Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Trump’s hand-picked candidate for Iowa governor just became the first Trump-endorsed gubernatorial pick to lose a primary. Veteran CBS journalist Scott Pelley is accusing network brass of ordering him to lie on the air. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche got grilled on Capitol Hill over three million withheld Epstein documents. A Tennessee Republican congressman threw a staffer under the bus after his own social media account posted a homophobic attack.
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Trump Suffers Humiliating Loss in Iowa
Republican voters in Iowa are now openly defying Donald Trump.
Trump personally endorsed Randy Feenstra for Iowa governor just days before the primary wrapped up. He called Feenstra “MAGA all the way,” gave him his “Complete and Total Endorsement,” and posted the same message twice on Truth Social for good measure.
Iowa Republicans were unmoved, nominating Zach Lahn last night instead. Feenstra is now the first Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate to lose a primary ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Now, Trump’s team wasted no time trying to spin this. One Trump strategist texted NBC after the results came in and said it was “clearly a Randy problem,” adding, “we go with Lahn. That’s fine.”
Sure. Totally fine.
The timing of Trump’s endorsement didn’t help Feenstra. He got it so late that he couldn’t use it in his TV ads during the final stretch of the campaign. But even setting that aside, this race was a signal.
Lahn had support from RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” crowd, and former Iowa Rep. Steve King, who Feenstra beat in 2020, actually campaigned against him this time around. Outside groups hit Feenstra on immigration, calling him soft. Feenstra’s team hit back by pointing out that Lahn invested in a company that sells sex toys.
Iowa Republicans, apparently, chose the sex toy guy. That tells you something about where the party’s internal tensions are running.
What this also means for November: with incumbent Republican Governor Kim Reynolds stepping aside and not seeking a third term, Democrats actually have a shot here. Their candidate, Rob Sand, has been Iowa’s state auditor since 2019 and ran unopposed in his primary. He’s running a bipartisan pitch, trying to bring in Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans.
Iowa isn’t a state Democrats typically circle on the map. But after this primary? It’s worth watching.
Here’s what’s worth sitting with, folks. A strongman’s whole power rests on the belief that he can’t lose, and the moment voters prove otherwise the spell starts to crack. That’s exactly why the founders built primaries and elections in the first place, so that no single man could ever turn a political party into his personal property, and Iowa just reminded everybody that the people, not the patron, still get the last word.
Scott Pelley Says CBS Ordered Him to Lie on the Air
Scott Pelley, the longtime CBS News correspondent who was fired this week after publicly accusing network leadership of “murdering” 60 Minutes, has now gone on record with specifics. And he’s now making it known that the network’s owners told him to lie on the air.
In a formal statement issued Tuesday night, Pelley wrote, “new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” He said he’d been told to include claims that were unverified, and that so far, he’d managed to refuse or ignore those instructions.
But there’s more. Politicians, he wrote, were being invited to choose which correspondents would interview them. To be clear, sources getting to pick their own interviewers isn’t journalism, but PR with better lighting.
Pelley also said that mismanagement had nearly tanked an entire episode of 60 Minutes. The broadcast, he wrote, came within 19 minutes of not making it to air.
And he named the reason for all of this. The new billionaire owner of CBS, David Ellison, was dismantling the most successful program in television history to “curry a moment of favor” with the Trump administration.
This is the media environment we’re living in right now.
CBS fired Pelley “for cause” after he confronted network leadership at a staff meeting and accused them of killing the program. Senior leadership and two correspondents had already been let go before Pelley was shown the door. He said in his statement that “good people were silenced because they stood up for our audience.”
It’s important to remember that 60 Minutes wasn’t struggling at all. The show had just posted a 9 percent jump in viewership at the end of its 58th season. Pelley called that kind of growth “unheard-of.”
It’s important to emphasize that all of this is happening not because of poor ratings, but because someone at the top decided that access to power matters more than honest reporting.
Pelley closed his statement after 37 years at CBS by praying “for a day when sanity, competence, and courage return.”
