wildly out of balance.

Congress also failed to pass drought relief for farmers, much-needed disaster aid requested months ago, a farm bill that couldn’t even get out of the Agriculture Committee because of Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell’s lengthy absence and a stalled bill on regulating college athletics. Additionally, FISA surveillance authority has expired, and the Defense Department spending bill remains in limbo after Democrats blocked it Congress is looking at six or seven weeks after the election to somehow get all of this across the finish line before the Christmas recess.

Republicans are also still trying to pass a budget reconciliation package to fund Trump’s Iran war, though that process is still incredibly time-consuming, with all-night vote-a-rama sessions likely with any reconciliation effort. Vulnerable Republican senators in tight reelection races like Susan Collins of Maine don’t want to go anywhere near that before Election Day, as it gives Democrats a chance to force uncomfortable votes that could be ammunition for campaign ads. Republican aides now predict nothing serious will happen in Congress until January of 2027.

We ratified the Twentieth Amendment in 1933 for exactly this reason, because George Norris and the reformers of his generation thought it was indecent for lawmakers the voters had already fired to keep writing the nation's laws for months afterward. Congress shrank that window on purpose, and now it's cramming a year's worth of governing right back into it.

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Election Officials Say Trump’s New Mail Ballot Rules Impossible to Enforce

State election officials are now warning that the Trump administration’s new rules for the U.S. Postal Service governing mail ballots are impossible to enforce by November.

The rule would require every outbound and inbound ballot envelope to carry a unique tracking barcode. Vendors say there simply isn’t enough time or even paper to reprint the millions of envelopes that would need the redesign. Washington state alone estimates it would cost roughly $2 million just to replace more than a million envelopes. None of the state’s typical vendors say they could get the job done in time.

The U.S.P.S. portal election offices are supposed to use to upload voter lists that change until Election Day also remain untested. Colorado estimates the process will require tens of thousands of hours of time for election workers. Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state warned the system can’t even handle a bulk upload from Maricopa County’s 2.5 million voters without crashing.

The county clerk in Jefferson County, Colorado said U.S.P.S. officials can’t even give basic answers to questions about how any of this will function with ballots going out in just a few weeks. A national association of election officials says they were caught off guard when the final rule was announced due to running primary elections, and that they’re used to having warnings of changes months in advance so they can adequately prepare to adapt to new systems.

The White House predictably blamed the confusion on lawsuits from Democratic officials challenging the rule. But one election expert told CNN that the administration’s goal in all of this seems to be confusion itself.

The rules are currently on hold in federal court, and the Trump administration is expected to appeal all the way to the MAGA majority Supreme Court if necessary.

In 1966 the Supreme Court struck down Virginia's poll tax in Harper, and Justice Douglas wrote that a state can't make wealth or the paying of a fee the standard for who gets to cast a ballot. Nobody's calling this a poll tax, but when the price of admission is two million dollars in reprinted envelopes and tens of thousands of staff hours that nobody has, the citizen waiting on that ballot loses the vote just the same.

Trump White House Quietly Planning for Democrats to Take Back Congress

Even as the president publicly insists Republicans will hold Congress, his White House is quietly preparing for a Democratic takeover.

Behind closed doors, the administration has been contacting lawyers, reviewing investigations from Trump’s first term and getting political appointees prepared for Democratic investigations and subpoenas. According to Politico, the office of the White House Counsel has told staff it’s prepared to represent them in an official capacity if Congress wants to drag them before a committee, though that protection doesn’t always extend to people who have already left their jobs.

Todd Blanche’s Justice Department has also rolled out a new legal opinion arguing for an expansion of executive privilege to cover Trump’s communications with outside advisers — while it previously only applied to just official staff — provided those talks remain confidential and relate specifically to presidential decision-making. It’s not a blanket shield, and Congress could still overcome it by showing the information is critical. But paired with an existing Supreme Court ruling limiting congressional subpoena power, legal experts say it hands the White House a much bigger toolbox for stonewalling investigators, and it could put company executives who’ve talked to Trump in an awkward legal bind of their own.

Democrats, for their part, already have a list of officials they want to question, from chief of staff Susie Wiles to deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. One Democratic strategist said the whole approach is about tying corruption directly to the cost-of-living story, connecting self-enrichment and favoritism to the prices families are paying right now.

The White House has also installed a new counsel, Will Scharf, months earlier than past administrations typically made that switch, a sign this team isn’t planning to be caught flat-footed the way it was back in 2019.

The first congressional investigation in American history came in 1792, when the House demanded the papers on the St. Clair disaster and George Washington's own cabinet concluded he should hand over whatever the public interest allowed, which he did. Two hundred and thirty-four years later, the argument coming out of this White House is that even a president's private conversations with people who don't work for the government are none of Congress's business.

Before You Go, Support the Journalism That Rejects Billionaire Money

None of these stories fit the preferred narrative the billionaires who own most of the media want us to believe. Oligarchs like David Ellison, Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Bezos want us to think they’re inevitable and that there’s no use fighting back. That’s why they won’t cover stories like Republicans running away from Trump’s midterm convention, Congress giving up on getting Trump’s agenda passed and the White House lawyering up in expectation of new investigations and subpoenas. But Raw America can cover these stories every day, because we don’t have a wealthy backer telling us what we can and can’t write.

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Be sure to click the ❤️ and restack this newsletter so we can reach as many people as possible. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.

House Republicans are panicking over growing Democratic support for expanding the Supreme Court and now want to cap the current number of justices at nine. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is challenging Trump to build a data center at Mar-a-Lago given that he’s doubling down on embracing them. Former members of Trump’s MAGA movement are now calling it out for its culture of religious devotion to the president. And Vice President JD Vance says he’s actually fine if his policy decisions bring about the end of the world.

A quick request: Big Tech algorithms are blocking our content from reaching our followers. We noticed this happen after we called out Silicon Valley billionaires for cowering to Trump. This is exactly why oligarchs can’t be trusted to run our media outlets or the distribution platforms, and it’s why we’re counting on free subscribers like you to upgrade, as that’s one less voice they can’t suppress. This week only, we’re running our biggest sale ever by offering 35% off on an annual subscription and 20% off on a monthly subscription. If you’ve been considering becoming a paying subscriber, there’s no better time to do it.

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Panicked Republicans Roll Out Bill to Stop Court-Packing Before Losing Majority

Congressman Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, who is one of the most influential Democrats in Congress, is now backing calls to expand the Supreme Court. He told NBC’s Meet the Press that 13 justices would be a good number to start with, as it matches the current number of federal circuits.

This is particularly significant given Clyburn’s seniority. He’s as establishment as it gets, and his endorsement is credited with helping Joe Biden win the 2020 primary against Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. When someone like Clyburn is now advocating for adding new Supreme Court justices, that shows a seismic shift is afoot.

Clyburn also invoked reviled former Chief Justice Roger Taney and his Dred Scott v. Sandford decision that legitimized treating Black Americans as second-class citizens, saying the Roberts Court risks dragging America back to one of the darkest periods of our history. Former Vice President and 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has also floated the idea of matching the 13 federal circuits with the same number of Supreme Court justices.

Republicans are clearly felt the pressure. House Speaker Mike Johnson announced Tuesday that the Republican-controlled House will soon vote on a constitutional amendment to permanently cap the Court at nine justices. He said it was necessary to prevent Democrats from packing the Supreme Court, and he of course couldn’t resist throwing in some choice words about what he called “communist socialists” plotting to reshape the federal judiciary. Those are two different things, Mike! Pick one and stick with it.

Of course, it’s important to remember that a constitutional amendment is almost impossible to get across the finish line as it needs two-thirds support in both chambers of Congress, as well as from two-thirds of all state legislatures to get ratified. The 27th Amendment took more than 200 years to ratify. Johnson knows this is unlikely, meaning this is an act of political theater dressed up as legislation aimed at painting Democrats as radicals ahead of a critical midterm election.

All theater aside, it’s an undeniable fact that public trust in the Supreme Court is almost completely gone. Only a third of Americans actually approve of the job the Court has been doing. And top Democratic Party figures who once treated court expansion as fringe and unthinkable just a few years ago are now treating it as a mainstream concept.

Sponsored Kalshi Question: When will traffic at the Strait of Hormuz return to normal?

‘Put One in Mar-a-Lago’: AOC Challenges Trump on Data Centers

Trump recently wrote on his Truth Social platform that any community opposed to building new data centers is dooming itself to be “backwards and poor.” He said the sprawling facilities known for sucking up water and driving up everyone’s utility bills are creating new jobs and generating tax revenue, and argued that China is thrilled every time a city or county halts or delays data center construction.

Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York had a pretty sharp response to the president: if Trump is so bullish on data centers, why doesn’t he have one built next to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida?

Ocasio-Cortez is tapping into a very real sentiment shared by Americans of all political persuasions. A recent poll from YouGov and the Economist found that only one in four Americans actually think new data centers are a positive development. Even Republican Congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee — who is one of Trump’s loudest supporters in Congress — said that he must be “backwards and poor” too, since he doesn’t think the administration has done a very good job of defending the necessity of building more loud, polluting, resource-guzzling data centers.

The sentiment against data centers is even alive and well in Republican-dominated Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott, who is in a tight reelection race of his own against Democrat Gina Hinojosa, issued an executive order pausing new data center construction. When Trump’s own allies are bucking him on a major issue, it’s a sign of a potential political reckoning in the very near future.

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Former MAGA Supporters Say Trump’s Movement Consumed By ‘Religious Psychosis’

Former members of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement are now going public with their accounts of how and why they left the movement, with many describing it as a religious cult to the Guardian.

One woman from Michigan called her own experience in the MAGA movement a “religious psychosis,” saying her loyalty wasn’t really to the president but to a far-right conservative evangelical culture that encouraged her not to work, or even vote, while never questioning her husband’s decisions. She said for her, MAGA meant “Make America Godly Again,” though she said she was turned off by the rank hypocrisy of those around her.

A Virginia man described how he grew up without a sense of belonging, and eventually allowed himself to be consumed by Islamophobia in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. He then transitioned into evangelical Christianity before becoming a full-blown supporter of the MAGA movement, complete with the signature red hat. He said it took years of consistent trauma therapy before he started asking real questions about what led him down that path.

Rich Logis, who is the founder of the group “Leaving MAGA,” is a former Trump campaign volunteer himself. He said the key is to not try to talk anyone out of anything, but rather just give people a place to land once they’ve started expressing doubts about the president and his movement. “Leaving MAGA” billboards are now up in 27 states now with a simple message: “Having doubts? You are not alone.”

Each of these harrowing stories reveal the sheer level of delusion that consumes most MAGA supporters, along with the immense courage it takes for those people to willingly walk away from a tight-knit community bound together by fierce loyalty to the president. Given Trump’s cratering approval ratings, “Leaving MAGA” may continue to be a valuable resource for Trump’s disaffected base.

JD Vance Says He’s Fine With Bringing About ‘End Times’

Vice President JD Vance recently sat down with a 22 year-old far-right evangelical podcaster. At one point, he asked Vance whether he thinks we’re currently living in the end times. The vice president said he doesn’t know, but added that he wouldn’t be shocked if the actual Antichrist was currently living among us.

Then, Vance said something that should stop us cold. He said he’s trying to focus on doing as much of God’s work as possible, and if that leads to the “end times,” then that’s okay.

This is a pretty alarming remark from the sitting vice president of the United States with presidential ambitions of his own, who is one heartbeat away from having his hand on the nuclear codes. We should all take note whenever someone with that level of power says they’re fine with bringing about a Biblical apocalypse. Vance notably gave this interview right as the Trump administration is publicly cozying up to Vladimir Putin, waging war in the Middle East, and deliberately eroding Americans’ right to vote.

Vance didn’t actually say the name of who he believes is the Antichrist sharing our current reality.

Before You Go, Support the Media That Holds the Billionaires Accountable

If Raw America had a billionaire owner calling the shots, it goes without saying that we’d be unable to cover stories like these. You won’t hear about people abandoning Trump’s MAGA movement on David Ellison’s CBS, or read about JD Vance cheering on doomsday in the pages of Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times. The only reason we can bring you these stories is because we aren’t beholden to a wealthy backer who made themselves the sole decider of what you get to know.

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I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Thank you again for reading, and for supporting independent journalism. And please take a second to click the ❤️ and restack this post so we can reach the people the people who need it most.

Here are some stories you may have missed:

• Yet Another Republican Scrubs Mentions of Trump from Website. Florida Republican Congressional candidate Mike Beltran was recently caught removing praise of President Donald Trump from his campaign website. While a former version of his site said that Beltran “stood with President Trump every step of the way.” That deleted section also noted that Beltran was one of just seven Florida Republican lawmakers who never endorsed Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bid for the presidency. Beltran also deleted language endorsing Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that cut Medicaid by $1 trillion in order to extend tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

• Trump’s War in Iran Has Cost Average American an Extra $1,200. A new analysis finds the average American has had to pay roughly $1,200 more for basic necessities like groceries and gas as a result of Trump’s war with Iran, which recently passed the six-month mark. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, calculated the cost by factoring in gas prices, which are roughly $1 per gallon higher than they were before the war, and increased diesel prices translating into higher prices for goods trucked to stores. Zandi also considered the inflation rate increasing due to the war, which has gone from 2.4 percent in February to 3.4 percent today.

• Crude Oil Hits $90 Per Barrel After Trump’s Latest Attacks on Iran. Brent crude, which is an international benchmark for oil prices, hit $94.52 a barrel on Tuesday after the Trump administration announced a new wave of attacks on Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps targets on Larak Island, reportedly killing three people. The island is a key military asset for Iran, providing logistical support. Iran attacked two American bases in Jordan in retaliation. The Iranian government is suggesting hostilities could end if the U.S. agrees to the terms initially proposed in the June peace agreement.

The Army’s top civilian leader just quit after warning that Pete Hegseth’s purge of top generals has left the military in a significantly weakened position. A whistleblower is now revealing that the U.S. Postal Service is scrambling to build an error-ridden mail voting system that could disenfranchise millions of Americans this fall. Billionaires are pouring money into a PR campaign designed to drown out the voices of Americans who don’t want data centers in their backyards. And Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed just delivered a perfect response to Vice President JD Vance, who called him “evil” at a Republican rally.

Before we go further, we need your help to fight back against the billionaires. Mark Zuckerberg is throttling Raw America’s content on Facebook and Instagram, meaning our work is being intentionally hidden from our own followers. This is exactly what we mean when we say billionaires can’t be allowed sole control over both media outlets and distribution platforms. But readers like you, who understand the importance of independent media, can fight back by upgrading your subscription. Each new subscription is one more voice they can’t suppress. And right now we’re offering our biggest discount yet of 35% off on an annual subscription and 20% off on a monthly subscription. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, today is the best day to do it.

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Army Secretary Takes Jab at Pete Hegseth Before Resigning

Former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll didn’t resign quietly. Before he quit his post as the top civilian overseeing the U.S. Army, he reportedly sat down with Donald Trump and laid out just how bad things have gotten at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon.

According to people familiar with the meeting, the president was caught off guard by how many generals and senior officers had been fired, forced out or passed over for promotion since Hegseth’s confirmation. Driscoll told the president the Army simply can’t modernize itself when it keeps losing its most experienced leaders.

Driscoll isn’t wrong. The Army now has fewer generals than at any point in recent history. And with Driscoll headed for the exits, the largest branch of the U.S. military is now without a Senate-confirmed top general, a confirmed officer running operations or a confirmed commander for American troops stationed in Europe.

Hegseth came to the Pentagon as a former part-time Fox News weekend host with a mission to root out what he called “woke” ideology in the military. But instead he’s created a massive leadership vacuum. Hegseth has ended the careers of dozens of Army leaders without any clear explanation. Officers deemed insufficiently loyal to the Trump administration got pushed out, regardless of their combat records or experience.

Driscoll and Hegseth actually had a lot in common. Both are Iraq War veterans who attended Ivy League schools and have quietly harbored presidential ambitions. But their leadership styles couldn’t have been more different. Hegseth was only confirmed with a tie-breaking vote from the vice president, and he’s built his reputation on picking fights with the press and daring his critics to quit. Driscoll took a more diplomatic approach, working with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and refraining from Hegseth’s culture war fights.

Their differences led to open conflict over personnel decisions. Driscoll tried in vain to protect Army Chief of Staff Randy George from being fired after his name showed up on a list of officers targeted for removal over perceived disloyalty to Trump. George was fired in April of this year.

Now, Army leaders are fretting about Driscoll’s potential replacement. Officials fear Trump will nominate Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, who is like Hegseth in that he’s a veteran with a combative leadership style and no experience running a large organization. One unnamed official told the Atlantic that handing the Army to someone similar to Hegseth could do generational damage to the institution.

When George Washington walked into that hall at Newburgh in March of 1783, standing in front of officers who were talking openly about marching on Congress, he stopped it cold. What he settled that day is the thing this country has run on ever since, that the Army belongs to the Constitution and not to any one man or any one movement. Strip out every officer who won’t pass a loyalty test and you haven’t built a stronger military. You’ve built a smaller one that’s been taught the wrong lesson about who it serves.

Whistleblower Says Trump’s USPS Forcing Error-Riddled System on Millions of Voters

A new whistleblower report should cause significant alarm for anyone who plans to cast a ballot by mail this November.

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut released a statement Tuesday from an unidentified whistleblower who is warning that the U.S. Postal Service is scrambling to build a massive new mail-in ballot system in just three months when a project of this magnitude typically takes at least a year.

