Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Lindsey Graham’s sudden death now has 80 year-old Donald Trump reportedly obsessing about his own death. The top Republican in the Senate is now publicly refusing to acquiesce to the president’s latest demand, and is jeopardizing Trump’s biggest legislative goal in the process. Newly released body camera footage and text messages are now revealing that ICE agents used racist slurs to describe Latino immigrants. And the man who built DHS’ immigration data system walked off the job, saying he couldn’t stomach one more day of what he called Trump’s “war on immigrants.”
Before we get into it, we need to talk about what’s at stake. Last weekend, at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner, NBC’s Kristin Welker was seen on camera laughing it up with Stephen Miller — Trump’s deputy chief of staff who repeatedly lied on camera about Renee Good and Alex Pretti. And the entire White House press corps sat silently and sipped their cocktails while Trump insulted and berated them. It was an astounding display of fealty to a president who has consistently shown he has no respect for the First Amendment or the free press.
This is why we launched Raw America six months ago. And thanks to our paying subscribers, we’ve been able to have our own reporters on the ground in Washington giving you the real stories while the billionaire-owned press does PR for the most corrupt administration in history. But we’re behind on our fundraising and need more of our free readers to step up and help us stay operational. If independent media that doesn’t pull punches and tells the plain truth matters to you, take a moment and upgrade your free subscription to a paying one. We’re counting on you.
Trump Increasingly Worried About His Own Death
Lindsey Graham was just 71 years old when he died despite having no obvious health problems. His autopsy revealed an aortic dissection, meaning a tear in one of the body’s major arteries.
Graham was also one of Donald Trump’s top allies, and the suddenness of his death now has the 80 year-old Trump pondering his own demise.
People in the president’s inner circle say he’s been asking if Graham’s constant travel schedule may have contributed to his death. He’s reportedly also been digging into Graham’s family history, trying to figure out if there was a genetic explanation for the seemingly healthy senator dropping dead without warning.
Trump is almost a decade older than Graham and is on track to be the oldest sitting president in American history. After Graham’s death, Trump heaped praise on him in a way that could have been interpreted as a man worried about his own mortality. He told “Meet the Press” that Graham was “a tough one to lose” and that he still “can’t believe it.”
Throughout Trump’s second term, he’s been consistently dogged by health-related stories that the White House has yet to fully explain. We still don’t know the deal with the mysterious bruises on his hands. He’s been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, which has led to people noticing his swollen ankles. And of course, the president has a habit of falling asleep in public, sometimes in full view of the press in broad daylight.
The president also keeps bringing up that he’s passed three cognitive tests, as if that’s proof of genius rather than proof that White House doctors think the constant tests are medically necessary.
He’s also openly wondered about the afterlife. Trump has openly speculated, more than once, about whether he’ll actually get to heaven when he dies. During a February rally in Georgia, he told his supporters he’s “not so sure” he’ll get in.
The Daily Beast’s David Rothkopf proposed that this may be why Trump is so fixated on putting his name on buildings and erecting monuments to himself. He said on a recent podcast that Trump is “hearing the footsteps of the Grim Reaper,” and wants to “memorialize himself everywhere he looks.”
We may be watching Trump crack up in real time. An 80-year-old president just watched a healthy 71-year-old senator die without warning. It clearly shook something loose inside him.
George Washington had every chance to make himself permanent, and he turned it down. He walked away after two terms when nobody in the country would've stopped him from staying, and in his will he asked to be buried in a private manner, without parade, without a funeral oration. He understood something this president never will, which is that the entire point of a republic is that it doesn't need any particular man in order to survive. When a president spends his final years bolting his name onto buildings and generating fake pictures of himself standing next to Washington and Kennedy, that's not a man building a legacy. That's a man confessing he doesn't believe the country will remember him on its own.
Senate Republican Leader Bucks Trump’s Latest Demand
Trump is now demanding Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota cancel the Senate’s five-week August recess. He wants Republicans to stay in Washington and force through his draconian SAVE Act, which would make it harder to vote by mail, mandate photo ID at the polls across the country and even require voters bring a birth certificate or a passport just to be able to register to vote. And if the bill doesn’t get the required 60 votes, Trump wants senators to eliminate the filibuster.
Thune is saying no.
The Senate’s top Republican correctly pointed out that this bill has already failed on the floor multiple times and said, “show me how this ends. What’s the picture of victory at the end?”
Trump took to social media to pressure Thune anyway, writing that the majority leader “should not allow the United States Senate to ‘leave town’” until the bill passes or the filibuster is dead.
Some MAGA senators are piling on, with Mike Lee of Utah stating he’ll object to any motion to leave town next week. Both of Florida’s Republican senators, Ashley Moody and Rick Scott, are also making similar promises, as is Jim Banks of Indiana. They all said they’re in favor of the Senate staying in session through Labor Day if that’s what it takes to pass the bill.
But a lot more Senate Republicans think calling off the August recess is a terrible idea. John Cornyn of Texas — who lost his reelection bid to a Trump-endorsed Republican in the May runoff election — warned that vulnerable incumbents are being set up for failure, and that Trump is risking “demoralizing our base of voters we’re depending on in 99 days to elect Republicans.” Cornyn added there was really no reason to stay in Washington beyond what he called Trump’s own “self-aggrandizement.”
Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is retiring from the Senate after January, said Trump’s idea was “catastrophic” and would amount to “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” while Republicans try to cling to their majority in November.
All of this comes after Thune directly challenged Trump to “get on the phone and get the votes” after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was losing his patience with the GOP leader. He added that 15 Republican senators have openly said they’re not willing to end the filibuster or even the “blue slip” process by which federal judges and U.S. attorneys are confirmed, saying it’s “just a fact, and the facts don’t change.”
