Hi, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, watching the country head out to Memorial Day grills, while working hard for you.

First, thank you for being a paying subscriber. This week, you funded my exclusive interview with Sen. Mark Kelly, an update on the GOP majority’s meltdown on Capitol Hill, and the reporting that goes into every newsletter and video we put out. None of that exists without you. I mean that.

Now, let’s get into it.

The Law Held: Trump’s Landmark Deportation Case Called to Heel

On Friday, a federal judge dismissed every charge against Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

You might not remember his name, but Abrego Garcia is the Maryland man Trump’s administration deported to a Salvadoran terrorism prison last year in open violation of a court order. He became the face of Stephen Miller’s deportation push.

Trump’s henchmen spent months refusing to bring him back, but eventually were forced to. The second he set foot on American soil, the DOJ hit him with human-smuggling charges built on a four-year-old traffic stop the feds had previously closed.

Judge Waverly Crenshaw, an Obama appointee, called Abrego’s case what it was. He ruled the prosecution was “vindictive” and the underlying investigation was “tainted.” He cited Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s own public statements on Fox News as evidence the case was retaliation for Abrego Garcia having the gall to sue the administration that disappeared him.

“Absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution,” Crenshaw wrote.

This wasn’t the only court ruling calling Trump to heel this week.

Two days earlier in Chicago, a federal judge dismissed every remaining charge against the so-called Broadview Six — activists and local Democratic officials, including a former congressional candidate, who were charged with felony conspiracy for protesting outside an ICE facility.

The U.S. Attorney himself walked into court and admitted his own prosecutors had committed “significant errors” before the grand jury. They included improperly vouching for evidence and removing jurors who disagreed with the charges. The dismissal was with prejudice. The case can never be refiled.

Two cases. Two federal courts. One week. Both were tied to the central engine of the Trump administration’s second-term project: using federal prosecution to punish people who get in the administration’s way. And in both, the judiciary said no.

DHS is still trying to disappear Abrego Garcia to a third country. The fight isn’t over. But this week the line held.

The War You’re Not Hearing About: Cuba

This week, while Americans focused on Iran and groceries, the Trump administration moved into open military posture against Cuba. On Wednesday, the DOJ unsealed a federal murder indictment against 94-year-old Raúl Castro for ordering the 1996 shootdown of two civilian aircraft.

The same day, the Pentagon announced the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group had entered the Caribbean.

This is the same operational sequence Trump ran against Venezuela in January. Manufactured legal pretext, naval buildup, Special Forces abduction of a foreign head of state. Florida Republican Rep. Carlos Giménez told CNN the Castro indictment “gives the United States the legal basis to go and remove” Castro from Cuba. Foreign Policy this week described what’s happening as the U.S. “edging closer to military intervention.”

On Friday, hundreds of thousands of Cubans rallied in Havana outside the U.S. embassy. They said they don’t want a war, and they’ll defend their country if Trump brings one.

Cuba, however, has a run-down military with few functioning military assets.

The Iran war Trump launched without Congress has already cost 13 American service members their lives. Trump heartlessly told Fox News this week he gets a “kick” out of criticism over that number. Now the administration’s laying the same groundwork for a second war while the first one’s still bleeding.

Hopeful Things Happened This Week

You wouldn’t know it, but there were plenty of good things that happened this week.

House Republicans pulled their own War Powers Resolution vote on Thursday night. Not because the resolution would lose, but because it was about to win. Speaker Mike Johnson held open an unrelated bill on a Women’s History Museum for 45 minutes, then yanked the war powers vote entirely. It’ll come back to the floor in June.

Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are watching their majority “melt down,” in one GOP senator’s own words. Sen. Bill Cassidy flipped to support the Senate War Powers Resolution on his way out the door.

Karl Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week that Trump’s approval numbers will cost Republicans the midterms unless they change course on Iran and gas prices. House Republicans stripped $220 million for Trump’s ballroom from their own legislation. They also canceled a vote on $72 billion in additional ICE funding.