This all stems from Trump’s recent executive order putting new restrictions on mail voting, and the legal fight over it has been raging for weeks. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, who was appointed by Barack Obama, blocked several parts of the order in June. The MAGA Supreme Court majority lifted that block on August 24, but only on narrow grounds without ruling on its legality.

A few days later, the U.S.P.S. published its final rule, and Talwani imposed a new restraining order that blocks implementation for now. She refused to lift that order on Monday. This Thursday, there’s another on making the block last through November, though the Supreme Court could still weigh in before then.

The most alarming part of the whistleblower report is that the system uses a zero-tolerance rule in that if there’s a single scanning error anywhere in a batch of tens of thousands of ballot envelopes, the entire batch could be rejected.

Election officials have already warned that this system can’t be ready before mail ballots start going out this Friday in the critical battleground state of North Carolina. But the administration seems determined to force it through anyway ahead of the midterms where Republicans are expected to take a beating.

Blumenthal said Trump’s Postal Service has effectively created a system tthat will disenfranchise millions of American voters, and that the administration seems determined to make it harder for Americans to cast ballots all for craven political gain.

Let’s all remember that Trump himself has used mail voting himself plenty of times, even while spreading debunked conspiracy theories for years while falsely claiming it cost him the 2020 election. A Brookings Institution report found mail voting fraud happens in about four cases out of every ten million ballots cast. That’s nowhere near enough to change the outcome of any election.

More than 29 percent of Americans voted by mail in 2024. If this error-prone system goes into effect, Blumenthal says he wouldn’t even recommend anyone vote by mail in the midterms.

Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution says the times, places and manner of holding elections get set by the state legislatures, and that Congress can alter those rules. The president isn’t in that sentence. He isn’t anywhere in it. That wasn’t an oversight by the framers, it was the design, because they’d watched what happens when the man in power gets to decide how the votes come in. Route the nation’s ballots through an agency the White House controls and you haven’t secured an election. You’ve moved the machinery of self-government into one man’s hands.

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Billionaires Scrambling to Fund Pro-Data Center Propaganda Campaign in Key States

A group calling itself Build American AI is now launching a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in major battleground states like Kansas, Ohio, and Wisconsin aimed at countering public anger over data center development. The group is backed by the super PAC called Leading the Future, which gets its funding from tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the firm Andreessen Horowitz, along with OpenAI president Greg Brockman.

The anger against data centers is very real, and shared by Americans on both sides of the political aisle. A survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found 61 percent of adults now oppose new data center construction in their community. That’s a 12-point increase from earlier this year. A separate Gallup poll found 75 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans don’t want data centers built anywhere near them, along with a whopping 74 percent of independents.

Most Americans associate data centers with rising utility bills, frequent power outages and the sheer amount of water these facilities require. In Ohio, Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown has made his opposition to data center development a cornerstone of his campaign against Republican Senator Jon Husted. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is nervous enough about the issue that they’ve warned AI companies the data center industry itself will be seen as a political liability across the country if Husted fails to win reeelection.

Trump is continuing to double down on his support for the politically toxic facilities. He recently posted on social media that any community that opposes data centers is choosing to be, in his own words, “backwards and poor.”

New York became the first state to officially impose a moratorium on new hyperscale data center construction. Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott has also effectively frozen new data center development. The advocacy group Data Center Watch has found that at least 75 data center projects worth a combined $130 billion got blocked or delayed by local opposition in just the first three months of 2026. That’s a lot of Americans saying no to billionaires. Now, this new propaganda campaign is those same billionaires trying to use their money to drown out Americans’ voices.

We’ve watched this exact play before. In the 1920s the electric utilities ran the largest public relations campaign in the country to convince Americans that public power was radical and un-American, and it worked right up until the Senate passed Resolution 83 in 1928 and sent the Federal Trade Commission in to look. Seven years and ninety-six volumes of findings later, Congress passed the Public Utility Holding Company Act and broke the power trusts apart. That lesson didn’t expire. When an industry has to buy the public’s consent, it’s because it knows it can’t earn it.

Abdul El-Sayed Responds to JD Vance Calling Him ‘Evil’

At a recent MAGA rally in the Detroit area, Vice President JD Vance called Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed “very, very evil.” El-Sayed — who Raw America interviewed this spring — wasn’t about to let that slide.

In a Monday night interview with CNN, the Michigan Democrat turned the word back around on the vice president, pointing out that true evil is starting wars when there’s already peace. El-Sayed added that evil could also be defined as stripping away poor people’s health insurance just so billionaires can get a tax cut. And he also called it evil to force AI data centers onto community that don’t want them.

El-Sayed has called for abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), ending U.S. military aid to Israel, and passing a Medicare for All healthcare system. He just won his Democratic primary in August despite being outspent by tens of millions of dollars. Now, he’s facing off against former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers for the seat being vacated by Democratic Senator Gary Peters. Michigan has flipped twice in the last two presidential elections.

Rogers has his work cut out for him. Between the fallout from Trump’s war with Iran, high costs of living and Trump’s plummeting poll numbers, it won’t be easy to convince Michiganders to vote for another rubber stamp for Trump.

In 1961 a unanimous Supreme Court told the state of Maryland, in Torcaso v. Watkins, that it couldn’t force a man to declare a belief in God just to serve as a notary public. Not a senator, a notary public. The Court wouldn’t allow even that small a religious test, because once you let government sort citizens into the acceptable and the suspect by what they believe, there’s no natural place for it to stop. So when a vice president stands on a stage and tells a crowd there’s something evil about a candidate while pointing at who that candidate prays with, he’s reaching for a test this country took off the table more than sixty years ago.

Before You Go, Join the Fight Against the Billionaire-Owned Press

The billionaires who are buying up cable networks and major newspapers want you to think they’re inevitable. That’s why they won’t tell you about more Americans rising up against their deeply unpopular data centers, or about the secret effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans who vote by mail. Raw America has no billionaire backer. We have you. That’s why we pride ourselves on covering the stories the oligarchs want to bury.

But we can’t do this without you. The bigger we get, the harder the billionaires are fighting to bury our content in their algorithms. That’s why we’re counting on readers like you to support independent media by upgrading your free subscription to a paying one. We’re making that easier than ever by offering a Labor Day discount of 35% off on an annual subscription and 20% off on a monthly subscription. Make today the day you upgrade so we can keep this work going.

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thank you for reading, and thank you for supporting independent journalism. And if you haven’t yet, please take a second to click the ❤️ and restack buttons so we can reach as many feeds as possible.

Here are some stories you may have missed:

• Trump Says Hegseth ‘Doing a Fantastic Job.’ Despite the departure of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll — who attributed his resignation to the poor leadership of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — President Donald Trump is standing by the former part-time weekend Fox News host. Trump’s remarks come as Hegseth is facing renewed scrutiny over the Iran war, which has now stretched on for six months with no clear end in sight. Former Barack Obama aide Christopher Hale said this week that multiple West Wing sources have confided to him that if Republicans lose the midterms, Hegseth will likely be fired before Thanksgiving.

• Gregory Bovino Was Under Internal Investigation Before His Retirement. Former U.S. Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who was the face of the Trump administration’s ICE crackdown in Minneapolis, was reportedly under an internal investigation for allegedly lying under oath about immigration enforcement operations in Chicago. Investigators had asked Bovino to respond in writing to questions about whether he lied about events that led up to him deploying tear gas against protesters during Operation Midway Blitz earlier this year. Bovino has insisted he did nothing wrong, and said his only regret about his service was that he didn’t deport more people.

• Thomas Massie Accuses Former Prince Andrew of Committing ‘Sex Crimes in the U.S.’ Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who authored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, recently named 14 people he called co-conspirators of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and demanded they be prosecuted. Among the names Massie mentioned was that of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who was stripped of his royal titles amid allegations in the posthumous memoir of Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre that he assaulted her when she was a teenager. Massie alleged that the former prince “committed sex crimes in the U.S.” and called for him to face criminal charges.

White House insiders are now saying Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could be fired as soon as Thanksgiving if Republicans fail to keep their majorities after the midterms. Bari Weiss’ CBS News is under fire for a social media post that implies a link between Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and the 9/11 attacks. New reporting shows Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine has raked in millions of dollars from donors with ties to Jeffrey Epstein as she battles for another six-year term. And Donald Trump insists that any American community that doesn’t want a massive data center in its backyard is doomed to be “backwards and poor.”

Before we get to the news, independent media is under attack and we need your help. We’ve learned that Mark Zuckerberg is throttling our content on both Facebook and Instagram, after we’ve been calling him out on bowing down to Trump. This is a perfect example of why we can’t allow billionaires to control media outlets and distribution channels, and why we’re counting on readers like you, who believe in independent media, to make today the day you become a paying subscriber. Right now we’re offering a Labor Day sale with a 35% discount for all annual subscribers, and a 20% off discount for all monthly subscribers. This is the biggest discount we’ve offered, and there’s never been a better time to upgrade.

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Pete Hegseth May Be Fired if Republicans Lose Midterms

Multiple people close to the Trump White House are saying Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s head will be the first to roll after the midterms, and that he could be out of a job before Thanksgiving if Republicans lose badly in November.

Former Obama aide Christopher Hale — who appeared on Raw America in April — has said his sources in and around the West Wing are confiding to him that Hegseth could be the president’s scapegoat given that the Iran war is driving Trump’s approval ratings into the gutter.

This comes after a bombshell report from the Washington Post found that Hegseth’s Pentagon has been quietly paying conservative influencers to defend him online. These are retired veteran officers with significant social media followings who started cheerleading for Hegseth once they got their Pentagon assignments. The DoD won’t even say what those influencers are officially doing.

Hale says that report almost assures that Hegseth will be sent packing this fall.

It’s not hard to see why the pressure is mountinf for the the part-time weekend Fox News host-turned-defense secretary. Hegseth has already caused significant alarm inside the Pentagon by purging top generals. And he’s since become the face of Trump’s deeply unpopular war in Iran.

His own top military brass has warned him earlier this month that Trump’s war is no longer sustainable without an exit plan. Hegseth keeps insisting otherwise.

Even Republicans have had enough of the Pentagon chief. In May, outgoing Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina told Politico he hoped Trump would fire his defense secretary before the next Congress gavels into session. Tillis made sure to blame Hegseth specifically for the chaotic messaging around the initial strikes on Iran and said the defense secretary completely misled the president on the entire operation.

Keep an eye on this story. Republicans are already looking for someone to blame for a bad midterm night, meaning they not only know that it likely won’t go their way, but that they’ll need a scapegoat to save face.

Sponsored Kalshi Question: Will members of Congress be banned from trading stocks?

Bari Weiss’ CBS Implies Link Between Abdul El-Sayed and 9/11 Attacks

CBS News’ official X account published a post on Monday that seemed to connect Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the September 11th attacks.

The post framed El-Sayed as someone who “may be facing renewed scrutiny” over comments he made back in 2020, when he was executive director of the Detroit Health Department during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time, El-Sayed called for Americans to show the same united national resolve against the pandemic that the country showed after 9/11. In a separate post, he pointed out that because more Americans died from Covid than from 9/11, he expressed hope that meant the country would spend the next decade fighting poverty and disease with the same energy spent fighting terrorism.

That’s it. That’s the entire controversy. If you can even call it that.

The backlash to the post was swift. Economist Dean Baker said the post looked like straight-up “anti-Muslim bigotry.” Journalist Parker Molloy of The Present Age Substack called the post “an insane tweet with an insane headline.” NPR Marketplace editor Steve Mullis wrote on Bluesky that the way CBS was framing stories made it look indistinguishable from right-wing outlets like Fox News and Breitbart.

Researcher Jared Holt, who Raw America interviewed in May, pointed out that this is a familiar genre of news story. He explained that whenever an outlet claims someone is facing scrutiny from a vague, unnamed source, the outlet itself is almost always the one intentionally manufacturing the scrutiny.

Leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker connected the post straight back to CBS’ ownership, saying this is exactly why MAGA billionaire David Ellison bought the network and installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief. Democratic Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari of Arizona called the post “blatantly racist.”

It’s worth remembering here that Weiss had exactly zero television news experience before Ellison put her in charge of one of the biggest and most influential newsrooms in the world. She’s even bragged in the past about not owning a television. It’s almost like she was put in her role for ideological reasons rather than for actual merit.

Raw America was founded as the answer to billionaire-controlled media trying to dictate the narrative. Unlike CBS, we don’t have a billionaire’s bank account keeping us afloat. We have you. Upgrade your subscription right now for 35% off for the entire year and help ensure Raw America keeps up the fight against the billionaire class.

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Susan Collins Under Fire for Taking Money from ‘Epstein Donors’

Maine GOP Senator Susan Collins is facing new questions about where her campaign donations are really coming from.

Federal filings show Collins and her associated PACs have spent years collecting checks from oligarchs with extensive ties to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. That includes Jay Lefkowitz, the lawyer who negotiated Epstein’s 2008 sweetheart plea deal that was widely criticized as a slap on the wrist, and billionaire Leon Black, who once paid Epstein a whopping $158 million for financial planning services despite Epstein having no formal certification as an accountant, tax attorney or financial planner.

Other prominent names on Collins’ donor list with documented links to Epstein include Bill Gates, sports mogul Casey Wasserman, and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who has also funded the controversial Flock cameras that are on virtually every street corner.

Maine Democratic Party spokesperson Misha Linnehan argued that after spending three decades in Washington, Collins has clearly taken the side of billionaire class and the Epstein class. He also pointed out that Susan Collins voted against releasing the Epstein files.

Casey Wasserman, who reportedly flew on Epstein’s plane, gave Collins roughly $10,000. Bill Gates, who testified to Congress in June that Epstein tried to blackmail him, gave over $24,000. Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman gave $3 million to a pro-Collins super PAC.

So far, none of these donors have been charged with any crimes relating to Epstein. But the optics are bad for Collins, who is running against former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson. A recent Fox News poll actually has Jackson ahead, by a slim margin of 48 to 46.

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesperson Maddy McDaniel said Mainers are taking note of Collins prioritizing wealthy special interests and billionaires over working-class Maine voters, and predicted they’ll vote her out this fall.

Trump Says Only ‘Backwards and Poor’ Communities Would Reject Data Centers

Trump is continuing to double down on the buildout of massive AI data centers across the country, while hurling insults at anyone who objects to them.

In a Monday post to his Truth Social account, Trump wrote that the only reason a community wouldn’t want a data center is if it wants to end be “backwards and poor.” He added that killing what he called the golden goose would be on the communities themselves, many of which are rural and in deep-red states.

But data centers have become politically toxic according to the latest polls, with the vast majority of Americans saying they don’t want to live anywhere near a data center. Lawmakers from both parties of the political aisle have criticized data centers for overloading power grids, causing severe strain on water systems and churning out nonstop industrial noise.

Even Republicans know that data centers are reviled by most Americans. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who is in a tight reelection race of his own, just imposed new regulations on data centers after spending the last year celebrating them. Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Stacy Garrity have each called for a temporary halt on some data center construction projects.

Vice President JD Vance acknowledged that many Americans associate data center construction with higher utility bills. He supported their ongoing construction but with a requirement that companies who are building them should pledge to put power back into the grid rather than draining it dry.

Trump continues to argue that data centers are essential to beating China in the AI race, and claimed China is thrilled every time an American community pushes back against one. The president immediately criticized New York after it became the first state to pause new data center infrastructure back in July. It remains to be seen whether Trump’s support of data centers will last should voters blame his party for them in the midterms, as appears to be the case in Ohio.

Before You Go, Support the Journalism That Fights the Billionaire Class

Today’s edition showed you why the billionaire-owned legacy outlets can’t be counted on to give you the full picture. David Ellison’s handpicked editor at CBS is trafficking in blatant Islamophobia and exploiting one of the worst tragedies in American history all to smear a Democratic candidate. And we all know none of the MAGA oligarchs devouring media outlets one newsroom at a time would ever call out a sitting Republican senator for taking money from Epstein’s rich friends. But Raw America has no wealthy backer demanding we pull stories that offend them. We answer only to you.

Raw America can only remain independent if readers like you who believe in independent journalism chip in to keep our work going. But in celebration of Labor Day, a paying subscription is now at its lowest price yet: we’re announcing a a 35% discount for all annual subscribers, and a 20% off discount for all monthly subscribers between now and next Monday night. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your subscription but waiting for the right time, this is it.

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I’m British Chris with Raw America. Thank you again for reading and for supporting independent media. And if you haven’t yet, click the ❤️ and restack this post so we can break through to more feeds.

Here are some stories you may have missed:

• Supreme Court Allows Trump to Continue Building His Ballroom. In a 5-4 decision, the conservative Supreme Court majority ruled that construction of President Donald Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom can now continue, ruling that the plaintiffs suing to stop it lacked standing. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three liberal justices on the Court, and wrote in his dissent that the ballroom was “likely illegal” given that Congress never signed off on the destruction of the East Wing of the White House. The ruling notably left the door open for another group to sue to stop construction.

• GOP Strategist Warns Republicans Likely Facing ‘Historic Losses’ in Midterms. Republican strategist Terry Holt recently told the New York Post that thanks to Trump’s record-low approval ratings, his party is likely to suffer '“historic losses” in both the House and Senate this fall. Holt’s warning comes as Republican candidates in marquee Senate races like Alaska, Georgia, Maine, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas are all facing an uphill battle against their Democratic opponents in the latest polls. Democrats only need to flip four of those seats to win back control of the chamber.

• Trump Demands FCC Punish Journalist for Saying His Endorsed Candidates Have Poor Track Record. After NBC’s Kristen Welker said Trump-endorsed candidates for Congress have “mixed” results when it comes to winning their primaries, the president responded on Truth Social by promising to report Welker to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “for rebuke or punishment” Trump’s appointed FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who wrote the section of Project 2025 pertaining to the FCC, has a proven track of record of viewing Trump’s Truth Social proclamations as instructions despite the FCC having a mandate to act independently of the White House.

