Good morning. Im Thom Hartmann.
Republicans are reportedly “scared s—less” ahead of Donald Trump’s primetime address tonight, worried he’ll meander off-script while rehashing debunked 2020 election conspiracies during a war in the Middle East and an affordability crisis. Trump also pressed Pentagon contractors to use more magnets after his son landed a $620 million Pentagon loan tied to a magnet company. A new investigation found Trump has a pattern of promoting companies on Truth Social just days after buying their stock. And a new Human Rights Watch and ACLU report describes unconscionable abuse at the country’s largest immigration detention center in Texas, including beatings, medical neglect, and a death ruled a homicide. Let’s get into it.
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Republicans ‘Scared S—less’ of What Trump Might Say Tonight
Republicans are reportedly bracing for a rambling mess when President Donald Trump delivers his live, primetime address to the nation tonight. The 80 year-old president has hyped it as “really big news.” But those with inside knowledge expect it to mostly be Trump rehashing his widely debunked 2020 election conspiracy theories.
One former Trump administration official told Politico that his White House contacts ate all “scared s---less.” They’re reportedly less worried about the speech on the teleprompter and more concerned about what the president might improvise.
Trump’s own staffers have apparently been begging him to talk about the economy instead, given that inflation numbers have recently been on the decline. But Trump’s economic approval rating remains in the tank, as his tariffs and the ongoing Iran war continue to pile on more financial pain onto ordinary Americans.
The White House hasn’t given us a preview of the speech yet, but it’s reportedly going to focus on voting machine security and claims of foreign election interference. Remember, we’re now six years out from the election that states and judges all agree that Trump lost fair and square.
Even some of the president’s closest allies think this is a bad idea. Former adviser Steve Cortes said MAGA voters still believe there was a “grave injustice” in 2020. However, he warned that lingering on it before the midterms will turn off persuadable voters, saying it sounds like “sour grapes.”
Additionally, major networks, including CNN, Fox News, and ABC, apparently haven’t yet cleared their schedules for Trump’s speech. And nobody’s even sure if the White House officially asked.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to spin the information blackout as a reason for Americans to watch, saying. “Nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say, which is why everyone should tune in.”
Trump teased the topic to reporters in the Oval Office, saying the speech would cover “election machines and integrity” and that nothing “gets bigger” than that.
Here’s what makes tonight genuinely dangerous. In 1800, John Adams lost a brutal, bitterly personal election to Thomas Jefferson, and then he did something no ruler in history had ever done. He packed his bags and went home. That quiet act of accepting defeat, the first peaceful transfer of power between rival parties the world had ever seen, is the foundation everything else in this country stands on. When a president uses the most powerful podium on Earth to teach Americans that elections can’t be trusted, he isn’t just rewriting 2020. He’s sawing at the one beam that’s held this republic up for 226 years.
Trump Tells Pentagon Contractors to ‘Do Magnets’ After Don Jr. Invests in Magnet Company
Donald Trump is also raising eyebrows after comments he made recently at the Pennsylvania Defense & Innovation Summit. While addressing a room full of Pentagon contractors, the president decided the topic of the day should be magnets.
“I hope you’re gonna do magnets,” Trump told the audience. “Do magnets, OK?” He wouldn’t stop. “I’ll tell you how to make money. Do magnets.”
Trump has been focused on magnets for awhile. He told Fox News last fall that magnets are essential technology, while also insisting “nobody knows what a magnet is.”
This ignores the fact that physicists figured out how magnetism works back in the 19th century, and quantum mechanics confirmed the details in the 1900s. It’s well understood science. Just not by the person overseeing the world’s largest economy and most well-funded military.
Various posters on social media also casually observed that Trump’s magnet obsession sounds similar to a 2010 Insane Clown Posse song, where one lyric is, “f---ing magnets, how do they work?”
But what’s less funny is that Donald Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., invested in a rare earth magnet startup through his venture firm, 1789 Capital. According to the Financial Times, that company, Vulcan Elements, was in line for a roughly $620 million loan from the Pentagon.
ProPublica went on to report that White House trade adviser Peter Navarro personally lobbied the Defense Department to approve the loan. Pentagon officials said they felt pressure to quickly green-light the deal because “the call came from the White House.”
So when Trump tells a room of Pentagon contractors to “do magnets,” it may be because his own family has financial skin in the game.