The most revealing quote of the week came from a source close to the White House who said, “In many ways I don’t think they fear the president anymore. Many have realized you can outlive Trump, politically speaking.”

I think the fever is breaking. It’s not an even break — Trump’s candidates are still trouncing his opponents, but the Senate’s refusal to take up his slush fund is telling.

We’ll Keep Fighting For You

Every authoritarian movement bets that the public won’t notice the slow decay: the deportations, the indictments, the buildups, the disappearances. This week we noticed. Federal judges noticed. Congress noticed. The Cuban people noticed.

We’re not out of the woods. We may not be for a long time. But this was a week with more daylight in it than the corporate press is letting you see.

Thanks for being here, and thank you for being a paying subscriber funding this work. You matter. I really appreciate you being here with me.

— John Byrne / Founder, Raw America and Raw Story

P.S. If you missed my interview with Sen. Mark Kelly this week, I’ve unlocked it for you to watch below. You can read a news summary of the interview here, as well as the full transcript. Enjoy your Memorial Day!

Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, and I have to tell you, this was the week the mask finally came off.

For ten years, Donald Trump has acted the role of the man who fights for the forgotten American. The factory worker. The struggling miner. The voter the elites supposedly look down on. He hammered Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the cost of living. He told voters he understood their pain. He promised to fix it on day one.

This week, he admitted that was all a lie.

Before I get to it, let me say thank you. You’re the reason we get to do this work without billionaires looking over our shoulders. We truly appreciate your support.

Trump Takes Off the Mask

Before boarding Air Force One for China, a reporter asked Trump whether Americans’ financial pain factored into his Iran negotiations. His answer was spare: “Not even a little bit.” The only thing that mattered, he said, was making sure Iran didn’t get a nuclear weapon.

This is the same president who ran on affordability in 2024. The same president who, just six months ago, declared himself “the affordability president” on Truth Social.

A CNN poll out this week tells the story. Trump has 30% approval on the economy. 26% on inflation. 77% say his policies have raised their cost of living. And the commander-in-chief just said he doesn’t think about any of it.

Dan Pfeiffer at Pod Save America called it the worst thing Trump has said as president. Not because it was the most offensive, but because it was the truest. The voters who turned to Trump in 2024 because they thought he’d lower their grocery bills just heard him say, on camera, that he doesn’t care.

Then it got worse.

Two days later, Sean Hannity asked Trump if he was going to seize Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. This was Trump’s stated reason for a war that’s killed an estimated 1,700 Iranian civilians and crashed the global economy.

Trump’s answer? “I don’t think it’s necessary, except from a public relations standpoint. I think it’s important for the fake news that we get it.”

Trump admitted the centerpiece of his Iran policy — the thing the war is supposedly about — is just a PR move for the cameras.

In between, there was a feverish stream of Truth Social posts. Fifty-five in three hours. Accusations that Obama committed treason. AI slop showing Obama, Biden, and Pelosi up to their necks in sewage. A mockup of a $100 bill with Trump’s face on it.

This is the unfiltered version of Trump. This is his true face.

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Trump’s Focus in China: Roses

When Richard Nixon went to China in 1972, the world hadn’t seen an American president set foot there in the entire 22-year history of the People’s Republic. He came home with the Shanghai Communiqué, the foundation of US-China relations. Nixon called it “the week that changed the world.” Whatever you think of him, his trip rewrote the map of the Cold War.

When Barack Obama went to Beijing in 2014, he came home with a historic US-China climate agreement that committed both countries to specific emissions cuts. He also brought back a 10-year visa extension that opened up travel for millions.

What did Trump bring home?

Roses, apparently.

“These are the most beautiful roses anyone’s ever seen,” Trump told China’s dictator Xi Jinping on Friday. Xi promised to send some seeds for the White House Rose Garden.

NPR called the trip “big on pageantry” but “short on concrete agreements.” No breakthrough on Taiwan. No deal on Iran. Trump told Hannity that Xi looks like he came out of “central casting” and bragged that he now knows “more about Taiwan than almost any country.”