• International Community Erupts at Trump After He Invites Russia to G20 Summit. A representative for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime attended the G20 summit in North Carolina on Monday, sparking backlash from the international community. Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov attended the summit, marking the first time Russia has participated in the G20 since its invasion of Ukraine four years ago. German vice chancellor and finance minister Lars Klingbeil called Siluanov’s attendance “quite troubling” and said the world cannot “simply return to normality” given Russia’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine.

America’s top military leaders are making it clear to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that Donald Trump’s war with Iran has stretched U.S. forces to a breaking point. Hegseth has also apparently built a secret network of paid MAGA influencers inside the Pentagon while posing as independent voices online. Michigan’s Republican Senate candidate is now having to walk back a fundraising email in which he falsely suggested that he saw Osama bin Laden’s dead body firsthand. And in Texas, Republicans are in a state of panic as Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico dominates the airwaves all while Trump is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars that he isn’t spending to help Ken Paxton.

Before we go deeper, independent media needs your help. Mark Zuckerberg is throttling our content distribution on Facebook, which means thousands of our subscribers and followers aren’t even seeing our content in their feeds anymore. Zuckerberg did this after we reported on him sucking up to Trump. This is exactly what happens when pro-Trump billionaires are allowed to decide what we read and watch every day.

If you believe in the importance if independent media, this is the moment to subscribe. Each new subscriber is one more voice the billionaires can’t silence no matter how much they may try to shut us down. And right now, we’re offering a Labor Day flash sale with a 35% discount for all annual subscribers, and a 20% off discount for all monthly subscribers. Today is the best day to upgrade your free subscription to a paying one.

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Military Leaders Go Behind Trump’s Back to Call His War Unsustainable

According to new reporting from The Washington Post, several top military commanders have warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that Trump’s war with Iran simply can’t keep going much longer. That warning, dated August 14th, showed up in a classified Pentagon planning document called the Secretary of Defense Orders Book.

All of the respective heads of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force signed off, along with the four-star generals overseeing U.S. military operations in Europe, Asia and Latin America.

The Pentagon is in damage-control mode. Defense Department spokesman Sean Parnell called the publication of the orders book a crime and insisted the initial reporting was inaccurate. However, he also confirmed that Hegseth routineyl deals with formal disagreements from commanders.

We’re now six months into the Iran war and the strain on America’s military is growing more untenable by the day. Ships, aircraft and troops dedicated toward watching other parts of the world have been pulled away to support Trump’s war, even including forces meant to help defend the U.S. defend itself from foreign attacks.

Several commanders formally registered what’s called a “non-concur” in the document, which is military language for “we disagree with this order, but we’re duty-bound top follow it anyway.”

The Navy’s top admiral, Daryl Caudle, had the most alarming assessment for Hegseth. He said the U.S. Navy simply cannot sustain its current commitment to Iran without an exit strategy. Barely a quarter of America’s destroyer fleet is even ready to deploy right now, which is a sharp drop from where the fleet was before the war started in February.

Sailors on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier — which was only just relieved — had their deployments extended by several months. Some have reported dire conditions on board like meager and spoiled food, poor plumbing and broken laundry facilities. There have even been reports of sailors attempting to jump overboard after so many months at sea with no clear end in sight.

Both the U.S. Army and Air Force went along with Hegseth’s plan to keep troops deployed in the region, but they admitted the risks can’t be ignored. Roughly 2,000 paratroopers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division were deployed in March and are expected to stay in the Middle East at least through September. And their mission could be extended further depending on what happens this fall.

Trump’s war has also significantly drained America’s arsenal. Nearly a quarter of the Pentagon’s Reaper drone fleet is gone. Patriot and THAAD interceptors, which are the missile defense systems that protect U.S. troops from incoming attacks, have also been depleted by this war. They were already stretched thin given that they’ve been helping Ukraine ward off Russian attacks since 2022.

Meanwhile, America’s Pacific allies are raising alarms of their own, with Taiwan concerned that they could be more vulnerable to an attack from China with the U.S. depleting its arsenal in Iran. The only dedicated aircraft carrier the Navy had stationed in the Pacific is now taking the place of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.

The Trump administration insists reports of munitions shortages are inaccurate. But the generals and admirals who are actually managing the war are painting a very different picture.

The men who wrote the Constitution were so afraid of a permanent war machine that they built a hard limit right into Article One, Section Eight. Congress can’t fund an army for more than two years at a stretch. They wanted every war shoved back in front of the voters again and again, because they understood that an executive who never has to ask permission is truly dangerous. Six months into a war nobody voted on, with barely a quarter of our destroyers ready to sail and admirals putting their objections in writing, we’re finding out exactly what those men were worried about.

Hegseth’s Secret Taxpayer-Funded Army of Online Trolls Exposed

The Post has also found that Pete Hegseth quietly hired a team of pro-Trump trolls at the Pentagon, without disclosing what they’re actually doing.

Here are their names: Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel with more than 135,000 followers on X. Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel with nearly 620,000 social media followers. And Thomas Anderson, a retired colonel who posts under the name “Cynical Publius” to his 300,000-plus followers. These accounts all frequently defend Hegseth and Trump from criticism.

Maness and Schlichter had active government email addresses as of last week. Both men are working out of the office of Anthony Tata, who is the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. Anderson was in Pentagon records earlier this year with the same kind of address and office, though he was no longer listed as of late last week. Those addresses carry a “.civ” suffix, marking them as civilian employees rather than military personnel or contractors. That status means they can potentiall shape government policy, even as the Pentagon refuses to publicly say what their jobs even are.

They were apparently brought on as “highly qualified experts” or “special government employees.” Special government employees are legally capped at 130 working days in any 365-day period. However, highly qualified experts face no such limit and can work full-time or part-time, on a paid or unpaid basis. Schlichter carried the highly qualified expert designation according to the federal database reviewed by the Post.

Whatever their listed duties are, their online activity is revealing. These accounts consistently heap praise on Hegseth and Trump while attacking anyone who criticizes them. Maness wrote a July column urging the administration to fire “disloyal” Pentagon employees while condemning longtime careerists, accusing them of treating the department as their permanent fiefdom. His author biography identified him as a retired colonel, though it said nothing about his current role at the Pentagon. Another wrote a glowing post about Hegseth’s visit to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, where sailors have reportedly tried jumping overboard due to the brutal conditions on board.

There could be more aside from these men. Another influencer who goes by the moniker “DataRepublican” has close to a million followers. She was recently revealed to be a Defense Department special government employee after spending months holding press credentials inside Hegseth’s handpicked Pentagon press corps of MAGA loyalists.

Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said the Pentagon appeared to be using taxpayer money to hire propagandists to push out partisan talking points, and he pointed out there could be more we still don’t know about. It’s worth asking how many more supposedly independent online voices complimenting Trump and the GOP are actually getting taxpayer dollars to do so.

Back in 1913, Congress got so uneasy about federal agencies hiring publicists to sell the government to its own citizens that it passed a law banning the practice. No appropriated money for publicity experts unless Congress says so out loud. That statute is still on the books. This was a Congress that had watched corporations perfect the art of the press agent, and it decided the government’s job was to inform Americans, not to manage them. When the Pentagon starts quietly bringing on the people who tell you what to think about the Pentagon, you’ve stopped being a citizen who’s owed the truth. You’ve become an audience that’s being worked.

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GOP Senate Candidate Forced to Walk Back False Bin Laden Claim

A Republican Senate candidate is now in trouble over a fundraising email.

Former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers of Michigan, who is running for the Mitten State’s open U.S. Senate race, recently sent supporters a fundraising email that appeared to suggest he played a direct role in the killing of Osama bin Laden back in 2011.

In the email, Rogers claimed he worked “in the shadows, hunting down terrorists,” and then, in bold text, claimed he “saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America.”

But Rogers wasn’t in Abottabad, Pakistan when Osama bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team Six operatives. He wasn’t in the White House Situation Room either, where then-President Barack Obama and other officials watched the raid unfold in real time. Rogers was at his Washington, D.C. home, where he got a phone call from CIA Director Leon Panetta informing him about the raid. As chair of the House Intelligence Committee at the time, he was later shown photographs of bin Laden’s body.

That’s a very different thing than what his fundraising email implied.

Rogers’ campaign is so far staying tight-lipped. Azi Paybarah, the reporter who first surfaced the message, suggested Rogers could have been referring to having seen those photographs, rather than claiming direct involvement in the actual raid.

This isn’t the first time Rogers has stretched the truth. The day after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary on August 4th, Rogers posted a statement to social media saying he never imagined he’d be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11. But El-Sayed never said that. Rogers got expoed by FactCheck.org, along with Snopes and PolitiFact. El-Sayed himself said in April that he doesn’t think 9/11 was justified. That comment was from Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who campaigned with El-Sayed, and later walked back that comment. El-Sayed distanced himself from Piker in his April interview with Raw America.

Joseph McCarthy campaigned as Tail-Gunner Joe and told Wisconsin voters he’d flown thirty-two combat missions. He was an intelligence officer who briefed pilots, and historians who’ve gone through the records put his real number at a fraction of that. The leg injury he described as a war wound came from a shipboard initiation ceremony. He built a career on a war story he’d inflated, and then he spent that career questioning everybody else’s loyalty. That’s the pattern worth watching here. The exaggeration isn’t the whole story. The exaggeration is what buys a man the standing to tell voters that a Muslim American doctor thinks his own country had 9/11 coming.

Republicans Panic as James Talarico Dominates Texas Airwaves

Republicans are watching a key Senate race slip further from their control by the day.

Democratic state representative James Talarico is running for Texas’s open Senate seat against scandal-ridden Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. So far, Talarico has had Texas’ airwaves almost entirely to himself.

Since June, Democrats have outspent Republicans on TV ads in Texas’ Senate race by a margin of nearly $31.5 million to just $4.7 million. Most of that Democratic spending is coming directly from Talarico’s own campaign, which has proven itself particularly adept at raising money. Paxton’s campaign has spent just over $150,000 on advertising in that same stretch.

Senate Republican leaders warned Trump before the May primary runoff that if he endorsed Paxton over longtime incumbent John Cornyn, the president’s political operation would have to fund an expensive general election to keep Paxton competitive. Paxton has long been beset by bribery and corruption allegations, including a 2023 impeachment vote in the Texas House. The state Senate later acquitted him.

So far, Trump has yet to cut any checks. Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., is sitting on more than $400 million but hasn’t yet to committed real resources to defending Paxton. One top Republican said MAGA Inc. keeps promising to spend but hasn’t.

Paxton himself has been begging for help on conservative media, telling Newsmax he was “a little behind on TV.” He’s confident more support is coming, but he hasn’t said anything specific on where that help is supposedly coming from.

Some outside GOP groups have tried to fill the gap with attack ads hitting Talarico over his opposition to a 2025 bill that Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott signed preventing Texas land sales to buyers from China and other countries designated as national security threats. However, Talarico’s campaign is pushing back by pointing to a 2019 trip Paxton took to China with other state attorneys general that was reportedly concerning to other staff in the attorney general’s office.

Texas-based GOP strategists say the real danger for Paxton is that he’s just not an inspiring figure for non-MAGA Republicans. One source told CNN the situation as “frustrating to watch,” and stressed that Paxton could be viewed as a much weaker nominee compared to Cornyn if he fails to close the gap with Talarico.

Even Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, wouldn’t commit to funding Paxton’s campaign in the final months of the campaign. Scott insisted Texas was going to remain in Republican hands and that money is on its way, saying he expects Trump’s super PAC to get involved.

Notably, when Senator Cornyn was asked whether he plans to campaign for Paxton, he simply answered “no.”

When the Supreme Court handed down Citizens United in 2010, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that independent spending can’t corrupt anybody, because it’s independent. Sixteen years later, a Texas attorney general impeached by his own party’s House is going on cable television to beg a super PAC to notice him. Four hundred million dollars sits in one account while a state of thirty million people waits to learn whether it’s worth advertising to. That isn’t independence. That’s a handful of donors deciding which candidates Texans are allowed to hear from, and Kennedy’s promise looks thinner with every cycle that passes.

Before You Go, Fund the Journalism That Only Answers to You

Think about why you had to come to Raw America to get half of these stories. News outlets controlled by pro-Trump billionaires like David Ellison at CBS and Patrick Soon-Shiong at the Los Angeles Times don’t want you to know about Republicans panicking over potentially losing Texas. And they’re going to try hard to bury stories about the people being paid with taxpayer dollars to post pro-regime propaganda. Raw America has no billionaire owner to answer to, or any corporate parent threatening to pull a story because it might upset their federal contracts. We answer to you, and you alone.

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Make sure to tap that ❤️ and restack this post, so we can get it into more feeds. It makes more of a difference than you think. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.

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Here’s Why Your Investment Matters

Let’s start with impact. On Thursday night, Jesse Watters, a Fox News host in primetime on the most-watched network in the country, devoted a segment of his show to attacking us.

Specifically, he referenced Carl Gibson’s interview with Angie Nixon, Florida’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. Nixon explained how she plans to flip a Republican-held seat in Trump’s adopted home state by running on Medicare for All and getting corporate money out of politics.

Fox News focused on Raw America? Wow. You made it happen. And we’re just eight months old.

Here’s what got under Fox’s skin. An interview from an independent outlet that you started. A channel with no billionaire backer or corporate parent, or swanky office in NYC.

Nixon may be a longshot for Senate, but if Fox is on the attack, it means you’ve got something going. When a network with Fox’s reach spends precious primetime minutes swatting at an independent startup, it means the ground is shifting under their feet.

The New Media Moment Is Real, and We’re In It

Americans are walking away from legacy media, and they aren’t coming back. Across the political spectrum, people now say they trust independent and digital news over the outlets their parents grew up with. The trust in institutions is gone, and readers are picking the voices they believe are telling them the truth without a boss upstairs deciding what’s allowed.

Substack recently passed five million paid subscriptions. Independent outlets that didn’t exist a few years ago now count their subscribers in the hundreds of thousands. The Washington Post and CNN are now scrambling to build their own creator networks, trying to emulate the thing they spent years sneering at.

The billionaire-owned press has looked at independent media and concluded: we’d better become that before it eats us.

But this moment doesn’t fund itself. The reason we could put Angie Nixon on camera without a single call from upstairs telling us to spike it is that we don’t have an upstairs.

That independence is our strength, but it means we live or die by whether you decide this work is worth paying for. Breaking through to primetime takes resources. The reporting takes resources. None of it happens without readers who chip in.

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Trump May Have Just Kneecapped His Own Voters

Here’s something else I caught this week that breaks the conventional narrative.

Trump is livid with mail-in voting. Conventional wisdom holds that Trump gutted vote-by-mail to suppress Democrats. But it turns out that the people who run Republican campaigns are panicking, because the voters most likely to get tripped up are actually his own.

Don’t take my word for it. Take Ben Ginsberg’s. Ginsberg spent decades as one of the most powerful election lawyers in the GOP. He was counsel to the RNC, the Senate and House campaign committees, and the Republican Governors Association.

This week he went on CNN and said the order will largely hit Republican voters.

“Republicans are the older party and older folks like to vote by mail,” he said. “They’re the rural party. And certainly vote by mail is important to people in rural areas. And thanks to Donald Trump, there are many more low propensity voters in the Republican Party.”

The reason is straightforward. Democratic voters tend to live in more urban areas, where voting is more accessible. In rural states, the ballot box may be dozens of miles away.

None of this is something to cheer, exactly. An order that disenfranchises voters is bad no matter whose voters they are. But there’s a special irony here. Trump cast his own ballot by mail, then turned around and tried to make it harder for millions of Americans to do the same. And the ones who may pay the price are the very people who put him back in office.

The Number That Should Have the GOP Running Scared

Here’s why this is landing at exactly the right moment. CNN’s Harry Enten recently went on air and tallied up the Democratic primary turnout across the country this cycle. His word for it was “bonkers.”

More than 25 million people have voted in Democratic primaries this cycle. This is already ahead of where the party was during the entire 2018 primary season, the year it flipped 40 House seats and took back the chamber.

Since 2006, the party with the higher primary turnout has gone on to win the House every single time. Republicans should be running scared. Enten’s read on why the number is so high? A president who is deeply underwater with the public.

Enthusiasm like that doesn’t come from cable panels telling people to calm down. It comes from people who are paying attention, the same people walking away from legacy media and toward outlets like this one.

A Few Small Wins Worth Savoring

It wasn’t all big-picture this week. A few things went right, and they’re worth naming.

A federal judge in Massachusetts, Indira Talwani, hit pause — again — on Trump’s last-minute scheme to gut mail-in voting weeks before the election. She put the rule on hold and said flatly that the government never produced any evidence of the fraud it claims to be fighting. Trump will appeal, so this fight isn’t over. But for now, ballots keep moving.

The generation that helped put Trump back in office is having second thoughts. New Navigator Research polling found that 31 percent of Gen Z voters who backed Trump in 2024 now regret it. His approval with Gen Z now sits at just 33 percent.

This is the lowest of any age group, and he’s now underwater with every single one. Young voters who supported Trump are slipping away.

None of these are the whole war. They’re a temporary restraining order, a poll, a network losing its composure on live TV. But strung together, they tell you which way the wind is blowing. And it isn’t blowing toward Trump.

A Note from Our Team

This week, our White House reporter exposed Trump’s Canadian tariff scam and got a member of Trump’s own party on the record calling his trade war “just nuts.”

