Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Trouble’s brewing inside the Trump White House, with staffers leaking details of growing friction between the president and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. One Republican senator is now publicly admitting that Trump’s war with Iran has left America worse off and that his party will “probably” pay for it in November. Mitch McConnell’s hometown paper just a pre-obituary laying out why the 84 year-old senator will be remembered as one of the most destructive figures in American politics. And a rural Texas border town is now suing the Trump administration, arguing its border wall could ruin the entire community.
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Trump Increasingly ‘Annoyed’ with Markwayne Mullin
Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem atop the Department of Homeland Security just four months ago, is already ruffling feathers inside the White House. NBC News reports that tension is building between Mullin and the White House, according to a senior Trump administration official and a senior Homeland Security official, both speaking anonymously.
Mullin apparently set the president off when he paused ICE’s vehicle stops after agents killed two people in Houston, Texas and Biddeford, Maine in less than a week, leading to growing protests in both cities. Trump abruptly reversed that decision, since Mullin never asked permission from the White House.
One unnamed administration official told NBC “every Cabinet secretary knows that they have to come to the White House for major policy decisions.” The source added that Trump “sees, hears, reads everything.”
Mullin later went on CNN and got into it with Jake Tapper over the Supreme Court’s ruling in Mullin versus Doe, the six to three decision from late June that cleared the way to end temporary protected status for roughly three hundred fifty thousand Haitians and several thousand Syrians. Mullin told viewers those people could either fill out the paperwork and stay here under permanent status or take a plane ticket home. What he left out is that temporary protected status doesn’t itself create a path to a green card, and only some holders can adjust at all, depending on how they entered the country, their record, and whether they’ve used public benefits. For most of the people he was talking to, that paperwork isn’t sitting there waiting to be filled out. The performance reportedly rankled the White House too.
Additionally, Mullin’s push to put his own ally in charge of ICE has caused some major headaches among Trump’s team. Lance Schroyer spent nearly thirty years with the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, rising to major, and he currently serves as Mullin’s senior adviser at Homeland Security. He was also part of Mullin’s security detail back when Mullin was a senator. Trump nominated him in late June, and he still needs Senate confirmation. Some officials doubt Schroyer’s ability to run the agency, pointing out that he has no direct experience with federal law enforcement or immigration enforcement. A senior administration official told NBC that several officials aren’t “particularly thrilled with him.”
The White House insists everything’s fine, with spokeswoman Abigail Jackson stating Trump and Mullin remain aligned on the administration’s goals. But when unnamed officials are leaking details of a growing conflict between the president and the DHS secretary to the media just months into the job, that’s pretty significant. It’s worth watching to see if Mullin will still be in his role this time next year.
Here’s why this is more than palace gossip. In October of 1973, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy William Ruckelshaus both resigned rather than fire the special prosecutor investigating the president. They understood something simple. A cabinet officer swears an oath to the Constitution, not to the man in the Oval Office. Mullin stopped those vehicle stops after two men were shot dead, and inside of a day the president overruled him and the pause was gone. Whatever you think of Markwayne Mullin, notice what this tells us about where we are. The only functioning check left inside this administration isn’t law, or evidence, or two dead men in Houston and Biddeford. It’s whether one man happens to agree with you that morning.
Republican Senator Admits America ‘Worse Off’ Thanks to Trump’s War with Iran
Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has voted multiple times to end U.S. involvement in Iran. He’s now telling reporters that America is definitively “worse off” than before Trump launched the war in late February.
Paul was blunt with reporters on Capitol Hill, saying: “I think the Iran war has not been a success. He added that he’s “been opposed to the Iran war from the beginning” and that “by any objective measure, we’re worse off than we were before the war.”
He pointed specifically to the Strait of Hormuz, which only recently become militarized after Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked Iran. Paul noted there’s no “easy way to un-militarize the strait.”
More and more Republican lawmakers are worried that Trump’s decision to increase hostilities with Iran has boxed in both the administration and the U.S. as a whole. The Republican-controlled House voted Thursday to pass a War Powers Act resolution limiting Trum'p’s ability to wage war in Iran.
Continued Iranian threats against ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz have since pushed Brent crude past the $100 a barrel mark, and gas prices have climbed to a national average of more than $4 a gallon. Crude futures went up nearly five percent on Thursday after Trump threatened to attack civilian targets in Iran if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps attacks ships in the strait.
In addition to the Iranian military, Houthi rebels from Yemen — which are backed by Iran — are now threatening Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, putting even more pressure on global oil markets.
