Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
A new report confirms that Donald Trump has stacked his administration with more centimillionaires and billionaires than the last three presidents combined. New polls shows that even the most hardcore Trump supporters are turning on him with less than three months to go before the midterms. Newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche just admitted out loud that his Justice Department will act in lockstep with the White House. And one senator just raised a lot of eyebrows with a pointed jab about Trump’s relationship with a young blonde staffer.
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Trump Under Heightened Scrutiny for Surrounding Himself with Billionaires
A new bombshell report from advocacy group Public Citizen just dropped, and its findings are staggering: Donald Trump has appointed 57 people worth at least $100 million to his administration. That includes 17 ambassadors and 40 top-ranking officials across the executive branch.
To put that in perspective, that’s more than four times the combined total of the previous three presidents. George W. Bush had five executive branch appointees worth $100 million or more. Joe Biden had five in his White House. Barack Obama only had three.
To repeat: Trump has 57.
Among those 57 include eight of the 23 people in Trump’s Cabinet. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Education Secretary Linda McMahon are both billionaires. Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg and Small Business Administration chief Kelly Loeffler are also billionaires. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and special envoy Steve Witkoff each have net worths in the hundreds of millions.
Public Citizen’s list doesn’t even include Trump himself, who has more than $6 billion to his name according to Forbes. It also doesn’t include Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who spent last year helping Trump gut federal agencies like USAID, leading to the deaths of millions of people in the poorest countries.
Trump has repeatedly said he conflates extreme wealth with “great competence” and said the super-rich are “some of the smartest business leaders.” He views a nine-figure net worth as proof a person knows how to run a country.
But Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert made the point that when the people running the government are pulled almost entirely from the top tenth of the top one percent, it’s worth asking who these people are actually working for.
Trump won back the White House in 2024 largely because a plurality of working-class voters believed him when he said he would bring down the cost of living. Now those same voters are watching him pack his government with people who almost certainly haven’t even thought about the cost of groceries in decades.
The disconnect is becoming even more apparent. A July poll found that only 32 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the economy. To compare, that’s down from 40 percent at the start of his second term last January.
Theodore Roosevelt spent his presidency warning that a government owned by the very rich would inevitably govern for the very rich, and he built an entire era of American reform around breaking that grip. We’re now running that experiment in reverse, handing the levers back to the exact people Roosevelt said democracy had to be protected from, and then acting puzzled when nobody in Washington seems to hear working families at all.
Even Trump’s Most Devout Supporters Are Bailing
Trump isn’t just bleeding out support from independents. He’s now watching support from inside his own party dwindle, even from the most diehard Republicans.
A new poll from the Economist and YouGov put Trump’s approval among Republicans at 79 percent. That sounds high until you realize that’s a steep 12-point drop from his second inauguration. And the number of Republicans who “strongly approve” of Trump has absolutely cratered, plummeting from 68 percent to just 48 percent.
An increasingly large number of Republicans who don’t identify with the MAGA movement are also disgusted with this administration. Only 51 percent of non-MAGA Republicans approve of Trump right now, with that approval rating dropping by 13 points in just one week.
Other polls are showing similar data. The Financial Times found Trump’s net approval among Republicans fell eight points in just 30 days. ActiVote pegged Republican approval at 79 percent, which is down from the 86 percent registered in January of 2025.
It’s also worth remembering that during the entirety of Trump’s first presidency, his approval among Republicans averaged 88 percent between 2017 and 2021, according to Gallup.
The economy is a big reason for the drop in support. Trump’s war in Iran, which he launched in February without congressional authorization, has also contributed significantly to his declining popularity among members of his own party. Iran war support has stayed gone above 40 percent since the bombing started, as gas prices have skyrocketed from roughly $3 a gallon before the war to more than $4 today.
Republican voters are feeling particularly squeezed right now. Consumer sentiment data compiled by the University of Michigan data shows that among Republican consumers, confidence in the economy plunged by 9.5 points just this month. That’s more than double the overall national decline, and it’s one of the largest monthly drops pollsters have recorded in decades.
This has big implications for the midterms. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll from last month gave Democrats a 10-point advantage among voters who say they’re certain to vote in November. Even conservative group AFP Action is warning that one in five core Republican voters could stay home this fall. Their own executive director used the word “scary” to drive the point home.
The Framers put the war power in Article I, Section 8 and handed it to Congress instead of the president, because they’d spent their whole lives watching kings send other people’s sons to die on a whim. When one man starts a war by himself and the bill shows up at the gas pump six months later, the country ends up learning the exact lesson the Constitution was written to spare us.
Todd Blanche Confirms His DOJ Will Be a Trump Rubber Stamp
On Sunday, newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche — who was Trump’s former personal criminal defense attorney — told NBC’s Meet the Press that the Justice Department wouldn’t be independent of the White House.
Blanche didn’t say that the DOJ would side with the White House “under certain conditions,” or even offer an “it depends” to assuage concerns. He said it on the air, out in the open.
Blanche bizarrely tried to argue that having an independent DOJ would somehow mean refusing to prosecute violent crime if Trump made that request. No one is suggesting the DOJ shouldn’t prosecute violent criminals. We all know just as well as Blanche that questions about DOJ independence are valid, because Trump has openly communicated that he wants to use the Justice Department to go after his own political enemies.
Blanche insists Trump — who, again, is his former client — never asked him to do anything unethical or illegal. He also insisted that any suggestions that the president calls him up and tells him who to prosecute is a “false narrative.”