A top GOP Senate aide told Raw America that Trump is “an idiot who doesn’t understand economics and doesn’t understand math,” and an aide to House GOP leadership said Trump is “Democrats’ secret weapon for success.”

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I believe we’ll win this cycle. In fact, I’m certain of it.

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I’m John Byrne. See you next Sunday.

Good morning. I’m John Byrne. Before we dive in, take a second and tap that ❤️ and restack this edition. These algorithms were built to smother reporting like the stories below, and a share from you is what breaks through.

Trump’s press secretary is quitting the podium, and the tabloids want you to believe The View is fighting to hire her. A federal judge in Washington is done being lied to about the Epstein files and is inching toward throwing Trump’s attorney general in contempt. Pete Hegseth is telling friends he might run for president. And in Georgia, the one Democrat with every reason to go soft is instead calling the president a crook to his face — and winning. Four stories, one thread: the difference between what power wants you to see and what’s actually going on.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. Facebook has severely limited our content distribution, which means many of our own followers aren’t even seeing our reporting in their feeds anymore. This came after we did reporting on Zuckerberg cozying up to Trump. That is not a coincidence; it is what happens when independent media tells the truth about a billionaire. The one thing no algorithm can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. If you believe this reporting matters, subscribe right now or upgrade your subscription. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

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The Leavitt Drama That Somebody Invented

Here’s how the machine works. Karoline Leavitt wrapped up her final week as White House press secretary, and the Daily Mail ran a barn-burner: “Karoline Leavitt in secret talks to join TV’s most controversial show.” Trump’s thrilled, the story said. A conservative firebrand set to storm the liberal fortress of The View.

Then CNN’s Brian Stelter made a phone call — the kind of thing that used to be standard before outrage became the product.

An ABC source told him the truth: Leavitt was invited to appear as a guest, once. She wouldn’t even be a guest host. She wouldn’t join in any official capacity. All six current co-hosts are returning for the new season. The whole “secret talks to join the panel” saga was, in a word, manufactured.

A twenty-nine-year-old who spent two years berating reporters from the podium gets a routine booking invitation, and it’s inflated into a culture-war epic. Leavitt says she’s heading home to her kids and back to MAGA Inc., Trump’s super PAC, to “cheer him on.”

That’s the real story, and it’s a small one. The invented version got the clicks.

The Judge Trying to Get More Epstein Files Released

While the tabloids chased a bogus story, something real is happening in a federal courtroom. Attorney General Todd Blanche’s Justice Department is edging toward a contempt finding over Jeffrey Epstein records it was ordered to produce under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan wants handwritten FBI notes tied to a woman who says she was sexually abused by Donald Trump when she was thirteen years old. He wants a redaction log. He wants a sworn declaration.

What he got, according to legal analyst Michael Popok on the Legal AF podcast, was a two-page filing he described as gibberish backed by no affidavit. It claimed a hard-luck account of DOJ lawyers toiling through Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. A pity party, Popok dubbed it, dressed up as a legal reply.

The lawsuit was brought by journalist and attorney Katie Phang, who alleges the department improperly redacted the files and is stonewalling their release. One of her lawyers flatly contradicted the DOJ’s claim that it had never produced handwritten notes in the matter, pointing to more than a hundred examples of exactly that.

Popok’s read on Sullivan: the judge has had it. Produce the notes, or he’ll start finding people in contempt. The judge can also threaten jail. When a Justice Department would rather risk contempt than let the public see what’s in a file, the file is the story. We want to know what’s in there.

The War Secretary Who Wants a Promotion

In news that should be in The Onion, Pete Hegseth has told close friends he’s weighing a run for president in 2028. He’s convinced he shares the toughness and defiance that made Trump a phenomenon. His surprise turn at the Iowa State Fair this month (Iowa being the traditional first stop to the White House) did nothing to quiet the chatter.

The Pentagon insists it’s foolish speculation and Hegseth’s only focus is the job.

About that. Hegseth is running a war on Iran that most Americans don’t want — even Fox News finds 66% disapprove of Trump’s handling of it. Gas has jumped from under three dollars a gallon to just over four. Eighteen American servicemembers are dead. Iran keeps rattling global oil shipping, and there’s no end in sight.

Three former defense secretaries — Panetta, Hagel, and Cohen — told NBC that Hegseth’s partisan campaign swings are inappropriate.

“My God, we’re at war,” Hagel said, incredulous that a sitting Pentagon chief is stumping in Iowa.

No defense secretary in American history has ever made the jump to president. Hegseth is auditioning for the role while his decisions kill U.S. troops overseas.

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The Democrat Who Refuses to Flinch

And then there’s Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff. As the only sitting senator up for election in a state Trump carried in 2024, politicos say he should be tacking to the center. The safe play is to soften and moderate; Ossoff has successfully done the opposite.

Ossoff — who seems like he’s already auditioning for president — calls Trump a “draft-dodging, crook president” and his administration “an obscenity.” He labels his Republican challenger Mike Collins a Trump “puppet.” He talks about the “Mar-a-Lago mafia.”

And it’s working: he leads his opponent in every major poll and holds a commanding money advantage less than three months out. His theory, as he put it to The New York Times, is that Trumpism feeds on the sense that government doesn’t care and can’t deliver, so he delivers: an $8.4 million grant to fix one small town’s gas lines, a cellphone number thousands of Georgians actually have. A lifelong Republican mayor who voted against him six years ago is backing him now, because, she says, he calls and asks what they need.

His opponent rejoins with “common sense versus communism crazy” and jabs about a “trust fund kid,” while contending with reporting about former staffers who trafficked in racist and antisemitic material.

Ossoff’s bet is that competence plus spine beats Trumpian grievance. As national Democrats waffle, he’s showing that shouting might be the winning move.

Support the Fight Against MAGA-Controlled Billionaire Media

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Tap the ❤️ and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach people the algorithm would rather they didn’t. Thank you for everything you do.

I’m John Byrne. Thanks for reading, thanks for fighting, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

A new Democratic memo shows that immigration — the very same issue that helped elect Donald Trump to a second term — may now be his biggest weakness heading into the midterms this fall. Far-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos just got detained by ICE after being turned in by a fellow MAGA activist. A judge shut down Trump’s third attempt to overturn his New York felony convictions by moving them from state to federal court. And in reliably red states like Kansas and Texas, longtime GOP staffers are now jumping ship to work for the Democrats trying to beat them.

Before we get into it, a quick ask, because it’s why we’re all here: independent media is the last place where the truth can be told without interference from billionaires and corporations, and we need your support now more than ever. Raw America has big plans for the midterms, and we’re counting on readers like you, who understand the importance of independent journalism, to step up and chip in. If enough people reading this right now subscribe for just 22 cents a day, we can continue this work through the midterms and beyond. Upgrade your free subscription to a paying one right now for less than a quarter a day. Isn’t that worth high-quality independent journalism that only answers to you?

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New Memo Reveals Key Issue That Could Take Trump Down

A new memo from Democratic-aligned group Winning Jobs Narrative Action found that two specific immigration-related messages each moved support toward Democrats by roughly two points. That’s significant movement on an issue Republicans have owned for years, if not decades.

WJN Action’s executive director, Steve Pierce, told The Bulwark that working-class voters are turned off by images of masked goons grabbing people off the street and killing American citizens in Minneapolis. Even people who lean toward Republicans on immigration don’t like it.

But Pierce emphasized that outrage alone isn’t enough to win. Democrats need to not only oppose Trump but make a positive case on why immigration is a net benefit to society.

According to the memo, sticking to the economic argument is key. Immigrants pay taxes, and their labor props up entire industries like agriculture, construction and hospitality. And while ICE funding skyrockets, food assistance and health care are put on the chopping block. That contrast of billionaires fattening their pockets while working families are left out in the cold performed well with voters.

Pierce also cautioned Democrats against trying to out-tough Republicans on immigration enforcement. If voters want immigration hawks, they can just vote Republican instead of Republican lite. Democrats’ secret weapon may just be taking a economic approach rooted in compassion.

Sponsored Kalshi Question: Pete Hegseth out as Secretary of Defense?

Right-Wing Activist Arrested by ICE After MAGA Influencer Snitches on Him

Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart editor and one-time political adviser to rapper Kanye West, has now been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Louisiana. He was picked up at the New Orleans airport, in the same city where West is performing this weekend.

Yiannopoulos was born in England, though he’s spent the last decade as one of the loudest voices on the far right. Yiannopoulos previously worked for Republican former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and has aligned himself with neo-Nazi podcaster Nick Fuentes.

But the most interesting part of the story is that MAGA influencer Laura Loomer — who has been referred to as Donald Trump’s informal loyalty enforcer — is now taking credit for turning him in. Loomer wrote on her X account that she first alerted ICE and the FBI that Yiannopoulos was in the U.S. illegally after he allegedly called for her to be assassinated. She framed his detention as a win, and celebrated that he’ll likely be deported back to the UK.

While it’s interesting that Yiannopoulos’ arrest was a byproduct of MAGA-on-MAGA feuding, it’s still more than a little disturbing that masked agents of the states showed up to abduct someone just because they got a call from one of the president’s favorite social media personalities.

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Judge Slams Door on Trump’s Attempt to Overturn His Felony Convictions

U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, an appointee of Bill Clinton, just rejected Trump’s latest attempt to move his hush money criminal case out of New York state court to federal court. This marks the third time Hellerstein has rejected this particular gambit from Trump’s lawyers.

Trump’s team has been trying to move the case to federal court so they can argue that the MAGA Supreme Court’s 2024 presidential immunity ruling should wipe out the president’s 34 felony convictions. An appeals court panel previously told Hellerstein to take another look into Trump’s request. He did. And the answer is still no.

In his ruling, Hellerstein wrote that Trump’s grounds for trying again didn’t contain any new information and were devoid of any actual legal justification. He said Trump failed to show good cause for the prolonged delay. And he added that the crux of the case — in which Trump paid hush money to cover up an extramarital affair and then falsified business records to hide it — isn’t the kind of official presidential act that presidential immunity was meant to protect.

In May of 2024, Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts tied to a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. This was the only one of his four criminal cases to actually go to trial. The president has, of course, appealed Friday’s decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and his legal team insists the whole thing is a witch hunt, naturally. But so far, every single judge who’s actually looked at the immunity argument as it relates to Trump’s felony convictions has rejected it.

Longtime GOP Staffers Abandon Republicans to Work for Democrats

In two Senate races Democrats are hoping to flip this fall, veteran Republican staffers are walking away from their own party to instead help the Democrats aiming to unseat them.

In Kansas, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Adam Hamilton just hired Austin Gilpin, whose resume includes the Kansas GOP, Republican Congressman Ron Estes and Republican former two-term Governor Sam Brownback. Gilpin said he went to work for Hamilton simply because Republican Senator Roger Marshall — who Hamilton is challenging in a surprisingly close race — chose Donald Trump over both Kansas and basic decency.

In Texas, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico has officially hired Jacob Smith, who worked for Republican Senator John Cornyn for five years up until Cornyn lost his primary to Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton (who won with Trump’s endorsement). Smith praised Talarico as someone who speaks to people who work too hard for too little. He added that Paxton was the most corrupt, self-dealing politician in Texas.

This is newsworthy as both of these are states are considered reliably red, with Trump winning both by double-digit margins in 2024. This year’s Senate races weren’t supposed to even be remotely competitive. But the president’s approval rating has continued to plummet to new lows thanks to his disastrous war with Iran and his bungling of the economy. Thanks to Trump’s historically low poll numbers, Democrats are now able to make significant headway in states that used to be off-limits.

Some of the latest polls show Texas has a real chance of flipping. Two separate polls from August show Talarico ahead of Paxton, with one showing the Democrat leading by six percentage points, and another showing Talarico ahead by three. Marshall is still in the lead in Kansas, but internal polls from both Democrats and Republicans internal polls show the race is well within the margin of error.

There’s still plenty of time before voters head to the polls. But the fact that GOP staffers are rejecting their own party’s candidates in two Republican strongholds shows there could be some significant upsets in November.

Before You Go, Support Independent Journalism That Fights for You

The number of news outlets that will actually give you the full story and connect the dots are rapidly disappearing, as right-wing billionaires gobble them up one by one and shut down the rest. We launched Raw America with the bet that Americans who want journalism that isn’t compromised by billionaire money will not only read it, but keep it funded. Our strength is in being the one thing the billionaires can’t buy. And we’ll never answer to anyone but our readers.

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Thanks to our paying subscribers, we’re able to bring you twice-daily newsletters like these, along with exclusive scoops from Capitol Hill and the White House and live interviews with major newsmakers like Hunter Biden, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Florida U.S. Senate candidate Angie Nixon, among others. Every dollar of every subscription goes directly to our team of reporters, editors and video producers who work hard every day for you and you alone.

Thanks for reading. I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Have a great weekend.

Here are some stories you may have missed:

• Corporate Profits Hit Record Highs While Workers’ Wages Plunge to New Lows. The gap between corporate shareholders and ordinary workers is widening to historic levels, according to new data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Corporations have posted roughly $4.8 trillion in annual pre-tax earnings — making up 18 percent of national income — while employees’ share of that money is just 60 percent in accumulated wages and benefits. That’s the lowest percentage since the 1950s. J.P. Morgan analyst Abiel Reinhart told the Financial Times that workers “have been receiving an increasingly small share of national income over time.”

• Trump Has Bragged About Ending Iran War 66 Times, Yet War Drags On. The Iran war has effectively reached stalemate status despite President Donald Trump claiming more than five dozen times that the war has already been won. The war is hitting its six-month mark this weekend with still no end in sight, and 18 U.S. service members dead. The financial cost of the war is also significant, with some estimates finding that the Trump administration has spent as much as $120 billion on the war effort. In a post to his X account, Hunter Biden joked: “No President in History has ended the same war so many times.”

• Thousands Converge on Washington to Demand New Voter Protections. To commemorate the 63rd anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, thousands of Americans marched on the nation’s capital to demand Congress pass new legislation enshrining voting rights, while also protesting Republican states’ attacks on voting. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) promised a “tide” was coming in the November midterms, and that Republicans would face a reckoning from voters after passing laws aimed at curbing their representation.

There’s a simple solution to our “illegal immigration” crisis: put some wealthy white CEOs — who are inviting these often desperate people into the country and hiring them — into prison. Ronald Reagan came up with the idea and put it into law, but no president since him has been willing to enforce it.

As a result, there’s a growing movement in America to defund and close down ICE, fire and prosecute their brutal and murderous thugs, and close their concentration camps.

Fox News found 59 percent of voters across the political spectrum say ICE is “too aggressive,” and nearly two-thirds of voters told Marist the agency “has gone too far.” Support for abolishing ICE outright has doubled since 2018.

While most people in the movement point to the barbarity of their tactics and how they’re now spying on protesters, an even stronger argument for ending the agency is that they’re simply not needed.

There’s an alternative, which will largely stop the flow of undocumented people coming into America in search of economic opportunity, and its already part of American law. It’s just that our politicians refuse to enforce it.

The Hartmann Report

A Daily Newsletter of Renaissance Thinking about Progressive Politics, Economics, Science, and the Political News Issues of Our Day

By Thom Hartmann

Farmers in Maine this week are nervously waiting for the knock. The Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association warned its members that ICE agents are already flying drones over fields and work sites looking for brown-skinned people. In Connecticut this week these masked, bloodthirsty goons have been dragging parents off in front of their kids at the school bus stops, at least 25 people in a single day were sent to concentration camps in Texas or elsewhere.

But have you heard of a single wealthy white farmer, general contractor, or other corporate employer of these “illegals” going to jail?

Of course not, because the show this administration is are putting on isn’t about preventing illegal immigration; it’s purely an effort to terrify people of color — including American citizens — being done by radical white supremacists like Stephen Miller and Donald Trump who find it a source of gleeful entertainment. After all, nobody wears a balaclava to serve a fine on a poultry executive.

As Fortune Magazine noted:

“Trump himself has been accused of employing unauthorized workers at his hotels, golf courses and other businesses.”

The rest of the world is more rational and less racist, it seems. I’ve worked in two countries (Germany and Australia) where I had to get a visa and a work permit to draw a paycheck. In both cases, it wasn’t the government that demanded I fill out the paperwork; it was my employers. Because they didn’t want to be hit with big fines or legal processes for paying an unauthorized foreigner.

Their systems attacked the problem of “illegal immigration” from the money end, something that instantly gets the attention of wealthy employers who want to hang onto their wealth and avoid being tossed in the clink.

America, on the other hand, decided a long time ago that it was easier to go after poor brown people than wealthy white employers, and that sentiment has carried through to today.

After all, undocumented people without papers can’t report wage theft, can’t complain about dangerous working conditions, and can’t sign up for a union. They’re easily abused and exploited, and generally their labor is cheaper than citizens, which is why companies employ them.

The AFL-CIO made exactly that argument in 2000 when then-Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson said:

“Employers often knowingly hire workers who are undocumented, and then when workers seek to improve working conditions, employers manipulate the law to fire or intimidate workers. This subverts the intent of the law and lowers working standards for all workers.

“The law should criminalize employer behavior, not punish workers.”

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There’s an amazing history here, including a major role played by Ronald Reagan and Mitt Romney, that both emphasize how wrong the ICE approach is and how much more effective and humane a system that focuses on employers like other democracies do would be.

Our first serious attempt to criminalize undocumented immigration was in 1952 when Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, better known as the McCarran-Walter Act. It made it a federal crime to “harbor” an undocumented alien.

