Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Mitch McConnell’s team put out a proof-of-life photo and MAGA is already calling it fake. Trump and his family raked in over a billion dollars from crypto while taking regular investors for everything they have. The Senate has officially returned to Washington, with Republicans scrambling to fill Lindsey Graham’s seat and committee posts. And the Vatican is loudly refuting the White House’s accusation that Pope Leo was engaging in politics when criticizing the Iran war.
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MAGA Calls BS on Mitch McConnell’s Hospital Photo
Republican Senator Mitch McConnell’s office released a photo Sunday showing the 84-year-old lying in what looked like a hospital bed next to his wife, Elaine Chao. It was the first anyone had seen of him since his June 14 hospitalization. The photo dropped just hours after McConnell’s Republican colleague, Lindsey Graham, died suddenly at 71.
McConnell’s office released a statement alongside the photo, supposedly written by McConnell himself. It says he didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke. Instead, he fell and was rendered unconscious, and later developed a mild case of pneumonia while recovering. The statement says he’s since been moved to a rehab center.
MAGA Republicans weren’t convinced. Trump loyalist Laura Loomer asked why McConnell’s staff would release a photo instead of video and wrote, “I call BS. The American people aren’t stupid.”
Loomer also zoomed in on the newspaper McConnell is holding in the photo, and said the text looked AI-generated, and that the tag on his shirt was also blurry. She also asked why there’s no IV in the photo if he’s really in a hospital bed.
Loomer also claimed on July 6th that a “high-level source” close to the White House told her McConnell is “officially braindead” and is only being kept alive by machines. That claim kicked off a wave of speculation that McConnell’s team had been hiding his condition.
Former Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz also jumped in, arguing that a written statement isn’t the same as hearing it from McConnell’s own mouth, on camera. Former Fox producer Kylie Jane Kremer said the public deserves an unedited video, instead of a photo and a paragraph of text. She also observed that there was no metadata on the photo, demanding to know when and where it was actually taken.
Metadata is often for security purposes so people can’t track someone’s location. But in an environment rife with distrust, even that choice is seen as evidence of a cover-up.
This story says less about McConnell’s current condition, and more about where the Republican base’s trust with him currently sits. When even a senator who’s spent over a decade as the party’s leader in the Senate can’t get the benefit of the doubt from the GOP, that shows how fractured Republicans are right now.
And there’s an older lesson buried underneath all this. When Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in 1919, his wife and his doctor hid the truth and quietly ran the country from behind a locked door, and the public didn’t learn how sick he really was until it was long past the point of doing anything about it. A self-governing republic can’t function when the health of the people who hold power over our lives gets treated as a private family secret, because you can’t hold accountable what you’re not allowed to see.
Trump Made a Fortune on Crypto While Thousands of Investors Lost Their Shirts
Back in 2021, Trump called Bitcoin a scam. Fast forward to 2025, and Trump and his family made more than $1.4 billion through their own cryptocurrency businesses. That’s the most profitable year of his entire business career, which includes decades of real estate developments including hotels and casinos in multiple cities and states. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of everyday people who bought into Trump’s crypto ventures got crushed.
Take Fatime Elrgdawy, a 29-year-old software engineer in California. She put $2,000 into the $TRUMP coin, only to watched her investment shrink to less than $120 within five months. The coin lost 97 percent of its value from its peak.
The family’s crypto empire began with World Liberty Financial, which was launched in 2024 during the final weeks of Trump’s campaign. Crypto executives poured money into Trump’s reelection effort, with the industry eventually becoming the single biggest donor sector in the whole 2024 election cycle. Bitcoin hit an all-time high in 2025, and the White House gutted efforts to police the industry while pardoning convicted crypto fraudsters along the way.
Foreign money has also complicated the equation. Four days before Trump’s inauguration, a company tied to an Abu Dhabi royal quietly bought up nearly half of World Liberty Financial, funneling $187 million to the Trump family. That same week, Trump rolled out his meme coin monetizing his fist-pump photo from the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. That deal made him roughly $636 million last year.
Ordinary retail investors weren’t as fortunate. Roughly two-thirds of people who bought Trump’s meme coin lost money, adding up to nearly $3.8 billion in total losses. Another analysis found 85 percent of buyers in one World Liberty token are underwater right now.
The same Abu Dhabi royal who invested in World Liberty later got approval to import advanced American AI chips,. Another firm tied to that same royal, which is holding $2 billion in a World Liberty coin, is now among the new owners of TikTok’s U.S. operations after the Trump administration spent months pressuring the app to sell off its American operations.
The Trump administration continues to insist there are no conflicts of interest. The president told CNBC last week he could know the details of his crypto fortune but doesn’t, insisting nothing illegal happened.
Meanwhile, prices for his coins have been sliding along with the rest of the crypto market. But the pattern remains the same: the man sitting in the Oval Office and his family are running a crypto empire, and making a killing while everyday investors are left holding the bag.
The founders saw this exact danger coming. They wrote the Foreign Emoluments Clause into Article One of the Constitution for one reason, to make sure no American official could pocket money or gifts from a foreign power and then bend our policies to serve that power instead of our own people. When an Abu Dhabi royal wires $187 million to the president’s family and then walks away with our most advanced AI chips and a slice of TikTok, that isn’t some clever loophole in the system the founders built. That’s the precise thing they built the system to stop.
Republicans Scramble to Fill Lindsey Graham’s Seat and Committee Assignments
The House and Senate are back from recess, and there’s a lot on the agenda. This couldn’t come at a worse time for Republicans, after Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died suddenly at the age of 71.
Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to break a weeks-long Republican blockade in the House, while Trump has effectively frozen the Senate over his demand to pass his restrictive voter ID bill. Senate committees are also holding confirmation hearings this week for attorney general nominee Todd Blanche, and Jay Clayton, who has been tapped to be the next director of national intelligence. The Senate’s also taking up its version of the defense bill, which Democrats are expected to block over Trump’s handling of Iran.
Graham is remembered as a staunch Trump ally. He also inserted himself into just about every major legislative fight, from budget battles to foreign policy and healthcare, and he did it long before Trump ever arrived on the scene. He occasionally crossed the aisle, even voting for some Democratic-appointed Supreme Court justices, which would get most Republicans run out of town in the current political climate.
Graham was close with both Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Mitch McConnell, serving as a bridge between the Senate and the White House. As Budget Committee chair, he was set to lead a third reconciliation package this year. He’d also just returned from a trip to Ukraine, where he announced a Russia sanctions deal with bipartisan support just one day before his death.
Now South Carolina has to figure out who replaces him. Republican Governor Henry McMaster will appoint someone to fill the seat through the rest of this year. Then a special primary kicks off, with filing opening next week , a primary election on August 11th, and a potential runoff on August 25th if nobody clears a majority. Names already circling include Reps. Ralph Norman, Nancy Mace, Russell Fry, and William Timmons, along with Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette.
There’s also a scramble over Graham’s committee posts. Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is preparing to take over the Budget Committee gavel, which would be a significant shift given Johnson’s history pushing for draconian spending cuts. Graham was also expected to become the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee next year. Now that job could go to Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, or Josh Hawley.
That;s a lot of change in just a handful of months, and it shows just how much one senator’s death can influence the entire chamber’s balance of power.
Here’s why that lands so hard. Back in 1946, Congress passed the Legislative Reorganization Act and handed a small handful of committee chairs enormous power over what does and doesn’t become law for the rest of us. Eighty years later, we’re watching that bargain play out in real time, where the death of one man and an appointment made by a single governor can quietly redraw the map of federal spending, judicial nominations, and national security. That’s an awful lot of power over your life for you to have almost no say over.
Vatican Hits Back at Trump’s Claim That Pope Leo Is a Politician
The Trump administration’s ambassador to the Vatican tried to dismiss Pope Leo XIV’s criticism of the Iran war by arguing the pope was speaking as a head of state, rather than as a religious leader. The Holy See is taking that accusation seriously.
Vatican spokesperson Andrea Tornielli published a statement directly refuting that argument. He argued that whenever the pontiff speaks on war, immigration or other pressing issues, he’s doing so as a spiritual leader proclaiming the Gospel, not a politician.
The Vatican is responding to Brian Burch, the U.S. ambassador to Vatican City and a prominent Catholic ally of Trump, who suggested in a recent that the pope is on equal footing with other heads of state and is acting as sovereign leader of Vatican City when criticizing Trump’s foreign policy.
This exchange shows the escalating tension between Leo, who is the first American-born pope, and the Trump White House. The pope has been careful not to cast himself as being in an adversarial relationship with the administration, but he’s also become more direct in calling out the White House’s policies. He’s repeatedly condemned the Iran war, spoken out against Trump’s claims that God favors the U.S. over Iran, and said in Spain that the war doesn’t meet the Catholic Church’s definition of a just war. And last year, the pope called the administration’s immigration crackdown inhuman.
Tornielli’s statement didn’t mention Burch by name, but the implication was obvious. He warned that characterizing the pope’s role as a politician comes at the expense of his true mission as a faith leader. Even when addressing war, migration or artificial intelligence, Tornielli insisted the pope remains first and foremost a spiritual guide, not a head of state.
This puts Catholics in the White House, including Vice President JD Vance, in a pretty awkward position. They have to balance their loyalty to Trump with the fact that their own church’s leader keeps publicly rebuking their boss.
We’ve seen this move before. When Martin Luther King Jr. stood up at Riverside Church in 1967 and called the war in Vietnam morally wrong, plenty of powerful people told him to stay in his lane and stick to civil rights, as though a moral leader had no business questioning a war. King’s answer was that conscience doesn’t stop at the edge of politics, and neither does the Gospel. When an administration tells a pope that his objection to killing only counts if we agree to file it under politics, it’s making that very same demand, and it deserves that very same answer.
That’s your Monday morning rundown. MAGA doesn’t trust Mitch McConnell’s team to be transparent about his health. Trump and his family made over a billion dollars from crypto while ordinary investors got soaked. A senator’s death has kicked off a scramble that will shape policy fights for months to come. And the head of the Catholic Church just loudly rejected the White House’s attempt to wave away the pope’s criticism.
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Thanks for watching, and thanks for supporting independent media. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Here are some stories you may have missed:
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Trump Recommends Lindsey Graham’s Sister Be Appointed to Fill His Seat. President Trump on Monday endorsed Darline Graham Nordone, the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to be appointed to succeed Graham in the wake of his sudden death last weekend. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) is expected to announce Graham’s replacement at a press conference on Monday afternoon, though a special primary is likely to follow next month. Reps. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) are expected to run.
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Democrats Trying to Minimize Impact of ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ Caught in Political Trap. Some of the most punishing provisions of Republicans’ “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA) — which President Trump signed into law last July — are set to take effect following the midterms, and some Democratic governors are hoping to save their constituents from the worst parts of the law. The OBBBA cuts funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (or SNAP, also known as food stamps) by roughly 20 percent while slashing Medicaid funding by more than $1 trillion over 10 years. Democrats are now faced with the conundrum of either intervening to minimize some of the worst effects of those policies like rural hospital closures through various administrative solutions, or allowing them to take effect. Political scientist Miranda Yaver wrote in the New Republic that any administrative fix could serve to “bail Republicans out of bad policymaking.”