The math is pretty clear. No Democrat supports the bill for obvious reasons. Four Republicans already voted against Trump’s preferred version of the legislation in June. Thune says he’d reconsider the August recess if there were actually a path to passage. But right now, there’s no chance. And Trump’s only option is to throw tantrums on social media.
We ratified the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, and we wrote it in about as plain a language as this country has ever managed, that the right to vote can't be denied or abridged on account of race, and that Congress has the power to enforce that. For the century that followed, states figured out you don't need to ban anybody from voting if you can just make voting hard enough. Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Paperwork nobody could produce on demand. That's the family this bill belongs to, and everybody in that chamber knows it. When a president demands the Senate blow up its own rules to pass a documentation requirement that not one member of the opposition supports, he isn't trying to secure an election. He's trying to decide in advance who gets to be in one.
ICE Agents Caught Using Racist Slurs to Describe Latino Immigrants
A new court filing in Los Angeles is revealing the shocking racial hatred that rank-and-file ICE agents have toward Latino immigrants.
Body camera footage from a June raid at a Home Depot in Hollywood caught an agent saying he was “pretty sure” a man in a minivan was a “wet.” Text messages from agents’ phones referred to “tonks everywhere selling food,” with that word reportedly coming from the sound a flashlight makes when it hits someone’s skull. Another video showed an agent teling his colleagues to “plug us in wherever you see some tonks and we’ll jump out.”
All of this came about as part of a motion filed by the ACLU, Public Counsel, and other attorneys asking a federal judge to block what they call an “ongoing campaign of suspicionless and discriminatory detentive stops” across the Southern California region.
ACLu attorney Mayra Joachín said the language agents used shows the “racist sentiment” behind “what’s driving the way that immigration operations are being conducted.”
This new evidence also shows a dramatic shift in tactics from the Biden administration to the Trump administration. Previously, ICE agents worked from individualized target lists built on actual investigations. But starting last year, ICE field offices were told by the agency’s headquarters to start arresting “collaterals,” meaning people who weren’t targets at all, in mass sweeps.
The court filing showed that in practice, this meant ICE agents driving to Home Depots and car washes and running checks until they found a small number of people who may be undocumented, and then raiding the location on a chosen day regardless of whether the original targets were even still there.
When one officer was asked in a deposition what he looks for, he simply answered, “older Hispanic male.” The attorneys’ conclusion in the filing was that federal agents “are really looking for Latinos.”
And this is only the tip of the iceberg. More than 800 federal agents admitted to using their personal phones during these operations. But in a June court hearing, the government told a judge that none of those agents’ phones had actually been forensically imaged, in spite of a direct order from the court to do so.
In 1954, two weeks before Brown v. Board of Education, a unanimous Supreme Court decided a case called Hernandez v. Texas. Pete Hernández had been convicted by a jury in a Texas county where not one person with a Spanish surname had been called to serve in twenty five years, and the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of equal protection doesn't stop at Black and white. It covers everybody. It was the first case ever argued before that Court by Mexican American attorneys, and they won it nine to nothing. Seventy two years later a federal agent sits down for a sworn deposition and says the thing he's looking for is an older Hispanic male. That's not enforcement drifting off course. That's the same logic the Supreme Court threw out, back on the street and wearing a badge.
Top DHS Data Official Resigns Over Trump’s ‘War on Immigrants’
Marc Rosenblum spent a decade building out the Department of Homeland Security’s statistics office, expanding it from 11 employees to 45, and having it publish monthly data on ICE and CBP arrests and removals that had never before been revealed to the public.
Over the weekend, he resigned. And the former DHS statistician didn’t hold back when explaining the reason for his abrupt exit.
In a LinkedIn post, Rosenblum wrote that he’s “thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration,” attributing his resignation to Trump’s “war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts, not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption.”
Right-wing outlet America First Post tried to spin Rosenblum’s departure to imply corrupt behavior, suggesting he “easily could’ve been underreporting deportations or illegal populations.” But Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council called the outlet’s claim an “outrageous lie,” saying Rosenblum was responsible for the most transparent immigration data the government had ever released, which all stopped flowing the moment Trump’s second term began.
That data drought masks the true scope of Trump’s mass deportation campaign. At one point, Trump’s ICE agents arrested more than 10,000 people in just five days, and at least 11 people have been killed during ICE operations, including U.S. citizens like Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. DHS has claimed it’s only targeting “the worst of the worst,” but its own database showed fewer than 10,000 people fitting that description out of roughly 220,000 total people detained. That’s just 4.5 percent.
The Cato Institute’s David Bier said there’s currently “no accountability” at DHS and “no public understanding about what’s really going on that is not curated by a press release from the agency.” Reichlin-Melnick called Rosenblum “one of the most dedicated civil servants I’ve ever met,” and lamented that his office has been “repeatedly blocked from sharing previously public data” since Trump’s second term began.
In 1975, Frank Church ran a Senate committee that pried open what the intelligence agencies had been doing during all the years nobody was allowed to look. Mail opened. Citizens spied on. Plots run in the dark. Every bit of it defended at the time by officials who insisted the public didn't need the numbers. What came out of that wasn't just a scandal, it was permanent oversight committees and a law requiring warrants, because Congress finally concluded that secrecy is the thing that lets abuse compound. Every agency that's ever gone bad went quiet first. So when the people whose entire job is counting walk out the door and the counting stops, that's not a staffing problem. That's the lights going out in the one room where the public used to be allowed to stand.
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