Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. If you’re watching this on Substack, take a few seconds to both tap the ❤️ and click restack. That’s the easiest and most effective way to make sure more people see these stories.
Both President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance are now using the final stretch of the midterm cycle to cater to the lowest common denominator by leaning into racism and bigotry aimed at Democrats. Several top House Republicans are now conceding that their chances of hanging onto their majority have slipped away and that their only hope now is in keeping the Senate. A new leaked audio recording of Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton shows him telling a roomful of lobbyists that both his campaign and his party are drowning. And a Republican congressman in Maryland embarrassed himself after blowing his top at an audience of voters who laughed at him during a debate.
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This afternoon at 3:30 PM ET, Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson will be interviewing Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried about how Democrats are aiming to flip Trump’s home state. Watch it live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
Trump Leaning Into Racism and Bigotry in Final Stretch of Campaign
As Election Day draws closer, Trump’s campaign strategy has become increasingly desperate, and he’s now leaning into gutter racism in his attempts to fire up the Republican base ahead of November 3.
The president’s approval rating is at an abysmal 33 percent according to CNN. Most Americans lay the blame at his feet for rising costs of living including food, housing and fuel prices. So since Trump has no record to run on, he’s counting on scaring voters into checking the box for Republicans.
Last weekend in Tennessee, Trump went after Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (who Raw America interviewed in April), saying he likes to call El-Sayed “Mohammed” even though he knows that isn’t his real name. He then insisted he could call the accomplished doctor and former head of the Detroit Health Department “whatever the hell I want.” He took it a step further during an Ohio rally, calling El-Sayed a jihadist.
El-Sayed wrote on social media that the president knows his name and says it every day, and argued Trump was trying to use his name and faith as a way to distract voters from his failed policies that are making life more expensive for everyone.
While headlining a rally in Texas, JD Vance called Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico a “freak” and implied he was gay. Vance may have just been throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks given that Trump-endorsed Republican candidate Ken Paxton is plagued by various corruption and infidelity scandals.
And of course, we saw this week when federal agents raided the Washington D.C. home of Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. The night after the raid, Trump questioned whether Omar — who is a naturalized U.S. citizen — even had Constitutional rights. Omar reminded everyone that Trump has attacked her ever since her first election in 2018 and is now using the full weight of the federal government against her in a politically motivated investigation. White House staffers insist the president isn’t a racist, but we’re also talking about the same person who spread the racist “birther” conspiracy theory about Barack Obama.
The Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified almost 160 years ago after a bloody civil war fought over the institution of chattel slavery, says every person born or naturalized here is a citizen, full stop. Citizenship doesn’t come with an asterisk for people whose names a president can’t be bothered to pronounce. When the man who swore before the country to uphold the Constitution asks whether it applies to a sitting congresswoman, it’s no longer a dog-whistle. He’s directly telling us which Americans he believes the Constitution is for.
Top Republicans Admit Keeping House Majority Is Effectively Impossible
Republican leaders in the House of Representatives are now privately conceding that their majority will be gone after November 3. Five separate GOP members of Congress told Politico that keeping the speaker’s gavel is effectively impossible, and they’re now simply hoping to hang onto the Senate.
One anonymous senior House Republican confided to Politico that Trump “has made this election all about himself.” Another projected Democrats to have a net gain of roughly 10 seats in November and added that Republicans in new gerrymandered districts in both Florida and Texas are “hanging on with their fingernails.”
It’s easy to see this happening in real time if you follow the money. Republicans already called off ad buys in competitive swing districts held by New Jersey Republican To Kean and Iowa Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks, even though Trump easily won both just two years ago. They also gave up on holding onto the Omaha, Nebraska seat that’s being vacated by retiring Republican Congressman Don Bacon. The main House GOP super PAC ceded its paid ads in Nebraska and Iowa to a Senate Republican group.
