Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Senate Republicans are siding with Majority Leader John Thune over Trump as the president demands senators blow up the rules to pass his agenda. The LA Times’ billionaire owner is falling months behind on payments to contractors and vendors, raising serious questions about the 144 year-old paper’s potential IPO down the road. Pete Hegseth just did a quiet one-eighty on his flu vaccine requirement reversal after an outbreak at a Texas Air Force base sickened more than 200 recruits and killed one. And in a wave of primary elections Tuesday, progressive candidates backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept three congressional races, reshaping the Democratic caucus heading into the midterms.
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Senate Republicans Are Increasingly Bucking Trump
Donald Trump is heading to Capitol Hill Wednesday to meet with Senate Republicans, hoping to win some of them back over amid a string of public defections.
CNN is reporting that Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota, who keeps telling him the votes aren’t there to jam through his most controversial priorities like his draconian voter ID bill. Thune has repeatedly said that bill doesn’t have the votes to pass.
More than a dozen Senate staffers and members told CNN Thune has been essentially shutting down Trump’s demands one by one. Thune has declined to kill the filibuster, refused to fire the Senate’s nonpartisan parliamentarian, and made clear to Trump that the math just doesn’t work for getting his wish list through the Senate.
And Republican senators are backing him up.
Retiring Republican Thom Tillis of North Carolina said Trump “is creating terms that will never ever be satisfied,” and that none of his colleagues want to “walk into a boxed canyon.”
Republican John Cornyn of Texas, who just lost his own primary to a Trump-backed challenger, said Thune is “guilty of nothing except telling the president the truth,” and doubled down when saying Trump didn’t have the votives for his agenda in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Trump’s decision to back Ken Paxton over Cornyn despite the latter’s unflinching loyalty to Trump over the years was a lesson that reverberated through the entire Republican conference. Senators up for reelection in 2028 are wondering if loyalty to Trump is even a winning strategy anymore. Cornyn said it all: “Republicans have been deferential to the president to a point that doesn’t seem to have done any good.”
Trump wants the Senate to function like the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson pulled off wins on narrow margins by sheer force of loyalty. But the Senate isn’t the House. And Republicans are saying what works in a chamber where 218 votes gives you everything doesn’t translate to a body where any three or four members can shut the whole thing down on any given day.
Keep in mind Republicans just voted to rein in Trump on Iran, his White House ballroom project is on hold, and his MAGA loyalist slush fund blew up a spending deal. This is what Thune’s job looks like right now: constant crisis management, with Trump constantly chucking new grenades into the chamber.
The deeper question ahead of Trump’s meeting is whether the president is actually willing to hear what his own senators have been trying to tell him: that his most ambitious demands aren’t going anywhere.
A president who treats his own senators as employees and tries to fire the referee when the rules don’t go his way isn’t governing, he’s auditioning for something the framers wrote Article One specifically to prevent.
The LA Times’ Billionaire Owner Isn’t Paying Bills
Patrick Soon-Shiong is the billionaire who owns the Los Angeles Times. But apparently the multibillionaire can’t pay his paper’s bills on time.
Status reported this week that the Times has been consistently falling months behind on payments to contractors and vendors. According to multiple sources, the Times has regularly failed to pay bills on time, and in some cases has only cut checks after vendors escalated the problem to senior executives or threatened further action.
One example is that of conservative writer Catherine Herridge, who left CBS News and signed what was described as a lucrative deal with the Times last fall. Just months into that deal, the Times fell several months behind on her payments. She eventually got paid, but only after a protracted battle.
When Status asked the Times about all this, a spokesperson tried to defend the paper by basically confirming the problem. The Times, the spokesperson said, is current on “the majority” of its payment obligations. The majority. That word signals something is very wrong.
The paper’s senior vice president of finance recently resigned. The Times says his departure had nothing to do with concerns about the business, but Status’ sources say otherwise.
