Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
A top cardiologist is sounding the alarm over Trump’s habit of falling asleep in public. Bari Weiss is facing growing pressure from Paramount executives over the chaos she’s unleashed at CBS News. A whistleblower is revealing that Trump officials planned to falsely declare nearly 3 million living people dead. And a federal watchdog has found that ICE detention center guards in Louisiana used a chokehold and even stabbed a detainee with a pen.
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Cardiologist Says Trump’s Doctors Are Hiding Something
Dr. Jonathan Reiner has seen enough. The man who served as Dick Cheney’s personal cardiologist for years is raising serious concerns about Donald Trump’s health, and he’s not pulling punches.
It started with footage showing Trump, who is almost 80, with his eyes shut during an Oval Office event. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was thanking Trump for opening trade doors and lavishing praise on him, and the president was asleep in his chair.
Reiner insisted there’s a “glaring omission” in Trump’s most recent physical, saying his public sleeping episodes are “not normal.”
That physical, conducted at Walter Reed Military Medical Center on May 26, covered a lot of ground. Trump’s weight is up 14 pounds from last year, now at 238 pounds, so he says. His resting heart rate climbed from 62 to 73 beats per minute. The report covered preventive screenings, cardiovascular risk, and metabolic evaluations. But not a word about sleep.
That omission matters more than the White House wants to admit. Trump’s social media posting patterns suggest he’s not sleeping through the night on more than 80 percent of days. Reiner told CNN last month that Trump has what he called “severe daytime somnolence,” which he described plainly as a “severe illness.”
And this isn’t a one-time thing. Trump has been caught nodding off in public settings repeatedly. In the most recent footage, he wasn’t just blinking slowly at his desk. He was slumping sideways in his chair, head lolling, even as Energy Secretary Chris Wright and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin were praising him.
The White House responded typically, calling Reiner a “Democrat hack doctor” and insisting Trump is “the sharpest, most accessible, and energetic president in American history.”
Reiner simply proposed putting Trump’s physician in front of the press to answer questions. But the White House won’t do it.
Trump turns 80 in nine days. The American public has every right to know the full picture of his health.
After Woodrow Wilson had a stroke in 1919, his wife and his doctor hid how incapacitated he really was, running the country in his name while the public was kept in the dark, and we ratified the 25th Amendment in 1967 precisely so that could never happen quietly again. A president’s fitness to do the job isn’t his private property, it belongs to the people who hired him, and a White House that locks the doctor away from the press is telling you it’s got something to hide.
Bari Weiss in Hot Seat Over CBS News Meltdown
Bari Weiss came into CBS News promising to shake things up. Paramount’s leadership now appears to be second-guessing the hire.
The implosion at “60 Minutes” is now bleeding far beyond the news division. CBS Entertainment chief Amy Reisenbach has been telling associates privately that Weiss is inflicting serious damage on the broader CBS brand. Even the network’s showrunners are panicking: after new “60 Minutes” executive producer Nick Bilton publicly compared linear television to a melting ice cube, they’re asking why they should keep developing shows for CBS at all. Others in Hollywood are voicing concern that Weiss is MAGA-fying the network/
Reisenbach isn’t alone. Dozens of senior Paramount figures reportedly share the view that Weiss is hurting the company, and some believe she should be removed.
The immediate crisis centers on “60 Minutes.” Weiss fired the show’s senior leadership, then ousted correspondents Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega, and Sharyn Alfonsi. That left three remaining correspondents, Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim, privately meeting for over an hour to figure out what to do next.
Bilton has been working the phones and the dinner circuit trying to keep them from walking. He sent a memo to staffers praising the trio as “core” to the show’s success and vowed he “will never be instructed by ownership of the company” on what stories to cover. He also elevated Maria Gavrilovic, a respected senior producer who had worked closely with Pelley, to a top slot.
But the broader industry verdict is damning. Former correspondent Steve Kroft told New York Magazine that “’60 Minutes,’ as the audience has known it, no longer exists.” The Writers Guild of America East called the firings “cruel and needless.” SAG-AFTRA called them a “continued assault on the foundations of CBS News.” Former CBS News president Andy Lack said he was “stunned” by how Weiss handled it and that Pelley didn’t deserve what happened to him.
Meanwhile, Bilton is pulling down $2.5 million a year for the job. That’s a million dollars more than the executive producer he replaced.
Nobody inside CBS News even knows if there will even be a “60 Minutes” on the air by fall. Edward R. Murrow built the very standard CBS News was supposed to live by, and back in 1958 he stood in front of a room full of broadcasters and warned that television would rot into nothing but wires and lights in a box the moment its owners cared more about the bottom line than the truth. Watch what’s being done to 60 Minutes and tell me he wasn’t describing this exact day.
This is what happens when billionaires buy legacy media outlets. Honest journalism suffers, and the people who kill it get rewarded. This is exactly why we created Raw America. Become a paying subscriber and help keep independent media strong.
Trump’s White House Wanted to Falsely Declare 2.7 Million People Dead
A former senior Social Security executive named Jeremiah Schofield has filed a 49-page whistleblower disclosure with two Senate committees revealing that Trump administration officials, working with Elon Musk’s DOGE operation, planned to falsely classify 2.7 million living people as dead.
The goal was chaos. According to Schofield, a DOGE official working with the Department of Homeland Security spelled it out plainly on a conference call: people would either self-deport, or they’d show up at a Social Security office to prove they were alive, and get arrested.
