Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Trump’s doctor is releasing a medical report that raises more questions than it answers, and top physicians are laughing at it. Senate Republicans are quietly forming a new caucus aimed at frustrating Trump’s priorities. A fired Border Patrol commander is attacking Trump’s own team. And a Republican strategist is saying Trump just made a hundred-million-dollar mistake in Texas.
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Doctor Calls Out Trump’s White House Over Medical Report
Donald Trump turns 80 in a couple of weeks, and his personal physician just put out a memo saying the president is in “excellent health.” Though his memo doesn’t actually show the results that led to that conclusion.
Trump’s doctor, Captain Sean Barbarella, listed a series of diagnostic tests, including a coronary CT angiography, a carotid artery ultrasound, an echocardiogram, and an AI-enhanced electrocardiogram. Then he said all of them showed no abnormalities. But he noticeably left out the actual numbers.
The White House argued that their absence should be seen as “confirmation” that nothing clinically meaningful was found, but Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who was Dick Cheney’s cardiologist, pointed out that’s not how medicine works.
Reiner said that explanation flat-out “not true” in a social media post. He pointed out that a medication list from a president’s physician is supposed to be complete, not have multiple medications omitted.
Some medications were listed without dosages. The memo mentioned aspirin and two other drugs, without specifying how much Trump is taking of any of them. The White House said the list was “abbreviated for readability and relevance.”
Physicians told the Wall Street Journal that the report was “almost too good to be true” for a man Trump’s age. Vascular surgeon Dr. William Shutze said it “seems to be a filtered narrative.”
Trump’s cholesterol numbers in particular are raising eyebrows. Daniel Torrent, a Georgia vascular surgeon, told the Journal his cholesterol numbers are abnormally good, and that medication alone doesn’t usually get you there, especially not for a man who famously lives on fast food and doesn’t exercise.
The memo also claimed that an AI-enhanced EKG estimated Trump’s cardiac age as 14 years younger than his actual age. Reiner told CNN that he and his cardiology colleagues laughed at that one.
And the report completely ignores Trump’s bruised hands, ankle swelling, neck rash, episodes of slurred speech, and the president visibly struggling to stay awake during high-stakes meetings and press conferences.
Trump has repeatedly bragged about acing a “high difficulty cognitive test” four times in a row. What he doesn’t mention is that the test in question, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, is a dementia screening tool designed to be easy for any normally functioning adult. It doesn’t measure intelligence, but rather if someone has severe cognitive decline. Passing it doesn’t mean what Trump thinks it means.
Folks, we’ve seen this movie before. When Woodrow Wilson was felled by a stroke in 1919, his wife Edith and his physician hid the truth from the country for the better part of a year while the government ran out of a sickroom, and it’s exactly that kind of cover-up that gave us the 25th Amendment a half century later. The American people are the only ones who actually own this government, and a government that asks you to take its word for it, no numbers, no dosages, no honest accounting of what the whole country can see with its own eyes, isn’t being transparent. It’s running a stagecraft operation on the people it answers to.
Senate Republicans About to Cause Huge Problems for Trump
Congressional recesses are usually when tensions between the White House and Capitol Hill cool down a little. But Republicans in Washington are now taking their frustration with Trump to a new level.
It started with what Trump did to longtime Texas Senator John Cornyn, who was blindsided when Trump swooped in and endorsed scandal-plagued state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Cornyn lost badly. And his GOP colleagues are not letting it go.
Cornyn posted a parable on social media about a frog and a scorpion. The scorpion asks the frog to carry it across a river, then stings the frog and drowns them both, saying “I couldn’t help myself, it’s my character.” He didn’t mention Trump, but he didn’t have to.
Republican Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who was pushed out of his own primary after Trump endorsed an opponent, didn’t hold back, saying: “The president does not understand functionally that you cannot get things done unless you have some sense of unity with the people who you must work with.”
Senate Republicans have told the White House they won’t move on a major $70 billion ICE funding bill until Trump cancels his $1.8 billion slush fund set up to compensate some of the people convicted for storming the Capitol on January 6th.
Trump can only lose three Republican votes on any partisan measure if Democrats stay united. And more than half the Republican conference is opposed to the fund. A federal judge has already ordered the administration to pause it while a legal challenge plays out.
The senators now willing to break with Trump include the usual names: Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul. But that group has now expanded into what some senators are calling the “wounded bear caucus,” a loose collection of colleagues who Trump forced into retirement and no longer have anything to lose.
That includes John Cornyn, Bill Cassidy, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who stepped aside after Trump made clear he wouldn’t back him.
The expectation among Republican staffers is that almost all legislation outside of basic government funding and defense policy is now on hold. Most of the president’s legislative priorities, all potentially stalled because Trump keeps picking fights with the people he needs to win.
