Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Newly surfaced video confirms Donald Trump was hidden away in an airport catering truck and flown out on a decoy jet after leaving the NATO summit in Turkey. Meanwhile, Trump is actively defying Supreme Court rulings that went against him, including on his tariffs, his illegal firing of a Federal Reserve board member and birthright citizenship. The clock is also running out for Trump to fill dozens of federal judicial vacancies before the midterm elections. And Senate Republicans are now closing ranks around Majority Leader John Thune, complicating Trump’s attempts to push him out over his refusal to go along with his attempts to kill the filibuster.
But first, a brief ask, because it’s the whole reason we’re here. There’s a reason Trump’s billionaire friends are intentionally buying up cable networks and newspapers, and it’s not because they want to invest in journalism. They’re doing it so they can be the ones who decide what you get to know and what gets buried. This is why we started Raw America. We don’t answer to a billionaire owner and never will. We answer to you. But whether we’re able to keep doing this is entirely dependent on whether our readers believe in independent journalism enough to keep it funded. If you’ve been enjoying our newsletters on a free subscription, today is the day to change that. You can subscribe for just 22 cents a day, which is less than a cup of coffee. Upgrade your free subscription to a paying one and help keep accountability reporting alive.
Trump Hidden in a Catering Truck and Flown Out on a Decoy Jet
Last month, Donald Trump was in Ankara, Turkey, for a NATO summit. Cameras rolled as he boarded the old Air Force One in plain view. The White House told everyone he was flying home on that jet, though in actuality he was being squirreled away in a catering truck normally used to load meals and taken to a decoy plane. The Washington Post recently posted the video breaking down exactly how Trump was transported in the catering truck.
One unnamed U.S. official told the Washington Post that the move was necessary due to a credible assassination threat from Iran, which borders Turkey. Officials are calling the catering truck and decoy jet maneuver a “deception operation.”
Journalists with the White House’s traveling press pool were told to keep their window shades closed during the flight. When reporters asked Trump why the shades had to stay shut, he said it was because they were “probably on a dangerous flight,” before adding with a shrug, “But if I go, you go. Right?” That’s a pretty big reveal that Trump apparently had no issue putting reporters’ lives at risk while he was safely flown out on a different plane entirely.
To be clear, previous presidents have been known for these types of manuevers. Former President Bill Clinton used an unmarked jet to slip into Pakistan back in 2000 while his official Air Force One flew as a decoy. But Donald Trump remains the first president of the United States to be hidden inside a catering truck on foreign soil.
White House communications director Steven Cheung said the move was necessary as Trump’s new jet donated by the Qatari royal family has “high-level security protocols” and that “there are many enemies of America who have their sights on him.” But the fact remains that the government lied to the American public and its own press corps about where the president was. This is the kind of thing that used to merit congressional hearings.
And we’ve been here before. In October of 1919, Woodrow Wilson had a stroke that left him barely able to function, and his wife Edith and his physician, Cary Grayson, simply didn’t tell the country. For months the American people had no idea who was actually running the government. The lesson then is the lesson now. A republic can survive a president in danger. What it can’t survive is a habit of deciding, case by case, that the public doesn’t need to know where its president is or what shape he’s in. Security is a reason. It was never meant to be a blank check.
Trump Testing How Far He Can Push Past Supreme Court Rulings
Over the past few weeks, Trump has responded to Supreme Court rulings striking down his policies not by accepting the losses, but by finding new ways to do the exact same things the nation’s highest court expressly ruled unconstitutional.
Birthright citizenship is one key example. The Supreme Court ruled this summer that basically everyone born in the United States is a citizen, as the 14th Amendment clearly states. But Trump forged ahead with two new executive orders carving out exceptions for children born to so-called “alien enemies,” foreign terrorists, foreign lobbyists, or people the administration claims were in the U.S. fraudulent tourist visas. Trump even said the quiet part out loud: “We’re ending it a different way.”
The Supreme Court also ruled that Trump lacked the authority to unilaterally fire Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook. Judges wrote in their ruling that the president couldn’t fire her without giving her proper notice and a chance to respond. So the White House sent her a letter dated August 5th, signed by deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, renewing the threat to fire her and giving her 21 days to answer. He still has yet to prove his main allegation that Cook supposedly committed mortgage fraud, and she has yet to be criminally charged with anything. Cook continues to deny the allegations, with her attorneys calling the the accusations totally baseless.