And here’s what makes all of this especially strange: Soon-Shiong is worth billions. This is a man who recently recruited a veteran news executive named David Rhodes, flew him to Los Angeles in coach, put him up in the guest house instead of a hotel, and handed him the keys to one of his personal vehicles rather than arranging for a rental car. Rhodes, for his part, told Status that the experience suggested Soon-Shiong wasn’t really willing to invest seriously in the outlet, saying “that might be why I didn’t take the job.”
Soon-Shiong is currently trying to raise up to $500 million to take the 144-year-old newspaper public. But if word is getting out that the Times can’t consistently pay contractors and that a senior finance executive walked out the door, that pitch is going to be a harder sell.
This is what happens when legacy media institutions fall into the hands of billionaires who treat journalism like a side investment. Staff get laid off, bills go unpaid, and marquee hires find themselves fighting to collect checks they were already promised.
I.F. Stone ran his Weekly for the better part of two decades on nothing but subscriptions, no ad money and no boss, and he broke stories the bigger papers wouldn’t touch precisely because no owner could ever yank his leash.
This is why we created Raw America, and why we will never be bought by a billionaire. But that means we need readers like you to keep us afloat. Become a paying subscriber today and help keep independent journalism alive.
Hegseth Does Quiet One-Eighty Over Vaccine Requirements for Troops
Back in April, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth scrapped the military’s flu vaccine requirement for troops, ending a policy that had been in place since 1945. He called the old mandate “overly broad and not rational” and framed making the flu shot optional as a way for troops to have more freedom.
But after a flu outbreak at the Lackland Air Force Base in Texas has infected at least 222 Air Force recruits, hospitalized four, and killed one, Hegseth is quietly putting the requirement back in place.
One recruit, Keon McDaniel, was six weeks into basic training when he suffered a medical emergency on June 12. He was rushed to Brooke Army Medical Center and died on June 16. His cause of death is still under investigation, and it’s not yet confirmed to be connected to the flu outbreak. But this young man is dead, and it happened during a flu outbreak that broke out at a military base where only about 40 percent of new trainees had received the flu vaccine.
Before Hegseth’s reversal, that vaccination rate was close to 100 percent.
The Army, Navy, and Air Force have walked back the reversal, now once again requiring flu shots for basic trainees. The Pentagon granted formal exceptions to Hegseth’s own policy. The embarrassment couldn’t be more complete.
Democrat Joaquin Castro, whose Texas district includes the base, didn’t hold back, saying, “it was only a matter of time before an outbreak occurred.” He added that Hegseth’s decision “undermined our military readiness.” And he’s right.
There is a reason these vaccine requirements exist. Recruits live in cramped quarters, train in close physical contact, shower communally, and operate under the kind of stress and sleep deprivation that suppresses immune function. These are exactly the conditions where respiratory viruses spread fast and hit hard. The public health community has known this for decades. The 1945 mandate existed because military commanders learned this the hard way.
Hegseth walked in and threw that out, and now the military is quietly reversing course because of a preventable outbreak that has already cost at least one life. Hegseth’s culture war politics led directly to a readiness failure. And troops are paying a heavy price
George Washington had the entire Continental Army inoculated against smallpox in 1777 because he understood disease has always killed more soldiers than muskets ever have, and Hegseth just relearned that lesson the hard way, with hundreds of recruits sick and one young man dead in the middle of an outbreak his own policy invited.
Mamdani Reshapes New York’s Congressional Delegation
Tuesday night’s primaries were a major turning point for the Democratic Party, with all three Democratic socialist candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani winning Democratic primaries for congressional seats. Two of those wins came at the expense of sitting incumbents.
Two-term congressman Dan Goldman, who made his name during the first Trump impeachment, was decisively defeated by former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. Lander ran as a direct challenge to what he called “corporate Democrats.”
Five-term congressman Adriano Espaillat, who is the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, lost to Darializa Avila Chevalier, a doctoral student and democratic socialist who made her opposition to U.S. aid to Israel’s far-right regime a central part of her campaign.
And New York Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, another Mamdani-backed democratic socialist, easily won the primary to succeed retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez, even though Velazquez backed her rival.
All three are expected to win easily in November, given the deep-blue nature of their districts.