Schofield joined Social Security in 2000, worked his way up over 25 years, and was leading IT modernization efforts when DOGE arrived. He initially welcomed them. That changed fast.
When he pulled a sample of 25 people from the 2.7 million on the list, he found they were all alive. Some were U.S. citizens. Some were lawful permanent residents. There were teenagers. Senior citizens. A widow collecting survivor benefits.
The Social Security Administration’s lawyers warned that falsely marking living people as dead would violate federal law. Schofield raised the alarm up the chain. His supervisor agreed with his concerns, then abruptly left the agency two weeks later.
Being placed in Social Security’s Death Master File is economically devastating. Banks use it, along with employers and landlords use it. Once you’re in there, you can’t open a bank account or receive wages. You can’t get credit, or even maintain your insurance plan.
The administration already ran a smaller version of this scheme, moving 6,100 immigrants into the death file in 2025. Some had to physically go to Social Security offices just to prove they were still alive.
Senator Elizabeth Warren was direct, calling it “an illegal attempt by DOGE to weaponize Social Security to carry out Trump’s cruel immigration agenda.”
The men who wrote our Constitution banned bills of attainder right there in Article One because they’d watched governments destroy a person by simple decree, stripping away their standing without a trial, without evidence, without any chance to answer back. Declaring a living, breathing human being legally dead so they can’t bank or work or feed their family is that same ancient abuse dressed up in a spreadsheet, and it’s exactly the power our founders fought a revolution to keep out of the hands of any king or any president.
ICE Guards Choked and Stabbed Detainees
The Department of Homeland Security’s own internal watchdog has documented abuse at one of the country’s biggest ICE detention centers, and the findings are ugly.
At the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, a federal inspector general’s report found that a guard applied a chokehold to a detainee to “gain control” during a scuffle with another detainee. ICE’s own policy manual explicitly forbids chokeholds and neck restraints unless deadly force is authorized. The officer received “remedial training.”
In a separate incident, a guard stabbed a detainee’s thumb with a pen because the detainee didn’t move his hand away from a door. The facility determined the officer needed disciplinary action, but investigators found no documentation that any discipline was ever carried out.
A third incident involved a five-person team using mechanical restraints and a suicide smock on a detainee who refused to change into it. Staff failed to document the required medical review.
The broader picture from the report is grim: unsanitary food storage, leaking ceilings, denying immigrants meetings with their lawyers, and medical staff failing to document required treatment. The inspector general warned that guards’ behavior toward detainees could lead to “property damage, injury, and death.”
More than 60,000 people are held in ICE detention on any given day. The Trump administration has told Congress it wants to expand that to 99,000.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told the House Homeland Security Committee this week that ICE’s detention standards are better than most U.S. prisons. A DHS spokesperson dismissed the inspector general’s findings as “minor infractions.”
The people detained in these facilities aren’t convicted criminals. They’re immigrants entitled to due process. And the government’s own watchdog is documenting abuse that the administration is shrugging off as nothing to worry about.
When Madison and the First Congress wrote the Fifth Amendment, they chose their words with deliberate care, promising that no person, not no citizen but no person, shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The instant a government decides which human beings count as persons and which ones don’t, it stops being a government of laws, and an administration waving off chokeholds and stabbings as minor infractions is telling you exactly where that line has already moved.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Senate Votes to Keep ICE Funded Through the Rest of Trump’s Term. The Republican-controlled Senate has passed a $69.5 billion bill that would fund U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) through 2029, when President Donald Trump’s second term ends. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) was the only Republican to oppose the bill. The legislation now heads to the House of Representatives, where Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) says he plans to pass it next week.
Trump Confirms He’ll Attend NBA Finals in New York Next Week. President Trump announced this week that he’ll be in attendance at Madison Square Garden to watch Game 3 of the NBA Finals on Monday, at the invitation of Knicks owner James Dolan. Trump also did not rule out attending Game 4 next Wednesday night. He would be the first sitting U.S. president to attend an NBA Finals game. Oddmakers at BetOnline.ag estimate a 75 percent likelihood that Trump will be booed by fans at Madison Square Garden.
Utah Residents Petition to Court to Let Them Vote on Data Center Construction. A group of Utah residents are now asking state courts to intervene to allow a ballot referendum on a proposed data center outside Great Salt Lake. The data center — which would span 40,000 acres and be twice the size of Manhattan upon completion — was initially approved by the Box Elder County Board of Commissioners earlier this year, and plaintiffs are arguing that the Utah Constitution stipulates that any law passed by a county’s legislative body is subject to a voter referendum.
New York Legislature Passes One-Year Moratorium on New Data Centers. Lawmakers in New York voted this week to impose a one-year ban on all new data center construction. The bill would also require new rules for data centers to follow that include energy efficiency goals, labor standards and direct benefits to communities. The legislation awaits Gov. Kathy Hochul’s (D) signature.
Anti-Trump Republicans Struggle in Democratic Primaries. Despite being prominently featured in the media, anti-Trump former Republicans running as Democrats in various primaries across the U.S. have so far had mixed results this election season. Former Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan finished fourth in Georgia’s Democratic gubernatorial primary last month. In Pennsylvania, former federal prosecutor Ryan Crosswell — who left the DOJ after being asked to drop a corruption case against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams — failed to secure the Democratic nomination in a contested Democratic primary for a congressional seat. And in New York, George Conway, who is the former husband of one-time Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway, is struggling to make headway in the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District.