On Air Force One returning home, Trump said he’d now accept a 20-year suspension of Iran’s nuclear program. This is a retreat from his earlier demands, and a weaker deal than Obama’s 2015 agreement that Trump tore up in 2018.

So that’s the Trump China legacy. Roses, nonsense, and a quiet capitulation on Iran.

The Hidden Story Underneath

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

We’ve spent ten years arguing about whether Trump means what he says. Whether he’s playing political “Madman.” Whether his crude remarks are strategic, or if he even understands what he’s doing.

This week, he answered all those questions himself. He told us he doesn’t think about Americans’ finances. He told us the Iran war is a PR exercise. He posted AI-generated sewage memes about two former presidents the night before a state visit to a nuclear-armed rival.

The voters who put him back in office in 2024 — the ones who said they trusted him on the economy more than Kamala Harris — heard him this week. Not from a leaked memo. Not from a former staffer. From his own mouth, on camera, and his own thumbs at 1 a.m.

The midterms are six months out. 36 House Republicans have announced they won’t run again. Trump’s economic approval is the lowest of his political career. And he keeps going on television signaling that he doesn’t even care about the people who voted for him.

Sometimes a presidency unravels in a scandal. Sometimes it unravels in a war. And sometimes a president just stands at a microphone on the way to meet a foreign leader and tells everyone exactly what he thinks.

That was this week.

Thanks for reading and supporting Raw America. I’m so glad you’re a part of our people-powered movement. We’re going to keep telling you what’s happening, no matter who owns the rest of the press.

Please share this newsletter with someone who needs to know. It makes a big difference.

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See you tomorrow.

— John Byrne / Founder, Raw America and Raw Story

P.S. If you missed our partner’s interview with Elizabeth Warren this week, I’ve inserted it below. Raw America and Call to Activism are teaming up to cover Capitol Hill.

Hey, Raw America family. Happy Mother’s Day! Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, thinking about an article I came across yesterday that has rearranged the way I look at American politics.

A huge thanks to you for being a paid subscriber. Your support is the only reason we can keep doing this. We don’t have a billionaire owner. We don’t have a corporate parent. We have you, and that’s how we like it.

The Last Good Billionaire

Ted Turner died Wednesday at 87, and I’ve been thinking about his legacy. Not just because he built CNN. Because he was the last of a species we’re going to need again: a billionaire who actually believed in journalism.

I started Raw Story in 2004. The same year, Turner published an essay in Washington Monthly that I’ve been re-reading this week. “Without the proper rules, healthy capitalist markets turn into sluggish oligopolies, and that is what’s happening in media today,” he wrote. “When you lose small businesses, you lose big ideas.”

Twenty-two years later, the Ellisons are circling CNN, Bezos has neutered The Washington Post, and in a year, most of cable news will be controlled by billionaires loyal to Donald Trump.

What made Turner different seems sadly passé: he loved the news. He thought it mattered. When Tom Johnson, then president of CNN, asked Turner what the rules were for covering the news, Turner gave him one rule: be fair. That was the rulebook.

In the run-up to the Gulf War, Johnson told Turner it was going to take $30 million over budget to cover the impending war. Turner said, “You spend whatever it takes, pal.” That’s how CNN ended up the only network broadcasting live from Baghdad while the bombs were falling.

Try to imagine the Ellisons saying that today. If anything, they’d cover it up. They cut. Turner spent. That’s the difference.

Maureen Dowd put it perfectly this week: “Unlike today’s greedy and soulless tech billionaires, Turner had fun being rich. The lords of the cloud aren’t swashbucklers; they just are buckling to President Trump.”

Turner was a wild man. He’d sleep on the couch in his Atlanta office in a bathrobe and eat out of vending machines. He built CNN from nothing. He pledged a billion dollars to the United Nations in 1997. He shamed Bill Gates and Warren Buffett into giving more, calling them “ol’ skinflints” and proposing an “Ebenezer Scrooge Prize” for the stingiest billionaires.