We’ve seen this movie before. Back in 1922, Interior Secretary Albert Fall quietly steered the Navy’s oil reserves at Teapot Dome to his wealthy friends, and it took Senate investigators years to drag the truth into the daylight. Fall went to prison, and the scandal became the very definition of government corruption for a century. Now a Pentagon loan gets fast-tracked because the call came from the White House, and the president’s own son holds the stake. The behavior hasn’t changed in a hundred years. The only question is whether anybody’s still willing to do what that Senate did and hold power to account.
Trump Caught Boosting Companies on Truth Social Days After Buying Their Stock
Trump is now allegedly using the bully pulpit of the presidency to make his investments more valuable. A new CNN investigation found the president has promoted more than 20 companies on Truth Social within days of buying their stock, sometimes right before announcing government actions that could benefit those same businesses.
One example is the chip manufacturer Nvidia. Last spring, Trump posted to his Nazi-infested social media site that permits for AI supercomputer projects would be “expedited and quickly delivered.” What he didn’t mention was that he’d bought close to half a million dollars in Nvidia stock just a few days prior.
CNN found at least 44 stock purchases across 21 companies that were followed within a week by a glowing Truth Social post promoting that same company. The White House, of course, denies any links between the purchases and the posts.
Officials say Trump’s stock trades are completely handled by outside investment managers in “fully discretionary accounts,” and that neither Trump nor his family plays any role in choosing what stocks to buy. But there’s one notable catch: unlike his predecessors in the White House, Trump never actually put his assets in a blind trust.
That means he can still see what he owns, even if he’s not personally buying or selling stocks. For decades, presidents either sold off their investments, parked their money in diversified funds or used blind trusts specifically to avoid being accused of corrupt behavior. Trump chose an entirely different setup, naming his eldest son, Donald Jr. as his trustee.
Legal experts say that new arrangement is significant. Dan Greenberg of the Cato Institute called the arrangement “an ethics disaster.” He added that discretionary accounts managed by outsiders still aren’t the same thing as a blind trust.
Another notable example is Trump buying stock in U.S. Steel on the same day he posted that his tariffs would make the company “profitable and valuable” again. He also made dozens of trades in Tesla, including a buying spree the day before he called a detente on his public feud with Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
He’s also bought stock in GE Aerospace, pharma giant Eli Lilly and Apple just 48 houts before posting about all three companies simultaneously. He bought American Eagle stock a few before heaping praise on the company’s controversial ad campaign featuring actress Sydney Sweeney that critics said was a wink and a nod to white nationalist rhetoric about “good genes.”
Watchdog groups say the pattern itself is uniquely worrisome from an ethical standpoint. Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette of the Project on Government Oversight called it “a case study in presidential conflicts of interest.” He said even just the mere appearance of impropriety from the president can erode public trust.
Trump has personally called for banning Congress from trading stocks while in office. But he’s fighting efforts to hold himself to the same standard, and even attacked MAGA Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri for even suggesting it.
Gary Kalman of Transparency International US said that even Jimmy Carter voluntarily put his peanut farm in a blind trust when he took office, saying: “We have exempted the one person who can’t actually recuse themselves from a conflict of interest. He added: “That should be a huge red flag.”
There’s a reason this feels familiar. After Watergate, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 because Americans had just learned the hard way that democracy dies a little every time officials profit from their own power. That law forced financial disclosure on every senior official in the land, on the theory that sunlight plus shame would keep people honest. What we’re watching now is what happens when a president treats disclosure as a formality and shame as optional. Rules like that only work when the people at the top believe the rules apply to them too.
Country’s Largest Immigrant Detention Center Called a ‘Human Rights Disaster’
A harrowing new report was just released exposing the dehumanizing conditions at America’s largest immigration detention facility. Human Rights Watch and the ACLU published the report after speaking with 71 detainees at Camp East Montana, which is a privately run facility at the Fort Bliss Army Base near El Paso, Texas.
The report’s findings are heartbreaking. Detainees described being regularly beaten by masked guards, medical neglect, malnutrition, and being completely cut off from the outside world.
Angélica César, the report’s author, said detainees revealed “unbearable cruelty and international human rights violations.” She added some accounts could be reasonably defined as enforced disappearance under international law.
64 of the 71 detainees interviewed said they either directly experienced or witnessed beatings by so-called “anti-disturbance” guards. One detainee said guards would run into housing pods in groups of ten, sometimes as many as twenty, masked and without name tags, while randomly grabbing people for beatings.
The facility is already known for the death of Gerardo Lunas Campos in January. DHS initially claimed he tried to kill himself and died during a rescue attempt. But the medical examiner later ruled his death a homicide by asphyxiation.