Paul also quipped that Americans “are mostly upset about how much things cost” and said his party will “probably” face a backlash from voters in November. The Kentucky Republican couldn’t help but blame inflation during the Biden years for higher prices, but admitted that some of the higher prices Americans are paying for goods are a byproduct of Trump’s war.
Here’s the thing nobody in that hallway said out loud. When the framers sat down in Philadelphia in 1787, they put the power to declare war in Article One, Section Eight, and they handed it to Congress, not to the president. Madison wrote later that the executive is the branch most interested in war and most prone to it, which is exactly why the decision got placed with the branch that has to go home and face voters. We’re now five months into a war Congress never voted on. Gas is over four dollars. Republican senators are admitting on camera that we’re weaker than when we started. That’s not a policy failure you fix with better generals. That’s what happens when a country quietly stops using the one piece of machinery the founders built specifically to keep a single man from taking us to war by himself.
Mitch McConnell’s Hometown Paper Publishes Devastating Pre-Obituary
Mitch McConnell’s own local paper isn’t waiting to define the longtime senator’s legacy, with a columnist calling him a “detestable figure” in a scathing piece that could be read as a sort of pre-obituary.
Louisville Courier-Journal columnist Joseph Gerth explained he wrote the piece now, rather than waiting until McConnell dies, so it wouldn’t be dismissed for being insensitive to the dead. Gerth noted that he didn’t want to hear “how dare you say that about a guy who just died” similar to how criticism of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was received after his recent death.
McConnell, who is 84 years old, has been hospitalized since June 14. His office attributed to a fall along with a bout of pneumonia. But his staff has yet to explain why he was rushed to George Washington University Hospital last month after a 911 call that reportedly described a heart attack and an unconscious patient who needed CPR.
Gerth didn’t hold back in his column, calling McConnell is “every bit the detestable figure” that Richard Nixon was. The columnist argued Kentucky’s senior U.S. senator will be primarily remembered for his manipulation of the Supreme Court confirmation process. He noted that McConnell oversaw the court shift from center-right to far-right over a four-year period, and helped overturn 60 years of civil rights case law along with nearly a century of law allowing Congress to check the presidency.
Gerth also called McConnell one of Trump’s chief enablers. He wrote that in the 1960s, McConnell actually supported civil rights, but eventually drifted away from that position as he got older and more entrenched. He added that McConnell “had more guts as a young man than he had as an old man.”
The Courier-Journal writer also honed in on McConnell’s blockade of Merrick Garland, who was President Obama’s third Supreme Court nominee in 2016. Even though McConnell claimed voters should be the ones who decide which party’s president will get another justice, McConnell then broke his own rule when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020. The Kentucky senator rushed through Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, just eight days before an election Trump lost.
Gerth wrote that this move turned a slim 5-4 conservative majority into a radical right-wing 6-3 supermajority, which “destroyed the court’s credibility with the American people.”
McConnell has a few local wins, which include expanding the Jefferson Memorial Forest in Louisville. But Gerth argued none of those victories will amount to much next to his abject failure to rein in Trump.
After the January 6 insurrection, McConnell called Trump “practically and morally responsible” for the attack on the Capitol. As the leader of Senate Republicans, he had the chance to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial, which could have barred him from ever holding federal office again. He didn’t do it.
Gerth reminded readers of McConnell’s own past criticism of Trump, calling him “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” a “despicable human being,” and a “narcissist.” Despite that, McConnell still ended up supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign after he was convicted of 34 felonies.
Gerth put McConnell in the same camp as disgraced presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, saying they both ended up holding the same positions on civil rights. He added that these regressive policies are now propped up by a Supreme Court McConnell built, without an inkling of the courage Goldwater once showed against a corrupt president during the Nixon years.
Gerth concluded by writing: “Whew! I’m glad I got that off my chest while he’s still alive.”
Questions about McConnell’s health keep piling up with no answer. His D.C. office, which is run by longtime aide Terry Carmack, still won’t say what work McConnell’s actually doing right now.
Here’s the part that ought to stay with you. In August of 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, and a young Mitch McConnell was on the right side of that fight. Two years before that he’d been a congressional intern here in Washington, and he stepped outside his office to watch the March on Washington fill the Mall. He’s told that story himself, more than once, with real pride. Six decades later, the court he assembled has spent its time pulling apart the legal architecture that moment built. That’s the whole tragedy in a sentence. A man doesn’t have to start out as a villain. He just has to decide, over and over across sixty years, that holding onto power matters more than whatever he was going to do with it. And then one morning he wakes up as the most effective enemy of the thing he once stood on the Mall to watch.
