Good morning. Trump purged the last Republican in Congress who pushed for Epstein transparency, posting 38 straight “ENDORSED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP!” updates starting at 6:23 a.m. after Thomas Massie lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger. His administration is now handing $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to Jan. 6 rioters — including people convicted of beating police officers — and former prosecutors are warning it’s a recruiting poster for the next insurrection. And Trump just suspended a military partnership with Canada that has existed since World War II, apparently because the Canadian prime minister said something at Davos he didn’t like.
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Trump Spent His Morning Crowing About Primary Wins. His National Numbers Tell a Different Story.
Trump fired off 13 Truth Social posts in three minutes starting at 6:23 a.m. Wednesday, each one a boilerplate victory lap from Tuesday’s primaries: “ENDORSED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP!” His endorsed candidates went 37-0 on the night, and he wanted everyone to know it.
The biggest scalp was Thomas Massie, the seven-term Kentucky congressman who had become one of Trump’s most persistent thorns in the House. Massie co-authored legislation that forced the release of Justice Department documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. He opposed the budget bill. He criticized Trump’s Middle East policy. Trump called him “the worst congressman in U.S. history” and a “Weak and Pathetic RINO.” Trump-backed Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein beat him 54-46.
Folks, this is exactly what the Founders feared most. James Madison warned in Federalist 10 about factions so consumed by loyalty to one man that they’d purge anyone in their own ranks who dared exercise independent judgment. A congressman who occasionally says no isn’t a traitor to his party. He’s doing the job the Constitution designed him to do. When that becomes a fireable offense, we’ve stopped being a republic and started being a court.
Trump’s comms director Steven Cheung posted on X after the race was called: “Do not ever doubt President Trump and his political power. F--k around, find out.”
What Trump did not post about was his own approval rating, which currently sits at just under 37 percent — the lowest of his second term and only four points above his all-time low in January 2021, days after the Capitol attack. Democrats hold an average lead of nearly seven points heading into November’s midterms. They need to flip three House seats and four Senate seats to take back both chambers.
Authoritarians have always confused the silence of fear with the consent of the governed. Trump can run the table inside a Republican primary electorate that’s been marinating in Fox News for a decade, but the broader American public is telling pollsters something very different. The midterms are the firewall. They always have been.
Within his own party, Trump’s primary grip remains ironclad. Outside it, the numbers are a different story entirely.
Former Jan. 6 Prosecutors: The $1.776 Billion Rioter Payout Is a Recruiting Poster for the Next Insurrection
The Trump administration has set aside $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to compensate people who claim they were targeted by the Biden Justice Department. The pool of eligible recipients includes roughly 1,600 people charged in connection with the January 6th attack — including those convicted of assaulting police officers.
Stop and let that sink in. Your tax dollars, the money taken out of your paycheck every two weeks, are going to pay the people who beat Capitol Police officers with flagpoles and bear spray on January 6th. There is no precedent for this in American history. None. Even after the Civil War, when Lincoln pardoned Confederate soldiers, he didn’t write them checks.
Former prosecutors who built those cases are not mincing words about what this signals.
“People were sending text messages about George Washington crossing the Delaware as they took a rebar from the inaugural stage and bashed police officers on the head,” said one former Jan. 6 prosecutor, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “Think how much weaponry they could purchase with that. Think how much money they could use to recruit other people with the message: if you commit crimes in the name of Trump, you’re going to be pardoned and enriched.”
Tim Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney who served as chief investigative counsel for the House January 6th committee, called the fund’s premise staggering. “It’s an alternate universe that there would be any credible claim that they are entitled to damages,” he said.
The fund will be administered by a “Truth and Justice Commission” composed entirely of administration appointees. Acting AG Todd Blanche can remove any of them without cause. The names of recipients and the amounts they receive will not be made public.
A secret slush fund, administered by political appointees the president can fire at will, paying out untraceable sums to people convicted of attacking the seat of American government. That’s not justice. That’s a patronage system, and it’s the exact kind of corruption the Constitution’s emoluments and appropriations clauses were written to prevent.
JD Vance, asked whether people convicted of assaulting officers would be eligible, told reporters the administration would examine “everything case by case.”
Jacob Ware, a terrorism researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the fund signals that “criminal behavior, criminal actions against our election system such as occurred on Jan. 6, will be compensated if done on behalf of the president.” He called it “antithetical to democracy.”
The dollar figure, $1.776 billion, was not chosen by accident. Former prosecutors and extremism researchers noted that Jan. 6 participants used the year 1776 as a rallying symbol as they moved to overturn the 2020 election.
