A federal judge issued a temporary pause on the billionaire Ellison family’s attempt to buy CNN’s parent company. New polling shows Republicans admitting their finances have gotten worse under Trump’s presidency. The Trump DOJ recently subpoenaed the family members of New York Times reporters investigating Air Force One security concerns. And Republicans quietly abandoning Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims because voters simply aren’t buying it anymore.
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Judge Halts Ellisons’ Attempt to Buy CNN’s Parent Company
This story is a genuine win for anyone worried about media consolidation.
A federal judge just hit pause on a planned $110 billion merger between Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Skydance. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín — a Joe Biden appointee — issued a 14-day restraining order, siding with 12 Democratic attorneys general who argued the merger would jack up consumer prices and give consumers fewer choices.
Judge Martínez-Olguín wrote in her ruling that there are still serious questions about the merger’s legality, and that the public would benefit from enforcing antitrust law designed to encourage competition and discourage monopolies.
Paramount says it plans to appeal the ruling. But California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is leading the coalition of states opposing it, called it a critical early win,. He cautioned that media consolidation negatively everyone’s daily life when one billionaire or company is allowed free rein to limit competition and put out worse products.
The mega-merger would have combined two massive film studios, two streaming platforms, and two news organizations — including CNN — under one man: David Ellison. He’s the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men who also happens to be one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors.
Ellison hosted a dinner honoring the Trump White House back in April. Trump himself was there, along with Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth and Todd Blanche. Just a few weeks later, the DOJ’s antitrust division closed its antitrust investigation and cleared the way for the merger.
Now Paramount is in a bind. It promised Warner Bros. shareholders a penalty of $600 million each quarter if the deal didn’t close by September 30. That bet looked a lot safer when Trump’s DOJ seemed ready to fast-track the whole thing.
This is the exact same playbook we see in authoritarian regimes around the world. Billionaires court the leader, the leader’s regulators grease the skids, and a handful of wealthy oligarchs decide what news the people get to see. For now, a judge stopped it. But the fight isn’t over.
Republicans Admit Their Finances Are Worse Under Trump
New polling from the Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos shows 65 percent of American adults disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy. A full two-thirds of Americans say groceries are flat out unaffordable. And 59 percent don’t believe they have a good shot at improving their standard of living.
Only 17 percent of adults say they feel better off today than when Trump’s second term began. A whopping 43 percent say they feel worse off.
The most shocking part of the poll? Among non-MAGA Republicans, the share of respondents who feel worse off jumped from 22 percent in April to 35 percent in July, while the share of people who feel better off dropped from 23 percent to 16 percent. Those trends should be a flashing red light to everyone in the White House.
Even among White evangelical Protestants, who are typically one of the most reliably Republican voting blocs in the country, the number who feel worse off climbed from 19 percent to 26 percent.
Inflation cooled slightly in June, down to 3.5 percent from 4.2 percent in April, That’s largely because gas prices fell during the brief ceasefire with Iran. But gas has since climbed back above $4 a gallon after the Iran war flared up again.
A Harris Poll from late May and early June found that 95 percent of Americans believe the country is in an affordability crisis. And a majority of those polled, 57 percent, believe the economy is getting worse, up from 46 percent in February.
The share of Republicans who think things are improving fell from 49 percent to 27 percent over that same stretch. The affordability crisis isn’t a partisan issue. Americans of all political stripes are now screaming for help.
Trump DOJ Sends Subpoenas to Reporters’ Families
Newly unsealed court documents show the Trump DOJ’s subpoena campaign against New York Times journalists went even further than previously believed. The DOJ sought phone records not just for reporters, but for members of their own families.
That includes the phone numbers of two reporters’ spouses, one of whom works as general counsel at a major law firm, and the phone number of another reporter’s mother, who works as a mental health professional who is bound by provider-patient confidentiality.
These subpoenas came after an earlier attempt to compel reporters to testify before a federal grand jury about their reporting on security issues with Trump’s gift jet from Qatar’s royal family. While the DOJ defended the subpoenas as consistent with federal law and department policy pertaining to national security, the New York Times said the government’s conduct suggests this isn’t really about national security at all.