Rural Texas Town Sues Trump Over Border Wall
Presidio, Texas has a little over 3,200 residents, and its development district is now in federal court fighting Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security over border wall construction. The town is arguing the wall could end up flooding the entire community, and the administration is breaking the law in its rush to build it.
The DHS is determined to move forward with its $46 billion plan to build a massive border wall stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. The project has attracted opposition from landowners, environmental groups and Native American tribes, who are all warning the rushed construction is actively threatening historical sites, sacred land and ways of life along the Southern border. This argument is particularly powerful now that illegal border crossings have dropped to historic lows.
Presidio is warning that if the wall is built, it could compromise a fragile system of berms and levees built in the 1970s and ‘80s to protect the town from flash floods, which is a very real danger in West Texas. They also argue the DHS is violating the Rivers and Harbors Act, say because of how the Act is written, the agency was required to consult the Army Corps of Engineers before moving forward, which they never did.
According to court filings, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is planning to rip out the earthen levee slope and replace it with a concrete wall topped by 30-foot steel bollard panels. When the town asked for more details, they were denied due to “national security” reasons.
Democracy Forward lawyer Laura Bakst, who is representing the town, told the Associated Press there is a “long history here of CBP construction causing or increasing flood risks.” But the Trump administration argues it’s premature to argue harm since construction hasn’t happened yet. The DHS continues to insist it has broad authority to waive environmental and historical laws to build the wall.
While that waiver power does exist, critics say the department is stretching it well beyond its original intent by applying broad waivers across the entire 2,000-mile length of the Southern border with Mexico. Democracy Forward attorney Louis Katz called it an “extraordinary exertion of authority.”
The timing is uniquely important. Justice Department lawyer Alexander Yun told the judge overseeing the case that construction in the Presidio area could begin in late August, September, or October. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Congress last month that the initial layer of border wall should be finished by this time next year, with CBP head Rodney Scott saying crews are building six miles of wall a week across the nation.
As for the sharp drop in border crossings, the government argues that those numbers are just an “anomaly” and that the real goal is to reduce the number of illegal crossings to zero. Judge Reggie Walton — who was first appointed to the federal bench by George H.W. Bush — wasn’t buying those claims, saying it’s “just a reality” that people will always try to cross the border. However, he didn’t seem to be sold on the town’s side, saying he’s wrestling with how much authority he actually has to rein in the federal government, given that Congress handed it the power to waive certain requirements. Walton says he’ll issue a ruling by the end of July.
In 1952, Harry Truman seized the country’s steel mills. He said he had no choice, that American troops were fighting in Korea and the nation couldn’t survive a strike. The Supreme Court told him no, in Youngstown Sheet and Tube versus Sawyer, because Congress had never given him that power and because national security isn’t a magic phrase that makes the law disappear. Presidio is asking the same question seventy-four years later. Thirty-two hundred people want to know whether the levees keeping the river out of their houses are going to hold, and the answer they got back was that they’re not allowed to know. When a government tells its own citizens that the safety of their own town is classified information, that wall isn’t about the border anymore.
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Here are a few important stories you may have missed:
Vance Removes Secret Service Agent Who Complained About His High-Maintenance Demands. Vice President JD Vance has reportedly booted a member of his Secret Service detail for leaking Vance’s outlandish demands to reporters. The agent described one incident in which Vance insisted that agents accompany his young son on a military helicopter to attend a golf lesson. Agents also grumbled about being asked to drop everything to accommodate Vance’s last-minute family vacations and complained about his “inappropriate” use of taxpayer-funded resources.
Former Military Officers Say They Were Pushed Out for Questioning Hegseth. Several high-ranking military officers recently confided to MS NOW that they were forced into retirement for pushing back on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s orders. Officers were reportedly angry with Hegseth for pushing out General Christopher Donahue, who was commander of U.S. forces in Europe and Africa. The officers said it was hypocritical for Hegseth to boast about the “warrior ethos,” saying Donahue had a “real warfighting background” and that Hegseth was intimidated by him.
Oil Climbs to $100 per Barrel as Iran Tightens Grip on Strait of Hormuz. As President Donald Trump’s war with Iran continues to escalate, oil prices are climbing to the triple-digit mark. Global benchmark Brent crude jumped by six percent to $100 per barrel when oil markets opened on Thursday. Traffic in the Strait of Hormuz has slowed to a crawl as Iran’s government continues to attack U.S. targets throughout the region. The strait is a major chokepoint for the global oil trade, with roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply using it as a primary route.