They’re stealing the iconography of the American Revolution to subsidize an attack on the American Republic. The men who actually signed the Declaration in 1776 pledged their lives and fortunes against a king who thought he was above the law. To turn their date into a payout code for people who tried to overturn an election is an obscenity, and every American who loves this country should say so out loud.
Massie Torched Fox News on His Way Out the Door
Thomas Massie did not go quietly. In a concession speech that ran more than 20 minutes Tuesday night, the outgoing congressman blasted Fox News as “slop,” accused the network of blacklisting him for 18 months, and told supporters they weren’t running against Trump or Gallrein — they were running for something they believed in.
“After 18 months of a blackout of not letting me on Fox, they finally let me on Fox today, four hours into the election,” Massie told a crowd that booed loudly at the mention of the network. “Hey, their slop is selling, so they will keep selling it.”
Fox News said it had invited Massie to appear in June 2025 and he declined. Massie did not address that claim.
Now, I disagree with Thomas Massie on just about every policy question you could name. But two things can be true at once. He was one of the very few Republicans willing to cross Trump on Epstein transparency, and for that, the entire MAGA media apparatus turned on him. When Rupert Murdoch’s network decides which Republicans get airtime based on whether they’ll defend the president of the moment, that’s not journalism. That’s the kind of state-aligned media Eisenhower warned about when he talked about the dangers of concentrated power shaping public opinion.
His primary loss completes a yearslong effort by Trump to drive him out of office. The two clashed repeatedly — over the budget, over foreign policy, over Epstein. When Massie helped pass legislation forcing the release of Epstein-related Justice Department documents last year, it was the final straw. Trump spent the final weeks of the primary calling him “the worst congressman in U.S. history” and a “totally ineffective LOSER.”
Gallrein, the man who beat him, used his victory speech to thank Trump and pledge fealty to the America First agenda.
The voters who backed Massie didn’t abandon Trump to do it. Most of them, by all available evidence, support the president. What they supported in Massie was something narrower: a congressman who occasionally said no. That voice is now gone from the House Republican conference.
Article I of the Constitution gave Congress the power to check the executive precisely because the Founders knew presidents would always try to consolidate power. A legislative branch that exists only to ratify the president’s tweets isn’t a branch at all. It’s a rubber stamp, and history is very clear about what happens to republics once their legislatures stop legislating.
Trump Just Suspended a Military Partnership With Canada That Survived World War II, Korea, and the Cold War
The Pentagon announced this week that it is suspending the Permanent Joint Board on Defense with Canada, a military advisory body that has existed since 1940. The stated reason: Canada has not invested enough in its own defense.
The real reason appears to be that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said something at the World Economic Forum in January about middle powers banding together as a bulwark against superpowers. Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby cited those remarks specifically when announcing the suspension.
Think about what we just did. Franklin Roosevelt and Mackenzie King created this board in August 1940, while Hitler’s armies were on the English Channel and the survival of the democratic world was genuinely in doubt. It survived Pearl Harbor, the Korean War, Vietnam, the entire Cold War, 9/11, and two wars in Iraq. It took Donald Trump’s bruised feelings about a Davos speech to break it.
Carney responded by noting that Canada is now spending 2 percent of its GDP on defense for the first time since the Cold War ended, including a $40 billion commitment to the North American Aerospace Defense Command. “I wouldn’t overplay the importance of this,” he said of the suspended board.
Canadian defense experts were less measured. “None of this political rhetoric serves anyone’s purposes but China and Russia,” said Andrea Charron, director of the Center for Defence and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba.
She’s right, and that’s the part that ought to stop every American cold. The alliance system that the United States built after World War II, the one Truman and Marshall and Eisenhower sweated blood to construct, was the single greatest force multiplier in modern history. It’s why we won the Cold War without firing a shot at Moscow. Vladimir Putin has dreamed of dismantling it for 25 years, and now an American president is doing the work for him, one snubbed ally at a time.
Experts note that the board’s suspension is unlikely to disrupt day-to-day military cooperation, since other channels remain open. But the symbolism is pointed. The United States just mothballed an 85-year-old defense partnership with its closest geographic ally because its prime minister gave a speech at Davos that was insufficiently deferential. Canada is also renegotiating its trade deal with the U.S., recently awarded a radar contract to Australia instead of an American firm, and is weighing Swedish fighter jets over American-made F-35s.
Trump’s frustration with Carney has been building for months. This week, it cost a relationship that outlasted every major geopolitical realignment of the past century.
And here’s the bill coming due. When you treat your closest allies like vassals, they go shopping elsewhere. American defense contractors are losing billions in business because the president can’t stand being criticized. American workers in those factories are losing paychecks. American influence in the world is bleeding out in real time, and the people running this administration are too busy posting in all caps at 6:23 in the morning to notice.
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