Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
A new book claims Trump White House staffer Natalie Harp was perhaps the biggest driving force behind the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, which houses the First Lady’s office. New FCC documents show Chairman Brendan Carr has been in constant contact with right-wing media executives and White House officials while refusing to discuss any of it in public. A new state-by-state approval tracker finds Donald Trump is underwater in almost every state in the country with the exception of three. And Democrats just narrowly flipped a Pennsylvania state House district that Republicans had held for nearly three decades, which Trump won by 18 points less in 2024.
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Young Blonde Trump Aide Made Direct Move Against Melania
Last fall, we all watched in horror as construction crews tore apart a piece of the White House that had stood for more than a century. Trump said the destruction of the East Wing of the White House — which he did without congressional approval — was necessary for his $400 million ballroom project. But what no one knew was that Trump’s devoutly loyal 35 year-old staffer, Natalie Harp, was one of the loudest voices calling for the demolition. That’s according to the book “Regime Change” by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
Author Michael Wolff and journalist Joanna Coles recently discussed Trump’s penchant for surrounding himself with young female aides like Harp, with Coles calling them “mini-Melanias.” Wolff said he’s heard from people around Trump that Harp is positioning herself as the woman closest to the president.
This is a significant development, as the East Wing houses the Office of the First Lady. Former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci said that office is now virtually non-existent compared to Trump’s first term. Melania spends most of her time at Mar-a-Lago rather than the White House.
Scaramucci added Trump marriage’s has been rocky for awhile. He believes Melania’s approach during her husband’s second term is to only show up when she needs to. The first lady has spent most of her time on her own documentary project and has largely stayed out of the public eye.
This may sound like a strange, small story on its face. But it reveals a lot about how this White House is actually run. Access and loyalty seem to be what determines outcomes the most, even if that means demolishing a piece of American history.
Here's the thing. The last time the White House lost a chunk of itself, it took a foreign army to do it. British troops put the place to the torch in 1814, and Dolley Madison stayed behind long enough to get the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington out the door, because she understood that house wasn't her husband's property. It was ours. Two centuries later nobody had to invade. All it took was a staffer who figured out that proximity to Trump is the only currency that spends in this building, and a president who treats public property like it's a line item on his personal balance sheet. That's not palace gossip. That's what it looks like when a government stops thinking of itself as a trust and starts behaving like a court.
Trump FCC Chair’s Deep Ties to Right-Wing Media Revealed
Brendan Carr, who Trump appointed as chair of the Federal Communications Commission, has remained cagey about his relationship with the Trump White House. But now, new documents show just how closely intertwined Carr’s FCC is with the Trump administration and suggest he’s not only Trump’s point person on his offensive against the media, but that he’s also acting in concert with far-right media outlets.
Politico’s Dasha Burns directly asked Carr whether he’d spoken with the president before or after calling on ABC to apply early to renew their broadcast licenses for local affiliate stations. That order notably came just one day after Trump and Melania publicly called for ABC to be punished over a Jimmy Kimmel joke.
Carr refused to give a direct answer, telling Burns he won’t discuss conversations with the White House.
But thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by advocacy group Democracy Forward — whose CEO, Skye Perryman, recently appeared on Raw America — and reported on by the Guardian, we have real answers.
Between March of 2025 and February of this year Carr was present for at least eight White House meetings and had at least three scheduled calls with Trump administration officials, including two with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. He’s also had phone calls with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The records also show Carr has had numerous meetings with major media executives. Carr has had sit-downs with Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch and Sinclair chairman David Smith, who briefly yanked Jimmy Kimmel off the air over a joke about Charlie Kirk. Carr has also hosted former Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida in his office, who now hosts a show on the MAGA network One America News.
Democracy Forward special counsel Dan McGrath said these documents show a the administration’s political allies and conservative media figures have a significant level of direct access to the FCC. He added this should raises significant concerns about the FCC’s independence as a federal regulatory body.
Carr — who authored the section of Project 2025 pertaining to the FCC — has publicly admitted that independence doesn’t really matter anymore since the president can fire commissioners at will. ABC pointed to that very same admission in its lawsuit challenging the FCC’s license renewal order.
It’s also revealing that most of Brendan Carr’s meetings with media figures are with extremely conservative ones like Fox, Sinclair and OAN. Carr is also using his regulatory power to squeeze the legacy media networks that Trump has called “enemies of the people.”
This is the real story. This isn’t just a late-night joke. It’s about a key federal regulator who appears to be coordinating closely with the industry he’s supposed to regulate, while telling the public to not look behind the curtain.
When Congress passed the Communications Act of 1934 and created the FCC, it handed out broadcast licenses on one condition, that the airwaves belong to the public and have to be used in the public interest, convenience, and necessity. That standard is in the law for a reason. Lawmakers had watched the early radio era and understood that whoever controls the spectrum controls what a country believes about itself. Now we've got a chairman who admits his own agency isn't independent, who fills his calendar with Murdoch and Sinclair and OAN, and who reaches for license renewals the minute a comedian annoys the president. That's the 1934 bargain running backwards. The public's airwaves are being used to punish the president's critics and shelter his friends, and the people who wrote that law would know exactly what they were looking at.
