Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Republicans are telling their own candidates to run away from Trump’s war in Iran as new polling shows the public has turned hard against him. Senate Republicans are losing patience with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as the war drags into its fifth month with no end in sight. Legal experts are warning that Epstein survivors are about to get betrayed by Todd Blanche as his confirmation vote looms. And a Republican senator just made a strange comment about Mitch McConnell’s health that raised more questions than it answered.
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Trump Allies Quietly Tell Republicans to Abandon Trump to Save Themselves
Donald Trump’s own allies are reportedly telling Republicans to distance themselves from Trump’s rhetoric about the Iran war, given new polls that show Americans have had it with the president.
MS NOW’s Jake Traylor said he and a colleague have talked to multiple senior officials and people running midterm strategy for the GOP. Their advice to candidates, including both incumbents and challengers to sitting Democrats, is to put space between themselves and Trump’s rhetoric on the war, as the polling becomes increasingly brutal.
A new survey from CBS News and YouGov found 65 percent of Americans disapprove of the Iran war. 66 percent think it’s going badly. More than two-thirds want it to end right now. And 60 percent think Trump is trying to make the war sound better than it actually is.
That last number is significant. It means most of the country doesn’t believe what the administration is telling them about how this war is going.
One major reason for that skepticism is that more Americans seem to be catching on that the U.S. has no easy way out in Iran. Axios reported that U.S. Central Command called off strikes near the Strait of Hormuz for a third straight night after the top American military commander in the region told Trump the bombing campaign had hit the limits of what it could accomplish.
The New York Times reported there are concerns inside the administration that keeping the war effort u[ could drain U.S. air defense stockpiles to dangerously low levels.
Trump’s U.N. ambassador, Mike Waltz, dismissed those concerns in a recent interview with NBC’s Meet the Press. But in the same breath, he of course blamed the Biden administration for leaving behind what he called a depleted military.
So now Republicans can’t even agree on whether there’s a supply problem, let alone what to do about it. And their own strategists are telling candidates the safest move is to just talk about something else.
That should tell you everything about how confident the party actually is heading into November.
We've been here before. In the spring of 1968, the gap between what the Pentagon was saying about Vietnam and what Americans could see with their own eyes got so wide that on March 31st, Lyndon Johnson went on television and announced he wouldn't run again. He didn't lose a battle that week. He lost the country's belief that he was telling the truth about a war. When 60 percent of Americans tell a pollster the president makes things sound better than they are, that's not a messaging problem you can consultant your way out of. That's a democracy noticing it's being lied to, and no party in our history has ever survived that moment by changing the subject.
Republicans Losing Patience with Hegseth as War Drags On
Republican senators are now openly questioning whether Defense Secretary Hegseth is even capable of running the Pentagon through this war. Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina told The Hill he has no confidence in Hegseth anymore.
Tillis said the Pentagon chief has a massive insecurity complex, lacks experience running large organizations and is a habitual micromanager. He added that Hegseth has been pushing out some of the most distinguished military leaders the Department of Defense has.
Keep in mind this is a sitting Republican senator whose vote is essential if Trump hopes to pass a nearly $95 billion reconciliation package that includes $73 billion for the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.
And it’s not just Tillis casting doubt on Hegseth’s leadership capabilities. One Republican senator anonymously confided to The Hill that there’s a loss of confidence among rank-and-file Pentagon employees, and that those concerns are making their way to Congress.
Republican Senator Susan Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said she found the recent forced retirement of the U.S. Army’s top commander in Europe deeply troubling. She said those troops swore an oath to the Constitution, and she still wants definitive answers from the administration on its exit strategy.
Republicans are also asking why the Trump administration didn’t anticipate that Iran would keep the Strait of Hormuz closed for this long, consistently driving up oil and gas prices since February. They’re continuing to ask why nobody in the White House predicted Iran would attack U.S. bases in neighboring countries like Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. And now the conflict has spread to the Red Sea, where Iran-backed Houthi rebels from Yemen have targeted Saudi oil shipments.
Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker of Mississippi said he still wants Trump to escalate however necessary to win the war. Senator John Cornyn of Texas believes the U.S. has the resources necessary to force Iran to reopen the strait without giving up major concessions to its new hardline government.