Wealthy white ranchers and meat processors in Texas, however, rebelled when the law was being debated and paid off enough legislators that the “Texas Proviso” was inserted into the law that explicitly said that employing a person wasn’t legally the same thing as “harboring” them.

That changed, however, in 1986 when Ronald Reagan pushed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 through Congress, which, in addition to granting legal status to about 2.7 million aliens, explicitly criminalized hiring future undocumented people. In his signing statement, Reagan said:

“The employer sanctions program is the keystone and major element. It will remove the incentive for illegal immigration by eliminating the job opportunities which draw illegal aliens here.”

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The law was enforced for a few years, peaking at around 10,000 employer audits in 1990, but over the next decade audits fell by 77 percent. Cases where wealthy employers were actually fined dropped by 82 percent; total fines in 1996 were a measly $3.1 million, an amount the employers could just shrug off. Since then, it has fallen off a cliff.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University did and published the research: since 1986, no more than 25 employers have been prosecuted in any single year and in the 2018-2019 12-month period that they examined only seven cases were prosecuted and none of them involved going after a corporation.

During that same year, however, our government prosecuted 86,000 individual people for illegal entry and 35,000 for illegal re-entry. For example, in Mississippi in 2019 ICE agents arrested 680 workers at seven poultry processing plants in the largest workplace raid in a decade. Agents surrounded the buildings to prevent people from leaving, did mass arrests, and left children crying alone in cars in the parking lot.

As the Mississippi Free Press documented at the time:

“Left out of the indictments, though, are charges against personnel at two companies whose executives have given thousands of dollars to top Mississippi officials, and who received public endorsements from former Gov. Phil Bryant prior to the August 2019 raids.

“Those companies, PECO Foods and Koch Foods, represent five of the seven plants that ICE targeted in last year’s raids…that, in turn, poured thousands into the campaign coffers of some of Mississippi’s top federal officials, including [Republican] U.S. Senators Cindy Hyde-Smith and Roger Wicker.”

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Then there’s the Mitt Romney moment of rationality from one of the few sane Republicans left. When the former Massachusetts governor was running for president in 2012, he forcefully argued in a January 23rd debate with President Obama that the key to solving the problem of illegal immigration wasn’t to arrest the brown-skinned people but, instead, to go after their employers.

That would cause the jobs to dry up, Romney argued, and that in turn would lead people who couldn’t find or maintain employment to “self-deport.” After Obama bragged that his administration had “presided over record 396,906 deportations in 2011,” Romney replied simply:

“The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here. We’re not going to round people up.”

Romney’s idea, however, offended the white supremacists who were increasingly dominating the GOP. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus was quoted by CBS News right after the debate:

“‘Using the word ‘self-deportation’ - I mean, it’s a horrific comment to make,’ the chairman told reporters at the RNC’s annual meeting in Boston, according to an audio recording from Business Insider. ‘It’s not something that has anything to do with our party. But when a candidate makes those comments, obviously it hurts us.’”

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Stephen Miller and his racist crowd would emphatically agree, as they delight in the idea of brown-skinned people being on the receiving end of 350-volt shock gloves, their latest nod to raw brutality worthy of the Klan in days of old. Even E-Verify, a good attempt, is still voluntary for most private employers under federal law.

The Trump/Miller mandate is straightforward: Don’t go after the rich white guys who invite “illegals” here; instead, terrorize and humiliate the people who just came here looking for a better life or to escape being murdered.

As Adam Serwer pointed out in The Atlantic in 2018, “The cruelty is the point.” Just watch the DHS press releases, the mugshot montages, and Trump’s gleeful all-caps posts on his Nazi-infested social media site and it’s all vividly clear. This isn’t law enforcement; it’s a show being put on for the very worst of the white supremacists and racists among us. And, tragically, the entire world is watching in horror.

It’s been forty years since Reagan called employer sanctions “the keystone” to solving the undocumented immigration problem, and every time anybody tries to solve that problem the business lobby jumps in and kills it. All while ICE gets tens of billions of dollars to chase and beat up dishwashers.

So, today may be a good day to call your member of Congress and your two Senators (202-224-3121) and let them know we should be arresting rich white employers instead of powerless employees.

And that we need to fix our system from top-to-bottom with legislation producing Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Texas Democrat Veronica Escobar has proposed a great start and gotten modest bipartisan support for her Dignity Act that does just that, and there was a good-faith effort championed by Republican Senator James Lankford that then-candidate Donald Trump ordered killed in 2024 because he wanted this brutality show instead.

We’ve all had enough of this disgusting racism and violence.

And if this piece was useful to you, please share it and subscribe to the Hartmann Report. Independent journalism runs on readers who pass this work along, and this is one story the people who own the poultry plants would very much like you to not think about.

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In addition to columns like these, Raw America is working tirelessly at bringing you the news and perspectives the billionaires who are gobbling up media outlets one by one want buried. Our White House correspondent, Brian Karem, has a new report out this week about what Republicans and Trump’s own White House staff are really saying about his trade war behind his back. And our Wednesday interview with Florida U.S. Senate nominee Angie Nixon even rattled Fox News, with primetime host Jesse Watters highlighting it in a segment attacking democratic socialism.

Whether our hard-hitting independent journalism continues is entirely up to our paying subscribers, who keep us afloat by chipping in. Because we have no billionaire backer or corporate parent, we need everyday readers like you to step up and make sure we can keep doing the work that Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post and David Ellison’s CBS won’t. Upgrade your free subscription to a paying one for just 22 cents a day. It only takes a minute. We’re counting on you.

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Judge Hits Pause on Trump’s Mail-In Voting Restrictions

This one has huge implications for November: a federal judge in Massachusetts just halted the Trump administration’s new mail voting restrictions in a ruling handed down Thursday night. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, who was appointed by Barack Obama, put the rule on hold for two weeks, saying the government never produced any actual evidence of the fraud it claims the rule is meant to stop.

This case has been litigated for months. Talwani already paused the rule once before. But then the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority stepped in Monday and allowed the Trump administration to move forward with the new restrictions, ruling that the states and voting rights groups sued too soon as the rule hadn’t yet gone into effect.

But here’s what the Roberts Court conveniently left out: the U.S. Postal Service had already published the final version of that rule one business day before the ruling came down. That means the states and voting rights groups were actually right on time with their lawsuit, which they refiled Wednesday, prompting Talwani’s Thursday night restraining order.

The Trump administration is also not wasting any time. The White House was pushing the rule forward all week, and even publishing an FAQ on Thursday explaining how the rule would work, all while telling the courts it wasn’t trying to dictate how states run their own elections.

So what does the rule actually do? It creates complex new requirements for mail ballot envelopes that state election officials say would be effectively impossible to put in place before November. It also requires states to hand over a list of every voting-age citizen so the federal government can cross-check them against U.S. citizenship data. It also prevents the U.S.P.S. from delivering or picking up ballots from anyone who doesn’t clear that federal check.

Talwani wrote plainly that the disenfranchisement risk to voters this November massively outweighs whatever unproven fraud problem the administration says it’s solving.

Every single state allows some form of mail voting. Eight states, mostly out west, along with Washington, D.C., mail a ballot to every registered voter automatically. This fight is about millions of people’s basic ability to cast a vote, and it’s not over. The administration is expected to appeal, so keep watching this one.

Back in 1864, with the country tearing itself apart, states rewrote their election laws so Union soldiers could mail ballots home from the battlefield, because a nation at war decided that being far from your polling place shouldn’t cost you your voice in who governs you. More than a century and a half later, we’re arguing about whether the Postal Service ought to be allowed to carry a ballot at all, and that tells you the argument was never really about fraud.

Fox News Highlights Raw America’s Interview with Florida U.S. Senate Candidate Angie Nixon

Fox News primetime host Jesse Watters put Raw America’s work front and center on his show last night for a segment trying to scare his viewers about democratic socialism.

Watters featured Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson’s Wednesday interview with Angie Nixon, Florida’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, on his Thursday episode as an example of what he framed as a warning sign for Republicans heading into the midterms. During her appearance on Raw America, Nixon laid out exactly how she plans to flip a Republican-held Senate seat in Trump’s adopted home state.

Her pitch to voters is pretty straightforward. She’s running on implementing a Medicare for All healthcare system, which a Yale study found would save over $1 trillion and more than 100,000 American lives every year compared to the current system. And she wants to get big corporate money out of American politics. And even though Republicans have long treated Florida as safe territory, Nixon says her platform is catching on with working-class Floridians in one of the most expensive states in the country.

That interview got noticed by Fox News bosses, which signifies that independent media is breaking through. When one of America’s most-watched cable networks feels the need to spend segment time highlighting an interview from an independent outlet with no billionaire backing or corporate parent, that’s a sign that small outlet is making a big splash.

Raw America proudly rejects money from billionaires who want to control the narrative, and we don’t answer to a corporate parent company. That independence is exactly why we’re able to conduct in-depth interviews with people like Angie Nixon without having to worry about a call from upstairs ordering us to spike it.

Ida B. Wells had her Memphis press destroyed and her paper shut down in 1892 because her reporting on lynching was landing exactly where it hurt, and she kept publishing from exile anyway. The rich and well-connected have a long history of trying to downplay and dismiss people working to make a difference, but the arc of history shows their tactics have never worked.

Getting under Fox News’ skin isn’t our goal, but it’s a sign that out independent journalism is landing. Breaking through to the mainstream requires resources, and none of that can happens without readers chipping in to keep the lights on. Upgrade your free subscription to a paying one right now so we can keep breaking through.

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Key Bloc of Voters That Elected Trump Now Regrets Voting for Him

New polling numbers are likely causing headaches for Republican strategists heading into November. A new survey from Navigator Research poll is finding that 31 percent of Gen Z voters who backed Trump in 2024 now regret their decision. 28 percent of Millennial Trump voters feel the same way, along with 20 percent of Gen X voters who backed Trump. Older voters are also having buyer’s remorse, with 10 percent of baby boomers expressing regret for how they voted in 2024.

The Gen Z bloc turning against Trump is especially significant. Trump won 42 percent of the youngest voters who were born in the late 1990s and 2000s, compared to the 55 percent of that cohort who voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Losing even a fraction of that bloc is a huge development.

Trump’s approval rating among Gen Z sits at just 33 percent. That’s the lowest of any generation surveyed. Millennial Trump support registered at 38 percent, while only 39 percent of Gen X respondents approved of Trump. Only 41 percent of boomers approve of the job Trump is doing in the Oval Office, putting him underwater with every single age demographic.

Navigator’s director of polling and analytics, Tina Tang, told The Hill that 40 percent of Gen Z Americans view politics as central to their identity, and many aren’t satisfied with the direction the country is going under Trump’s second term. Whichever party manages to put together a real plan on the affordability crisis has a real shot at winning these voters over in November.

We ratified the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in 1971 because a generation old enough to be drafted and sent to die in Vietnam pointed out they had no say in the government doing the sending, and it moved through the states faster than any amendment in our history. Every generation since has had to learn the harder half of that lesson, which is that a vote only counts for as much as you’re willing to demand with it after election day, and Gen Z is learning it right now.

Florida County’s Deputy of the Year Used Flock Cameras to Stalk His Ex-Girlfriend

This story shows exactly why putting Chinese-style mass surveillance tools in the hands of local law enforcement is a big mistake.

404 Media reported that sheriff’s deputy in Brevard County, Florida named Michael Fultz resigned after an internal investigation uncovered a stunning pattern of misconduct. Fultz first joined the sheriff’s office in 2024 and his bosses even named him Deputy of the Year in 2025. The same day he received that award, Fultz’s former girlfriend sent the sheriff’s office a formal complaint detailing his unstable behavior. That complaint triggered the internal investigation that ultimately ended his career.

Investigators found Fultz had posed for photos dressed as Adolf Hitler and frequently used racial slurs freely in text messages. He once photographed his ex with his service weapon in her mouth during sex. And he used the controversial Flock cameras — the network of controversial automated license plate camera system that have drawn nationwide scrutiny — to track her movements. He even bragged to her about doing it.

When investigators confronted him, he denied using Flock cameras to spy on his ex. But when the office checked Flock’s system logs, they found he had indeed run multiple searches on her vehicle. He’d labeled the reason for his searches as “investigation,” even though there was no case linked to her.

He’d even accessed Flock’s systems while he was off duty, using his department-issued phone rather than a work computer. The photos involving Fultz’s service weapon came after he shot and killed a man while on duty in April 2025. His ex told investigators the act was consensual but that she eventually realized how inappropriate it was given his position as a sheriff’s deputy.

Investigators also found a pattern of reckless behavior tied to Fultz’s motorcycle-related social media accounts. He was at over 100 miles an hour on several occasions, and repeatedly covered his license plate. He got out of traffic tickets each time by telling officers he was a fellow cop. Even after getting a direct order to keep his plate visible, he rode out of the sheriff’s office parking lot covering it up less than half an hour later. All of that was caught on video.

The sheriff’s office concluded that while termination was necessary, but since Fultz had already left the department, they simply closed the file.

Fultz is far from the only case of an officer using Flock cameras to spy on women. Officers across the United States have been caught abusing Flock’s camera network to track ex-partners, including multiple cases in Georgia and South Carolina that led to arrests. One town suspended its Flock Safety contract after officers were caught spying on women. What makes Fultz’s case stand out is that he admitted to his victim he was using Flock cameras to track her. Most people targeted this way never even find out until months or even years after the fact.

In 2018 the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that police need a warrant before they can pull your phone’s location history, because even Chief Justice Roberts could see that a record of everywhere you’ve been tells the government nearly everything about your life. A camera network logging every car on every road hands that same power to whoever happens to be on shift, and right now the only thing standing between that power and a woman’s front door is the personal character of the man typing in the search.

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Watch Raw America’s full interview with Angie Nixon that was just featured on Fox News:

Texas just suspended more than 1.2 million voter registrations a little more than two months before voters cast their ballots in the midterms. President Donald Trump’s own niece says his round-the-clock reliance on 35 year-old aide Natalie Harp is proof of his rapid decline. A GOP governor in a deep-red state is pushing back on the Trump Justice Department’s “aggressive” election monitors. And new financial disclosures show Trump making stock trades tied directly to his own war and foreign policy decisions.

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Texas Quietly Suspends More Than 1.2 Million Voter Registrations

More than 1.2 million Texas voters — a full six percent — have had their voter registrations suspended with just a little over two months to go before Election Day. A suspension means their county doesn’t have a voter’s confirmed address, or thinks they’ve moved.

That won’t stop anyone from voting in November, but it does make the process more complicated. If someone shows up at their polling place with a suspended registration, they have to fill out a residency form before they get a ballot. And if they’ve moved to a new county, they either have to go back and vote in their old county or settle for a provisional ballot, which may or may not actually be counted.

This isn’t isolated to rural counties. Dallas County alone has more than 129,000 suspended voters. Tarrant County, which houses Fort Worth, has over 73,000 suspensions. Collin and Denton counties, which are also part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, each have more than 56,000. Voters have until October 5 to fix their status, but reaching 1.2 million people between now and then will be a significant lift, especially for people who never moved and just got caught up in a bureaucratic mess.

The timing of the suspensions is particularly worrisome given the tight polling in Texas’ marquee races. The latest polls show Democrat James Talarico has a narrow lead over Republican Ken Paxton in the U.S. Senate race, while Democrat Gina Hinojosa is in a dead heat with Republican Governor Greg Abbott. Additionally, Texas already handed its voter rolls to the Trump Justice Department. Given that context, over a million suspensions on the eve of a major election looks less like bureaucratic confusion and more like Republicans pulling all the stops to prevent a Republican stronghold from flipping blue.

Trump’s Niece Says Natalie Harp’s Constant Presence Is Proof of President’s ‘Decline’

One of the president’s relatives is now speaking out about a significant development within Trump’s inner circle. Mary Trump, who is the daughter of Trump’s brother, Fred, told Substack host Jim Acosta that 35 year-old Natalie Harp’s constant presence at Trump’s side proves that he’s declining significantly and needs round-the-clock care.

Harp, is the former One America News host who is fiercely devoted to the president and never leaves his side. She’s earned the nickname “human printer” for her habit of carrying around a portable printer to hand him physical copies of flattering articles from right-wing sites and pro-Trump memes for his personal enjoyment. And she’s paid $150,000 a year to do it.

Mary Trump said it makes her uncle look like a frail old man who needs a woman young enough to be his granddaughter constantly babysitting him and feeding him flattery, most of which she said is probably completely made up. She added it was a very bad look for the 80 year-old president.

Trump biographer Michael Wolff described Harp’s role in a similar way, saying her entire job is to hunt down praise of Trump and make sure he sees it. Mary Trump thinks that need for constant reassurance has only gotten more intense as her uncle’s approval ratings keep dropping and more members of his own party turn on him. She also argued Trump lashing out because his fragile ego is under attack, meaning Harp has to fill that gap by constantly feeding him compliments.

There could also be something even more weird happening underneath the surface. The Daily Beast recently published letters Harp wrote in 2023, in which she called Trump her “Guardian and Protector in this life” and that he’s all that matters to her. Mary Trump called that fawning obeisance extreme and over the top, and said Harp is clearly someone who is also mentally unwell. But she said what worries her most isn’t the personal dynamic between Harp and her uncle, but the fact that the man with the nuclear codes needs constant flattery.

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GOP Governor Comes Out Against Trump’s ‘Aggressive’ Election Monitors

Wyoming Republican Governor Mark Gordon is breaking with his party on Trump’s latest push to send “election monitors” to states across the country ahead of the midterms. Gordon said Justice Department observers at last week’s primary were behaving in an “aggressive” and “irregular” way.

