Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Senate Republicans are loudly warning Trump that voters are exhausted with his endless war in Iran as gas prices become a real problem for the GOP heading into the midterms. CNN employees are pushing back on MAGA billionaire David Ellison’s plan for an “independent” editorial board, calling it a toothless PR move. Democrats now have a real shot at flipping the Senate, with eight Republican-held seats genuinely in play less than three months before the election. And new reporting shows Donald Trump has personally pocketed roughly $2.2 billion in a single year, with ethics experts declaring Trump’s second term the most openly corrupt presidency in American history.
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GOP Senators Say Their Voters Are ‘Exhausted’ with Trump’s War
Donald Trump launched his war on Iran on February 28th. He promised it would be over in a matter of weeks. That was nearly six months ago.
Now, Senate Republicans say their voters have had enough. Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia says her phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Her constituents are worn out. They don’t want boots on the ground, or billions of their tax money going overseas. And they definitely don’t want a war with no end date.
RepublicanJohn Cornyn of Texas wants Trump to actually explain what it’s trying to accomplish, saying the on-again, off-again messaging is confusing. He added the weeks-long timeline the administration floated at the start was the biggest mistake.
Meanwhile, Iran is keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed, which is a huge problem as it handles a fifth of the world’s oil supply. Tehran says it won’t reopen the strait to American ships until the U.S. Navy lifts its blockade, pays reparations for the war and withdraws troops out from the region. Gas prices are averaging around $4 a gallon nationwide. That’s roughly a dollar more than when the war started, with just a few months to go before voters head into a midterm election that was always going to be decided on the cost of living.
An August Reuters/Ipsos poll found just 35 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s war. 58 percent expect gas prices to keep getting worse. Last month’s survey from the same pollster found 69 percent of Americans think Trump never clearly explained his goal for the war.
Even Trump doesn’t seem totally sure. Last week he told Axios he was “low-keying it,” saying it will work out. That’s not a strategy. And Republican senators fighting for their political lives this fall know it.
Congress wrote the War Powers Resolution in 1973 because it had just watched a president stretch a limited action in Southeast Asia into a decade of coffins coming home. That law’s still on the books, and the Senate keeps voting not to pick it up.
CNN Staffers Sounding Alarm Over Ellison’s Plans for Network
Paramount Skydance — whose right-wing billionaire owner, David Ellison, has been trying to buy CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery — is now floating a new idea he hopes will assuage concerns about the network’s independence. Ellison wants to create an “editorial board” to oversee CNN if his purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery goes through. Paramount told the Wall Street Journal it’s always looking at “internal improvements to journalistic integrity.”
CNN staffers were quick to call BS on that proposal.
Veteran journalist and CNN contributor Kara Swisher said no actual journalist would suggest such a thing, and said these kinds of oversight boards are typically to toothless and useless by design.
It isn’t just Swisher. One veteran CNN staffer told Status News that the working assumption inside CNN is that any board would be stacked with people like right-wing opinion columnist Bari Weiss and UFC CEO (and devout Trump loyalist) Dana White. Working journalists are right to doubt the independence of a board that includes those names.
Another staffer anonymously told Status that no CNN journalists actually believe Paramount would let an independent board run the network. Additionally, that board wouldn’t do anything to ease the pressure from the Trump White House to fast-track the merger.
This all comes after a dozen state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, are suing to block the $110 billion merger. Paramount says the idea of an editorial board had been floated before the lawsuit was filed. But the idea only surfaced recently, and AG Bonta isn’t impressed. He called Ellison’s assurances “piecemeal promises” and that the lawsuit is necessary for antitrust enforcement to stop a whole host of major media properties from being owned by one man.
The New York Post is also reporting that Ellison — who owns CBS News — may move the network out of New York as payback against Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit along with Bonta. Ellison reportedly told senior Paramount Skydance executives he’ll start relocating the company out of California on October 1 if Bonta doesn’t negotiate an end to the suit by the end of September. Relocating out of both New York and Hollywood would be a massive and costly undertaking that would simultaneously cut off the company from top-tier talent in both the news and entertainment industries. Bonta likened the threat to blackmail.