A Number That Stopped Me Cold

Yesterday, in Harper’s Magazine, I learned something that struck me cold: the median age of a primary voter in the 2024 elections was 65.

I had to read it twice.

Here’s why this matters. Around 90 percent of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are effectively decided in primaries, not in general elections. Most districts are gerrymandered into safe seats for one party or the other. The general election is a formality. The primary is the actual election.

Which means the people choosing nearly 400 of our 435 House members are not reflective of our country as a whole. (The median age in America is 39.)

Nationally, turnout among voters 65 and older was six times higher in the 2024 primaries than turnout among voters under 34. Six times. The next Congress is being picked by one slice of America while everyone else sits it out.

I want to be careful here. Many of you reading this are over 65. You vote. You pay attention. You read newsletters like this one on a Sunday morning. You’re the reason this thing exists. When I talk about gerontocracy, the word political scientists use, I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about a system that has quietly handed one age cohort outsized power, with consequences nobody asked for.

The consequences are everywhere. The median age of a member of Congress was in the early fifties from 1960 to 1990. It’s over sixty now.

Last year, 75-year-old Gerry Connolly beat AOC for the top Democratic seat on the House Oversight Committee, then died of throat cancer a few months later. His absence made it that much easier for House Republicans to ram through Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, slashing taxes and welfare in one swing. Texas Republican Kay Granger vanished from the Capitol last year and was found six months later in a memory-care facility.

She never even resigned.

There’s a partisan dimension too. Americans 65 and older have moved from a reliably Democratic group to a reliably Republican one over the past two decades. Two-thirds of voters who align with the Republican Party are 50 or older. About a third are 65-plus.

This isn’t really about age. It’s about a system that rewards one type of voter: settled, retired, available on a Tuesday morning in March, and punishes everyone else. Young people move more, work irregular hours, can’t always get off shift to vote in a primary nobody told them mattered. The over-65 cohort has time, stable addresses, and decades of practice navigating the ballot. They show up. The system was built this way.

So how do we fix it?

Open the primaries. If 90 percent of House races are decided in primaries, every voter — independents, infrequent voters, young people who haven’t yet picked a team — should be allowed to vote in them. Closed primaries are an invitation-only election for the most committed partisans. Throw the doors open.

Kill partisan gerrymandering. Independent redistricting commissions work in states like Michigan, and they break the lock incumbents have on their own districts. Friday’s Virginia ruling stung, but the long-term fight is to take map-drawing away from politicians entirely.

Make voting trivially easy for young people. Automatic registration when you get a driver’s license. Same-day registration. Mail ballots that don’t require you to be home on a Tuesday. Election Day as a federal holiday. None of this is radical. Most working democracies do all of it. We just don’t.

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Reasons to Keep Showing Up

Friday’s Virginia ruling was a letdown. But this week also brought real news.

In Michigan, Democrat Chedrick Greene won a state Senate seat by 19 points in a district Kamala Harris carried by less than one point in 2024. An 18-point swing in five months. That’s the kind of number that reshapes how political pros think about November.

In Ohio, Dr. Amy Acton, the public health director who steered the state through the pandemic, won the Democratic gubernatorial primary unopposed. She’ll face Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech billionaire who self-funded his primary win and who’s widely seen as beatable in November.

The system is run by people who show up. So we keep showing up. Every primary. Every special election. Every Sunday morning, with a cup of coffee and a fight worth having.

Thank You, Truly, for Being With Us

Raw America does this work because of you. We don’t take corporate money. We don’t take billionaire money. We don’t have a parent company looking over our shoulder. We have readers, and that’s the whole point.

Every paid subscriber lets us pay our reporters and our video team. Every paid subscriber lets us chase stories the legacy press is too afraid or too compromised to touch. Every paid subscriber is a small vote against the Ellisons, the Bezoses, and the soulless oligarchs buying up what’s left of the American press.

Ted Turner spent whatever it took. We try to do the same. Thanks to you.

Enjoy your Sunday. Please share this with someone who needs to know.

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See you next week.

— John Byrne

Founder, Raw America and Raw Story

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