Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Trump’s White House seriously weighed suspending a constitutional right that dates back to the founding of the republic in order to speed up deportations. The New York Times is facing a wave of criticism after publishing a softball interview with a Jeffrey Epstein associate. Screenshots appeared to show Eric Trump asking former UFC champion Daniel Cormier about betting on “rigged” fights at the White House’s UFC before Cormier deleted the post and both men denied it. And JD Vance’s book tour is going so poorly that it’s making Marco Rubio look like a viable presidential candidate.
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Stephen Miller Wanted to Suspend Core Constitutional Right to Ramp Up Deportations
The New York Times is reporting that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the man most responsible for Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, spent months pushing one of the most radical ideas floated inside any modern White House: suspending habeas corpus for undocumented immigrants.
Habeas corpus is the legal principle that the government must justify, before a judge, why it’s locking someone up. It’s been part of American law for centuries. The founders thought it was important enough to put it in Article I of the Constitution. But Miller didn’t care. He wanted it gone.
Hardcore Trump loyalist Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary, was so alarmed he wrote a secret memo to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on April 29 of last year, warning against Miller’s proposal. He pointed out: “Denial of habeas corpus rights was a key grievance underlying the American Revolution.”
Habeas corpus has only been formally suspended four times in U.S. history, each time during a war or armed rebellion. Only Lincoln did it without congressional authorization, and only at the outset of the Civil War.
Trump himself was interested. The day after Scharf sent his warning memo to Wiles, Trump publicly alluded to it at a cabinet meeting.
The idea eventually faded, but not because anyone in the West Wing had a change of heart. It faded because the legal fight would have been too costly
Miller found a workaround anyway. Starting last July, ICE began treating immigrants arrested anywhere inside the United States as if they’d just been caught at the border, meaning they could be held without a bond hearing. Judges ruled against it, but the White House routinely ignored them.
Miller also pushed hard to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minneapolis after federal agents killed Alex Pretti. Scharf wrote a separate memo against it, and pushed back when JD Vance endorsed the idea.
The meeting broke up without a decision. But as the New York Times’ report makes clear, the Insurrection Act remains a loaded weapon, with true believers in the West Wing still looking for an opportunity to use it.
Back in 1866, in Ex parte Milligan, the Supreme Court said it plainly, that the Constitution governs rulers and citizens alike in war and in peace, and no emergency a president invents can shut that door. The reason habeas corpus terrifies men like Miller is that it’s the one right that forces the government to look a judge in the eye and explain itself, and a government that can lock you up without ever doing that isn’t a democracy anymore, it’s just whoever happens to be holding the keys.
New York Times Accused of Laundering Reputation of Epstein Associate
Last week, the New York Times published what looked like an interview with Kathy Ruemmler, the former Goldman Sachs lawyer and Obama White House counsel with ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
But here’s what stood out: it wasn’t a news story. It ran in the opinion section, written by former DOJ staffer Ankush Khardori, who isn’t on the Times staff. Khardori approached the paper with the piece himself. The opinion section didn’t commission it.
And Ruemmler, who had largely declined to respond to the Times newsroom’s questions about her relationship with Epstein, sat for more than three hours of interviews with Khardori.
Nearly 1,500 commenters pushed back, as well as newsroom staff. People started asking whether the Times opinion section was functioning as a PR agency for powerful figures connected to to rehabilitate their reputations while avoiding actual reporters.
One staffer called it “uncritical.” Another wondered whether the Times’ opinion section had served as a “loophole.” A front-page Times news story from just a month earlier reported on the “extraordinary lengths” Ruemmler had gone to in order to repair her reputation following the Epstein revelations. That same story noted she’d declined to comment on reporting about a reputation management firm working on her behalf.
Then she turned around and gave a lengthy interview to a freelance op-ed writer whose piece concludes that “castigating Ms. Ruemmler will not change the incentives that allowed Mr. Epstein to evade prosecution for so long.”
The Times says the news and opinion sections don’t coordinate. That’s true, and that’s partly the problem. The paper’s credibility is treated as a single thing by readers and critics even when the institution itself insists on a wall between the two departments.
This all raises a real question about whether the Times opinion section is operating in sync with the rest of the organization, or whether it’s becoming its own rogue entity.
I.F. Stone built his own little newspaper decades ago for exactly this reason, because he understood that the cozier a press outlet gets with the powerful, the less it can be trusted to tell you the truth about them. When a paper hands a powerful person three hours to launder her story and never sends a reporter to push back, it’s not practicing journalism, it’s practicing access, and a democracy can’t hold anyone accountable when its biggest newsrooms would rather be invited to the party than report on it.
Moments like this are reminders of why we launched Raw America in the first place. Major newspapers that allow public figures to avoid hard questions undermine their own credibility. Raw America will never hold back or pull punches when it comes time to hold powerful people accountable. If that matters to you, take a moment to become a paying subscriber.
