Trump-Endorsed Candidates Get Devastating News from New Poll

Democrats ask judge to block Trump's "brazen theft" of tax dollars, account in Trump's name bought oil and gold after promising end to war, ICE agent charged in Minneapolis

Good evening, and welcome to Raw America. I’m John Byrne, in for British Chris.

Nearly 100 House Democrats are fighting to block what critics are calling a brazen $1.7 billion taxpayer heist disguised as a legal settlement. A bombshell financial disclosure shows that while Trump was publicly telling Americans a war with Iran would end “soon,” an account in his name was quietly buying up oil, defense, and gold stocks. An ICE agent has been criminally charged in connection with a shooting in Minneapolis. And new polling shows that Trump’s endorsement in general elections may actually be doing more harm than good for Republicans in swing districts.

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Democrats Ask Court to Block Trump’s Slush Fund for January 6 Rioters

Let’s start with what House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin is calling “pure fraud and highway robbery.”

Earlier this month, Trump’s lawyers quietly filed a disclosure in federal court indicating that the president was dropping his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. That lawsuit stemmed from the 2019 and 2020 leak of Trump’s tax records by a former IRS contractor, who was later sentenced to five years in prison.

Instead of pursuing the case, Trump’s Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund to compensate so-called “victims” of the “weaponization” of the DOJ under Joe Biden. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s personal lawyer before leading the DOJ, signed off on it.

By the way, one group of people who could potentially receive taxpayer money are the nearly 1,600 January 6 rioters Trump pardoned last year. The fund would be controlled entirely by a commission, with no clear oversight.

Raskin didn’t mince words. He said no president can manufacture a fake lawsuit against the government, settle it with himself as both plaintiff and defendant, and then funnel the money to his allies. He called it a racket.

Ninety-three House Democrats signed onto an amicus brief in federal court urging Judge Kathleen Williams to dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction and block any settlement from taking effect. Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden called it the most brazen theft of taxpayer dollars by any president in American history. The fight isn’t over.

Trump Bought Millions in Gold and Oil After Promising the Iran War Would End

This next story is the kind of thing that would have dominated headlines for weeks in any other era of American politics.

A new 113-page filing from the Office of Government Ethics shows that a brokerage account in Donald Trump’s name made roughly 3,642 individual trades in the first three months of 2026. That’s about 60 trades per day, with a total volume estimated between $220 million and $750 million.

But here’s what makes it remarkable. On March 23rd, Trump publicly reversed an ultimatum he’d issued to Iran, extending a deadline for negotiations after telling Americans the war would end soon. That same day, the account in his name was buying shares in petroleum companies like Phillips 66, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron, along with defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. Those are exactly the kinds of stocks that benefit when a war drags on.

The pattern held. As Trump was publicly reassuring the country, the account was steadily moving out of riskier U.S. equities and into safe havens like gold and Treasury bonds.

The Trump Organization says the accounts are managed entirely by third-party financial institutions using automated processes, and that neither Trump nor his family plays any role in specific investment decisions. But Richard Painter, a securities law professor and former chief White House ethics counsel under George W. Bush, told Fortune magazine he’s gone through every president and doesn’t believe any of them have actively traded individual stocks while in office. Not one. Until now.

ICE Agent Charged in Minneapolis Shooting

Minnesota prosecutors charged a federal immigration agent Monday with multiple felony counts of second-degree assault in connection with the shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis back in January.

The agent, Christian Castro, faces four felony counts and a misdemeanor charge of falsely reporting a crime. He’s the second federal agent charged by local officials in connection with what became a chaotic and deadly period of immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, during which one Venezuelan immigrant, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, was shot in the leg, and two U.S. citizens were killed by federal agents.

Back in February, a senior ICE official acknowledged that two officers involved in the Sosa-Celis shooting appeared to have lied about what happened leading up to the incident. That came one day after federal prosecutors moved to drop charges against two men who’d been accused of assaulting ICE officers involved in the shooting, saying the evidence was “materially inconsistent with the allegations.”

Keep an eye on this one. Minnesota isn’t done yet.

Trump’s Endorsement Is Backfiring in Swing Districts

Here’s a data point Republicans running in competitive districts probably don’t want to hear.

New polling from POLITICO and Public First found that in battleground general election races, a Trump endorsement actually hurts more than it helps. While Trump’s backing makes his 2024 supporters 22 percent more likely to vote for a candidate, it makes Kamala Harris’s 2024 voters 55 percent less likely to support that same candidate. The math doesn’t work out in Republicans’ favor.

The poll also found that backing from pro-cryptocurrency and pro-AI deregulation groups is unpopular with voters from both parties, which is a real problem for the outside money already flooding into those races. Pro-Israel groups generated backlash among Democrats. Abortion restriction groups were divisive along party lines but didn’t create the same cross-partisan toxicity that crypto and AI did.

The results fit with existing academic research showing that Trump’s endorsements may have actually cost Republicans seats in swing districts back in 2018.

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I’m John Byrne, for Raw America. Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.

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STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:

• Republican Senator Who Lost Primary May Be Thorn in Trump’s Side. After Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) placed third in the recent Louisiana Republican U.S. Senate primary, one expert believes an untethered Cassidy may use his remaining seven months in office to spurn President Donald Trump. Western Carolina University political science professor Christopher Cooper told Newsweek that Cassidy may act similar to outgoing Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who became an unabashed Trump critic after announcing he was not seeking a third term. Trump targeted Cassidy over his 2021 vote to convict him following his impeachment over the January 6 attack.

• New York Times Sues Pentagon Over ‘Utterly Unreasonable’ Restrictions. The New York Times has now filed a second lawsuit against the Department of Defense, accusing the agency of imposing “utterly unreasonable” limits on press access. The Times alleged in its complaint that under the new system put in place by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last year, reporters have to “spend hours chasing schedulers by phone and shuttling in and out of the building” just to report on the Pentagon. A DoD spokesperson defended the policy as “completely lawful” and accused the Times of wanting “to remove the barriers to them getting their hands on classified information.”

• Kamala Harris Demands Supreme Court Be Expanded to Counter Red State ‘Cheating.’ Former Vice President Kamala Harris — who lost the 2024 election to Donald Trump — recently told liberal nonprofit group Emerge that Democrats need to come out in favor of adding more justices to the Supreme Court as a means of countering last-minute redistricting attempts in red states. Harris accused Republican-led states of “cheating” in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in the Louisiana v. Callais case, which significantly weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Southern states cited the decision as justification to redraw maps ahead of the 2026 midterms to eliminate majority-Black congressional districts.

• Trump-Appointed Prosecutor’s Appointment in Jeopardy Over Misconduct Allegations. The pending confirmation vote for U.S. Attorney nominee Darin Smith, who Trump appointed to head the DOJ’s office in the District of Wyoming, may have hit a snag. Three U.S. District judges recently tossed nine cases after learning that Smith told a grand jury that all of the defendants coming before them were “murderers” and that they were getting “slam dunks” in each case. In reality, only one defendant was accused of murder. Democrats are hoping to use the dismissals as ammunition in their attempt to stop Smith’s confirmation.

• John Fetterman Admits to STOCK Act Violation. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) was caught in a recent financial disclosure failing to disclose a personal financial trade. NOTUS reported that Fetterman bought a corporate bond for First Citizens BancShares on behalf of one of his children in April of 2025 without disclosing it for more than a year, which is a violation of the STOCK Act. The bond was valued between $1,000 and $15,000, as disclosures only mandate a range, rather than a specific number. Fetterman blamed the delayed disclosure on an “administrative error.”