Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Trump’s White House ballroom project has ballooned to $600 million, and it turns out taxpayers are footing more than half of the cost despite Trump’s promises. Republican senators are now voicing real skepticism about Trump’s Iran deal. Election officials on both sides of the aisle are now saying Trump’s own Homeland Security secretary poses a bigger threat to election security than foreign adversaries. And the Trump administration is somehow blaming Obama after the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turned green jafter a $14 million renovation.
Before we get into the news, I need to ask for your help to keep Raw America’s independent journalism going. We’re now one of the fastest-growing independent media companies in the country after just five months. We have reporters on the ground filing reports from Capitol Hill, we’re broadcasting live interviews with both household names and lesser-known experts and we’re just scratching the surface. But we’re short on our fundraising goals and need readers like you to step up and become paying subscribers. If just five percent of everyone reading right now became a paying member, we’d have all the funding we need well into next year. That’s just one in twenty people. Will you be that one in twenty?
Cost of Trump’s Ballroom Shoots Up Another $200 Million — and Taxpayers Are on the Hook
Back in March, Trump told reporters that his illegal demolition of the White House East Wing and its replacement with a massive ballroom and underground bunker would cost up to $400 million, and that private donors would cover every cent of it, promising it would be “taxpayer-free.”
That was a lie.
The Washington Post obtained internal contractor documents showing that weeks before Trump made those comments, Clark Construction had already given the White House a detailed cost estimate putting the total at $600 million, with more than half of that expected to come from taxpayers.
And by the time Trump spoke, the federal government had already approved more than a dozen payments to Clark Construction totaling tens of millions in public funds. This was a deliberate lie to the American people about who’s really paying for the president’s personal vanity project.
The numbers kept shifting. When the East Wing demolition was first announced last July, the White House said private donors would cover a $200 million project. By October, Trump told reporters it had gone up to $300 million, still “100 percent” covered by him and his friends. In December, he was saying $400 million. And by March of this year, the internal estimate from Clark had already reached $600 million.
Contractor documents show taxpayer money was baked in from the very beginning. A July estimate projected more than $100 million coming from the Secret Service and White House Military Office. A White House lawyer was caught on email explaining she’d added language to contract documents to, quote, “tie the project more closely to security-related issues” specifically because Secret Service money was being used. Three independent procurement experts who reviewed the documents all concluded that using Secret Service funds for demolition of the East Wing was a stretch, at best.
Seven Republican senators ended up joining Democrats to block a legislative proposal that would’ve authorized $400 million for the project. And yet, taxpayers are still on the hook for his ballroom.
The framers put the power of the purse in Article One, with Congress and not the president, because they’d watched kings drain the public treasury to build their own palaces. When a president spends our money on his ballroom and then lies to our faces about who’s paying, he’s reaching for exactly the kind of unaccountable royal power the Revolution was fought to end.
Republicans Worried Trump Cut a Bad Deal with Iran
Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf signed a memorandum of understanding this week, more than 100 days after Trump first ordered strikes against Iran. The agreement reportedly opens the Strait of Hormuz, lifts the naval blockade, and lays out a framework for future negotiations.
But here’s the biggest problem: almost nobody has actually read it.
Republican senators spent Monday offering the kind of careful non-answers that should tell you everything about their level of confidence in this deal. Republican Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who chairs the Armed Services Committee, said he was “withholding comment.” Republican Josh Hawley of Missouri said getting a ceasefire sounded great, but he hadn’t seen it. Republican John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana joked repeatedly about not having seen the documents. Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa said he wanted to read it before commenting.
The Trump administration told lawmakers the full memorandum of understanding would be released within 24 to 48 hours. That gap gave Iran state media a window to frame the deal on their terms first, and what Iranian media reported raised some flags for Republican senators.
Iran’s version of events includes potentially $300 billion in reconstruction aid flowing to Tehran. Republican Rick Scott of Florida said he couldn’t imagine supporting that, and listed his conditions for any acceptable deal: no nuclear weapons, no ballistic missiles, no support for proxies, and no American money going to Iran. None of those things have been confirmed in the deal so far.
Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said money didn’t matter to him as long as Iran’s uranium enrichment capability is eliminated. But reports from the Iranian side suggest uranium-related questions will be settled at a later stage of negotiations, not in this memorandum.
Republican Thom Tillis of North Carolina — who is not running for reelection — was more direct, saying: “If it’s a secret deal, how can I take it seriously?”
Democrats are also skeptical about the details. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, pointed out that Iran is publicly describing terms that directly contradict what Trump said the deal contains. He’s making the point that until there’s a document everyone can read, there’s no way to know who’s telling the truth.
Let’s all remember when Obama struck a nuclear agreement with Iran back in 2015. Trump spent years attacking the deal and eventually scrapped it during his first term. Republicans spent years hammering the Obama White House over so-called “pallets of cash” sent to Iran, which were actually frozen Iranian assets they couldn’t access due to sanctions. Now those same Republicans are trying to decide whether to support a deal that may include hundreds of billions in aid to Iran, negotiated by a Republican president, whose terms they haven’t even been allowed to read.
There are nearly two months of further talks still to come before a final agreement. A lot can change. And probably will.
The founders required two-thirds of the Senate to ratify a treaty because they didn’t trust any single man to bind the whole nation in secret, and James Madison warned that the executive was the branch most prone to war and intrigue. A deal the senators who’d have to live with it aren’t even allowed to read isn’t diplomacy, it’s the very secrecy the Constitution was built to stop.
Election Officials Say Trump’s DHS a Bigger Threat to Elections Than Foreign Enemies
Local election officials around the country, Republicans included, are now saying that the Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin isn’t a partner in election security, but rather a threat.
Mullin has a documented history of election denial. He wrote online on January 2nd, 2021, that he wouldn’t vote to certify the Electoral College due to claims of fraud that were never substantiated. Four days later, even after the Capitol was overrun by a mob, he still voted not to certify. He also allegedly brokered a meeting at Mar-a-Lago for a former CIA operative to brief Trump’s team on debunked conspiracy theories about Venezuelan interference in the 2020 election.
Now that Mullin is in charge of DHS, election officials on both sides of the aisle are now contending with an agency that’s deliberately making it harder for them to do their jobs.
Matt Crane, a former Republican county clerk who now runs the professional organization for local election officials in Colorado, told NPR he’s actively discouraging counties from sharing voter data or security information with the federal government, saying he doesn’t trust the Trump administration to be responsible with sensitive data. He added: “They’ve brought the fox into the henhouse.”
The Trump administration has sued states over private voter registration data, attempted to access voting machines and ballots, and has officials like border czar Tom Homan suggesting ICE could show up at polling places this fall. That would be a federal crime, by the way.
Meanwhile, the organization that protected election infrastructure for seven years across thousands of jurisdictions, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, has already had its federal funding eliminated as part of Elon Musk’s DOGE effort. It’s now scrambling to survive on a membership model, and has less than 20 percent of its former membership.
CISA itself, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that Trump himself created in 2018, has had most of its election security staff pushed out or forced to resign. It’s been operating without a Senate-confirmed director for all of Trump’s second term, and local officials say they’re getting radio silence when they reach out.
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state, ominously warned that the actions of defunding and dismantling those protections “speak for themselves.”
The midterms are months away. The federal infrastructure meant to protect elections has been deliberately hollowed out. And the person now in charge of whatever’s left has a track record of pushing the election lies that motivated the January 6th insurrection in the first place.
Americans deliberately kept the running of our elections in the hands of thousands of local clerks rather than one federal agency, because the framers knew that whoever controls the machinery of voting controls the country. Handing that power to a man who pushed the same lies that fueled January 6th turns the agency meant to guard our votes into the gravest threat against them.
Trump Administration Blames Obama for Reflecting Pool Turning Green
Trump has been touting the newly renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, promising it’ll be the gleaming blue centerpiece for a July 4th rally he’s calling a “Tribute to America.” There’s just one problem: It’s green again.
The administration just spent over $14 million on a renovation that included a brand-new $1.7 million ozone nanobubbler filtration system designed to kill algae. The pool reopened. And the green algae was back in just a matter of days.