Bacon said the people who decided to allocate money elsewhere told him the main issue is Trump’s dismal approval rating. Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson, continues to insist the polls are simply wrong.
The last time a president had this much of a drag on his own party down was in 1974, when Watergate cost Republicans almost 50 House seats because voters were sick of Republicans being a rubber stamp for a crooked president. Checking an unpopular administration is what midterms are for in a republic. When lawmakers from the party in power quietly give up on trying to convince the country to keep them in power, it shows they no longer trust the voters they were elected to represent.
Ken Paxton Tells Lobbyists in Leaked Audio That Republicans Are in Deep Trouble
Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton apparently knows exactly how much trouble Republicans are in.
Rolling Stone recently obtained audio from a September 24 event hosted by a Republican-affiliated lobbying firm in Washington D.C. that was secretly recorded by an attendee who opposes Paxton’s candidacy. In the clip, Paxton tells attendees that Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott is “struggling” against his Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa. He also predicted his party will “probably lose some seats” in the Texas statehouse.
Paxton was also heard pointing the finger at nearly everything when discussing his flailing Senate campaign. He chalked up his lack of success to a bruising primary against longtime incumbent Senator John Cornyn and a slew of negative ads from his well-funded Democratic opponent, James Talarico. Other clips from that same meeting that have since been leaked to various media outlets have Paxton complaining that Cornyn wants him to lose in November, and that Trump’s war with Iran and record-high diesel prices are hurting his chances of winning. He also confided to attendees that Republicans would cut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security if they held onto their majorities.
Money is actually the least of Paxton’s problems. Spending in Texas’ Senate race alone has already approached nearly half a billion dollars. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk alone poured $10 million of his own money to Paxton’s super PAC. A Paxton spokesperson dismissed the Rolling Stone report as a partisan hit job based on cherry-picked audio recordings.
But the stubborn fact remains that Paxton spent the Fourth of July in London with his mistress, continues to duck reporters’ questions and still has yet to agreed to debate Talarico despite offers from three different networks. If Texas does end up electing a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in the 21st century, Paxton would only have himself to blame.
Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security in 1935 and deliberately made sure workers funded it with their own paychecks so that no politician would ever have the gall to get rid of it. Almost a century later, a candidate propped up by the world’s richest man is telling a closed room of lobbyists that working-class Texans need to just “suck it up” and lose the retirement fund they’ve been paying into their whole lives. That isn’t just an embarrassing gaffe, but a Republican accidentally revealing their playbook.
GOP Congressman Blows Up at Audience for Laughing at Him During Debate
Last night, Republican Congressman Andy Harris of Maryland had a rough debate night. During a League of Women Voters forum in Cambridge, the incumbent Republican and chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus faced off against Democratic challenger Dan Schwartz before a crowd of roughly 200 voters.
When Harris tried to blame Democrats for high diesel prices that spiked after Trump launched his war iwith Iran, the audience could be heard laughing at him. Harris appeared furious and walked toward one audience member, calling him rude. He then accused the crowd of infringing on his First Amendment rights. The moderator eventually had to pause the questions and ask the candidates to calm their supporters in the audience.
Schwartz landed some significant blows on Harris. After the Republican lawmaker defended stricter work requirements for social safety net programs, Schwartz reminded the audience that Congress had taken so much vacation this year that its own members wouldn’t meet those very same work requirements.
The mood got even more tense after the event concluded. Harris refused to answer some reporters’ questions, calling them silly. He also told one reporter she didn’t have permission to record him, and even had some of his staff sic police officers in the journalist when she continued to record him.
In 1964 the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan case that debate about public officials has to be fully uninhibited, robust and open to the public. That includes laughing at a congressman who blamed Democrats for high fuel prices caused by his own party’s war in the Middle East. The First Amendment was expressly written to safeguard citizens from government censorship, not to protect Andy Harris from his own constituents. A lawmaker who calls the police on a reporter for recording him at a public debate is telling us exactly what he thinks of both.
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