Detainees who saw Lunas Campos’ death described something very different than what DHS alleged. One man recalled Lunas Campos asking for his prescribed medication, and instead getting shoved into a cell. He then screamed that he couldn’t breathe while guards allegedly beat him. Then everything went quiet.
The report also delves into the case of a 66-year-old Cuban cancer survivor who’d lived in Florida for four decades. He went on a hunger strike after staff refused to administer his daily medication. Instead of treating him, staff put him in solitary confinement and eventually transferred him elsewhere. His wife told Human Rights Watch and the ACLU that she’s afraid he won’t survive detention much longer.
An internal ICE inspection this year found dozens of violations at the facility, including failures to document medical care and use of force. A Government Accountability Office audit found ICE wasted millions of dollars rushing the facility’s contract.
DHS claimed a new contractor will fix those problems. But César said conditions still haven’t improved. Detainees are still living in squalor, still being denied medical care, and still having a hard time reaching lawyers.
The report calls for shutting the facility down entirely and ending the Trump administration’s mass deportation program for good.
Our Constitution settled this question a long time ago. In 1886, the Supreme Court ruled in Yick Wo v. Hopkins that constitutional protections belong to all persons within our borders, not just citizens, and not just people the government happens to like. That case was about Chinese immigrants being singled out by San Francisco officials, and the Court said the law’s shield covers everyone standing on American soil. What’s happening behind the fences at Fort Bliss isn’t just a policy failure. It’s the breaking of a promise this country made 140 years ago, and it lands on every one of us.
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If this morning’s newsletter told you something the billionaire-owned press softened, that is exactly why Raw America exists. Trump is scaring his own party with his primetime address, telling contractors to make his son richer, using his platform to make his stocks more valuable and brutally abusing immigrants in hellish conditions. We covered all of these stories without a billionaire calling the shots. Raw America is reader-supported and unbuyable, and every subscription goes directly toward keeping it that way. If you have been reading on a free subscription, this is the single best moment to upgrade to a paying membership. Subscribe or upgrade right now.
Thanks for watching, and thanks for supporting independent media. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Here are a few stories that may have slipped by:
Trump’s Border Czar Warns of More ‘Bloodshed’ Unless Democrats ‘Shut Their Mouths.’ Tom Homan, who is President Donald Trump’s appointed border czar, recently issued an ominous warning to Democrats: if they don’t “shut their mouths,” there will be more “bloodshed” in American streets. Homan made the remarks in response to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents fatally shooting Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said that both men were not the original targets of investigations in those cities.
White House’s Teleprompter Operator Made Over $100,000 Betting on Trump’s Speeches. Gabriel Perez, who has been Donald Trump’s official teleprompter operator since 2016, is accused of making bets on the prediction market Kalshi for what Trump would say in his speeches. Perez allegedly wagered tens of thousands of dollars on the contents of Trump’s State of the Union address in February, along with more than a dozen other public speeches. He is reportedly in settlement talks with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
New Billboard in Tehran Depicts Trump Lying in a Coffin. A billboard recently went up in Enghelab Square in the Iranian capital of Tehran that shows President Trump, with his eyes closed, lying in a coffin. Persian graffiti painted on the billboard translates to a threat against Trump’s life. Other graffiti reads: “In memory of Minab's children,” which is a reference to the U.S. airstrike on a girls’ school that killed more than 200 students and staff earlier this year.
New Poll Shows Trump Approval Rating at 37 Percent Amid War and Lagging Economy. With less than four months before the midterm elections, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that President Trump’s approval rating is at just 37 percent, with 61 percent of respondents disapproving of his job as president. The poll shows lagging enthusiasm for Trump even among Republican-leaning independents, with the president only having 52 percent approval from that group. Respondents registered their distaste for the ongoing Iran war and were not optimistic that Trump would succeed in lowering gas prices or the overall cost of living.
Corporate PACs Kept Donating to GOP Congressman During Months-Long Absence. Rep. Tom Kean (R-N.J.) finally returned to Washington in June after having been gone since March of this year, missing hundreds of votes. Despite him being completely incommunicado with his whereabouts unknown, corporate political action committees continued to pour money into his reelection campaign. Some of the companies that maintained PAC donations to Kean include SpaceX, General Motors, Coinbase, UPS, Comcast, Entergy and New York Life Insurance, among others. Kean attributed his lengthy absence to a depression diagnosis. He’s running for reelection in 2026 in one of the most competitive congressional districts in the U.S.
