Good morning, I’m Thom Hartmann. Four stories crossed our desk overnight that the corporate press either buried or softened, and we’re not doing that here. Trump bragged on Truth Social about overruling his own safety officials during Saturday’s storm chaos, putting thousands of Americans back in harm’s way so he could get his speech. A bombshell Wall Street Journal report reveals European leaders held a secret midnight summit, phones left at the door, to plan for a future where they can no longer count on Washington. Chris Christie went on national television and compared Trump’s $1.4 billion crypto haul to Vladimir Putin’s style of self-enrichment. And a new poll shows a clear majority of Americans think Trump’s war on Iran wasn’t worth it, with his approval rating sliding even further as a result. Let’s get into it.
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Trump admits he overruled his own safety team during the storm evacuation
Trump spent twelve straight hours on Truth Social Sunday, posting more than 100 times between 11 a.m. and 11 p.m. Buried in that flood of posts, alongside a bizarre meme attacking Italy’s prime minister and a doctored photo of the Obamas that drew accusations of racism, was an actual confession. Trump admitted he personally overturned a recommendation to cancel Saturday’s “Salute to America” event even as severe storms and lightning forced organizers to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from the National Mall.
A senior White House official told the Washington Post that “all the entities involved” wanted the event canceled, including Trump’s speech and the fireworks. Trump said no. He told organizers to bring everyone back in, even if it meant waiting until 2 a.m. People ended up sheltering in federal buildings while lightning struck nearby. Trump didn’t take the stage until 11:15 p.m., roughly four hours after the evacuation began, and spoke for 40 minutes behind bulletproof glass to a soaked crowd that had been told to leave for their own safety hours earlier.
This wasn’t a low-key backyard barbecue. The National Mall event was classified as a National Special Security Event, a designation usually reserved for inaugurations or visits from foreign heads of state. And Trump overruled the people responsible for keeping that crowd safe because he didn’t want his moment rained out. He’s since bragged it produced “the Most Spectacular Fireworks Show” he’s ever seen.
There’s a long and ugly American habit of powerful men deciding their own comfort matters more than the safety of the people beneath them. The families living downstream from the South Fork dam in 1889 paid a terrible price when the wealthy sportsmen who owned that private lake couldn’t be bothered to keep it from failing, and a president who’d send a soaked crowd back out under the lightning to save his own applause line is working from that very same instinct.
European leaders held a secret midnight summit to plan life without America
According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, nearly 30 European leaders gathered for a secret crisis summit in Brussels back in January, arriving alone and leaving their phones behind. The trigger was Trump floating the idea of taking Greenland by force from Denmark, a NATO ally. Attendees reportedly compared the session to group therapy. Emmanuel Macron told the room there was no going back to how things used to be. Belgium’s prime minister warned that Europe risked becoming a servile vassal state of Washington. One European intelligence assessment reportedly described the current White House as not a normal government at all, but a single volatile individual running the show.
Even Britain’s own spy agency weighed in, telling Keir Starmer that Trump’s second term resembles a mashup of Salem witch trial drama and the bloody court of Henry VIII, and advising officials to avoid the topic entirely with their American counterparts. By March, patience had frayed further after Trump’s strikes on Iran sent European fuel prices soaring. Even Giorgia Meloni, previously Trump’s biggest ally in the room, conceded he’s “not reasonable.” This is what our closest allies are saying about the American president behind closed doors, and it took an American newspaper to bring it into the open.
After the last world war we didn’t lord it over our friends, we chose to pull them close, and the Marshall Plan rebuilt a shattered Europe into the bedrock of the strongest alliance the world has ever known. So when our closest partners start slipping into a room in the dark to plan a future without us, that isn’t American strength on display, it’s seventy years of patient work getting torched to soothe one man’s moods.
Chris Christie says Trump’s crypto windfall is “Putin-esque”
Trump’s newly released financial disclosure shows he personally made more than $1.4 billion off cryptocurrency in 2025 alone. More than $500 million of that came from World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture he built with sons Don Jr. and Eric, and another $635 million came from his own meme coin, which launched three days before his inauguration.
