Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
New details are emerging about Donald Trump’s secret flight out of Turkey last month in a decoy jet, with a new report finding that he made sure his favorite young blonde staffer came with him while top Cabinet officials got left behind. Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton got publicly humiliated on a phone town hall when a voter asked him why he cheated on his wife. Meanwhile, Trump is quietly funneling at least $900 million in taxpayer and donor money into his pet projects at the White House, all while dodging Congress. And Dick Cheney’s longtime cardiologist is now raising serious questions about Trump’s health that the White House has yet to answer.
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Trump Abandoned Cabinet to Fly on Jet with Young Blonde Staffer
When Donald Trump got word of a credible assassination threat from Iran during a NATO summit in Turkey, he escaped Air Force One and was smuggled to a separate military jet via a catering truck, leaving Air Force One to take off as the decoy with everybody else still on it.
What’s even more telling is that Trump brought along a very specific group of people. And that group didn’t include Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or even any of his top security staff. He even left top advisor Stephen Miller behind.
Instead, Trump chose 35 year-old Natalie Harp.
Harp is never more than a few steps from the 80 year-old president, and she was one member of the tiny group Trump yanked into that catering truck as he fled Air Force One.
Trump also brought along Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino and Walt Nauta, who runs his operations in the Oval Office operations. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also boarded the plane, but used the regular staircase in a way that made him look like the senior official on the flight. It’s telling that the people highest in line in the presidential order of succession didn’t accompany the president.
This ultimately isn’t a story about security protocol, but about this president’s true priorities. When Trump thought his life could be in danger, the people he wanted near him were his most devoted loyalists. Not the people who would actually be running the country if something happened to him. Make of that what you will.
Back in 1792, the Second Congress sat down with George Washington still in office and wrote a law spelling out exactly who steps up if the president can’t serve, and they deliberately built that chain around offices instead of around whoever the president happened to like best. They’d just fought a war to make sure this country never again depended on the survival of one man and his favorites, and a president who reflexively saves his valet and leaves the constitutional line of succession on a targeted plane has that lesson exactly backwards.
Ken Paxton Humiliated at Town Hall with Question About Cheating on His Wife
Texas U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton recently had a rough moment in front of thousands of voters.
Paxton, who is the current attorney general, prevailed in a brutal Republican primary against longtime incumbent Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) thanks to Trump’s backing. He’s now up against Democratic state representative James Talarico in one of the most competitive Senate races in the country, with Talarico currently leading in polls.
One reason Paxton is down could be due to his personal baggage. His wife, Texas state senator Angela Paxton, filed for divorce last year on what she called Biblical grounds, accusing him of adultery. She even kicked him out of their home.
During a phone town hall this week, one voter confronted Paxton with a simple question: “Why did you cheat on your wife?”
Paxton’s response was telling. First he froze, then he rambled about not wanting to discuss family matters on a call with thousands of listeners. Eventually he said he was proud of his kids and grandchildren, and tried to move on without actually addressing the question.
This issue has been dogging Paxton for weeks. Earlier this week, hecklers interrupted a Paxton event in Houston, shouting about his alleged affair while he was in the middle of attacking Talarico. And during a recent Paxton campaign event in San Antonio, hecklers were escorted out after shouting that Paxton protects pedophiles. That’s a reference to Paxton’s generous plea deal for attorney Adam Hoffman, who was convicted of sexually abusing a young boy. That deal let Hoffman serve less than a month in jail and not even have to register as a sex offender.
Paxton is no stranger to scandal. Texas legislators impeached him in 2023 over bribery and corruption allegations. The state Senate acquitted him, but the allegations from that trial — including his extramarital affair — never went away.
Additionally, Paxton was caught spending the Fourth of July in London with his alleged mistress while Americans were marking 250 years of independence from the British Crown. Talarico’s campaign didn’t let that slide.
Paxton’s campaign has yet to respond to questions about the Europe trip. When ProPublica and the Texas Tribune came at him separately over his voter registration, his campaign called that story baseless and lie-filled, and then went silent when reporters asked twice what exactly was inaccurate.
Talarico has now led in four consecutive polls, including one from Texas Southern University survey that put him ahead by a 47 to 45 margin, and one from the Texas A&M Bush School poll that had him up 47 to 43. Not one of those polls has Paxton ahead.
Even though beat an incumbent senator in a landslide primary in May, he may very well lose the general election because he can’t answer simple questions from voters about his past.
When Boss Tweed ran New York in the early 1870s he owned the courts and the machinery that was supposed to police him, and what finally cracked him open wasn’t a prosecutor, it was the New York Times printing his ledgers and Thomas Nast drawing his face for voters who couldn’t read but could sure look at a picture. The Texas Senate let Paxton walk, and a woman on a phone line is turning out to be a tougher room than twelve state senators ever were.
Trump Billing Taxpayers $900 Million for White House Pet Projects
The Trump administration is on track to spend at least $900 million on White House construction projects, and taxpayers are footing almost the entire bill.