But even Cornyn admitted that plan would be dangerous. He noted that the problem with endless wars is consistent escalation, where there’s no way out except surrender.
Meanwhile, Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia is acknowledging that the American public at large is sick of the war. Trump promised in March the war would last four or five weeks. We’re now almost at the five-month mark.
The cost to taxpayers is also rapidly skyrocketing. Hegseth told Congress last week the war has cost $37.5 billion, though independent analysts at Moody’s said the real number is likely closer to $132 billion. Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa said she still has no clarity on the cost of the after Hegseth’s testimony last week.
There’s currently not enough GOP support to pass the new military spending bill Trump is asking for, and the ongoing absence of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who hasn’t voted since June 11th, makes Republicans’ math even trickier. We’ll get back to McConnell in a minute.
Here's what Congress used to understand about its own job. In 1941, with the country about to go to war, a first term senator from Missouri named Harry Truman got in his own car and drove thousands of miles to look at defense plants for himself. What he found became the Truman Committee, and for years afterward it tore through wartime contracts and saved American taxpayers billions of dollars while the fighting was still going on. Nobody called it disloyal. Truman supported the war. He simply refused to believe that writing blank checks was the same thing as patriotism. That committee is what made him vice president. Today we've got a Defense Secretary telling senators this war costs 37.5 billion while outside analysts put it above 132 billion, and the Senate's answer is to complain about it anonymously. Oversight isn't something you do to a war. It's the only thing that keeps a war from owning the country that's fighting it.
Legal Experts Warn Todd Blanche Will Betray Epstein Survivors if He’s Confirmed
Legal experts are now sounding the alarm that Todd Blanche, who was Donald Trump’s former personal defense lawyer before becoming the acting attorney general, will deny justice to the survivors of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein if he’s officially confirmed to the role.
Epstein survivors sent a letter to Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn urging them to reject Blanche’s nomination to lead the Justice Department. They say that as acting attorney general, Blanche grossly mishandled the release of the Epstein files required under the bipartisan transparency bill Trump signed into law last fall. The letter pointed out that Blanche allowed survivors’ names, photos and identifying information to be disclosed, while notably redacting names of Epstein’s co-conspirators and enablers.
More than a thousand teenage girls and women were abused. Only Epstein and his chief accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell have ever faced criminal charges. Survivors say a recent meeting with Blanche — which he only agreed to because Tillis demanded it in exchange for his confirmation vote — amounted to an hour of deflection, interruption and gaslighting.
Blanche’s personal meeting with Maxwell in prison last summer — after which she transferred to a low-security prison camp where she gets to take yoga classes and play with puppies — is also a major point of contention.
Attorney Brian Sullivan told the Guardian they expect from a Blanche-led Justice Department to continue suppressing efforts to hold Epstein’s co-conspirators accountable because Donald Trump wants the whole thing to go away. Defense attorney Ron Kuby also predicted that if Blanche is confirmed, no other perpetrators will be prosecuted, and that the millionaires and billionaires who enabled Epstein will never be brought to justice.
Legal scholar Carl Tobias said even if the Senate doesn’t confirm Blanche, he could stay on as acting attorney general for the remainder of Trump’s presidency, allowing him to have de factor control over the Epstein case either way.
Survivors’ advocates Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky say they’re angry with Republicans letting Blanche’s nomination move forward, but vowed that the fight for accountability isn’t over.
The White House has, of course, praised Blanche’s performance at the DOJ.
Article Two, Section Three of the Constitution gives the president exactly one standing instruction about the law of the land. He shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Faithfully. Not selectively, not on behalf of whoever could afford the best attorneys. That sentence is in there because the men who wrote it had just finished living under a system where the king's justice always reached down and never once reached up. So when a Justice Department publishes the names of the girls who were trafficked and blacks out the names of the men who trafficked them, that isn't a redaction error and it isn't a clerical failure. That's the old system walking back in the front door wearing a better suit. And there are eleven Republican senators on one committee who can still say no to it.
GOP Senator Gives Cryptic Update About McConnell’s Health
Senator Shelley Capito was asked directly this weekend what’s going on with 84-year-old Mitch McConnell, who hasn’t been seen in public for more than a month. Her response raised even more questions than it answered.