The prayer is warranted.
This is the moment to remember why Jefferson said he’d rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers. A free press isn’t a luxury of democracy, it’s the immune system, and when a billionaire takes the most trusted program in television and guts it to win favor with a president, he isn’t just killing a show. He’s pulling out one of the last tripwires we’ve got that warns us when power has gone rogue.
Todd Blanche Confronted Over Three Million Missing Epstein Files
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche went before the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday, and Congresswoman Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania hammered him over the remainder of the Epstein files. Dean came prepared. She’s been to the DOJ herself to review unredacted Epstein files in person, taking handwritten notes, because that’s apparently what it takes now to track down information the government is sitting on. And she made sure to confront Blanche on the record about millions more Epstein-related documents the DOJ has still not released.
This isn’t a fringe complaint. The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and was signed into law by Trump himself. Dean asked Blanche whether the DOJ planned to comply with that law.
Blanche said they had complied, but Dean pushed back. She told him she remembered exactly what he’d said to her previously: that the remaining documents were “all duplicative” and that some of them involved “another guy named Epstein.” Blanche denied saying that.
The exchange got tense fast. Dean cut him off, told him she was repeating his own words back to him, and pointed out that now, in a public setting, he was trying to walk it back.
There was also the question of access. Some of the unredacted files that do exist are only available to members of Congress at the DOJ, not to the general public. Dean read from the transparency law itself. It says the documents “should be made publicly available.” That’s not ambiguous.
And then Dean said this: “The president has lied about being on Epstein’s plane, and the unredacted files prove that.”
The Republican chairman then tried to cut her off, telling her that her time had expired. But Dean kept going.
Her point is salient: The Epstein Files Transparency Act was passed, signed into law, and is apparently being ignored. Three million documents are still being kept under wraps in direct defiance of the law. And Todd Blanche is dodging questions about why they haven’t come out.
The Epstein story isn’t over. And this hearing made clear that Trump’s DOJ is still working overtime to keep the files buried.
Article Two of the Constitution hands the president exactly one job description when it comes to the law, and that’s to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. When a Justice Department buries three million documents in open defiance of a statute the president himself signed, it isn’t protecting anybody but the powerful, and a government that gets to pick and choose which of its own laws it’ll obey has stopped being a government of laws at all.
GOP Congressman Throws Staffer Under the Bus for His Own Post
Tennessee Republican Rep. Andy Ogles posted on X on Tuesday, the first day of Pride Month, that “homosexuality has no place in America.”
Then, when people pushed back, he blamed a staffer.
Ogles said in a follow-up post that he was blindsided when his phone started blowing up over a message sent by “a member of my comms team.” He called the post “stupid, hurtful and a complete distraction,” said the employee had been reprimanded, and moved on.
He did not apologize.
The backlash wasn’t just from Democrats. Republican Mike Lawler of New York went directly at Ogles, saying “Homosexuality exists. In America.” He then told his colleague he has: “family, friends, neighbors, colleagues and constituents who are gay and lesbian,” and that it “doesn’t make them less than or somehow unworthy of being an American.”
Lawler later called Ogles a “f***ing idiot” when TMZ asked him about it.
Republican former Congressman George Santos, who is openly gay, also weighed in, saying he never thought he’d hear someone he considered a friend say there was no place for him in the country because of who he loves.
It’s not clear whether it was Ogles or a staffer who actually posted the tweet. Congressional offices send social media posts. Most lawmakers have an approval process. But there’s a stark political reality that Ogles is sitting in a competitive seat. and this kind of post doesn’t help his party in a midterm environment where restless voters are eager for change.
Here’s the thing worth saying plainly. The entire story of this country has been the slow, hard work of widening that phrase “we the people” to take in the folks it left out at the start, and the 14th Amendment wrote equal protection into our founding promise for a reason. So when an elected official says a whole group of Americans has no place here, he isn’t just being cruel to his neighbors. He’s arguing against the country itself.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
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