U.S. Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed speaks to supporters and the media during a campaign rally in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., August 2, 2026. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook

Do we stand on the edge of a grand new progressive era, with good wages for all, racial and gender equality and justice, and America joining the rest of the developed world with cheap college and healthcare paid for by rational taxes on the morbidly rich? Or will Trump gleefully overthrow American democracy, finish his ongoing project of shuttering or handing to his oligarch partners-in-crime our free press, and imprisoning more of us who object?

When Mussolini put Antonio Gramsci, the founder of Italy’s Communist Party, in prison in 1927, Gramsci wrote from his prison cell that:

“[T]he old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

That interregnum is passing right now here in America, the symptoms are obvious, and change is upon us.

The Hartmann Report

A Daily Newsletter of Renaissance Thinking about Progressive Politics, Economics, Science, and the Political News Issues of Our Day

By Thom Hartmann

Two forces in American politics are similarly on a collision course today at two levels. Within the Democratic Party, it’s Clinton-era neoliberalism versus Bernie’s progressivism. In the overall political scene, it’s Trump’s and his captive GOP’s neofascism versus the entire spectrum of Democrats (both “corporate” and “progressive”) who, regardless of their differences, still embrace democracy.

The problem corporate neoliberal Democrats, the heirs to Clintonism and Obamaism, face is that a majority of Americans are now clear that it simply doesn’t work. We’re sick of partial, corporate- and billionaire-aligned solutions to large problems that should best be handed by our government as part of the commons.

— Trying to get affordable healthcare to all Americans via Obamacare, for example, is increasingly failing because the massive for-profit insurance industry it depended on is increasingly committed to squeezing every last penny out of us, regardless of how many of us die.

— Trying to lift a majority of Americans back up into their parents’ middle class lifestyle is also failing, largely because the corporate wing of the Democrats dependent on campaign contributions from giant union-hating corporations have “mysteriously” failed in their proclaimed effort to increase unionization and the minimum wage.

— Trying to give all Americans access to a college education without debt has failed because a large handful of big-bank-funded Democrats supported Bush’s bankruptcy “reform” in 2005 that outlawed using bankruptcy to discharge student debt. When Reagan came into office, roughly 80 percent of the cost of college was covered by state and federal money and college endowments; today that’s only around 20 percent; returning to 80% (and, thus, affordable college) is now a big legislative lift when our tax code is so skewed toward billionaires and massive corporations that the money for college is largely gone.

Forty-five years of the Reagan Revolution being maintained by both parties have pretty much proven that neoliberal Democratic policies won’t be enough to either stop Trump’s full-on push to convert America into a fascist state, nor will they address the very real problems most Americans are experiencing today when it comes to being able to afford everything from rent to groceries to healthcare.

Today’s generation of progressive Democrats, therefore, are taking a page from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and proposing genuinely big solutions to the massive problems that Democratic neoliberalism and Republican neofascism have produced.

And they’re winning!

This week’s primary results are just the latest indication that a progressive renaissance on par with the New Deal, or at least the Great Society, may be close to our doorstep.

While media pundits seem baffled, it’s obvious to most of the rest of us that this is being driven by our middle class collapsing from two-thirds of us when Reagan took office in 1981 to around 41 percent of us today (and now it takes two paychecks to get there, whereas a family could be safe with a single wage-earner in 1981).

Fully 60% of Americans now live paycheck-to-paycheck with virtually no savings, numbers we haven’t seen since the 1930s.

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— Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have given billionaires and massive corporations virtual control over our elections as their corrupt Citizens United decision has allowed literally billions in dark money to flood every cycle.

— Our privatized, profitized healthcare system, including the Medicare Advantage Scam, accounts (according to a recent study by Yale) for over 114,000 unnecessary American deaths every year and untold misery and loss of worker productivity.

— While racist Republicans complain that we don’t have enough white babies, young people with college debt can’t afford to buy a house, marry, raise a family, or even start a small business.

— Meanwhile, the top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 93% and one Nazi-saluting trillionaire racist owns more wealth than the entire bottom 50% of Americans, 174 million people.