And after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs on virtually every trade partner back in February, the president proceeded to roll out brand-new tariffs on 60 countries under a completely different legal authority. Small businesses that already sued to block the tariffs called the new justification a pretext to bring back the same tariffs the Court already killed.
Harvard law professor Richard Lazarus observed that Trump is deliberately pushing the boundaries of these rulings, particularly with Lisa Cook and birthright citizenship. Georgetown law professor David Super noted that most presidents typically treat Supreme Court rulings as the ultimate deciders of issues rather than as new obstacles to be surmounted. That even includes Trump during his first term, when he accepted the Court’s decisions on DACA and on the U.S. Census citizenship question with no pushback.
Whether or not it’s technically illegal, a president disregarding the fundamental system of checks and balances and acting as a tyrant is further proof of an ongoing constitutional crisis.
In 1832 the Supreme Court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that the Cherokee Nation was a sovereign people and that Georgia had no authority over its land. Andrew Jackson simply declined to enforce it, and six years later the Cherokee were marched west on the Trail of Tears. That’s the thing about a court ruling. It’s only as strong as a president’s willingness to treat it as binding. The Court has no army and no Treasury. It’s got a piece of paper and a norm, and once a president works out that he can go shopping for a workaround every time he loses, that norm is all that’s holding the thing together.
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Republicans Running Out of Time to Confirm Trump Judges Before Midterms
Trump still has lots of judicial vacancies to fill, and time is quickly running out to get them across the finish line before the midterms. And if control of the Senate flips in November, that door could slam shut entirely.
The Senate acted fast before leaving for the August recess, confirming a batch of appointees that included some judges and U.S. attorneys. So far, the GOP-controlled Senate has confirmed 53 federal judges have been confirmed since Trump took office in January of last year. That puts him slightly ahead of where he stood at this same point in his first term, when he had 51 judges confirmed.
But the Senate comes back in mid-September for just three weeks before gaveling out of session again until after the midterms on November 3. And Trump still hasn’t announced nominees for a number of open seats, including judgeships in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Florida, plus an Arkansas-based seat on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Judicial nominees also have to survive the “blue slip” process in the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which home-state senators can effectively veto a pick for an Article III judge or a U.S. attorney. That means the White House has to coordinate closely with senators, which takes up even more time when Republicans can scarcely afford it.
Legal experts tell Bloomberg it’s extremely unlikely for new nominees Trump announced even now could actually be confirmed before November. Most of this will have to wait for a lame-duck session after the election, when attendance gets shaky as many senators — especially those who are retiring or lost their elections — are often in their home states for the holidays.
This makes November’s Senate elections even more critical. Brookings Institution fellow Russell Wheeler wrote that if Democrats take back the majority, Trump’s effort to transform the federal judiciary in his image could be completely shut down.
This isn’t new either. In February of 1801, after John Adams lost the presidency, a lame-duck Federalist Congress rammed through the Judiciary Act of 1801, and Adams spent his final hours in office signing commissions for what history remembers as the midnight judges. Jefferson’s Congress came in and repealed the whole thing the very next year with the Judiciary Act of 1802. Which tells you exactly what’s on the ballot in November. Lifetime appointments feel permanent, and mostly they are, but the power to hand them out lasts only as long as the majority that grants it. Voters decide who holds that majority.
Republicans Take Thune’s Side in Feud with Trump
Senate Republicans are now breaking with Donald Trump, at least when it comes to the president’s efforts to oust Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
Trump has held off on endorsing Thune serving another term as the Senate GOP leader. This all traces back to Thune’s refusal to kill the filibuster to ram through Trump’s legislative priorities, most notably his draconian anti-voting bill, the SAVE Act.
Now, Senate Republicans are rallying around Thune. Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas said there’s real respect among the GOP conference for how Thune handles a difficult job, and that while Republicans have let Trump win on plenty of issues, voting out Thune as leader isn’t a line they’re willing to cross.
