Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Raw America White House correspondent Brian Karem is reporting that Pentagon officials are quietly criticizing Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth for blowing up the Iran ceasefire. Outraged Floridians are calling the renaming of Palm Beach International Airport after Trump an “egotistical grift.” Trump abruptly gutted one of the few federal bodies that helps states run clean elections just before the midterms. And new video shows Mitch McConnell being lifted into an ambulance on a stretcher, raising fresh questions about how forthcoming Senate leadership has really been about his health.
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Pentagon Officials Rip ‘Extremely Ineffective’ Hegseth and Raise Alarm About Trump’s ‘Forever War’
Raw America’s very own Brian Karem spoke with several Pentagon insiders this week who confided that both Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are losing the confidence of Defense Department officials over their bungling of the Iran ceasefire.
One official speaking anonymously out of fear of retribution said Trump is “risking the very ‘forever war’ the president campaigned against.”
Others inside Trump’s Pentagon are heaping criticism on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Multiple sources described him as feckless. One official said the former part-time weekend Fox News host was “extremely ineffective” at running the military.
“The president and the nation deserve far better,” the official said.
That’s a pretty serious accusation to level at the man running the Defense Department during a war. And it’s coming from inside his own Pentagon, not from cable news pundits or Democrats.
The Pentagon has been cautious in its messaging since the tenuous ceasefire struck in Islamabad broke down. DOD officials have already confirmed that new strikes are being carried out in the region, meaning the war is all but officially back on. Oil prices have been on the rise as traffic in the Strait of Hormuz has slowed to a crawl.
Let’s all remember that Trump ran in 2024 promising to keep America out of endless wars. He hammered that message relentlessly at his campaign rallies. But according to the people actually running military operations, the administration is stumbling into exactly the kind of open-ended conflict in the Middle East Trump swore he’d never allow.
The fact that this criticism is coming from multiple people inside the Pentagon is particularly noteworthy. Military officials using the phrase “forever war” to describe what’s happening in Iran just months before the midterms spells serious trouble for the president and his party.
Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973, over Richard Nixon’s veto, because a generation of Americans had just watched a war widen in the dark while nobody in Washington would own it. That law is still on the books. It says the choice to keep fighting belongs to the people’s representatives and not to one man and a defense secretary he found on morning television. We’re more than four months into a war Congress never authorized, and the people in uniform are the ones sounding the alarm about where it ends.
Outraged Florida Travelers Furious Over Palm Beach Airport Being Renamed for Trump
The Palm Beach International Airport is now officially named for Donald Trump, and Florida travelers are livid.
As of Thursday, the airport formerly known by the code PBI is now coded as DJT, and has been rebranded as the “President Donald J. Trump International Airport.” The code passengers actually see on a boarding pass doesn’t change until August 18. The airport is just five miles from Mar-a-Lago.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the renaming bill back in March, clearing the path for a rebrand the airport estimates will cost roughly $5.5 million. Florida taxpayers put up $2.75 million of the money.
Eric Trump shrugged off the backlash while talking to Fox News, calling the whole thing “slightly controversial.” But airport travelers are a lot more vocal.
MS NOW spoke with people at the airport Thursday. Florida resident Pat Brown, called it “disgusting, ridiculous, pompous, and a lot of other bad things.” She added that seeing the new highway sign on I-95 “makes me sick every time.”
Florida resident Phyllis Malmuth told MS NOW she’s tired of Trump’s name showing up everywhere, and that she “resent[s] that the name is on every institution that we have, this included.”
We’ve watched Trump spend much of his time in office trying to stamp his name on everything he can. His hand-picked board renamed the Kennedy Center after him last year, until a federal judge ruled the renaming illegal and ordered his name be taken off the building. An appeals court twice refused his attempts to put it back. Now he’s building a new arch next to Arlington National Cemetery, along with already having bulldozed the East Wing of the White House for a tacky ballroom, turned the Oval Office into a gilded eyesore and paved over the Rose Garden.
Keep an eye on the airport in the coming years, since Palm Beach County still owns the facility. Trump, however, owns the trademark on the new name. A Trump Organization spokesperson stated the family won’t take any money in royalties or licensing fees from the renaming. He also can’t collect direct payments from merchandise sold inside the airport, though his company still gets to deciee which vendors sell Trump-branded products there. He also retains the right to sell the same merchandise through his own online store.
The president can also license the name to outside parties and cash in on the trademark well beyond airport grounds, all while maintaining the final say over how his name and likeness get used in displays and promotions.
The first flight into the newly christened airport touched down just after 5 AM Thursday, carrying Eric Trump and his wife. Eric later told the Palm Beach Post his father deserved the honor, claiming “there’s probably no one that’s flown into this airport more times than Donald Trump.” Plenty of Floridians disagree.
The men who wrote Article I, Section 9 into the Constitution had one plain worry. They’d watched what happens in the old world when a ruler stops being able to tell the treasury from his own pocket, so they wrote a rule against it and put it near the top of the document. An airport isn’t a gift from a foreign king. But it’s the same instinct they were guarding against. Public property carries the president’s name, a private company controls the trademark, and the man who benefits gets to decide who’s allowed to sell the souvenirs.
