NEW: GOP Senators Defy Trump as He Covers for ICE

Trump reportedly "bored" with Iran war, Trump puts tech billionaires in charge of regulating their own industry

Good morning.

White House aides say Trump is getting “bored” with the Iran war and wants to declare victory and move on, even as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and Iran denies any peace talks are happening. Senate Republicans defied Trump to cut a partial DHS deal with Democrats and get TSA workers paid, rejecting the strategy their own leader called “not realistic.” Minnesota prosecutors trying to hold ICE accountable for the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renée Good are being stonewalled by the Trump administration, which is refusing to even identify the agents involved. And Trump just appointed Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Jensen Huang, and Marc Andreessen to a White House science and technology panel, putting the people who most need to be regulated in charge of writing the rules.

Raw America is Raw Story and Really Americans’ people-powered response to MAGA and the billionaire takeover of American media. CNN and CBS are running cover for a war whose own architects privately admit may already be a lost cause. The FCC chair is threatening to pull broadcast licenses from any outlet that doesn’t fall in line. The pro-democracy press is running behind the billionaire class in reach, resources, and influence, and that gap only closes if people who care step up right now. Please become a paid subscriber today. The link is below. Every subscription is a direct investment in the journalism the billionaires don’t want you to read.

Trump Is Bored With His War. His Own Aides Are Saying So.

A month into a war that has killed 13 American service members and more than 1,400 Iranian civilians, White House aides are privately telling reporters that Trump is getting “bored” with the conflict and wants to declare victory and move on.

“He’s getting a little bored with Iran,” one senior White House official said. “Not that he regrets it or something. He’s just bored and wants to move on.” A second official said Trump’s claims that the war is coming to an end are “mostly hyperbole” and amount to wishful thinking from a president desperate to change the subject.

The disconnect between Trump’s public statements and reality has grown impossible to ignore. On Thursday, Trump posted that he would hold off attacking Iran’s energy infrastructure for 10 days while citing “ongoing” peace talks. Iran denied any talks are taking place. Trump has claimed Iran is “begging” for a deal. Iran denied that too. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Oil prices remain elevated. And the president cannot claim the victory he needs until a shipping lane he has no plan to reopen actually reopens.

One former White House official offered a preview of how this ends. “He has learned he can tell the American people his feeling, and with enough time, the American people will accept his lie,” the official said. “Just telling us the war is won isn’t good enough. We need to see it. We need to feel it.”

Meanwhile, the White House communications team is posting war memes overlaid on clips from Iron Man, Braveheart, and Top Gun. Senior staff are embarrassed. “The war videos are cringe and disrespectful and gross,” one official said. The communications director responded that “the memes will continue and there isn’t a damn thing this person can do about it.”

Thirteen Americans are dead. The president is bored. The memes will continue.

Senate Republicans Defied Trump to Cut a DHS Deal. Here Is What It Does and Doesn’t Do.

Senate Republicans broke with Trump this week to reach a partial DHS funding agreement with Democrats, ending the airport staffing crisis that had left TSA workers without paychecks and security lines stretching for hours. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who had told Trump directly that his strategy of tying any deal to the SAVE America Act was “not realistic,” ultimately reached an agreement to fund most of DHS while leaving out ICE and Border Patrol enforcement funding.

ICE had already received several years’ worth of funding under Trump’s spending legislation. The new deal provides funding for TSA and most other DHS operations. Democrats secured requirements that ICE agents display their names and obtain judicial warrants to enter homes, basic standards that apply to virtually every other law enforcement agency in the country.

The deal is a significant moment. Trump demanded his own party hold the line and deliver the SAVE America Act. His Senate leader told him the votes weren’t there, cut a deal with Democrats anyway, and Republicans followed. The airports will reopen. The TSA workers will get paid. And Trump will not get his voting restriction bill through this process.

What the deal does not do is address the underlying conduct that started this standoff. ICE agents shot and killed two American citizens in Minnesota. The agency has separated at least 11,000 parents of U.S. citizen children from their families. Federal agents are still deployed at airports conducting immigration enforcement. None of that changes with this agreement.

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The Agents Who Killed Alex Pretti and Renée Good May Never Be Prosecuted. The Administration Won’t Even Identify Them.

Minnesota officials investigating the ICE killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good are facing a wall of obstruction from the Trump administration, which has refused to identify the agents involved or cooperate with state prosecutors in any meaningful way.

Pretti was shot eleven times by ICE agents while trying to help a woman being pepper-sprayed. Good was killed in the same operation. The administration called them threats. Corporate media amplified the framing and moved on. Minnesota prosecutors did not.

But the obstacles facing those prosecutors are now coming into full view. The administration has rebuffed requests to identify the agents. Prosecutors do not know where those agents currently are, meaning extradition could be required, potentially from MAGA-aligned states that may refuse to cooperate. The county attorney leading the investigation has decided not to seek reelection and will leave office at year’s end, meaning the prosecution could be inherited by whoever wins in November.

There is also a legal question about whether federal agents can be prosecuted by states at all under the Constitution’s supremacy clause, which protects federal officers acting within the scope of their duties. “Will the federal government or other states cooperate with that?” one law professor asked. “I think the answer is sort of iffy.”

The administration knows all of this. The strategy is not to win a legal argument. It is to run out the clock, change the personnel, and make the case impossible to prosecute by the time anyone tries. Alex Pretti and Renée Good were American citizens killed by federal agents on American soil. The government responsible for that is also the government deciding whether anyone is held accountable for it.

Trump Just Put Zuckerberg, Ellison, Huang, and Andreessen in Charge of Tech Policy. The People Who Need Regulating Are Now the Regulators.