According to internal White House records reviewed by the Washington Post, the administration didn’t go to Congress for this money, like previous presidents have done. Instead, Trump staffers cobbled together money from various other federal agencies and private donors, then moved it into a little-known account called “White House Repair and Restoration.” Congress typically appropriates about $2.5 million a year to that account. But since Trump took office last January, his administration has funneled $875 million into that same account.
$500 million of that money was transferred from the Secret Service and the White House Military Office budgets. Another $305 million came from private donors. Meanwhile, another $70 million has no reported source.
The biggest cost of these renovations is Trump’s bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House to make room for his gaudy $400 million ballroom. Federal judges already ruled construction of the ballroom illegal, and wrote in their ruling that Congress, not the president, has exclusive authority over construction and demolition of White House property. Trump has already indicated plans to appeal to the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court supermajority that has enabled him at almost every turn.
Some of that Secret Service money was originally meant to help recruit and train agents. Diverting it to pay for ballroom construction has raised eyebrows from lawmakers in both parties.
The White House insists all of this is being done legally, and said the April shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner justifies new security-related expenses. But experts who monitor federal spending say the scale of the transfers to the White House’s restoration account are highly unusual.
In 2008, the last time the White House had any significant updates, then-President George W. Bush made an official request to Congress to fix the West Wing’s systems after a government report found they were failing. Congress passed a bill to appropriate that money, and the Barack Obama administration expanded the work to the East Wing in 2009. The total cost of the project was about $376 million, spaced out over roughly four years. The General Services Administration, the agency tasked with handling repairs and maintenance to government buildings, oversaw the whole thing.
Trump completely bypassed that process. Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution explicitly grants Congress the power of the purse. Trump has clearly decided that rule is optional.
In 1975 the Supreme Court ruled against Richard Nixon in Train v. City of New York, and it wasn’t close, nine to nothing. Nixon had tried to sit on billions in clean water money Congress had already committed, and every single justice told him the law didn’t give him that choice. What we’re watching now is that same play run in reverse, hauling money toward a project Congress never approved, and this crowd is betting nobody’s got the nerve to enforce the ruling anymore.
Dick Cheney’s Cardiologist Says Trump ‘Has Not Looked Well’
The doctor who served as Dick Cheney’s cardiologist for 27 years is now raising pointed questions about why the White House has been so cagey about Donald Trump’s health. And he’s noting that while Trump is not his patient, he can’t help but notice how rapidly he’s declining.
In a New York Times op-ed, Dr. Jonathan Reiner noted how Cheney was unafraid to be transparent about his own heart problems while in office. He needed stents, a defibrillator and treatment for an arrhythmia and a blood clot. That kind of candor from the White House is rare when looking back at history. Grover Cleveland had secret cancer surgery on a yacht. FDR famously hid his declining health from the public. And in 2024, Joe Biden’s performance in a debate raised concerns that his White House has been downplaying his condition.
In the meantime, Trump turned 80 in June and will officially be the oldest president in American history by the time his term ends in 2029.
White House physician Dr. Sean Barbabella, says Trump remains in excellent health. But Dr. Reiner argued that public photos tell a different story. He pointed to the large bruises on both of Trump’s hands, the noticeable swelling in his legs, his habit of falling asleep in public and the as-yet unexplained advanced imaging tests.
There’s currently no legal requirement for a sitting president to prove he’s fit for office. This is despite less challenging jobs like commercial pilots, air traffic controllers and school bus drivers all having to regularly demonstrate they’re fit to do their jobs. The tradition of an annual presidential physical dates back only to Nixon. And the fact that it’s a tradition and not a law further underscores Reiner’s point.
Reiner said Americans deserve answers to questions about Trump’s health, like why his hands are so bruised, and why he’s taking so much aspirin. He’s also asking why the most recent presidential physical omitted his diagnosis of chronic venous insufficiency, and whether the swelling in his legs are chronic or acute, since acute swelling can mean Trump is having trouble with his heart or kidneys.
The cardiologist is also wondering why Trump’s most recent evaluation involved 22 different medical consultants, and why wasn’t his public sleeping episodes went unacknowledged in a May report on his health. More importantly, what led to last October’s advanced imaging session on Trump’s heart and abdomen at Walter Reed happen? And why wasn’t his use of the hair-loss drug finasteride listed in his most recent exam. Reiner also wants to know what other medications prescribed to the president are being withheld from the public, and why Trump keeps taking a brief, basic mental screening test instead of a more sophisticated neurocognitive assessment.
Reiner made the point that Americans deserve a functioning system for finding out whether the person who has the nuclear codes is actually physically and mentally fit to hold what may be the most demanding job on earth, rather than taking the White House’s PR team at their word.
The longtime physician concluded by calling on Congress to launch a 25th Amendment commission, backing a bill from Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland that would create an independent panel to review presidential health records. In a real democracy, voters shouldn’t be left guessing about the basic health of the person running the country.
Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967 after the country watched a president murdered in Dallas and a president before that hide a heart attack, doesn’t just hand this question to the cabinet. It specifically leaves room for “such other body as Congress may by law provide,” because the people who wrote it knew better than to make a president’s own hand-picked staff the only ones who ever get to look. That clause has sat there unused for 59 years, and a safeguard nobody’s willing to pick up isn’t really a safeguard.
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Im Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.
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