Good morning, and Happy Memorial Day. I’m Thom Hartmann.
This Memorial Day, I want to thank you for being a paid subscriber. Your investment in independent media makes all of this possible. I hope you have a wonderful holiday.
Trump’s obsession with his own vanity projects and petty vengeance campaigns is costing his party dearly in the midterms. A longtime MAGA super fan is now publicly calling for Trump’s removal from office. The Iran war Trump started is threatening to end with a deal even his own allies are calling an embarrassing loss. And the president’s $1.8 billion slush fund for MAGA allies has blown up the Republican Party from the inside. Let’s break it all down.
Trump Puts Himself First as GOP Fears the Midterms
There are just over five months until the midterm elections, and Donald Trump is doing almost everything imaginable except helping Republicans hold onto Congress.
He endorsed Ken Paxton, the MAGA-aligned challenger to Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn. Party officials have warned that Paxton’s personal baggage, including an impeachment over corruption charges and a messy divorce, could cost Republicans a seat they should never have to fight for, potentially forcing the party to spend $100 million to save it.
He created a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate people who claim they were victimized by the Justice Department under Biden, including people convicted for their roles in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. The figure, notably, references the nation’s 250th anniversary. Senator Mitch McConnell called it “a slush fund to pay people who assault cops.” Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina called it “stupid on stilts.”
Folks, the Founders worried about exactly this kind of leader. James Madison warned about factions driven by passion and self-interest swallowing whole governments. What we’re watching is one man treating an entire political party as a wholly-owned subsidiary of his ego, and the Constitution doesn’t have a mechanism for that because the Framers assumed political parties would have some basic instinct for self-preservation.
Meanwhile, Trump has been dismissing the cost of living as a Democratic “hoax,” waving off gas prices now averaging $4.52 a gallon as “peanuts.” Consumer sentiment just hit an all-time low going back to 1952. Only 28 percent of Americans approve of how Trump is handling the cost of living.
Rather than course-correcting, Trump has focused on building a new White House ballroom, painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, pressing ahead with a triumphal arch on the Potomac, and transforming a public Washington golf course into a “championship-level” course. He’s putting his own image on passports, currency, federal building banners and national park passes.
Triumphal arches and faces stamped on currency aren’t American traditions, they’re imperial Roman traditions. Augustus did this. Napoleon did this. Every strongman who’s ever wanted to convince his people that he is the state, rather than a temporary employee of the state, has done some version of this. And the working family in Toledo or Phoenix who can’t afford $4.52 gas isn’t going to be comforted by a gold-leafed ballroom in Washington.
Republicans are stuck. They know their fate is tied to Trump. They also know there’s almost nothing they can do to make him prioritize their survival over his own interests.
MAGA True Believer Demands Trump Be Removed from Office
Breck Worsham, a right-wing influencer and self-described “three-time Trump voter” who claims she worked on two of his presidential campaigns, posted on X late Sunday night calling for Trump to be removed from office.
Worsham wrote that Trump is a “threat to the country he was elected to represent.” She went on to call him “at best, a narcissist and at worst a sociopath.” And she told her followers that the president is “out of control and poses a direct threat to this country,” saying he “must be removed from office before it is simply too late.”
Worsham, who runs the ThePatrioticBlonde account with nearly 160,000 followers, was a true believer not long ago. On inauguration day in January 2025, she wrote “Today, we Make America Great Again.” The next morning she was writing good morning messages to “all you beautiful patriots” and bragging about being “drunk from all the liberal tears.”
By summer she was defending Trump on the Epstein files, carefully. By March, she’d finally snapped over the Iran war. She told her audience that despite being a 3 time Trump voter and a “Constitutional Conservative” who worked on his presidential campaign, she now regrets everything. By January, she wrote: “I am directly responsible for much of what is happening now. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t. I am truly sorry.”
Her story matters because of what it represents. When people who worked for Trump, who campaigned for him, who celebrated his inauguration in all caps, are now publicly calling for his removal, that’s a damning indictment of his administration.
Here’s the thing about authoritarian movements. They never collapse all at once. They erode at the edges first, one true believer at a time, when the lived reality of the project finally outweighs the emotional investment in the leader. The German conservatives who put Hitler in power in 1933 thought they could control him. By 1944 some of them were trying to blow him up. Worsham isn’t planting a bomb, she’s just telling the truth on X, but the pattern of disillusionment is older than this country.
The Iran War’s Possible Ending Is Almost as Messy as the War Itself
Trump started the Iran war without consulting Congress or the American people. Now he may be ending it on terms that even his own allies are calling a surrender.