Trump Abruptly Guts Agency Helping States Run Elections Months Before Midterms
With the midterm elections looming, Trump has forced out the remaining three members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
Reuters broke the news Thursday evening. The two Democratic appointees on the commission were fired by email from the White House Presidential Personnel Office. The lone Republican resigned. A fourth commissioner had already left back in April, meaning the commission is now completely vacant.
The EAC is the federal entity that helps states run elections and provides guidance on voting procedures. It certifies voting systems, accredits the labs that test them, and maintains the national mail voter registration form.
Trump made the firings after the recent Supreme Court ruling that tossed out more than ninety years of legal precedent, allowing Trump effectively unlimited power to fire the heads of independent agencies — including the ones Congress specifically designed to operate with merit-based protections. A White House official even cited that ruling by name when defending the firings.
Trump and his associates have reportedly spent the past year looking for ways to completely bypass the EAC on issues like voting machine system updates and changes. Emptying the commission outright accomplishes that goal.
The EAC is separate from the Federal Election Commission, which handles campaign finance enforcement and has also been paralyzed by vacancies that prevent it from reaching quorum. The EAC being hollowed out is just the icing on the cake.
All of this comes as Trump continues pushing his baseless and repeatedly debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He’s actively working to enact strict new federal rules on mail-in voting, and has pushed for investigations into election workers in multiple states across the country.
Firing every member of the board responsible for helping states run smooth, secure elections right before the midterms isn’t a coincidence. When looking at the context, it’s clearly part of Trump’s strategy to cast enough doubt on the results to litigate them in court if he doesn’t agree with the results.
In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court tore the heart out of the Voting Rights Act and told the country the protections weren’t needed anymore because America had changed. What followed was a decade of voter purges, closed polling places, and new restrictions in exactly the states that had been under federal watch. That’s the pattern, and you can set your watch by it. Somebody powerful announces the guardrails are unnecessary, and then the guardrails come down right before people vote.
New Video Shows Mitch McConnell Being Lifted Into Ambulance on a Stretcher
New footage has surfaced appearing to show Mitch McConnell being wheeled into an ambulance on a stretcher, following his apparent cardiac arrest at his Capitol Hill home last month.
The video was shot by a neighbor and published by CNN on Friday. It shows Washington D.C. paramedics loading someone onto an ambulance on the morning of June 14th. McConnell’s face isn’t visible in the footage, and bare feet are seen poking out from under a blanket.
The neighbor who recorded the video told CNN that a nearby eyewitness identified McConnell, saying, “Oh yeah, it’s Mitch, I saw his face.”
That same eyewitness who claimed to have seen the senator’s face also relayed something even more concerning. According to that account, McConnell wasn’t wearing an oxygen mask. And the neighbor with the camera said that while responders moved quickly, they didn’t have a sense of panic, saying “In a situation where perhaps time is of the essence, there seems to be a little bit more urgency, but there was no urgency here.”
Keep in mind that previously released dispatch audio indicated McConnell was found unconscious at his home and that first responders performed CPR on him. That will almost certainly cause significant damage to an 84 year-old man’s ribs.
Since the incident, rumors have swirled that McConnell may have suffered brain death. Senate Republican leadership has pushed back hard on those accounts, with a spokesperson for Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota saying the two men had a lengthy phone conversation covering topics including national security. A spokesperson for Majority Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming described a 20-minute call in which McConnell was apparently “fully engaged” and eager to return to the Senate. CNN commentator and former McConnell adviser Scott Jennings said his old boss “sounded strong” on the phone.
But the gap between those reassurances and the eyewitness account of an unhurried, mask-free ambulance transport is noteworthy. McConnell has a well-documented history of public freeze-ups and falls, including one that left him with a cracked rib and a concussion in 2023. He was last seen at the Capitol on June 11th, three days before he was hospitalized.
McConnell, the longest-serving party leader in Senate history, already announced he won’t seek reelection and will leave the Senate in January. Congressman Andy Barr already won the GOP primary to replace him. Kenucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, has until August 3 to declare McConnell’s seat vacant and call a special election.
Woodrow Wilson had a stroke in October of 1919, and his wife Edith and his physician quietly ran the country’s front office for the rest of his term rather than tell the American people how bad it was. It took us almost fifty more years and the Twenty-fifth Amendment before we finally wrote down what’s supposed to happen when a president can’t do the job. We never wrote that rule for the Senate. So a senator can be unreachable for a month, his staff can pass along secondhand assurances, and there isn’t a line anywhere in the law that says the people who elected him are owed the truth.
These stories wouldn’t be covered properly by cable channels and newspapers captured by right-wing billionaires. Our very own White House correspondent is breaking the news that Trump and Hegseth’s own Pentagon officials fear getting mired into a “forever war.” Residents of Trump’s adopted home state are livid about him slapping his name on an airport while setting himself up to profit from it. He sacked officials helping states run secure elections right before voters head to the polls. And there are significant questions about how whether Senate Republicans have been lying about Mitch McConnell’s health.
Raw America is able to cover these stories this way precisely because we don’t have a MAGA billionaire watching over our shoulder or a corporation telling us what we can and can’t say. But that independent model only works if enough readers step up to support independent journalism. If you’ve been enjoying our work on a free subscription, today is the best day to change that. We’re counting on you.
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