Former UFC Champion Posts and Deletes Texts of Eric Trump Asking About ‘Rigged’ Fights to Bet On
Sunday night, the UFC held a cage fight on the White House lawn. Before the fights, former UFC heavyweight champion Daniel “DC” Cormier’s X account posted screenshots of what appeared to be a private conversation with Eric Trump.
In the alleged exchange, Eric asks Cormier who he thinks is going to win, whether Cormier is placing bets, whether any fighters are injured, and then even asks: “Are any of the fights tomorrow rigged?”
Cormier’s alleged reply was “No, none of our fights are rigged and honestly I am appalled that you would even ask me something like that.”
Cormier deleted the post quickly. Both he and Eric Trump then denied the screenshots were real. Eric told the Wall Street Journal the exchange was “some kind of AI spoof.”
But longtime MMA writer Adam Martin said he saw the tweet before Cormier deleted it, and said others did too. He then wrote: “Wonder why DC deleted it. Someone got into his ear quickly, I guess.”
This exchange doesn’t prove anything. But what we do know is that the Trump family has a close partnership with the UFC and a documented history of corrupt behavior. Questions about the Trump family and the UFC won’t go away anytime soon.
Louis Brandeis wrote more than a century ago that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the whole point of that idea is that corruption can’t survive out in the open. The trouble with a family that turns the People’s House into a venue for a sport they profit from is that you stop being able to tell where the government ends and the private hustle begins, and once that line disappears, the public’s business becomes just one more thing being sold.
JD Vance’s Book Tour Failing So Hard It’s Boosting Marco Rubio’s 2028 Candidacy
JD Vance has a new book out called “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” about his conversion to Catholicism. It also details his alleged spiritual transformation into someone who makes decisions based on virtue rather than ambition.
If you’re skeptical, you’re not alone.
The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt focused on Vance’s relationship with right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated last fall. The excerpt credits Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, with convincing Vance’s wife Usha to have a fourth child, with Erika apparently telling Usha between sobs that she regretted having only two children with Charlie.
This is the passage Vance chose to launch his book tour with.
The problem is that Charlie Kirk’s posthumous deification has largely backfired on MAGA. Attempts to turn him into a movement martyr spawned months of mocking memes. And here’s Vance in June 2026, still trying to squeeze political juice from a dead man who most of the country has already forgotten.
Then there’s the USA Today interview Vance gave last week, clearly meant to come across as relatable. He talks about putting his days of “blindly chasing ambition” behind him. He says his conversion to Catholicism has made him a man who tries to “make wise decisions and moral decisions.”
That interview was immediately overshadowed by a New York Times piece from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan revealing how a calculating Vance worked to manage the political fallout from Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Vance aparently floated the idea of letting Ghislaine Maxwell out of prison for a day to be interviewed by Tucker Carlson, apparently expecting her to say Trump did nothing wrong. That’s the cold behavior of a political operative trying to do damage control for a boss with a lot to hide.
On top of all of this, Vance has been picking fights with Pope Leo XIV, warning the American-born pontiff to “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Questioning the pope’s theological credentials is not a traditionally Catholic thing to do. This may explain the cover of Vance’s book, which features not a Catholic cathedral but a rural Methodist church.
Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, though White evangelicals still run the GOP. And now Vance is writing about his Catholic faith in a book with a Methodist chapel on the cover while attacking the pope and talking about demons, which is much more of an evangelical fixation than a Catholic one.
His desperation is starting to show. He’s got an interview booked with The View, apparently hoping a confrontation with the hosts will give him a boost. But Vance’s attempts to play tough inevitably dissolve into petulance when someone presses him. He just can’t help himself.
The result is that he’s now polling even with Marco Rubio, a man so lacking in charisma that the New York Times described him as one of “the most juiceless politicians in American politics.” Vance is losing ground to a bag of mulch. No amount of book sales will going to fix that.
Almost a hundred years ago Sinclair Lewis gave us Elmer Gantry, the silver-tongued preacher who figured out that piety was the fastest road to power, and we’ve been watching that same act run on a loop ever since. The tell is always the gap between the sermon and the conduct, and a man who’ll publish a whole book about humility and virtue while quietly scheming to spring Ghislaine Maxwell for a friendly camera isn’t having a spiritual awakening, he’s running a campaign, and voters can usually smell the difference.
Raw America is expanding, but your support is critical to making it happen. We’re in the process of building out our Capitol Hill team, so we can break the big stories in Washington the billionaire-owned outlets want buried. And we’re bringing you even more live interviews with the people making news and giving you the inside knowledge you won’t get elsewhere. Tomorrow at 1 PM ET we’ll be speaking with former Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, who Jeff Bezos fired after she criticized Charlie Kirk. And at 3 PM ET, we’re sitting down with activists Jackie Morgan and Gabi Finlayson, who are leading the fight against a sprawling data center in Utah. Watch both interviews live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
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