This all ignores the basic reality that when Blanche served as deputy attorney general under Pam Bondi, Trump repeatedly pressured Bondi on his own social media platform to charge his political enemies with crimes, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Democratic Senator Adam Schiff of California.
Trump said he meant to send that message privately and accidentally posted it publicly, but the intent was clear. And Bondi was eventually fired. If Blanche expects to keep his job, he won’t do it by saying no when the boss asks for something.
More than 1,200 former DOJ employees came out against Blanche’s confirmation for this exact reason. This includes career DOJ employee Stacey Young, who said Blanche has shown time and again that loyalty to the president Trumps his duty to uphold the Constitution.
Democratic Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey also stated the obvious, that Blanche was give the nation’s top law enforcement job specifically because he’s willing to cross any ethical or legal boundary to protect the president.
To get an idea of just how partisan Blanche’s DOJ is, it’s worth pointing out that just a few days after he was confirmed, the new attorney general showed up at a political rally with Trump and praised the Republican candidate running against New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul. He also spoke at the far-right CPAC summit in March, and dismissed concerns about federal agents possibly showing up at polling places this November.
In United States v. Nixon, a unanimous Supreme Court, including three justices Nixon had put on the bench himself, ruled that no president sits above the reach of the law. An attorney general who won’t promise independence is quietly telling us he’d like to find out whether that decision still means anything at all.
Ossoff Suggests Trump Having Affair with Young Staffer
Over the weekend, Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia tore into Trump over the Iran war, golfing while the country is in crisis, making billions from the stock market and falling asleep in public. But the line that stood out the most was about Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old White House staffer who has become nearly inseparable from Trump.
Ossoff said Trump clearly doesn’t want to do his job, but just wants to spend his time on vanity projects like his ballroom, and, most notably travel with “Natalie” on what Ossoff called Trump’s “apparently defenseless flying palace.” That’s a reference to the $400 million jet that Qatar’s royal family gave Trump as a gift in clear violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause.
That plane made headlines last month when Trump secretly swapped out jets after the NATO summit in Turkey over an alleged security threat. He was seen boarding the Qatari jet — remade into an Air Force One thanks to almost a billion dollars in upgrades — but was instead smuggled in a catering truck to a separate military jet. Harp was reportedly one of the only people Trump brought with him into that catering truck. He notably left Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the decoy jet, which could have potentially been shot down.
According to the bestselling book “Regime Change” by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump has boasted that Harp will “never leave” him. A 2024 story in the Times described how she often wrote “devotional” letters to Trump, which included bizarre lines like “you are all that matters to me.” She even called him her “Guardian and Protector in this life.” Some members of Trump’s inner circle reportedly nicknamed Harp the “human printer” because she travels with a portable printer just to hand him documents, most of which are flattery articles from right-wing media and pro-Trump memes.
Her own estranged brother, Preston Harp, told the Daily Mail that his sister’s relationship with the president looked “very unhealthy,” and that Natalie is “just like his fan club.”
Ossoff is apparently the first Democratic official to call out Natalie Harp by name. He probably won’t be the last.
When Woodrow Wilson was flattened by a stroke in 1919, this country was effectively governed for months through one unelected person standing at his bedside, and almost nobody in official Washington was willing to say so out loud. A republic can survive a president who isn’t up to the job, but it can’t survive a capital city that agrees to pretend everything’s fine.
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It’s a virtual certainty that newsrooms in outlets controlled by MAGA billionaires would never cover how a Democratic senator implied that the 80 year-old president is cheating on the first lady with a 35 year-old aide. Just like you would never hear from David Ellison’s CBS or Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post that this president is losing support from even the most hardcore Trump supporters. But Raw America can cover these stories the way they need to be covered, precisely because we don’t answer to a billionaire or a corporation. We only answer to you, the reader.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.
Here are some stories you may have missed:
Trump Threatens to Bomb Key U.S. Ally as Iran War Drags On. President Donald Trump said Monday in an interview with Fox News that he wouldn’t hesitate to “bomb the s— out of” the Gulf Arab nation of Oman if it interfered in his war with Iran. In that same interview, Trump also revealed he had a communications back-channel with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), while the Iranian regime continues to deny it’s in talks with the U.S. However, Iran’s government has said it’s finalizing a deal with Oman to move ships through the Strait of Hormuz, which has remained closed since Trump relaunched his war last month.
Supreme Court Again Rejects Trump’s Attempt to Overturn Sexual Abuse Verdict. Despite its 6-3 conservative supermajority, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) once again rejected Trump’s attempt to overturn a New York jury’s 2023 $5 million verdict finding him civilly liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll. SCOTUS previously denied Trump’s appeal of the verdict last month. The Court released its latest decision Monday with no further explanation from justices. Trump is still challenging an $83.3 million defamation judgment a separate New York jury awarded Carroll in 2024.
Trump Accuses BBC of Harassment as Network Aims to Subpoena His Adult Children. With the discovery process underway in Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC, the president is now accusing the broadcaster of harassing his family as it seeks to issue subpoenas to Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC stems from a BBC documentary about the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which prompted Trump to launch a $10 billion defamation lawsuit. The BBC’s lawyers are arguing that obtaining documents and sworn testimony from Trump’s children could provide new insight on Trump’s thought process leading up to his infamous January 6 speech, in which he called on his supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.”