This has always been their plan: buy up all dissenting voices and turn them into propaganda mills, while making sure all the regulators are in your pocket. This is exactly why we created Raw America, because only independent media can be trusted to tell the plain truth without fear of being censored or shut down. Become a paying subscriber and help keep this work going.
Trump Only Has Positive Approval Rating in 3 States
New data from The Economist and YouGov shows Trump’s approval rating is positive in only three states. Wyoming has the highest net approval at +14, while Idaho comes in at +9. Trump’s approval is at +6 in ruby-red West Virginia.
But everywhere else, the president is underwater, with 47 states plus Washington D.C. all showing more disapproval than approval. D.C., which has been under military occupation for more than a year, is the worst for Trump at -83. Vermont and Maryland come in second at -50, while Trump registers at -48 in Hawaii.
But Republicans shouldn’t just be worried about the president’s approval rating in deep blue states, but the battlegrounds. He’s at -23 in Arizona, -31 in Georgia, -27 in Michigan, -27 in Nevada, -26 in Pennsylvania and -28 in Wisconsin.
These are all states that broke for Trump in 2024. They’re also the states that will almost certainly decide which party controls Congress after November’s midterms.
The White House is making the argument that the 2024 election was the “ultimate poll.” Pulling up two year-old data is certainly one way to respond to bad numbers, but it doesn’t change much worse numbers showing the current picture.
Polling data will continue shifting as more numbers come in, but these trends matter a lot more than any single data point. Dissatisfaction with the Trump administration has spread far beyond the blue states Trump has never won. It’s now showing up in the places that will determine which party controls committee gavels when the next Congress comes in session.
There's a reason statewide numbers hit differently than national ones. Before 1913, senators didn't answer to voters at all. State legislatures picked them, which meant a few machine bosses in a statehouse back room could hand a Senate seat to whoever paid the freight. The Seventeenth Amendment ended that and put every senator on a statewide ballot, and what we've had ever since is something close to a rolling referendum on whether an administration still holds the consent of the people it governs. So when a president is underwater in forty-seven states and the District, that isn't a rough news cycle. That's the machinery the Progressives built doing precisely what they built it to do, telling us ahead of time that the governed have stopped consenting.
Democrats Win Deep-Red Seat Republicans Have Controlled for Decades
Democrats just won a special election for a Pennsylvania state House of Representatives district that Republicans have controlled for almost thirty years.
In the 12th District, Democrat Brandon Dukes narrowly defeated Republican Scott Timko by fewer than 100 votes, 8,434 to 8,346, with 99 percent of the vote officially tallied.
Dukes, who is a commercial loan administrator, told the local Cranberry Eagle he was ecstatic, about the win and that he was still processing his victory. He pointed out that Donald Trump won the district by 18 points just two years ago.
This district sits in deep-red Butler County, which is also where a gunman tried to assassinate Trump in the summer of 2024. Democrats haven’t been competitive there for a generation, but they just won it anyway.
Pennsylvania Democratic Party chairman Eugene DePasquale said the result shows the benefit of Democrats compete everywhere up and down the ballot, and he framed it as a bellwether of November’s midterms.
Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro also celebrated the win, saying residents of the Keystone State are using their power to push back against what he called the chaos, cruelty and corruption of the Trump administration.
It’s not over, as Dukes will have to face Timko again in the November general election. But this special election result alone sends a message to both Trump and the GOP that they aren’t safe anywhere.
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Raw America has spent the first seven months since our founding to doggedly pursue the stories that the billionaire-owned legacy media outlets are either burying or watering down beyond recognition. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox won’t report on a Democrat flipping a deep-red district in rural Pennsylvania. David Ellison’s CBS won’t report on Trump being deeply underwater in all the major battleground states. Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post won’t cover how Trump’s FCC is in bed with right-wing media. But Raw America will, because we don’t answer to a billionaire owner. We answer to you, and you alone.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.
Here are a few stories you may have missed:
Natalie Harp Wrote Fawning Letter to Trump Signed ‘With All My Heart.’ Natalie Harp — the 35 year-old Trump White House staffer known for her fierce devotion to the president — once wrote a gushing letter to Trump painting a picture of her slavish loyalty to him. The letter described how Harp always wanted “things to be right between us” and how she sometimes forgot to eat and sleep while working for the president. She ended the letter by writing, “with all my heart, Natalie.”
Alaska U.S. Senate General Election Will Feature Two Dan Sullivans and Mary Peltola. Alaska’s Tuesday U.S. Senate primary concluded with Democrat Mary Peltola winning her party’s nomination, while incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) will also have to contend with a general election opponent who shares his same name. Peltola led on Tuesday night with 48 percent of the vote, while Sen. Sullivan came in second with 43 percent. Because Alaska’s general election features four finalists, a Republican candidate also named Dan Sullivan, who came in a distant third place, will also be on the November ballot.
Trump Administration Finally Explains Reason for Tarp Covering Kennedy Center. Lawyers for the Department of Justice told a federal judge Tuesday that the scaffolding and large tarp covering the facade of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will have to remain in place due to damage to the marble facade that was caused by workers removing Trump’s name from the building. The tarp has been in place for more than two months, after a judge ruled that Trump’s name had to be removed as any official name change had to first be approved by Congress.