The governor told the state’s canvassing board that state and local officials weren’t given advance notice of the DOJ’s plans before they showed up. He was careful to say that while he didn’t object to observers being present, their conduct went well beyond what Congress actually authorized them to do.

Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee, who is also a Republican, agreed. She called the Justice Department’s monitoring a poorly managed exercise that showed a complete disregard for Wyoming law. She said monitors asked for training guides, inquired to about how the county bought its voting equipment, and tried to examine vote tabulation machines directly. Lee said she had to personally turn down their requests to directly interview voters.

The DOJ says it sent two attorneys from its Civil Rights Division to Laramie County as part of a broader deployment of dozens of election monitors across seven states during the recent spate of primaries. The idea of sending federal monitors is a common practice, as the Biden DOJ had observers in nine states during the 2022 midterms. However, Trump is doing it at a much larger scale.

Democracy Docket reported last week that the Trump administration is planning to deploy roughly 1,000 election monitors for the midterms. That number has caused significant alarm among voting rights advocates given Trump’s pattern of making baseless and repeatedly debunked claims about voter fraud. It’s notable that this time, the pushback is coming from Republicans, seeing as most GOP officials have gone along with Trump’s election trickery up to this point.

Trump Caught Trading Defense Contractor Stocks in the Middle of His War

New financial disclosures show Trump made over 1,000 stock trades in June alone, and many of them line up a little too well with his own policy decisions. The filings show him buying and selling stocks in energy companies directly tied to his ongoing war with Iran, along with trading stocks in Big Pharma companies like Eli Lilly and Merck. He’s also made investments in AI companies like Nvidia.

The White House continues to argue that Trump’s investment portfolio is managed independently by outside firms and that he has no input on what gets bought or sold. But the patterns are nonetheless worth looking into. In June, right as the Iran war was pushing oil prices to new highs, Trump sold and then repurchased stock in ExxonMobil, along with buying and selling Chevron stock on three separate occasions. He sold shares in ConocoPhillips three times in June along with selling shares of Valero, while buying stock in Occidental Petroleum.

Perhaps most notably, Trump traded stocks of major defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and RTX right when Iran negotiations were underway. Some of those sales came just one day after he bought the stock.

All of this adds to a pattern of Trump padding his own net worth by billions of dollars at a scale no prior president has approached. Between all of the stock trades, his cryptocurrency ventures and his royalties and property income, the president is making out like a bandit.

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We’re only able to bring you stories like this that paint the full picture and give you the critical context because we don’t have a billionaire owner or corporate parent telling us to water down or soften our coverage. It goes without saying that David Ellison won’t let CBS talk about Trump’s own niece saying that he’s declining so much he needs 24-hour care. And a MAGA billionaire like Patrick Soon-Shiong would never let the Los Angeles Times talk about how even Republican governors are calling out the Trump DOJ’s election interference tactics. Only media that’s independent of billionaire control can truly hold this regime accountable.

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I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.

Here are some stories you may have missed:

• Investors Have Lost $4.7 Billion to Trump’s Cryptocurrency Ventures. A new report by the advocacy group Public Citizen has found that investors in President Donald Trump’s various cryptocurrency ventures have lost approximately $4.7 billion since last year alone. Most of those losses came from investors who bought into the president’s branded memecoin, which lost $3.2 billion in value within a year of its launch. Trump, in the meantime, has made more than $1.4 billion from crypto since the start of his second term.

• Grand Jury Report Finds Ron DeSantis’ Office Stole $10 Million Meant for Kids’ Healthcare. A Florida grand jury reportedly found that the Office of Governor Ron DeSantis (R) illegally diverted roughly $10 million in funds meant to compensate people who were over-billed for children’s healthcare services. That money was part of a $67 million settlement, and was apparently diverted to First Lady Casey DeSantis’ Hope Florida Foundation, which then sent the money to other accounts pertaining to DeSantis’ pet political projects run by the governor’s chief of staff.

• Kentucky Governor Demands End to Data Center Tax Breaks. Andy Beshear, the two-term Democratic governor of Kentucky, is now calling on state lawmakers to repeal tax incentives for hyperscale data center construction just a year after the GOP-controlled legislature passed those same tax breaks. Beshear’s call comes after a report last month from the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy released a report finding that the commonwealth could lose more than $2 billion in revenue if just four of the proposed hyperscale data centers are built. The term-limited governor said if billion-dollar tech companies want to build in Kentucky, they’re perfectly capable of doing so without handouts from the state.

• Trump Administration Wants to Expand Definition of ‘Small Business’ to Include Billion-Dollar Companies. The Small Business Administration is now aiming to allow companies with more than 3,000 employees making more than $1 billion in annual revenue to apply for small business loans and grants. That would be a significant increase from the current threshold of $47 million in annual revenue. Political organizations pulling in up to $632 million would also be eligible for small business loans and grants, up from the previous threshold of $14 million. That’s an increase of roughly 200 percent. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said the changes would “decimate opportunities for actual small businesses by opening the door to federal resources for billion-dollar companies.”

A sitting Republican member of Congress just quietly deleted Donald Trump’s endorsement from his own campaign website. A former staffer for Georgia Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Collins is found to have posted images of himself in Ku Klux Klan robes along with a swastika made out of a slur. The Department of Education posted a movie clip aimed at complimenting Trump, except the quote in it is about Adolf Hitler. And Trump’s White House is continuing to bleed out staff right as Democrats are expected to retake potentially both chambers of Congress and launch historic investigations into the Trump administration.

Before we get to the news, let’s acknowledge why you’re getting your news from Raw America instead of from a cable network or newspaper owned by a MAGA billionaire. You know David Ellison won’t let CBS give you the full picture, that Rupert Murdoch’s Fox won’t connect the dots and that Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times won’t report stories that may upset the apple cart. Raw America has no billionaire owner calling the shots. We answer to you. But whether we’re able to keep doing this work is up to readers like you, who decide that high-quality independent journalism is worth funding. The good news? A paying subscription only costs 22 cents a day. That’s it. And it’s all we need to stay fully independent and working exclusively for you. Upgrade right now.

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Raw America is only able to bring you newsletters like these, original reporting from Capitol Hill and live interviews with the people shaping the news thanks to the support of our paying subscribers. If you haven’t yet, make sure to read Raw America White House correspondent Brian Karem’s latest exclusive report in which Republicans are condemning Trump’s trade war. And be sure to watch our recent interview with Florida Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Angie Nixon, an unapologetic progressive looking to flip a red seat in Trump’s adopted home state.

Read Brian’s report by clicking here.

Watch our interview with Angie Nixon by clicking here.

GOP Congressman Quietly Deleted Trump’s Endorsement from His Website

The rural California congressional seat vacated by Republican Doug LaMalfa, who died in January, is now held by Republican James Gallagher after he won a June special election. President Donald Trump endorsed Gallagher on multiple occasions. In February, he wrote that Gallagher had his “Complete and Total Endorsement” and declared that “HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN.” At the time, Gallagher said he was deeply honored.

For months, that endorsement was prominently featured on the endorsements page of Gallagher’s campaign website. But at some point between early June and late July, it vanished.

A Daily Beast review found that Gallagher’s team removed every trace of Trump from that page without giving any announcement or explanation. This is despite Trump going out of his way to praise Gallagher on his Truth Social site, calling him a “very successful Family Farmer, Attorney, former County Supervisor” in a post before the June special election, urging the MAGA base to cast their ballots for him.

By the way, those Truth Social posts are still up as of today. Trump hasn’t taken anything down. Gallagher’s team is the only party doing the scrubbing.

It isn’t just Gallagher trying to wash off Trump’s stink. Kentucky congressional candidate Ralph Alvarado also wiped Trump’s name and image from his site. GOP Congressman Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania also quietly removed MAGA talking points from his own website, including language about opposing “forever wars.”

It’s easy to see why Republicans are increasingly viewing Trump’s endorsement as a liability. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 35 percent of Republicans say they “strongly approve” of Trump’s job performance. His overall net approval sits at 33 percent, a new record low.

The White House is trying to minimize and downplay the president’s sinking approval ratings, with spokesperson Davis Ingle saying Trump has already made “historic progress” and that this is “just the beginning.” Sure thing, Davis. But you should know that when your own party’s candidates are erasing your name from their campaign sites with the election just months away, that’s not exactly a sign of confidence.

Every strongman movement in history has run on the illusion of inevitability, and the moment politicians start quietly editing their websites you know that spell is wearing thin. But notice what Gallagher didn't do. He didn't renounce a thing, didn't say a word about why, he just hid the evidence, which means it all goes right back up the second the polls turn, and a party that only opposes a demagogue when it's safe isn't opposing him at all.

Former Staffer for Georgia GOP Senate Candidate Posted Nazi and KKK Images

The Georgia U.S. Senate race between Republican Mike Collins and incumbent Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff has taken a new ugly turn.

The Washington Post discovered that a former Collins staffer named Preston Parra shared images on social media of a swastika and another image of himself dressed head-to-toe in a Ku Klux Klan uniform. The swastika was spelled out using the word “twink,” a slur referring to slim young gay men.

Parra interned for Collins in 2024 and was later paid roughly $8,000 for fundraising consulting through Collins’s leadership PAC. In one post, he celebrated Collins campaign signs going up. Just a few hours earlier that day, he posted a German phrase widely associated with Nazi propaganda.

When the Post asked him about it, Parra defended the image of him wearing Klan robes as “satirical,” and said he made it with AI and described himself as a provocateur. He also blatantly argued that “the white race contributes more to the world.”

As tempting as it may be to explain this as a rogue former staffer, Collins seems to have a pattern of hiring staffers with problematic behavior. His and former chief of staff, Brandon Phillips, was fired after Collins’s own campaign account mocked a rival’s campaign operative during Georgia’s Republican primary. Phillips is also the subject of a House ethics review over allegations he hired someone he was personally involved with for a taxpayer-funded internship that she reportedly never actually showed up to.

Collins’s next chief of staff, Kip Talley, was also eventually fired. Slate reported that Talley was part of a group chat that included prominent white nationalists like Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who spoke at the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Then there’s Collins’s own son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, who’s shared Nazi imagery online. He also made a video arguing that Adolf Hitler’s legacy may be getting a second chance from Gen Z men. Additionaly, Collins’ former digital director, William Paul — the son of Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky — reportedly shouted antisemitic insults at Republican Congressman Mike Lawler of New York back in May.

Even Georgia Republicans are noticing the pattern. Tea Party organizer Debbie Dooley reminded Collins that if you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas. And a conservative radio host in Georgia even said he’s endorsing Jon Ossoff over the company Collins keeps.

Collins responded by called the ethics probe into his former chief of staff a “nothingburger,” and insisted the staffing scandals are nothing more than disgruntled former employees lashing out. But this is a problem for Republicans, who are counting on flipping a Senate seat Trump won just two years ago in order to keep their majority.

Georgia's been down this road before. In the 1920s the Klan wasn't a handful of cranks hiding out in the woods, it was mainstream enough to help put governors and senators and even a Supreme Court justice in office, and it got that way because respectable politicians decided the votes were worth the company they were keeping. That's how this poison always goes mainstream, not with a march but with a hire nobody wants to talk about, and calling it a “nothingburger” is exactly how you find out what a man will tolerate to win.

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Department of Education Deletes Post Positively Comparing Trump to Hitler

The Department of Education’s official X account recently posted a clip from the film “Darkest Hour,” in which Gary Oldman delivered an Oscar-winning performance as Winston Churchill. In the clip, Churchill declared, “you cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.”

Linda McMahon’s Education Department captioned the post “No one does it like us” with a tiger emoji, apparently trying to suggest that Donald Trump was the tiger Churchill was referring to.

But anyone who actually saw the film knows that Churchill wasn’t talking about personally being a tiger, but that the tiger in question was Adolf Hitler.

In the movie, Churchill was making the case for why Britain couldn’t appease Nazi Germany as his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, famously did with the Munich Agreement. The crux of that quote is that you can’t negotiate with a monster that’s bearing down on you.

Social media users immediately took notice. One account pointed out that the clip wasn’t even a real Churchill quote, and that the tiger in question was Hitler’s Nazi regime. Another was quick to ask what any of this had to do with public education policy in the United States. Another commenter wryly observed that the Department of Education’s apparent lack of media literacy by misinterpreting the scene was “beautifully poetic.” Eventually, the department received the message and deleted the post.

Trump has compared himself to plenty of historical figures, and British commentator Piers Morgan once gave Trump a replica of Churchill’s famous hat. But according to the book “Regime Change” by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump has also suggested that he has more power now than fitures like Napoleon, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin. He was also careful to add, however, that those men “maintained power though fear,” and asked — perhaps rhetorically — who would do a thing like that.

It might behoove the Education Department social media team to actually watch the movie before clicking the post button.

Thomas Jefferson warned us that a nation can’t be both ignorant and free, and that’s the entire reason we built a public school system in the first place. Now the very agency charged with defending that idea can’t recognize a scene about appeasing Hitler while it’s playing on their own screen, and these are the people busy dismantling the schools that teach our kids how tyranny works. When a country forgets its history, it stops being able to see the tiger, and that’s not an accident, it’s the goal.

Trump White House Staff Running for the Hills as Midterms Approach

Trump is helplessly watching an exodus of his most senior staff with the midterms just around the corner. People who have previously worked in the White House say this is happening for a very specific and obvious reason.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt is leaving at the end of August to go back to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. Her press shop colleague Abigail Jackson is already gone. Director of legislative affairs James Braid is also leaving at the end of September, and his deputy left in April. The White House’s Senate liaison left in June. A special assistant for legislative affairs also left earlier this summer. This means the White House staffers in charge of making sure the administration keeps Congress in line with its priorities are all gone.

Former officials say this is eerily similar to 2018, when Democrats flipped 40 House during Trump’s first term. Back then, staff quit in anticipation of a blue wave and likely congressional investigations that would grind the business of governing to a screeching halt.

One former White House official told Bloomberg that responding nonstop to congressional inquiries means that any actual work is indefinitely on pause.

Harrison Fields, a former Trump communications aide, said filling the vacancies in the legislative affairs office is a top priority, since Republicans haven’t had to attempt to actually find common ground to pass legislation given the trifecta they won in 2024.

Financial incentives are also prompting Trump staffers to see if the grass is greener on the other side. The Trump White House scrapped the traditional “cooling off” period meant to prevent former staffers from immediately cashing in as lobbyists. Alex Jacquez, who advised former President Joe Biden, said the two-year mark before the midterm elections is precisely when former staffers have the most leverage, and exactly when the lobbying firms start recruiting.

Burnout also plays a significant role. Alex Gray, who spent all four years as the National Security Council’s chief of staff in the first Trump administration, said the job is brutal on staffers’ health, and that the two-year mark is when many decide whether they want to spend another two years in a high-stress role.

Data from the Brookings Institution shows Trump’s second-term turnover rate is particularly high even when compared to his chaotic first term. Whatever the mix of reasons, fatigue, opportunity, or plain dread about what a Democratic House might do with control over congressional committees, the exodus is real, and it’s happening even sooner than last time.

Watch where these folks land, because killing the cooling off period turned government service into a two year apprenticeship for K Street, and the same people writing the rules for the pharmaceutical and oil companies this fall will be cashing their checks by spring. And the other half of this is even simpler. Nobody runs from work they're proud of, so when the staff starts clearing out before the subpoenas even show up, that's a confession, and it's a reminder that congressional oversight is the one tool the Framers left us that actually scares these people.

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The Republican National Committee sent out a fundraising text in Vice President JD Vance’s voice admitting groceries are too expensive, just days after Vance himself claimed the economy is booming. Two red state attorneys general are asking the Supreme Court to allow a pro-Trump billionaire to gobble up CNN’s parent company. A resurfaced video shows Trump’s young White House staffer Natalie Harp professing her bizarre devotion to him years before she ever joined his team, raising new questions about her medical claims and her fixation on the president. And Republicans who mourned the passing of country music legend Dolly Parton are now being called out for cutting public funding for her children’s book charity.

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JD Vance Admits Groceries Are Too Expensive in Fundraising Text

The Republican National Committee sent out a fundraising text this week in the voice of Vice President JD Vance. It tells the recipient that if she can’t afford to donate right now, that’s fine, because “groceries cost what they cost.”

This is an interesting line, given that this is the same administration that spent months insisting the economy is in tip-top shape, and given that Trump himself has called the affordability crisis a “scam” and a “hoax” cooked up by Democrats. And yet his vice president still admits that a need as basic as food is too expensive for regular people to donate money to a political campaign.

The text links to a longer letter, supposedly from Vance himself, that opens with an apology. Not for anything Vance has done but for what “this business” has done to the recipient. The letter goes on to ask for money anyway, while promising an itemized receipt showing exactly how the recipient’s donation will be spent.

And again, this text came out just days after Vance stood in his Ohio hometown and told a crowd that homeownership is finally becoming a reality again for young Americans, even though it isn’t.

So which is it? Is the economy working as intended, or are groceries so expensive that the vice president is telling people to skip donating because of the price of food?

The Lincoln Project pointed out that the affordability crisis must be real if Vance is now fundraising off of it. Progressive commentator Isaiah Walker was more direct, arguing there’s no way anyone signed off on this fundraising pitch thinking it was a good idea.

The polling is pretty clear: a significant majority of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy, and trust Democrats more on economic issues. This isn’t a problem with messaging anymore, but with credibility. Voters simply aren’t buying Republicans’ rhetoric any longer.

Sponsored Kalshi Question: When will traffic at the Strait of Hormuz return to normal?