The Times found in its initial report that Secret Service officials reportedly had concerns that were serious enough to merit Trump flying back from the NATO summit in Turkey on an older Air Force One jet while the Qatari plane went to an airbase in the United Kingdom.
Here’s the most worrying detail about the latest subpoenas: the DOJ is reportedly demanding phone records dating back to the beginning of 2026, which is obviously well before the articles in question were published. The Times’ lawyers argue that the DOJ’s real goal is to learn who the reporters’ sources really are.
The Times also said the DOJ never told the reporters it was trying to access their records through a third party, and accused the department of acting in bad faith. A government going after journalists’ spouses and mothers to find out their sources is textbook intimidation, and is the exact kind of thing we’re not supposed to have in a democracy.
Republicans Worry Trump’s 2020 Conspiracy Theories Harming Their Own Chances
Trump used his primetime address last week to revive his debunked 2020 election fraud conspiracy theories, and called on Republicans to push for bans on mail-in ballot bans. He also demanded purges of state voter rolls and investigations into what he alleged was a deep state cover-up.
Republican candidates are now apparently doing their best to tune all of that out.
The day after Trump’s speech, former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley, who is now running for North Carolina’s open U.S. Senate seat, held a 34-minute campaign event that never mentioned Trump’s claims. When a reporter asked him about it, Whatley offered a vague line about election integrity and moved on. Whatley is currently trailing his Democratic opponent, Roy Cooper, who is the former two-term governor of North Carolina.
Texas Republican U.S. Senator John Cornyn also didn’t hold back. He told the Washington Post he doesn’t understand why anyone’s talking about 2020 with a little more than 100 days left before the midterms.
Republican strategists are consistently finding that voters care a lot more about affordability and the cost of living than Trump’s stale grievances from six years ago. One strategist told the Washington Post that candidates who aren’t talking about the economy simply are risking losing the attention of voters.
Despite Trump’s unfounded conspiracies, he’s still the president, and he’s using his government to pursue his debunked claims to the ends of the earth. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin recently threatened to jail state election officials who refuse to “scrub” their voter rolls. Mullin doesn’t actually have the power to do that, as Congress would have to pass legislation to make that official. But the threat itself shows how serious this administration is about legitimizing Trump’s conspiracy theories, even if it hurts Republicans’ electoral chances.
Keep Raw America Independent
This administration has done its best to consolidate ownership of America’ biggest media outlets under a handful of his friends and donors. This includes Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong at the Los Angeles Times, and the Ellison family at CBS News.
Today’s ruling was a small but important victory in the fight against the billionaire takeover of the media. But the best counter to MAGA oligarchs trying to control the narrative is healthy independent journalism that doesn’t answer to anyone but readers.
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Thanks for watching. I’m British Chris. We’ll see you tomorrow.
Here are some stories you may have missed:
Colorado River Drying Up at Its Source. The Colorado River — which provides drinking water for tens of millions of Americans across seven western states — is reportedly drying up at its source in the Rocky Mountains. In addition to climate change making rainfall and snowpack numbers more unpredictable, the proliferation of data centers had also had a profound impact on water resources, with data centers requiring hundreds of millions of gallons of water every year to cool servers.
Trump’s Border Czar Says ICE Made No Mistakes in Minnesota Despite Killings of U.S. Citizens. Border Czar Tom Homan said Monday that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents didn’t make any mistakes during its crackdown in Minnesota this winter. Those comments came despite federal agents killing U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both of whom were killed on video in broad daylight. Without saying their names, Homan said the people who died at the hands of ICE agents were killed because they “failed to comply with law enforcement.”
Democratic U.S. Senate Candidate in Alaska Out-Raises Republican Incumbent. Democrat Mary Peltola, who is running against Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) in one of the most competitive U.S. Senate races this fall, vastly out-raised her opponent in the second quarter of 2026. Federal campaign finance filings show that Peltola’s campaign brought in $6.9 million since April 1, while the Sullivan campaign raised $2 million. However, Sullivan has more than $10 million spread across all campaign organizations and another $8 million on hand in his campaign account, while Peltola has just $6 million in cash on hand.