Ellison recently penned an op-ed in the New York Times insisting he’d be a good steward of CNN, while arguing CNN and CBS News exist to play it straight down the middle. He notably didn’t mention whether CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss would have authority over CNN’s newsroom, and remains cagey about whether current CNN chief executive Mark Thompson would keep his job if the merger goes through.
Edward R. Murrow warned a room full of broadcasters in 1958 that television could teach and illuminate, but only if the people who owned it wanted it to. Otherwise, he said, it was nothing but wires and lights in a box.
This story is a perfect illustrator of why billionaire ownership is so toxic to media. And it’s why Raw America was launched to be totally independent of billionaire influence. Subscribe right now to help us stay independent.
Democrats Need Just 4 Flips to Win Back the Senate. They Could Win 8
Democrats only need to flip four Republican Senate seats to take control of the upper chamber of Congress. But top election analysts like Cook Political Report say there are now eight genuinely competitive Republican-held seats, with several reliably red states now part of the conversation thanks to Trump’s sinking approval ratings. Growing fatigue with the Iran war and persistently high gas prices have also thrown various states into question.
In North Carolina, former Governor Roy Cooper, the Democrat, is ahead of Republican Michael Whatley in most polls. That even includes a Fox News poll from late July that had Cooper up by nine points. Cook rates the seat is a “likely Democratic” flip.
In Maine, Democrats got rid of scandal-plagued Graham Platner and replaced him with Troy Jackson, a logger and former Maine Senate president. Jackson is slightly ahead of longtime incumbent Susan Collins in the latest polls, with her current approval numbers among the worst of her career.
In Ohio, longtime former Senator Sherrod Brown is mounting a comeback and is aiming to oust Republican Senator Jon Husted. Brown’s campaign is using Husted’s support for data centers against him, blaming him for higher utility bills resulting from data centers’ heavy electricity usage.
In Alaska, former Congresswoman Mary Peltola is running a tight race against incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan, saying high gas prices are partially his fault due to his support for the Iran war. In Iowa, Democrat Josh Turek was just endorsed by Barack Obama and is competitive in the open seat being vacated by Republican Joni Ernst.
Texas Democratic state representative James Talarico is polling slightly ahead of Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who knocked off John Cornyn in the Republican primary thanks to Trump’s endorsement. Kansas pastor Adam Hamilton significantly outraised Republican incumbent Roger Marshall by roughly six to one last quarter. And in Nebraska, independent Dan Osborn is running again after coming within striking distance of Deb Fischer in 2024, and is aiming to upset incumbent Republican Senator Pete Ricketts.
There’s no guarantee Democrats will take back the Senate, and the map is still slightly favorable to Republicans. But eight competitive seats shows Democrats have a real opportunity in the midterms, and Republicans are on the ropes.
The Framers wrote Article One, Section Three so that a third of the Senate has to face the voters every two years, no matter how comfortable the majority has gotten. That was the entire point of staggering those terms, and in eighty-two days we find out whether it still works.
Trump Increased His Net Worth by Billions in ‘Most Openly Corrupt’ Presidency
This one should have been the biggest political scandal of the year, if the billionaire-owned media actually did its job.
Trump’s annual financial disclosure shows he added an estimated $2.2 billion to his net worth in 2025 from his numerous business ventures. That’s billions of dollars flowing straight into the president’s pockets while he’s occupying the Oval Office.
$1.4 billion of that money came from his cryptocurrency projects, including $636 million just in royalties from his own branded $TRUMP memecoin. According to the blockchain firm Nansen, roughly 989,000 people who bought $TRUMP were underwater by the end of June, losing a total of $3.81 billion as it plunged in value by 97 percent.
Trump’s Truth Social platform is now selling Wall Street firms early access to his market-moving posts, offering monthly subscriptions between $60,000 and $100,000. The buyers mostly include high-frequency traders who are paying to have access to announcements a few milliseconds before the public. Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia urged six major financial trade groups not to touch it, calling it a clear and unacceptable pathway for corruption.