The response from the Interior Department? Blame Obama.
A department spokesperson claimed the nanobubbler technology “successfully destroyed the algae bloom that has plagued every pool reopening since 1922, most infamously, the Obama pool reopening.” Communications Director Katie Martin is arguing that the algae returning was “part of the normal start-up process.”
So the algae is back, it’s fine, and it’s also Obama’s fault. Got it.
Now, the Obama White House did spend $34 million on a two-year reconstruction project that wrapped up in 2012 that addressed serious structural problems. The Reflecting Pool was leaking 16 million gallons of water a year and was literally sinking into the ground. Trump’s Interior Department acknowledged that the pipes under the National Mall still leak and won’t be repaired until later this fall.
Trump already posted about the pool on Truth Social, calling it “beautifully new” and promoting his July 4th rally. The pool may be cleaner by then. But the instinct to claim victory and lay blame on Obama regardless of the facts is sadly par for the course.
Harry Truman kept a sign on his desk that read “the buck stops here,” because he understood that owning the outcome is the whole job of leading the country. An administration that spends $14 million, gets green water, and reaches back to blame a president seven years gone has decided the buck stops anywhere but the Oval Office.
Raw America has big plans in the works, but we need your help to see them through. We’re in the middle of building out our Capitol Hill team, so we can have more boots on the ground breaking the big stories the billionaire-owned media wants to ignore. We’re also bringing you more live interviews featuring perspectives you won’t hear on the Ellisons’ CBS or on the Murdoch family’s airwaves. Today at 1 PM Eastern Time, we’ll be sitting down with former Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, who Jeff Bezos fired over comments she made about Charlie Kirk. Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
None of this work would be possible without your support. If you’re not already a paying subscriber, today is the best day to make the leap.
I’m Thom Hartmann. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump Admin Criminally Charging Minneapolis Residents for Protesting ICE. President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is announcing that it is charging multiple residents of Minneapolis, Minnesota with allegedly conspiring to impede federal agents. The DOJ alleges that members of “Antifa” illegally interfered with federal operations during the administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis earlier this year, in which U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by federal agents in broad daylight. Antifa is not a formal organization, but rather a decentralized movement against fascism.
Iran Says Deal Struck with Trump Requires Israel to Leave Lebanon. Iranian authorities are now claiming that the agreement to end the Iran war stipulates that Israel withdraw forces from Lebanon. Israel has previously rejected all attempts to force troops to stop attacking targets in Lebanon, which could end up sinking the deal before its full terms even become public. An unnamed U.S. official is disputing Iran’s claims, telling reporters that Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon is not in the agreement.
JD Vance Walks Back Claims of $300 Billion Reconstruction Fund for Iran. Vice President JD Vance is now insisting that Iran will not receive a “single dime” of U.S. taxpayer money as part of the agreement to end the war that began on February 28. Despite previous claims that a $300 billion fund for post-war “reconstruction” could be a part of the deal if Iran abides by the terms imposed on its regime, Vance told Fox News on Monday night that it would be other countries rather than the U.S. who would be pouring money into rebuilding the Islamic republic.
Top Democrat Warns FBI Director May Already Have ‘Slush Fund’ to Pay MAGA Loyalists. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) — who is the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee — said recently that FBI Director Kash Patel may already be in charge of a “slush fund” in which public money is sent to people in his inner circle. The Maryland Democrat wrote in a letter to Patel that he received information that Patel has directed payments of $8,000 to top FBI executives and his own security detail every pay period, in addition to their paychecks. Raskin said each agent may have been paid as much as $40,000 apiece so far.
Prominent Election Denier Wins Swing State GOP Primary for Secretary of State. Republican Jim Marchant will advance to the November election after officially winning Nevada’s Republican nomination for secretary of state. The Nevada secretary of state is in charge of overseeing election procedures, providing guidance to counties on conducting elections and certifying election results. Marchant has previously said he would not have certified Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in Nevada, which he won by roughly 34,000 votes. Marchant will face off against Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar in November, who he lost to in 2022.
