Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, watching the smoke clear from the 4th of July. This week, progressives rallied, and ICE’s detention machine rattled on.

Thank you for being a paying subscriber. You’re the reason we can cover all of this without asking permission from anyone.

A Barista Just Beat a 30-Year Incumbent

Let’s start with Denver. On Tuesday, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, unseated Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat who’s held that seat for nearly thirty years. Kiros was fired from her law firm in 2023 over a Substack letter defending criticism of Israel, and was most recently working as a barista. This is her first run for elective office; she took down an incumbent backed by a wall of super PAC money.

“This is a movement,” she told a crowd that had been singing and dancing before she took the stage. “We are just getting started.”

The numbers back her up. DeGette is the seventh House member to lose renomination this cycle — the third in seven days. Kiros’s win came a week after three insurgent candidates toppled incumbents in New York City races, all of them endorsed by Zohran Mamdani.

Justice Democrats knocked on tens of thousands of doors and made more than 200,000 calls in a single week to get her across the line. Bernie Sanders endorsed her. And in a solidly blue district, she’s favored to win in November.

DeGette argued that this moment requires experience, that you need a veteran to fight Trump. Voters decided they wanted someone unbought and unafraid instead. That’s not a rejection of fighting. It’s a demand for a different kind of fighter: one who owes nothing to the people funding the machine. That’s my idea behind Raw America, too.

Trump’s Self-Centered 250th

America’s 250th was supposed to belong to the country. Instead it belonged to Donald Trump. The “Salute to America” was built around him. It featured a slate of military flyovers, nearly every branch of the armed forces enlisted into a made-for-TV air show, and a record-breaking fireworks display of nearly 850,000 shells launched from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. (That’s the same pool he ordered repainted “American flag blue” in a renovation that ran past fourteen million dollars.)

Then the weather blew his party apart. He’d teased a marathon speech in triple-digit heat, telling a rally crowd he’d give “a really long speech just to show that I can do anything.” Washington hit 102 degrees, its hottest Fourth on record. Storms forced the National Mall to evacuate. The event started nearly four hours late, most of the musical acts got cut, and the remaining flyovers were canceled outright.

This is what the semiquincentennial became: a vanity project the sky itself wouldn’t cooperate with. The country’s founding was a rebellion against exactly this kind of rule. We didn’t fight a revolution to trade a king for a president who wants the fireworks pointed at himself.

ICE’s New ‘Normal’: 2,000 Arrests a Day

While the flags waved, the machine kept running. ICE arrested more than ten thousand people between Friday and Tuesday — over two thousand a day — and a source told NBC News this pace is the “new normal” the agency intends to hold. It’s quieter now, less of the masked-agent swagger we saw flooding Democratic cities in the spring, but bigger.

The tactics haven’t softened, just the optics. In New York, ICE agents defied two separate federal court orders barring courthouse arrests, detaining three men (from Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala) who showed up for their hearings exactly as the system demanded.

“ICE continues to flagrantly violate the law,” Rep. Dan Goldman said. The Legal Defense Fund released a tracker documenting roughly 400,000 arrests in the administration’s first fourteen months. Black and Latinx neighborhoods bore the brunt. There have also been at least twenty shootings, including the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

Paramount CNN Takeover Rolls Closer

The story we’ve been telling you for months is reaching its climax. Paramount’s $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent, is closing in on the finish line, and the network’s staff is bracing for a Bari Weiss era. Paramount has said the deal could close as soon as July 15th.

We’ve seen this movie at CBS: Weiss installed with no broadcast experience, a “60 Minutes” purge, Scott Pelley going public to say the newsroom “is on fire.”

Now the same anxiety has migrated to CNN. Anderson Cooper has reportedly told colleagues he won’t work under Weiss. Paula Reid is already leaving. Kara Swisher says she’s out when the deal closes. CNN chief Mark Thompson has told Paramount he won’t share oversight of the network. David Ellison keeps insisting “editorial independence will absolutely be maintained,” the exact phrase every buyer uses right before it isn’t.

The UK government has signaled it may intervene even after the Justice Department’s antitrust division cleared the deal. But make no mistake: the man who reshaped CBS to Trump’s liking is about to control CNN. This is media capture happening right in front of us, with the executives narrating reassurances the whole way down.

Join Our Community Today

The founders didn’t pledge their lives to a flag. They pledged them to an idea: that power answers to the people, not the other way around. Two hundred and fifty years later, that idea is under strain. But we’re stepping up to the plate.

This week, you helped us put more muscle behind that fight. Joining us in D.C. is veteran White House reporter Brian Karem, who’s spent years refusing to let this administration off the hook. He’s now working for us at Raw America.

Happy birthday to a country still worth fighting for. Thanks for being with us.

— John Byrne
Founder, Raw America and Raw Story

Good morning, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, watching Trump shrink in real time.

I want to thank you for being a paying subscriber. You’re the reason this newsletter exists. We have no billionaire, no board, no ad sales team telling us what to do. Just you.

Truly, I’m grateful for your being here. You’re the reason this work continues.