Trump announced Wednesday that he is appointing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison, and Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen to a White House science and technology advisory panel.

Sit with that lineup for a moment.

Larry Ellison’s son David already controls CBS News and is weeks away from acquiring CNN, HBO, and Warner Bros. Discovery. The elder Ellison is one of Trump’s closest billionaire allies. He is now advising the White House on science and technology policy, while his son remakes American media in the image of the administration his father is advising.

Mark Zuckerberg owns the algorithms that determine what billions of people see, share, and believe about the world. Meta’s platforms are the primary information environment for a significant portion of the American electorate. Zuckerberg is not being regulated. He is now helping write the rules.

Jensen Huang runs Nvidia, the company whose chips power virtually every major AI system in operation, including the surveillance infrastructure being built by Palantir under its $10 billion government contract. Huang’s technology is the hardware layer underneath the government’s expanding surveillance apparatus. He is now on the advisory panel that shapes federal technology policy.

Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm has invested in companies across the AI, defense technology, and surveillance sectors, many of which hold or are seeking federal contracts. He is now advising the administration that awards those contracts.

This is not a advisory panel. It is a merger. The billionaires who control the algorithms, the chips, the surveillance infrastructure, and the media are now formally integrated into the government that is supposed to regulate them. The conflict of interest is not incidental. It is the point. When the people writing the rules are the same people those rules are supposed to govern, the rules will be written accordingly.

Connect this to what we have reported this week. Palantir secured a $10 billion military contract to build the AI targeting infrastructure that processes the location data the FBI is buying without warrants. Ellison’s media empire is being constructed around an administration his father now advises. Zuckerberg’s algorithms shape the information environment in which all of this happens. And the FCC is threatening to pull broadcast licenses from any outlet covering it critically.

This is the architecture of a captured government. The surveillance contracts flow to the right companies. The regulatory panels are stacked with the right billionaires. The media is acquired by the right people. And anyone who covers it honestly faces license revocation, Pentagon press pass cancellation, or a president calling their journalism criminal.

Raw America covers this because someone has to. We cover it without a corporate owner, without a billionaire backer, and without a government contract telling us to look the other way. That independence is not free. It is funded by paid subscribers, and right now we need more of them.

A Note From Raw America

Our reporters have been on the ground at the most important Capitol Hill hearings and brought you exclusive interviews with top generals you cannot find anywhere else. We are joining the Washington D.C. press pool to get the most important conversations directly to our viewers, without a network executive or a billionaire adviser deciding which questions are too dangerous to ask.

The people who control the algorithms, the chips, the surveillance infrastructure, and the media are now formally advising the government that is supposed to oversee them. The FCC is threatening anyone who reports on it honestly. CBS is running cover. CNN is about to fall into the same hands.

The pro-democracy press is behind in this fight. Behind in resources, behind in reach, behind in the infrastructure needed to keep growing. That gap closes one way. Paid subscribers who understand that independent journalism is not optional right now fund the reporter in the hearing room, the interview with the general, and the story that does not get told anywhere else.

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In case you missed it: Raw America recently conducted an exclusive interview with former January 6 police officer Michael Fanone, who spoke about his experience protecting the U.S. Capitol as well as law enforcement overreach, abolishing ICE and Trump’s corruption, among other topics. You can watch the full interview below:

Good morning. We will see you Monday.

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STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• Former MAGA Congressman Discourages Trump from Using Ground Troops in Iran. Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) recently criticized the prospect of deploying ground troops in Iran, saying it would make the United States “poorer and less safe.” He also warned that such an action would lead to “higher gas prices [and] higher food prices” while potentially creating more terrorists. Gaetz’s comments come as President Donald Trump’s Department of Defense is deploying thousands of troops to the Middle East, including the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.

• Russia Supports Iran in War with U.S. While Trump Attacks NATO. Trump’s attacks on the NATO alliance ramped up this week, in which he accused allies of disloyalty by not supporting his war in Iran. The anti-NATO tirade comes as Russia is revealed to be providing critical intelligence to the Iranian military about the location of U.S. targets in the Middle East. Article V of NATO — which was founded as a way to strengthen Europe in response to Russian aggression — requires all member nations to support any member of the alliance who is attacked. The U.S. is the only NATO country to have invoked Article V, following the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington D.C.

• Far-Right Pastor Endorses third Trump Term. During a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Rev. Franklin Graham appeared to endorse Trump running for an illegal and unconstitutional third term. Graham, who is 73, called on conservatives to do “everything we can to get him reelected,” echoing Trump’s previous threats to seek out a third term in defiance of the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

• MAGA California Sheriff Seizes Even More Ballots. Chad Bianco, who is the sheriff of Riverside County, California and a Republican candidate in this year’s gubernatorial election, recently seized 426 boxes of ballot materials on top of the 650,000 he seized as part of an investigation into alleged voter fraud in the 2025 special election (in which Californians overwhelmingly voted in favor of Proposition 50). California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) said Bianco’s allegations were baseless, jeopardized voters’ confidence in the 2026 election and set a “dangerous precedent” of using law enforcement as a way to contest election results.

• DOJ Admits Its Breaking the Law on ICE Arrests — and Doubles Down Anyway. After the Department of Justice admitted in a recent federal court filing that the Department of Homeland Security’s practice of arresting immigrants inside and near immigration courts “does not and has never applied to civil immigration enforcement actions in or near immigration court,” the DHS vowed to continue the practice anyway. The DHS stated Thursday that there was “no change in policy” and that “nothing prohibits arresting a lawbreaker where you find them.”