Chris Christie didn’t hold back on ABC’s This Week. He said Trump and his family believe winning reelection gave them license to “take whatever they could take,” and called the scale of it “Putin-esque type of corruption and self-enrichment.” When Trump was asked to defend the earnings, his answer was that he doesn’t get involved with his own money and doesn’t talk to the people who manage it. Christie wasn’t buying that excuse either, pointing straight at the Qatari jet and the ballroom project that’s now reportedly ballooned to a billion dollars in cost to taxpayers. His closing line should worry Republicans heading into the midterms: “The American people are starting to catch up to this. You can feel it.”
The men who wrote our Constitution had watched foreign gold quietly buy the loyalty of kings and ministers, so they wrote the Emoluments Clause to make certain no American president could ever cash in on the office he holds. A billion and a half dollars in crypto and a jet handed over by Qatar is the exact nightmare they were trying to head off, and a president claiming he has no idea where his own fortune comes from doesn’t clear him, it damns him.
New poll: most Americans say Trump’s Iran war wasn’t worth it
A Financial Times/Focaldata survey taken June 26-30 found 58 percent of voters say the war with Iran wasn’t worth the cost, and 44 percent believe it actually left America weaker on the world stage. Only 31 percent said it strengthened the country’s position. A separate CBS News/YouGov poll found an even starker number, with 69 percent calling the war not worthwhile.
The financial toll is real too. Oil prices are up roughly 35 percent since the fighting started, and Moody’s Analytics estimates that’s cost American households a combined $100 billion, or about $750 per family. Trump’s approval rating has now dropped to 36 percent, down two points in a single month, with independents cratering eight points to just 21 percent. Meanwhile Democrats have widened their lead on the generic congressional ballot to 6 points, up from 4 points a month ago. Voters aren’t buying the ceasefire either. Two-thirds say it will do little to stabilize the region, or could make things worse.
Dwight Eisenhower, a general who’d seen the real cost of war with his own eyes, warned us that every gun made and every warship launched is in the end a theft from those who go hungry and unclothed. Seven hundred and fifty dollars pulled from every family’s pocket, a weaker hand against Iran, and a president whose numbers keep sliding is the bill finally coming due on the kind of war Ike begged us to think hard about before we ever started it.
That’s your Monday morning rundown. Four stories, one clear pattern: a president overruling his own safety team, alarming America’s closest allies, enriching himself at a staggering scale, and dragging the country into a war most people now regret. This is exactly the kind of reporting we built Raw America to do, and it’s exactly the kind of reporting that disappears the moment a newsroom answers to a billionaire owner or a corporate parent company instead of its readers.
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Thanks for reading, and thanks for standing with independent media. I’m Thom Hartmann
Here are five fresh stories from the last day that may have slipped past the fireworks coverage:
DOGE quietly hit its own expiration date and fizzled out. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency was set up with a built in July 4, 2026 sunset, billed as “the perfect gift” of a smaller government. Instead, policy experts told Politico the effort mostly gutted expertise and cut lifesaving programs while falling nowhere near the $2 trillion in savings Trump once promised.
Trump’s own memecoin has burned nearly a million of his supporters. A new report from crypto analytics firm Nansen found that close to 1 million people who bought into Trump’s memecoin have lost money on it through the end of June, even as the president continues to profit from crypto ventures tied to his name.
National Guard troops shot and killed a man in Memphis. Early Saturday morning, National Guard troops deployed in the city fired their weapons and killed a man who was reportedly armed with a handgun. State investigators are now handling the case rather than local police.
Trump’s July Fourth address broke with decades of tradition. Instead of the typically unifying, apolitical remarks past presidents have given on the holiday, Trump used his speech to praise the Iran war, rail against “communists,” and renew his push to restrict mail-in voting, a striking departure that unfolded even as severe weather forced evacuations at the event.
The government just opened investment accounts for newborns, funded by taxpayers. Dubbed “Trump Accounts,” the program automatically deposits $1,000 into new investment accounts for any child born during Trump’s second term, with the money invested in the stock market by private firms starting July 4.