Narcissus and the Reflecting Pool

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turned green this week, as it’s done many years in a row. Donald Trump declared it sabotage. He sent the National Guard out to patrol, and arrested a 67-year-old former Olympian who stopped by on a bike ride.

The man whose image is predicated on being a strongman is now left guarding a puddle. In the Greek myth, Narcissus drowned staring at his own reflection. Think upon that.

It’s hard to come up with a better storyline for a president whose power is on the wane. This is one of those stories people couldn’t stop talking about. I saw memes all over Facebook this week, celebrating the triumph of algae over Trump. If he can’t beat algae, he certainly can’t beat Iran.

Mamdani’s Movement Just Went National

Now for the real story. On Tuesday, the left didn’t just win in New York: it sent a message to every establishment Democrat in the country.

Three candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept their congressional primaries. The biggest shock: Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist and organizer, took down five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Espaillat was backed by Hakeem Jeffries himself and funded by AIPAC.

She’s now projected to become the first Dominican American woman in Congress. As many as 15 DSA-backed candidates won down the ballot.

These aren’t moderates. Their platform is housing as a right, an end to the deportation machine, and what Avila Chevalier calls a foreign policy of “babies, not bombs.” They ran on affordability, on protecting people ICE is disappearing, on refusing to fund endless war. And they won in a city where the establishment threw everything at them.

Mamdani put it plainly: “We are showing there is a new path for politics in our city and in our country.” Jeffries, naturally, shrugged it off: “a handful of primaries” won’t reshape the caucus, he said.

But when five-term chairs are losing to 32-year-old organizers, that’s not a handful. That’s a tide.

This is what an opposition with a spine looks like. And it’s spreading.

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The GOP is Breaking From Trump in Congress

Trump’s strongman act is failing, and Republicans can smell it.

On Tuesday, the Senate did something it had failed to do nine times before: it passed a war powers resolution telling Trump to end his war in Iran or get congressional approval. The vote was 50-48. Four Republicans crossed the line: Cassidy, Collins, Murkowski, and Paul. For the first time in history, both chambers of Congress voted to pull a president out of a war under the War Powers Act.

And it isn’t just the moderates. The same week, the House defied Trump again, passing a bill to arm Ukraine and hammer Russia with new sanctions, including 500% tariffs on Russian imports. They forced it to the floor with a discharge petition, gathering 218 signatures to go around their leadership.

The bill is headed for a near-certain Trump veto, but they passed it anyway. That’s a coalition voting its conscience knowing the president will spike it.

The loudest objections to Trump’s Iran deal aren’t coming from the doves. They’re coming from his hawks. Roger Wicker, who chairs Armed Services, said the $300 billion Iran reconstruction fund “would make Iran’s payoff under President Obama’s 2015 deal look like a pittance.”

Tom Cotton, the Intelligence chair, says the terms are “stepping in the wrong direction.” When the most hawkish men in the Senate call your signature foreign-policy achievement a giveaway to Tehran, the problem isn’t a few squishy holdouts. It’s the base.

Then there are those with nothing left to lose. John Cornyn, who was trounced by a Trump-backed challenger last month, walked out of a closed-door lunch and told reporters the president “spent the entire hour talking about things which were not exactly unifying.” He’s now hedging on backing Todd Blanche for attorney general. His line should be carved over the door of every newsroom in America: “The attorney general is not the president’s private lawyer.”

Thom Tillis, retiring after crossing Trump on his big spending bill, put it plainly — as the election nears, “people are going to vote the way they think their constituents want them to.” That’s the midterm math, said by a Republican.

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The Midterms Are Coming For Him

Notice what’s missing lately. Where are the grand, democracy-ending gestures? The shock-and-awe power grabs?

They’ve slowed. Because November is coming, and Trump knows it. The same Republicans crossing him on war powers are eyeing their own seats. They’re confronting him now precisely because they have to face voters in five months.

That’s not the behavior of a movement that thinks it’s winning. That’s a machine bracing for impact.

We don’t get to coast on that. The Court gutted immigration protections again this week, stripping temporary protected status from 350,000 Haitians and blessing the turning-away of asylum seekers at the border. The cruelty hasn’t stopped.

But the invincibility is gone, and the opposition has found its voice in New York and in the Senate.

Why I Do This Each Week

Raw America exists to track the corruption of power. We’re not a corporate stenographer that gives you a sanitized version of the news.

Here’s what your subscription builds: reporters on Capitol Hill tracking every Republican who breaks ranks and every one who crawls back. Live interviews with the officials Trump would rather keep quiet. And a newsroom that calls a defeat a defeat, even when the man who started the war is still calling it a win.

Algae beat Trump this week. So did a 32-year-old organizer in Harlem. The lesson is the same one we’ve been telling you all along: the strongman only looks invincible until someone refuses to look away. Thanks for being that someone.

— John Byrne / Founder, Raw America & Raw Story

P.S. If you enjoy this newsletter, share it with your friends and family, or anyone who needs to know. We’re building something big together, and more people need to know about it.

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