Then there’s his IRS settlement. Trump initially sued the IRS for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns, and his own Justice Department settled it that allowed permanent immunity from future audits for him, his sons and his businesses for all of his previous tax returns. A federal judge tossed out that settlement out due to obvious conflict of interest issues. She also sanctioned two senior Justice Department officials and referred one of Trump’s lawyers to the Florida bar. Trump is appealing that decision.
And of course, Trump also received a $400 million jet gifted to him from the Qatari royal family, blatantly sidestepping the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause.
Historian Julian Zelizer of Princeton University says Trump has found new ways to monetize the presidency in ways no other president ever has. Former Federal Election Commission general counsel Larry Noble says this already looks like the “most openly corrupt” presidency in American history. A July poll from CNN found 66 percent of Americans already believe Trump doesn’t put the good of the country over his own personal financial gain.
Corporate media keeps burying that story under each news cycle. But it should be the headline.
The Supreme Court decided Tumey against Ohio back in 1927 and threw out a conviction because the judge stood to profit from it, and the justices said it didn’t matter whether he’d actually been swayed. What mattered was that he could be, and that nobody watching could tell the difference.
Before You Go, Support Journalism That Only Answers to You
All of these stories show the consequences of what happens when there are no guardrails reining in corruption and authoritarianism. A president can recklessly wage endless war while his puppets in Congress do nothing to stop him. A billionaire with ties to the administration can use their endless wealth to buy entire cable networks to decide what we get to know. And a shamelessly corrupt president can use the nation’s highest office to pad his own pockets.
You’d never hear these stories covered this way in the media outlets controlled by the billionaires, which is the entire point. And that’s why Raw America will never take a dime from them. But our mission can only continue if readers like you decide independent journalism is important enough to fund. You already read us. Become a paying subscriber and make your support official.
Your subscription is what fuels all of our work, whether it’s videos like these, our exclusive reports from Capitol Hill and the White House or our live interview programming. Be sure to tune in tomorrow at 2 PM Eastern Time to watch our live interview with Hunter Biden. You can catch it on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.
Here are a few stories you may have missed:
Third Immigrant Dies at Infamous ICE Detention Facility. An immigrant detainee being held at the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey was reported dead this week after experiencing a medical emergency, making him the third detainee at the facility to die in federal custody since it was reopened in May of 2025. A nurse reportedly witnessed the man, a Guatemalan national named Jose Chajon-Raxon, having a seizure. He was transported to a local hospital, which federal officials did not name. His death comes after 41 year-old El Salvadoran man Edwin Lopez-Cornejo died at Delaney Hall earlier this month, which officials attributed to an unidentified medical emergency.
Immigrant Children Being Held at Texas Detention Center Five Times Longer Than Legally Allowed. The Texas Tribune is reporting that children are being held at the Dilley Detention Center as much as five times longer than the 20-day limit put in place by a federal judge. Advocates and attorneys for families being held at Dilley say their cells are often plagued with infestations from mosquitoes, cockroaches and spiders, with one detainee saying she’s only allowed to speak to her husband on the phone for 10 minutes every two weeks, under supervision from guards. Some children are being held at the facility for as much as 120 days.
Texans Protest Trump’s Border Wall Construction in National Park. Bulldozers have started clearing trees and brush at the Big Bend National Park in South Texas in order to make way for border wall construction. Bulldozers have been greeted by crowds of protesters bearing signs with slogans like “Don’t Bulldoze My Church” and “No Big Bend Wall.” The Department of Homeland Security awarded a $1.7 billion contract to the Albuquerque, New Mexico-based firm Southwest Valley Constructors to build the section of the wall in the national park.
Karoline Leavitt Caught Using AI on Her Exit Statement. Outgoing White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Wednesday she would be leaving the Trump administration to spend more time with her family. Two photos included in her exit statement show that Leavitt used AI to change her appearance. The Daily Beast reported that the post on her X account included a tag reading “made with AI.”