Red States Beg Supreme Court to Let Pro-Trump Billionaire Buy CNN

Two Republican attorneys general, Brenna Bird of Iowa and Austin Knudsen of Montana, just filed a motion asking the Supreme Court to intervene and kill an antitrust lawsuit filed by twelve Democratic-led states. That lawsuit is aiming to block Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN and a host of other media properties.

Iowa and Montana aren’t actually part of the original case. They’re simply asking the Supreme Court to use its seldom-invoked power over disputes between states to essentially override California and the 11 other states suing to stop the deal from going through.

Legal experts view Iowa and Montana’s effort as a long shot. University of Michigan professor Erik Gordon characterized it as political grandstanding, and said the Supreme Court is about as likely to block this antitrust enforcement as it is to name Donald Trump the litigator of the year. Attorney and former U.S. Ambassador Norm Eisen, who’s been fighting the merger, said there’s no valid legal argument for the filing, and that the Supreme Court intervening would effectively turn the entire system of antitrust enforcement on its head.

The filing from Iowa and Montana argues that because states opposing the merger have frequently mentioned CNN potentially getting a new owner, that means the lawsuit is political in nature, and not antitrust-related.

But the lawsuit itself doesn’t have anything to do with news coverage. It’s about whether one billionaire family should be able to singlehandedly control a massive Hollywood studio and basic cable distribution all at once. A federal judge already found serious questions about the deal that prompted her to issue a temporary restraining order in July.

There’s no need to over-complicate what this is. A deal backed by a Trump-aligned media mogul is running into resistance from state regulators doing their jobs. And instead of letting the legal process play out, Republicans are trying to circumvent it entirely by calling the manager in the form of the pro-Trump Roberts Court.

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Resurfaced Video of Natalie Harp Obsessing Over Trump Raises New Questions

Jonathan V. Last of the Bulwark recently published a report about a resurfaced video of Natalie Harp, the 35 year-old White House aide known for her intense obsession with Donald Trump. The clip is from around 2017, years before Harp ever worked for the president, and it reveals how deep and unsettling her devotion to him really is.

In the 96-second video, which was filmed as a selfie, Harp is standing by a lake, saying that she was the victim of a 2015 medical error. She claims she was accidentally infused with sterile water and went into hemorrhagic shock, causing her to lose nearly all of her blood platelets due to a rare medical condition. She added that the ordeal left her with cancer, chronic pain and significant medical bills. She then said Trump was responsible for changing her fate, though she never really explained how.

Medical experts who’ve looked into Harp’s claims say her account doesn’t add up. Errors involving sterile-water infusions are extremely rare, and documented cases show patients typically survive them. That significantly undercuts both Harp’s story as well as the claims of the man who initially posted the video, who is a Trump surrogate with ties to Michael Cohen.

This isn’t the first time Harp’s medical story has come under the microscope. At the 2020 Republican National Convention, she argued that Trump’s “right to try” law saved her from cancer. But analysts at the time pointed out that the experimental treatment she received was already legal and approved by the FDA well before that law went into effect.

This new video resurfaced just days after the Daily Beast published private letters from 2023 in which Harp called Trump her “guardian and protector in this life.” Her estranged brother called Harp’s relationship with Trump “unhealthy.” Regardless of her medical history, Harp’s claims combined with her proximity to the president — not to mention her having the keys to his Truth Social account — should be a much more significant concern for anyone paying attention.

Republicans Grieving Dolly Parton Defunded Her Children’s Book Charity

Music legend Dolly Parton died this week at the age of 80, after a brief battle with cancer. The entire country has spent the last week mourning her and celebrating her contributions. Parton’s Imagination Library charity is credited with sending more than 332 million free books to thousands of kids across five countries. It’s one of the most beloved charities in the country. Parton said she built the charity to unite people around a common cause regardless of politics.

But while the nation grieves her, two Republican-led states have already moved to defund her charity.

Indiana’s Republican governor, Mike Braun, cut the program’s $3 million dollar state allowance in 2025, insisting private donors would make up the difference. Missouri also slashed its funding of the Imagination Library from $6 million dollars down to $2 million. That cut forced the state to freeze new enrollment in the program back in July. State officials say they’re not sure whether the program eve has a future in the Show Me State.

Ironically, Missouri was the first state in the country to fully fund the Imagination Library back in 2024. Parton herself said at the time it made her happy knowing she was giving kids something that made them feel special. But less than two years later, that funding has evaporated, while the same Republicans responsible for defunding Parton’s charity now post tributes to her legacy.

That’s a pretty cynical pattern: cut the funding first, post the tribute, and hope no one connects the dots.

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Read Brian Karem’s latest report below on what Republicans are really saying about Trump’s trade war:

And watch Raw America’s interview with Florida U.S. Senate candidate Angie Nixon:

• How Nixon’s people-powered campaign overcame an 18-to-1 fundraising disadvantage to win the Democratic primary

• Why she believes an unapologetically progressive message can still win in Republican-dominated Florida

• Her case for Medicare for All and the fallout from expired Affordable Care Act subsidies

• Her criticism of how Florida bailed out big insurance companies instead of homeowners after major hurricanes

• The banned-books bookstore she opened in Jacksonville and the various services it provides for the community

• Her viral bullhorn protest against Florida’s Republican gerrymander

• Her closing pitch to volunteers and donors ahead of the general election

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How Nixon Won Despite Being Outspent 18-to-1 Fundraising Gap

Gibson opened by noting that Nixon had been massively outspent in her primary against establishment favorite Alexander Vindman — who, to his credit — immediately endorsed Nixon and even asked his fundraisers to donate to her campaign.

Nixon confirmed that she was outspent by a margin of $18 million to $1 million. She still won by an 11-point margin, and credited her victory to her campaign’s strategy of grassroots organizing. She added that as a union organizer and member of a union family, organizing was practically in her blood.

“It’s just good old-fashioned grassroots organizing,” Nixon said.

Why Nixon Thinks a Progressive Can Win in a Republican State

Gibson pressed Nixon on running as an unapologetic progressive in Florida, where Democrats haven’t held a statewide elected office since Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) left the Senate in 2019. Nixon responded that she isn’t framing the race in terms of left vs. right, but in terms of “top versus bottom.”

She also accused Sen. Moody of protecting her corporate donors in the health insurance industry at the expense of everyday Floridians, blaming the expired Affordable Care Act subsidies on Moody’s party and its subservience to corporate interests. She also lamented that millions of dollars in funds meant for needy children were diverted to defeat abortion rights and marijuana legalization ballot measures

“This is about right and wrong. It’s about ending corruption in Washington, D.C.,” Nixon said of her campaign.

Nixon Says Her Embrace of Medicare for All Isn’t a Liability, But a Strength

Gibson cited an Associated Press report finding that Floridians have been hit with particularly high healthcare costs following the expiration of ACA tax credits last year, and asked Nixon whether building her campaign around support Medicare for All was a political risk in a Republican-dominated state. Nixon insisted her support for universal healthcare was actually a secret weapon, citing conversations with tens of thousands of voters across all 67 counties.

“Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy. People are literally going bankrupt because they’re trying to stay alive,” Nixon said.

Drawing on her own experience as a single mother of more than a decade who had to sometimes choose between buying asthma medication and other necessities, Nixon cited a Yale study finding that a universal healthcare program like Medicare for All could save the federal government more than $1 trillion annually while saving roughly 114,000 lives each year.

“The only people that are upset about the idea of us having universal health care are insurance companies, and I don’t care about insurance companies,” she said.

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Holding Insurance Companies Accountable After Hurricanes

Gibson, who in 2022 worked as a flood insurance adjuster in Florida after Hurricane Ian, pointed to the recent pattern of major insurance companies denying wind claims and asked Nixon about Florida’s decision to bail out insurance companies rather than homeowners following the historic storm. Nixon didn’t dispute that assessment.

“The biggest recipients of welfare in this country are corporations and billionaires,” Nixon said.

She proposed a fully state-funded public insurance option that could lower premiums by directing savings toward a catastrophe fund instead of shareholders, using Florida’s insurer-of-last-resort, Citizens, as a starting point. She also attributed to Ashley Moody’s inaction on the issue to her deference to her donors in the insuranceindustry

“[Moody] didn’t check them for slow-walking people’s claims,” Nixon said, describing some Florida homeowners forced to sell to private equity firms after giving up on getting their insurance claims paid.

How Nixon’s Banned-Books Bookstore Is Fighting DeSantis’ ‘War on Woke’

Gibson then pivoted to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) “war on woke,” and asked Nixon about her Café Resistance Bookstore and Coffee Shop. The Florida lawmaker opened the Jacksonville business in direct response to Florida’s book bans, which proliferated after DeSantis signed a series of laws aimed at silencing Florida’s Black and LGBTQ+ communities.

Nixon described the bookstore as a “third space” that not only stocks banned books, but offers free tutoring, mentorship services for Black boys led by Black men and free contraceptive care paired with conversations connecting visitors to low-cost healthcare resources. Nixon also said the store functions as a popular meeting spot for community organizing groups.

“ICE is not welcome,” she said of Café Resistance.

Nixon’s Bullhorn Protest on the Floor of the House of Representatives Against Florida’s Gerrymander

Gibson brought up one of Nixon’s most viral moments from earlier this year, when she used a bullhorn on the floor of the Florida House of Representatives in Tallahassee to protest Florida Republicans’ new congressional redistricting map. Republicans proposed the map to give themselves an additional advantage in the U.S. House of Representatives following the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling that significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act.

Nixon reminded viewers it wasn’t her first such protest, pointing out that she had also staged a sit-in against a 2022 map that eliminated two Black-majority congressional districts.

“I knew they were going to try to talk over me like they did last time,” she said of her decision to bring the bullhorn.

The Florida Democrat pointed out that the new maps violated a 2010 citizen-led ballot measure explicitly banning partisan gerrymandering. She also noted that Gov. DeSantis even unveiled the maps on Fox News in color-coded form before he even notified legislators. The protest led to Nixon’s formal reprimand — the first in the Florida legislature in 20 years — and a later arrest after leading a sit-in at the governor’s office.

“What good is decorum and professionalism when democracy is literally being attacked?” she said.

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How Nixon Is Counting on People Power to Flip a Red Senate Seat

Gibson closed by referencing Congressman Maxwell Frost’s (D-Fla.) comment that Florida isn’t a red state, but rather an “under-organized” one, and asked Nixon if she feels that her organizing prowess can lead to her victory in November. Nixon lauded her campaign’s army of volunteers and said that it was an essential tool to turn out votes.

“We have over 40,000, maybe 50,000 volunteers in the state of Florida, and people are ready,” Nixon said.

She then made a direct appeal for financial support to run television ads across the state, while also stressing that donations go toward grassroots organizing rather than being spent “frivolously” on consultants.

“I did not get this far to lose. I need your back,” she said, urging supporters to visit her campaign website at AngieNixon.com.

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Despite President Donald Trump’s promises that his renewed trade war with Canada and his effort to import foreign beef will help Americans, a high-ranking White House source is calling the plans “ridiculous” and antithetical to the president’s stated goals, Raw America can reveal.

That source — who spoke to Raw America on condition of anonymity — sharply criticized the president’s new 50 percent tax on Canadian imports, which has led to the Canadian government announcing its own “dollar-for-dollar” tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of American-made products.

“Making prices higher for average Americans while picking a fight with a neighbor who shares the longest unguarded national border in the world is just nuts,” the source said.

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In addition to the White House source, Republicans on Capitol Hill have spent the last few days unleashing on Trump’s decision to reignite a trade war with the United States’ northern neighbor, along with the president’s intent to import 300,000 metric tons of beef over the next three months. Earlier this week, one unnamed GOP staffer told Raw America that Trump effectively “screwed” Republicans in the midterms with his gambit to lower beef prices.

“How can you claim to put America first when you’re putting foreign ranchers first?” The staffer said.

A separate Republican staffer told Raw America that Trump’s decision to antagonize Canada with new tariffs was akin to “shooting yourself in the foot for no reason,” particularly since the midterm elections are now just over two months away.

“This trade war means higher prices across the board for our constituents,” the GOP staffer said. “If you’re going to do it, why do it just prior to an election unless you have a death wish?”

During an Air Force One press gaggle earlier this week, Trump defended the move by saying Argentina — a leading beef exporter — was “starving” and that he wanted to help Argentinian President Javier Milei. Senate Majority John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), whose constituency includes a significant number of cattle ranchers, told reporters that Trump seemed to be against “fair and free” trade.

“Americans want U.S. beef on the table. Not foreign imports,” Barrasso said. He added that ranchers aren’t asking for “special treatment” but rather “simply want a fair marketplace.”

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Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who is typically regarded as one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in the Senate, also called the president’s plan to import foreign beef “ill-advised” in a recent post to his X account.

“Beef prices are too high for a simple reason: Our cattle herd is too small. Imported beef below market prices will only put more pressure on our cattlemen,” Cotton wrote. “We need to support our cattlemen, grow the herd, and let the market work.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who is not running for reelection this year, told reporters Trump was making “a mistake" by doubling down on Argentinian beef and Canadian tariffs.

“It’s what happens when he has advisers trying to micromanage things,” he said.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who comes from a cattle-rich state, also didn’t hold back. He told reporters on Capitol Hill this week that the president’s importing of foreign beef and new tariffs are out of step with his stated goal of putting American interests first and revitalizing American manufacturing.

“What our market really needs is a stable, America-First national policy,” Rounds said.

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In an exclusive interview with Raw America, former Senator John Danforth (R-Mo.) agreed with those Republicans’ remarks but urged them to go further and exercise their constitutional powers to rein in the president’s trade war.

“With many Americans already concerned about the rising cost of living from the President’s earlier tariffs and the war in Iran, Trump’s new tariffs on Canada — our long-time ally and trading partner—are senseless,” Danforth said. “They risk needless retaliation and higher costs for consumers. Congress should perform its Article I duties and act to limit the harm these tariffs will cause.”

Dr. Joel Rubin, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State during the Obama administration, told Raw America the president’s trade policy “makes no sense.” He added that it was “humbling” to see how much the United States’ reputation has suffered under Trump’s second term, and suggested the ultimate fallout could be the U.S. being relegated from global hegemony to second-tier status.

“We are weakening ourselves before our allies,” Rubin said. “We are creating a world where the U.S. is no longer a superpower and we’re opening the door for those like Russia and China to have a larger influence worldwide.”

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When considering the international implications of the president’s decisions, Rubin said America’s adversaries will aim to capitalize on every misstep by Trump, while our staunchest allies will almost certainly reconsider their relationship with the United States in the years to come.

“We risk going at everything alone,” Rubin explained. “The war in Iran is just one example. None of our allies are with us. We are now being held at arm’s length. Many of our allies were willing to look the other way after the first Trump administration. But now? They figure this is who we are and that’s going to hurt us for many years.”

The facts back up Rubin’s argument. Earlier this year, Denmark — one of America’s oldest allies — decided to purchase the Franco-Italian SAMP/T air defense system instead of U.S. Patriot batteries after spending the better part of a year trying to convince Trump to not invade Greenland. And in a blow to Amazon founder and top stakeholder Jeff Bezos, the central bank of the Netherlands recently ditched Amazon Web Services in favor of the German Lidl as their cloud operator.

“More than any other time in recent history, our allies are showing how little faith they have in us,” Rubin said. “The Canadian trade war is just the latest debacle. All of these moves were unprompted. All of them undermine our national interests.”

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The White House is reportedly panicking as Donald Trump’s approval ratings sink over his mishandling of the affordability crisis. A crowd of Republican voters in deep-red South Carolina just booed Trump when a GOP congressman mentioned his name during his concession speech. In Texas, an ICE agent charged with shooting a man in Minnesota and then lying about it could walk free from jail as soon as tomorrow. And a Republican-appointed federal judge just struck down a Texas law that banned drag shows, while saying anyone who doesn’t like drag shows can simply avoid them.

But first, we need your help: a handful of oligarchs tied to the regime in power are snatching up media outlets one by one and turning them into pro-regime propaganda. It isn’t hyperbole to say Trump wants a compliant media like in Putin’s Russia or Orban’s Hungary. Raw America was created to stop that from happening. But because we have no billionaire backer, we rely entirely on support from readers like you who believe independent journalism is important enough to fund. If you’ve been reading our newsletters and thinking “one day I’ll support this,” that day is here. Upgrade your free subscription to a paying one for 22 cents a day. That’s less than a cup of coffee. And it’s all we need to stay independent and working exclusively for you. Isn’t that worth the cost?

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White House Quietly Panicking About Looming Midterm Blowout

Both Donald Trump and his inner circle are becoming increasingly anxious. Not just about the war with Iran or courts that keep ruling against the administration, but about the cost of living.

The White House’s internal polling shows that most Americans say high grocery and gas prices are their single biggest worry heading into the midterms, which are now just over two months away. And with the clock ticking, Trump’s team is scrambling for a way out of the hole.

That’s a difficult task, as the president himself has spent months calling the affordability crisis a “hoax” cooked up Democrats. But Republicans aren’t exactly lining up to make that argument to voters who are seeing firsthand how much a pound of ground beef costs.

One White House source told Politico they’re banking on making it look like the administration is sympathetic and understands the problem. So last week, Trump announced he was waiving tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef for the next 90 days. He made sure to blame former President Joe Biden for high beef prices and promised he would bring prices down while helping ranchers at home.

American cattlemen weren’t exactly thrilled. Bill Bullard, who runs the beef trade group R-CALF USA, said ranchers had no warning at all about the importation announcement. He said he thought Trump had already abandoned this same plan once before, only to turn around and resurrect it.