Even Senator Rick Scott of Florida is still backing Thune, despite pushing him hard on the SAVE Act. He pointed out that presidents tend to get frustrated when they can’t get everything they want across the Senate’s 60-vote threshold.
Trump insists Republicans aren’t angry with him, but rather with Republicans on Capitol Hill. Senator John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana pushed back on that argument, saying voters are angry at everyone including Trump, especially when it comes to the cost of living. Keep in mind that Trump has dismissed the affordaiblity crisis as a “hoax” supposedly cooked up by Democrats.
This is all happening while Senate Republicans have quietly blocked a string of Trump priorities this year, including his $1.776 billion slush fund for MAGA loyalists, $1 billion for Trump’s gaudy White House ballroom, and the push for a new round of funding for Trump’s war with Iran.
And now that Trump’s approval numbers are sagging to the lowest point of both of his presidencies, more and more Senate Republicans see the president himself as their biggest political liability heading into the midterms, rather than John Thune.
Here’s what nobody in this fight says out loud. The filibuster isn’t in the Constitution. Article I, Section 5 says each chamber writes its own rules, and that’s the whole of it. The Senate invented the filibuster, the Senate has rewritten it before, and the Senate could throw it out on a simple majority vote any afternoon it decides to. Which means the only thing standing between a national voter suppression bill and the president’s desk right now is a house rule and a handful of Republicans who’ve decided they’d rather keep it. That isn’t a check on power. That’s a coin still spinning, and every one of us is standing around the table watching it.
Before You Go, Help Independent Media Survive
Right-wing billionaires are quietly gobbling up more media outlets, while smaller outlets unable to keep up shut down on a nearly daily basis. If left unchecked, the rich and well-connected get to do their dirt in the dark and escape all accountability. But Raw America doesn’t answer to them. We only answer to you, the reader. And that means we can cover these stories the way they need to be covered while the billionaires would either them soften them beyond recognition or bury them entirely. Our editorial independence is only possible with the support of our paying subscribers, who fund both our on-the-ground reporting in Washington and our live interviews with the people shaping the news. Today at 2 PM ET, make sure to catch our live interview with National Democratic Training Committee founder Kelly Dietrich, who will break down the recent primaries and provide inside knowledge on how you can get involved in creating political change in your own community. Watch on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.
Here are a few stories you may have missed:
Trump’s Media Company Lost $238 Million in Second Quarter of 2026. New filings show that the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), which is the parent company of the president’s Truth Social platform, posted $238 million in losses during the period between April and July. TMTG only posted revenues of $1.7 million in that same time frame. Most of those losses were concentrated in digital assets and equity securities. Shares of TMTG were down eight percent as of the close of trading on Monday evening.
Trump Still Not Ruling Out Firing Jeanine Pirro. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who Trump appointed to lead the Department of Justice’s prosecutions in the District of Columbia, is apparently still fighting for her job. Both Trump and Attorney General Todd Blanche have continued to offer cagey answers about whether Pirro will remain in her role following her office’s decision to dismiss several prosecutions related to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Former American Olympian David Hearn’s charges for allegedly damaging the Reflecting Pool were thrown out, with Pirro’s office admitting in a court filing that the damage was due to a botched installation rather than vandalism.
New Video Evidence Shows ICE Agents Using Racial Slurs Toward Immigrants. Body camera footage obtained from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in multiple cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and elsewhere shows agents referring to immigrants using various racial slurs. Court filings documented ICE agents using the slur “tonks” to refer to immigrants, which is a reference to the sound of a flashlight hitting a skull. Agents also used the term “wet” to describe undocumented immigrants, which is a shortened version of the slur “wetback” that dates back to the Eisenhower administration.
Wisconsin Voters to Nominate Candidates for Governor Tonight. Voters in the swing state of Wisconsin will head to the polls tonight to decide who to put on the general election ballot for the state’s highest office this November. Democratic socialist Francesca Hong is favored to win the Democratic nomination over moderate David Crowley, who is the current Milwaukee County executive. Current Governor Tony Evers (D), who is not seeking another term, has endorsed Crowley. Even though Hong has a significant lead over Crowley in the latest polls, progressive leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have declined to endorse her.