And let’s be clear about what that first sentence means. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. The Founders put it there on purpose because they’d just fought a revolution against a king who could march nations into war on a whim. Every president since Truman has chipped away at that clause, but Trump didn’t just chip, he took a wrecking ball to it, and Congress let him.
Trump has claimed multiple times that a deal to halt the conflict was “imminent” and “very close.” Each time, it turned out to be wishful thinking. Now there are reports that a framework agreement may be close, one that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and ease the U.S. blockade on Iranian ships and ports, with nuclear talks to follow.
That last part is the problem.
Trump went to war with Iran claiming his goal was to eliminate their nuclear program. Under the terms being discussed now, Iran’s uranium stockpile would remain in place during a 60-day negotiating window, while Washington unfreezes Iranian assets and dismantles its own blockade. Senator Thom Tillis pointed out the obvious contradiction on CNN Sunday, noting that eleven weeks ago the Pentagon was claiming Iran’s defenses had been obliterated and a nuclear solution was just around the corner.
Thirteen American families got a folded flag this year because one man decided he wanted a war. Eisenhower, who actually knew what war was, warned us in his farewell address about the military-industrial complex and the temptation to solve every problem with force. He’d recognize this moment instantly. So would every Gold Star parent from every undeclared war this country has fought since 1945.
It’s a bad situation with no good options. Polls show most Americans oppose the war. More military action risks even worse economic pain and Iranian retaliation against Gulf states and U.S. forces. But the deal on the table falls so far short of Trump’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” demands from March that even supporters like Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Roger Wicker are warning it signals weakness.
Democrats are equally critical, but from the opposite direction. Senator Cory Booker said Trump is “being played as a fool.” Senator Chris Van Hollen acknowledged it might be a blunder that’s simply unavoidable now, saying, “When you’re digging a hole, you should stop digging.”
JPMorgan analysts are projecting oil at an average of $97 a barrel for the rest of the year, even if a deal is reached. The economic relief that Trump’s allies are promising won’t show up overnight, if it shows up at all.
The president, facing sinking approval ratings, a restive Congress, and a summer of midterm politics, is caught between a war he can’t win and a peace he can’t spin.
Trump’s $1.8 Billion Slush Fund Blows Up the Republican Party
Before Congress left for Memorial Day recess, Senate Republicans were furious at Trump. House Republicans were furious at Senate Republicans. And a Senate meeting with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche that was supposed to calm things down instead, according to multiple reports, erupted into a shouting match.
All of it traces back to Trump’s $1.776 billion so-called “anti-weaponization” fund, announced without warning to congressional Republicans and designed to compensate people who claim they were targeted by the DOJ under Biden.
The immediate problem: the fund’s eligibility criteria appear to include January 6th defendants, including those convicted of assaulting police officers.
Think about what we’re actually talking about here. Public money, your money, being handed to people who beat police officers with flagpoles on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. The Founders included the Appropriations Clause in Article I, Section 9 specifically to prevent any president from turning the Treasury into his personal patronage machine. This fund is precisely the kind of corruption the Anti-Federalists warned us about when they argued the executive branch would inevitably try to buy loyalty with public dollars.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune had been maneuvering to pass a $72 billion immigration enforcement package through reconciliation, which would have allowed Republicans to pass it without Democratic votes. That plan collapsed the moment the DOJ announced the fund. Too many Senate Republicans, including Trump critics like Tillis and Trump allies like Senator Katie Britt of Alabama, refused to move forward.
Mitch McConnell summed up the Senate mood, saying, “Utterly stupid, morally wrong, take your pick.”
The House, however, is a different world. Speaker Mike Johnson defended the fund, declined to say whether January 6th rioters should receive payments, and deferred to Blanche for details. Other House Republicans went further, with Representative Ralph Norman claiming that January 6th “was a staged thing from Day 1.”
When sitting members of Congress who were in the building that day and hid under desks while the mob hunted for the Vice President, look you in the eye and tell you it was all staged, they’re not confused. They’re complicit. And historians a hundred years from now are going to study this moment the way we study the apologists for the Confederacy after Reconstruction.
Ted Cruz revealed on his podcast that 20 Republicans would have voted for Democratic amendments restricting the fund, enough to hand Democrats a visible win against Trump on the Senate floor. That prospect, Cruz suggested, is what pushed Thune to punt the whole thing until after the holiday.
The Republican majority is in theory large enough to get things done. But Trump’s decision to create the fund without warning his own party’s leadership is a reminder that loyalty in this administration runs in one direction.
This Memorial Day, we appreciate you. Thank you again for being a paid subscriber of Raw America.
I’m Thom Hartmann. We’ll see you tomorrow.