According to Politico, the beef import plan likely won’t have any meaningful impact on beef prices before November. But it paints a revealing picture of just how desperate the Trump White House has become. The administration is apparently willing to anger cattle ranchers, who make up a major part of the MAGA coalition, if it means the administration can get a small win on affordability.

The polling illustrates just how dire the situation is for the administration. A new Reuters/Ipsos survey found voters typically trust Democrats over Republicans on cost-of-living issues by a solid eight points. Trump’s public approval rating is also flatlining at just 33 percent, making it the lowest number of his entire second term.

There was a time when a government facing runaway food prices did something other than stage a photo op. In 1942, Congress passed the Emergency Price Control Act and stood up the Office of Price Administration, an agency with real authority to cap what sellers could charge, and the difference between that and a Truth Social post isn’t a matter of tone, it’s whether anybody in power still believes government is supposed to work.

Red State Crowd Boos Trump After Republican Mentions His Name

Trump’s flagging popularity is even visible in deep-red states like South Carolina.

Republican Congressman Ralph Norman lost last night’s Senate primary runoff to incumbent Senator Darline Graham, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham who Trump appointed to fill his seat. The president gave Graham’s campaign his full endorsement, held rallies for her and even proclaimed that voting for Lindsey Graham’s sister would be one of the best political decisions any South Carolinian would ever make. A Trump-aligned super PAC even poured more than $800,000 into her primary race.

But when Norman mentioned Trump’s name during his concession speech, the crowd erupted into boos. He even said that Democrats got what they wanted y having Darline Graham be the GOP nominee.

The congressman tried to stay diplomatic toward Trump, saying he agreed with the president’s policies and that he had the right to get involved, even if he didn’t personally understand why the president decided to give an endorsement in the first place. But the more he kept trying to smooth things over, the louder the crowd booed.

Eventually, Norman tried to put the booing to rest by promising something good will come out of this, though with the caveat that he didn’t know what that something was.

This is Norman’s second statewide loss this year. He also placed third in South Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial primary back in June.

Graham herself is a political neophyte. After her brother died in July, she was vaulted into the upper chamber of Congress. And when it comes to foreign policy — which was her brother’s specialty — she revealed a significant weakness. In one GOP primary debate, she admitted to the moderators and the audience that national security isn’t her strong suit.

A crowd of Republican voters booing the mention of Trump’s name in a deep-red Southern state is incredibly significant, and shows just how much his grip on his own base has slipped.

Movements built on fear don’t collapse all at once, they collapse the moment the fear stops working. In June of 1954, Joseph Welch asked Joe McCarthy on live television whether he had any sense of decency left, the room turned against McCarthy in a way it never had before, and within six months the Senate had censured him and his four-year reign over American politics was finished.

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ICE Agent Charged in Minnesota Shooting Could Walk Free as Soon as Tomorrow

In Minnesota, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent named Christian Castro is facing charges of assault and false reporting after local prosecutors say he fired his gun through the front door of a Minneapolis home in January.

Castro’s bullet hit 24-year-old Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg and eventually struck the wall of a child’s bedroom. Hennepin County prosecutors say Castro then falsely claimed Sosa-Celis and another man attacked an ICE officer with a broom handle and a snow shovel. ICE was forced to walk back that claim after body camera footage didn’t back up Castro’s story.

Castro has been sitting in a jail in Brownsville, Texas, ever since he was apprehended, while Minnesota is trying to extradite him to face justice. Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who is in a right reelection race against Democrat Gina Hinojosa, has yet to agree to extradition. Texas law stipulates Castro has to be released after 90 days if the state doesn’t act. That deadline is tomorrow.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, both of whom are Democrats, filed a lawsuit aiming to force Texas to send Castro back to the Gopher State and to stop the county sheriff from letting him walk free.

During a recent hearing, Minnesota attorneys argued that once Castro is released, it will be much harder to get him to face charges. And if he disappears in a state as large as Texas, that could become nearly impossible.

U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez, who Donald Trump appointed in 2018, said he was leaning toward letting Castro be released. However, he promised a formal ruling on the request for a restraining order.

Abbott’s office defended the governor’s failure to agree to extradition by saying they aren’t sure whether Castro counts as a legal fugitive. He also tried to justify it by pointing to fraud investigations into Minnesota’s social welfare programs — which Trump has also pointed to in order to justify his vastly unpopular immigration crackdown.

Keep in mind, this is all stemming from ICE shooting a man through his own front The agent who pulled the trigger is accused of lying about it after the fact. And the governor of Texas may simply let him walk rather than allow the justice system to work as intended.

The Framers saw this coming, which is why Article Four, Section Two of the Constitution says that a person charged with a crime who’s found in another state shall be delivered up on the demand of the state he fled. They chose the word “shall” because they understood that if governors got to pick and choose which fugitives they’d hand over, we wouldn’t have a union at all, we’d have fifty separate sanctuaries sorted by whoever the local governor happens to like.

‘Just Don’t Go’: Judge Strikes Down Texas’ Drag Show Ban

Here’s some better news out of Texas: a federal judge just struck down the state’s 2023 law restricting drag shows, on the grounds that it violates the First Amendment.

U.S. District Judge David Hittner, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, ruled that the drag ban improperly restricted free speech. That ruling blocks Attorney General Ken Paxton — Texas’ Republican nominee for U.S. Senate — from enforcing it.

The law imposed fines of as much as $10,000 for small business owners hosting drag events and allowed for criminal charges against performers, who could face up to a year in jail for walking onstage.

Hittner had already ruled this law unconstitutional after the law’s initial passage in 2023. An appeals court sent the case back to him last November with instructions on how to reevaluate it, and allowed the law to go back into effect while the process played out.

In his new ruling, Hittner pointed to the law’s vague language banning anything that appeals to what it calls “prurient interest,” and noted that under that standard, someone could be prosecuted for impersonating country music legend Dolly Parton. He mentioned her by name, on the same day her family announced her death.

He wrote that plenty of popular, entirely legal performances contain elements that could get swept up under the definition of the 2023 law, to illustrate just how broad and vague the statute really was.

One of the plaintiffs, a performer who goes by Brigitte Bandit and is known for her Dolly Parton tribute act, celebrated the ruling. Parton had actually given her a rhinestone guitar back in 2023. Bandit says she’ll honor Parton by performing as her at an Austin bar this weekend.

Hittner made sure to write in his ruling that anyone offended by drag performances has a simple way out: “Just don’t go.”

Hittner didn’t invent that logic, he inherited it. Back in 1971, in Cohen versus California, Justice John Marshall Harlan told the state it couldn’t prosecute a man for a jacket with a four-letter word on it simply because some people would rather not see it, because anyone who’s offended is free to look away, and one person’s vulgarity is another person’s lyric.

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We’re proud to work hard for our readers and strive every day to bring you the journalism that the billionaires don’t want you to see. That doesn’t only include daily newsletters like these, but an original report from Raw America White House correspondent Brian Karem coming later today, and our live interviews with the people dominating the headlines. Today, we’ll be interviewing Angie Nixon, who just won Florida’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary, at 1:30 PM ET. Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.

I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.

Here are some stories you may have missed:

• Iran Caused Billions in Damage to US Intelligence. Four sources with direct knowledge recently confided to NBC News that President Donald Trump’s war with Iran has resulted in significant damage to U.S. intelligence stations throughout the Middle East. Iranian drone attacks and missile strikes have caused billions of dollars in damage to key facilities like a CIA outpost in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, as well as roughly 20 different sites in eight different countries.

• Republicans Face New Obstacle in Keeping Alaska Senate Seat Red. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Republican Dan J. Sullivan will officially appear on the November general election ballot alongside incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan (R-Alaska), likely splitting the vote as Democrat Mary Peltola seeks to become Alaska’s first Democratic U.S. senator in more than a decade. Alaska allows for four finalists to advance to the general election ballot after the conclusion of each party’s respective primary.

• Maine Democrat Gets Help from Trump Administration in Effort to Unseat Susan Collins. Troy Jackson, who is Maine’s Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, is seizing on recent actions from the Trump administration to make his case to replace Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in November. During a recent campaign rally for Republican congressional candidate (and former GOP governor) Paul LePage, Vice President JD Vance downplayed the fatal ICE shooting of 25 year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was killed in Biddeford this summer in front of his three-year-old daughter. Jackson called Vance a “dirtbag” for saying Mainers outraged over Guerrero’s death should “have a little bit of perspective.” The Democrat also said Guerrero was a “young man” who “had a life” and “had a family.” Jackson is also heaping criticism on Trump for imposing new tariffs on Canada, which borders Maine. Even Collins called the tariffs a “mistake” after Canada responded in kind with new import fees of their own.

A retired conservative judge is warning that Trump may try to blow up the next session of Congress if Republicans lose the midterms. Protesters in kayaks recently confronted Chief Justice John Roberts at his private island in Maine. An Air Force major who called for Donald Trump’s impeachment now faces ten counts under military law, including for “contemptuous words” against the president. And a federal judge in Texas just ordered the release of a construction worker who was there when ICE agents fatally shot his coworker.

Before we get to the news, we need to say something. You’re reading this right now because you understand how important independent journalism is in this current moment. Because you know you can’t rely on the billionaire-controlled legacy media to give you the full truth. We do that every day here at Raw America because we don’t answer to a wealthy owner who wants to control the narrative. We answer to you. Whether this work keeps going is entirely up to you. If you’ve been reading our newsletters and thinking “I may support this one day,” today is that day. Upgrade to a paying subscription right now for less than a quarter a day. That’s all it takes. Your subscription makes all of this possible.

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Retired Republican Judge Reveals Trump’s Playbook if GOP Loses Midterms

Retired 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig is about as conservative as judges come. He was appointed by George H.W. Bush, commands respect from both sides of the aisle and isn’t exactly known for hyperbole. So when he goes on a podcast and talks about us waging a “final battle for America’s democracy” in the upcoming midterms, that’s a significant development.

Luttig warned on a recent episode of the “Court of History” podcast that should Democrats take back the House and Senate in the midterms, Trump won’t accept the loss lying down, but will instead look for a procedural trick to exploit. And the new January 6, 2021 could be January 3rd, 2027, when the 120th Congress is sworn in.

We all remember when Speaker Mike Johnson already delayed seating a duly elected Democrat for fifty days back in 2025, when Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva of Arizona waited for nearly two months to be seated after winning a special election. Luttig thinks Johnson could try to help Trump by replacing the House Clerk with a MAGA loyalist who simply refuses to notify certain newly elected members that they’ve been officially seated.

When combining a gambit like that with states whose top election officials are by conspiracy theorists who may refuse to certify results they don’t like, and we could feasibly have a scenario in which a Congress that voters duly elected never actually gets to serve.

Trump suggested something like this back in February, telling a MAGA podcaster that Republicans need to control the midterms to win elections. Luttig said that comment from the president was “breathtaking.” Keep in mind this isn’t a leftist commentator saying all of this, but a lifelong conservative judge.

Protesters Troll John Roberts Outside His Vacation Home

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has a private island off the coast of Maine where he spends his time in between terms. It’s probably about as far from the public eye as a sitting Supreme Court justice can get. But more than 40 committed protesters were determined to make sure Roberts didn’t get to hide from Americans forever.

Nearly two dozen protesters in kayaks, canoes and rowboats recently paddled out to Roberts’ and held a floating demonstration for an hour in the water in front of his house. Another 20 protested on land. Signs accused the Roberts Court of being a rubber stamp for fascism and accused him of sidelining the Constitution.

A local Maine organization called The Audacity organized the demonstration. They told reporters the point of the protest was to remind Americans how Roberts has abused his position to enable Trump at every turn. They pointed to the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson ruling that overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the 2024 Trump v. United States ruling that gave sitting presidents broad criminal immunity for anything deemed an official act, and the 2026 Louisiana v. Callais ruling that significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act.

Protesters also highlighted the Roberts Court’s pattern of relying on the so-called “shadow docket” to issue quick rulings issued with little to no explanation that have let Trump push through his policies despite lower courts ruling against him.

Roberts and his wife have around $25 million to their names. And after he retires, the chief justice will continue collecting his full Supreme Court salary for life. The fact that protesters found his private island home anyway and made an effort to call him out shows the American people are running out of patience.

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Air Force Major Who Called for Trump’s Impeachment Hit with 10 Counts Under Military Law

Major Jason Watson has spent 17 years in the Air Force. He has two kids and is just three years shy of retiring. He’s now become the face of a growing military justice battle after publicly and repeatedly calling for Trump to be impeached.

Watson is now facing ten charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) for his comments. The charges include dereliction of duty and conduct unbecoming an officer. He’s even facing three counts under Article 88, which is the provision that punishes officers for contemptuous words toward the president of the United States. His attorney says he’s the first major in military history to be charged under that specific article of the UCMJ.

Back in July, Capitol Police arrested Watson for standing on the Capitol steps in uniform while holding a sign that read “Impeach. Convict. Remove.” He was arrested again this month after a CNN interview in which he continued to criticize Trump. Watson is now sitting in pretrial confinement while the Air Force decides whether to officially court-martial him.

His attorney is calling it a matter of conscience, saying Watson wanted to act so other enlisted men and women in uniform wouldn’t have to. The Air Force notes that there are specific speech rules officers know about when they signs up. But it’s hard to ignore the timing, specificity and rarity of Watson’s charges. It’s hard not to notice that a contemptuous words charge has been brought against an officer upholding his duty to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Judge Orders Release of Man Who Witnessed Fatal ICE Shooting in Houston

Last month, ICE agents in Houston, Texas shot and killed 52 year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo while he was driving three of his coworkers to a construction job site. ICE first claimed Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle” and that agents had no choice but fire their weapons in self-defense. The survivors said ICE was the aggressor, striking Salgado Araujo’s van first, before an agent opened fire from the side.

Immigration officials ended up detaining the three surviving passengers and putting them in deportation proceedings. One survivor, Daniel Tirado Pantoja, just got a court order for his release.

A federal judge in Texas granted Tirado Pantoja’s habeas petition, saying he has no criminal record, isn’t a flight risk and poses no danger to anyone. The judge wrote that continuing to hold him in federal custody was a violation of his due process rights. Immigration officials now have 48 hours to set him free, and they can’t detain him again unless they can prove to a judge that he’s a danger to himself or others or poses a flight risk.

A separate federal judge previously ordered the release of passenger José Trinidad Rojas Pliego in July. Salgado Araujo’s brother Víctor is still being held in a detention center in Conroe, which is north of Houston. The Department of Homeland Security has yet to named the officer who killed Salgado Araujo, and maintains the shooting is still under investigation.

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Your subscription funds our team of video hosts like Thom Hartmann and British Chris, our editors, our White House and Capitol Hill reporters and our live interviews with the people shaping the news. Don’t miss our live interview tomorrow at 1:30 PM ET with Angie Nixon, the unapologetic progressive running for U.S. Senate in Florida. Catch it on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.

Thanks for reading. I’m British Chris, with Raw America. We’ll see you tomorrow.

Here are some stories you may have missed:

• GOP Strategist Calls Republican Midterm Convention a ‘S—show.’ Republicans are holding a first-ever midterm convention next month in Dallas, Texas, and the event is already being heavily criticized even by Republicans themselves over its poor planning and high cost. One unnamed Republican strategist told Puck News the convention had become a “s—show,” citing the lack of any actual business like nominations, and the fact that sitting House members are being asked to pony up $25,000 to attend. Higher-priced packages are selling for as much as $100,000. The strategist further complained that “nobody understands” why the convention is happening other than that President Donald Trump wants to remind everyone that he’s still there — with the strategist quipped that Republicans “don’t want to be reminded of that.”

• Congresswoman Says Trump Should Rename Lake Ontario to ‘Lake Natalie.’ As Trump escalates his trade war with Canada yet again, he’s now reportedly considering changing the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” in protest of the Canadian government. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) joked on Tuesday that Trump should instead just change the name of the body of water to “Lake Natalie,” after his fiercely devoted 35 year-old staffer Natalie Harp. Dingell suggested that Trump might actually start caring about protecting the Great Lakes if one of them was named for Harp.

• Trump Administration Suggests it May Demolish Kennedy Center if Court Won’t Allow Renovations. Attorneys with the Trump administration’s Department of Justice suggested on Tuesday that if the court doesn’t allow the president’s proposed renovations to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to go through, the president may demolish the facility entirely. DOJ lawyers called the current facility “structurally unsound, fundamentally unsafe, and embarrassing to the Nation’s Capital.” They added that the Kennedy Center’s board — which consists entirely of handpicked Trump loyalists — view Trump’s renovations as “the sole hope for the Center’s financial survival, and structural renewal.”

• Calls Mount for RFK Jr.’s Resignation as More Americans Die from Measles. With measles cases mounting across the U.S., both scientific experts and elected officials are now calling for Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign from his role. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Del.) attributed the spread of measles to the HHS secretary’s documented vaccine skepticism, and said Kennedy must “resign or be fired.” Shaughnessy Naughton, who leads the pro-science advocacy group 3.14 Action, said the recent measles deaths of two Americans are further proof of Kennedy’s “dangerous vaccine skepticism.”

• Billionaires Pour Money Into California Elections to Stop Proposed Billionaire Tax. A cadre of organizations funded by billionaires like Google co-founder Sergey Brin and PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel are now announcing a new ad blitz aimed at stopping the proposed wealth on the California ballot this November. The ballot initiative, which has been dubbed Proposition 40, would impose a one-time tax of 5 percent on all assets over $1 billion, with the revenue allocated for education and healthcare programs. The Thiel-backed group “Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes” is falsely characterizing Proposition 40 as an “everyone tax” and a “Trojan horse.”