Capito told independent journalist Nick Ballasy that McConnell is recovering and healing in a rehabilitation facility. She added that she talked to someone over the weekend who visited him and said he’s clear-minded and is working on regaining his strength. However, she wouldn’t say who that person was or when that visit took place.
When asked if she’d personally visit McConnell, Capito said she would probably wait until he personallt asks for visitors, saying that hospital are a sensitive topic.
McConnell was hospitalized on June 14th. His staff said the senator fell and was briefly rendered unconscious, and that he also suffered a bout of pneumonia. But in audio of an EMS dispatch call to McConnell’s home, an EMS dispatcher referenced a cardiac arrest whie a medic on the scene said they were rendering CPR.
The senator’s office released a photo on July 12th showing McConnell and his wife, Elaine Chao, though that prompted scrutiny even from McConnell’s Republican colleagues. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said he’d heard it was an older photo, before later walking back that claim.
McConnell’s office hasn’t offered any proof of life since then, and has only released vague statements about meetings with staff regarding Senate business. Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear has consistently called for McConnell to release a video updating his constituents on his condition. So far, nothing.
In October of 1919, Woodrow Wilson had a stroke that left him barely able to govern, and for the next seventeen months his wife and his physician built a wall around him and told the country he was resting. The Senate got uneasy enough that it sent two senators into his bedroom that December, essentially to find out whether the president of the United States could still hold a conversation. It took this country until 1967, nearly fifty years, to finally write down in the Twenty Fifth Amendment what that episode should have taught us immediately, which is that concealing a leader's incapacity is a threat to self government itself. We're a republic. Power here is held on loan from the people, and the people get to look at who's holding it. A senator's health is a private matter right up until the moment his vote belongs to four and a half million Kentuckians who can't get a straight answer about whether he's able to cast it.
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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 Administration Now Wants Medical Records for Millions of Americans. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) — which is typically known for issuing safety recalls for consumer products — is now reportedly pressuring hospital executives to release sensitive emergency room patient information to the federal government. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the CPSC is asking for things like names, addresses and diagnoses, saying participation in the effort is “mandatory” or “required.”
Pentagon Quietly Adds Over 140 New Iran War Casualties in Weekend Update. Over the weekend, the Department of Defense added more than 140 wounded service members to the official casualty count in Operation Epic Fury, which is the designation Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave for President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. The Guardian reported that the new update comes as Republican members of Congress are increasingly making noise about the Pentagon keeping troops committed to the war effort in direct violation of the War Powers Act, which requires congressional approval for any military operation lasting longer than 90 days. The DoD previously excluded some casualty figures, arguing those killed and wounded after the short-lived April ceasefire were part of a separate conflict.
Trump Administration Ramps Up Efforts to Strip Citizenship from Naturalized Immigrants. Since Donald Trump’s second term began in January of 2025, the Trump administration has revoked U.S. citizenship for roughly 90 naturalized citizens. USA Today reports that the White House is aiming to increase that number to 250 by October. The administration argues denaturalization is necessary for criminals and fraudsters, though critics point out that the denaturalization process is costly and sometimes takes years to complete, while diverting critical resources away from other Department of Homeland Security programs.
Former County Clerk Who Refused to Marry Same-Sex Couples Accused of Hiding Inheritance. Former Rowan County, Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis — who became a conservative folk hero for refusing to marry same-sex couples in spite of the Supreme Court legalizing it nationwide — is now being investigated for allegedly concealing her inherited assets in order to avoid paying court-ordered restitution. A federal judge ordered Davis to pay $565,000 to David Ermold and David Moore, who sued her for denying them a marriage license. An appeals court upheld the judgment last year. Davis allegedly gave her half-interest in property she inherited from her mother to her husband, brother, son and sister-in-law in order to get around selling it to pay Ermold and Moore.
Mamdani’s New Tax on Empty Mansions Projected to Bring in Far More Revenue Than Anticipated. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to tax vacant second homes worth more than $5 million was initially expected to target 10,000 properties. However, a new analysis by the New York City Department of Finance shows that roughly 31,000 empty houses could be subject to the tax as well. The tax projected to bring in more than $500 million in new tax revenue each year, though that number could be much higher given the findings released by the city’s finance department.