Folks, James Madison told us in Federalist 51 that the whole machine was built so ambition would be made to counteract ambition, so that the people running each branch would guard their own institution’s power even against a president of their own party. For nine years these senators buried that instinct and bent the knee, and now that Trump’s torched their careers anyway, they’re suddenly rediscovering that Congress holds the power of the purse and that Article One comes before Article Two for a reason. It’s a sorry reason to finally find your spine, but a Republic only works when the people we send to Washington remember they answer to the Constitution and not to one man.
Trump’s Former Border Enforcer Goes Scorched-Earth on His Administration
Gregory Bovino used to be the face of Trump’s deportation operation. He oversaw the ICE operation in Minneapolis that ended with federal agents killing two U.S. citizens in broad daylight. Trump demoted him in January. And now Bovino is on the other side of the world, attacking Trump’s own team.
Over the weekend, Bovino traveled to Portugal, to speak at the Remigration Summit, a racist gathering of far-right Europeans pushing for the mass expulsion of immigrants and minorities. Before the event, he told a far-right outlet that he’s now in “battle” not with immigrants, but with “timid politicians,” specifically calling out Trump’s “inner circle.”
He went after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin — who ran a plumbing business before being elected to the Senate, mocking Mullin as “a great plumber” who could “probably fix a leaky faucet” before suggesting Mullin ill-equipped to round up ande deport undocumented immigrants.
He also went after White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, accusing her of “caving to anarchists” over the ongoing protests outside a New Jersey immigration detention facility.
Bovino has been offering himself up to personally “handle” the Newark protests, and posting selfies at airport departure gates hinting he’s ready to fly in and take over. Though the White House has not publicly responded to any of it.
We’re witnessing a visible sign of fracture within the far-right. Bovino clearly believes Trump is going soft and that the people around the president are watering down the agenda he was hired to execute. He’s even airing his grievances on the global stage. Trump may not notice now, but his former border chief trashing his administration certainly doesn’t project strength.
Folks, let’s be clear about what that word “remigration” actually means, because it’s a sanitized European import for the forced expulsion of human beings based on where they came from, and we ought to know that story cold. We ran our own version in 1954 and called it Operation Wetback, and we built something far worse in 1942 when we rounded up our own citizens into camps, the policy the Supreme Court blessed in Korematsu before Justice Robert Jackson warned that such a precedent lies around like a loaded weapon ready for any hand that cares to pick it up. The fight inside this administration isn’t over whether to point that weapon, it’s over how fast, and a free people had better understand the difference between those two things before somebody makes the choice for them.
Republican Says Trump Made a ‘$100 Million Mistake’
Republican strategist Brad Todd didn’t mince words about Trump’s endorsement of Ken Paxton in Texas’ Republican US Senate primary, telling CNN the president “made a 100-million-dollar mistake.”
John Cornyn, according to Todd, was a “much more credible” candidate who was “going to be a shoo-in,” while Paxton is “a real lift.”
Paxton brings serious baggage into a general election. There are the accusations involving separate primary residences claimed with his ex-wife, her filing for divorce on “biblical grounds,” and his criminal record and long history of corruption. The GOP’s Senate campaign arm had been attacking Paxton’s record before Trump endorsed him and he won the runoff. Those posts were quietly deleted after Paxton became the nominee.
Even Steve Bannon, who’s about as far in Trump’s corner as anyone gets, called it “very tough” for Paxton to win in November.
Trump, meanwhile, is already declaring the general election over, posting on his Nazi-infested social media site that Paxton’s Democratic opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, is “the worst Texas candidate” he’s ever seen.
The irony is that Trump used his considerable political capital to knock out a loyal Republican senator who would have cruised to re-election, in favor of a candidate his own strategists are describing as a high-risk gamble.
Texas is a Senate seat the GOP was never supposed to have to fight for. And Republicans will be asking whose fault that was if Paxton comes up short in November.
Folks, don’t mistake me here, John Cornyn’s no hero in this story, and his record’s got plenty in it that folks watching this show would never sign onto. But two things can be true at once, and the second one ought to worry every American, because we’re watching a major party torch one of its own safe seats just to feed one man’s grudge and reward a candidate drowning in corruption charges. George Washington spent half his Farewell Address in 1796 warning us that the spirit of party would one day let a cunning and ambitious man put his own appetites ahead of the country, and a party that picks loyalty over character every single time is precisely the machine he was afraid we’d hand our children.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
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Trump Complains ‘Rigged’ Courts Are Halting His Birthright Citizenship Order. During a Truth Social posting marathon over the weekend, President Trump lashed out at the judicial system for being “rigged” against his agenda. The missive comes as the Supreme Court is considering litigation against his executive order seeking to repeal birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court’s term ends this month, and judges are expected to strike down the order as it directly violates the 14th Amendment.