Outside New York, the night had other notable results. In Maryland, Democrat April McClain Delaney survived a challenge from former congressman David Trone, who self-funded his campaign with $25 million. In Utah, former congressman Ben McAdams won a Democratic primary and is likely headed back to the House. And in South Carolina, a former Navy admiral that Pete Hegseth fired won a Democratic primary runoff and will compete in the fall.
The message from Tuesday is clear. Democratic voters want candidates who will challenge the party’s establishment, oppose unconditional military aid to Netanyahu’s government and align themselves with the kind of unapologetically progressive politics that Zohran Mamdani has made the center of his tenure as mayor.
The Democratic caucus heading into the midterms is about to get more progressive. And if Democrats win the House in November, that’s going to be especially significant.
Shirley Chisholm won her Brooklyn seat in 1968 by running unbought and unbossed straight at the county machine, and what New York voters did Tuesday says that same current still runs through those same boroughs more than half a century later.
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In this newsletter we revealed how Trump’s White House is rapidly losing the support of his own party in the U.S. Senate, how a major newspaper is still in financial distress despite having a billionaire owner and how Trump’s Pentagon is trying to walk back its failure after getting embarrassed by a public health emergency. Raw America is bringing you news like this without a right-wing oligarch looking over our shoulder, but we can only keep this up if enough readers on the free list decide independent journalism is worth supporting by becoming paying subscribers. If you’ve been enjoying Raw America’s work on a free subscription, today is the day to upgrade.
I’m Thom Hartmann. The fight is here. Thank you for being in it.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump Postpones Signing of Bipartisan Housing Bill to Demand Voter Restrictions. President Donald Trump on Wednesday abruptly cancelled his planned signing ceremony at the U.S. Capitol to demand Republicans combine it with his restrictive voter ID legislation. He hasn’t yet promised to veto the bill, which passed both chambers of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and has been heralded as the most significant housing affordability legislation in decades.
Senators Prepare for Another Potential Government Shutdown This Fall. Ongoing talks over the next government funding package stalled this week, prompting some Republican members of the U.S. Senate to express fears about another federal government shutdown just prior to this fall’s midterms. The chief sticking point for Democrats is Republicans’ demand for even more money for the Pentagon. Retiring Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who is the second-highest ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said Republicans wanted a four-to-one ratio of defense to non-defense spending, calling it “way out of line.”
Trump Gets Kash Patel’s Girlfriend to Sing at Freedom 250 Event After Other Acts Pull Out. After a string of cancellations by artists originally booked to perform at the “Freedom 250” event at the National Mall this July, country singer Alexis Wilkins — who is currently dating FBI Director Kash Patel — will be performing. Wilkins insisted she would be performing “on my own accord, as I have been many other places throughout my career.” The event initially promised performances from Martina McBride, Morris Day and the Time, Milli Vanilli, Young MC and The Commodores before they all dropped out one by one.
Client for Trump-Linked Firm Lobbying for Pardons Pays $500,000. Mo Strategies — a firm linked to President Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns — is now advertising its services to incarcerated federal convicts angling for a presidential pardon. According to its latest financial disclosure form, one unnamed client already paid $500,000. Trump has teased a potential wave of 250 pardons in conjunction with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence next month, and many prominent celebrity convicts like Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and cryptocurrency titan Sam Bankman-Fried have been advocating for clemency.
Millions of Americans Lose Food Stamps Thanks to Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. Since President Trump signed his “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” into law last July, roughly 4.7 million Americans nationwide have since lost their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) benefits — approximately 11 percent of the program’s enrollees. The tax and spending law imposed even more stringent work requirements on SNAP recipients, with many saying that the additional layers of bureaucracy make it more difficult for them to have the benefits they need to afford groceries. The law also shifts more administrative costs from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to states, many of which are already cash-strapped and unable to shoulder the additional burden. Meanwhile, the tax and spending law gave lopsided benefits to the wealthiest Americans, with those earning $1 million or more per year getting roughly $100,000 in additional tax breaks.