Our system has been rigged by 45 years of Reagan’s and Clinton’s neoliberalism, as I document in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and The Hidden History of the American Dream, and a clear majority of Americans have finally figured it out.

Inequality has never, ever before been this bad in America, going all the way back to the 1700s. So, no surprise, Democrats who offer real solutions are winning primaries across the country and are poised to make huge electoral gains this fall, unless Trump and his shock troops succeed in pulling off the coup they’re clearly trying to make happen.

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While corporate Democrats and Republicans decry “radical,” “far left” and “democratic socialist” candidates (and a desperate Trump is calling them “communists”), opinion polling is explaining the election outcomes that are befuddling op-ed columnists and “middle of the road” candidates.

— American voters tell pollsters they believe it’s obscene that one man (Musk) could have spent $290 million to make Trump president and that roughly one out of every six dollars spent in the 2024 election ($2.6 billion) came from just 100 billionaire families, virtually all of it funding GOP candidates. They want Citizens United overturned and a return to strict campaign finance limits.

— They want healthcare that everybody has access to and everybody can afford, and the only option on the table for that is what most other advanced democracies in the world have: Medicare for All or its equivalent. Fully 90% of Democrats and 66% of all Americans want it, and want it now. We also need to take on drug prices, a battle that pharma-funded corporate Democrats and Republicans have fought against for decades.

The solution to the high prices for everything isn’t just breaking up monopolies to bring back competition and small businesses (although that’s important); it also requires people to earn enough to live.

Only 6% of the private workforce has a union representing them (it was a third of us before Reagan and the GOP declared war on unions in 1981) and the minimum wage FDR gave us as part of his New Deal is stuck at $7.25/hour when if it’d been inflation adjusted since the 1960s it’d be well over $15.

A large part of the challenge average Americans face is because of the so-called K-shaped economy; the top is wide with a handful of billionaires controlling over half our wealth and the bottom is wide because of the impoverishment of our once-thriving middle class.

The answer here is simple: return to the corporate and personal income tax rates from 1933-1981 that built the middle class and prevented the emergence of American oligarchs.

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Meanwhile, climate change is literally killing us and it’s beyond obscene that Trump and his Republican toadies lie about it with a straight face just to keep the fossil fuel industry money flowing into their pockets.

Trump’s war on green energy is crippling our ability to grow industry, adding to home electric bills, and jacking up emissions, all because the industry’s fatcats took his deal and gave him millions to get elected.

Foreign wars haven’t helped us either, with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars Bush and Cheney lied us into having cost around $8 trillion (and thousands of American lives); Trump’s newest illegal war with Iran is costing us a billion a day and crippling our ability to hold off Russia’s and China’s expansionist desires.

Every single one of these issues are on the progressive agenda, whether you call it that or “democratic socialism” or just point out that it aligns with traditional Democratic Party traditions prior to the Clinton presidency.

Every 80 years, it seems, we end up with a new progressive revolution, and we’re overdue for this generation’s. Progressive Democrats are leading the way, but none of it will work unless we all engage.

Double-check your voter registration, throw a few dollars to your favorite candidates (ONLY use their campaign websites; never reply to a text message or email), and show up at your local Democratic Party to volunteer to help out.

And share genuinely progressive and educational media — including this newsletter — with everybody you know. Organized people can overcome organized money as we saw with Angie Nixon’s primary victory in Florida and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s in Michigan.

We can do this. Tag, we’re it!

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You won’t find insightful analysis like this latest column from Thom Hartmann — in which the legendary journalist digs beneath the headlines to reveal the big picture — in the op-ed section of Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post or Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. This is because we all know they didn’t buy those papers to support journalism, but to decide what the narrative should be.

We founded Raw America this year because, like you, we believe a small handful of billionaires shouldn’t be the sole deciders of what we get to know. The fact that you’re reading this shows you agree. But our independence is only possible because our readers believe in what we’re doing enough to chip in to keep it going. We’re hoping this column will be what convinces you to upgrade your free subscription to a paying one, which you can do right now for just 22 cents a day. We’re counting on you.

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Newly leaked letters from 35 year-old White House aide Natalie Harp are providing new insight into just how strange and intimate her relationship really is with 80 year-old Donald Trump. One of the president’s top advisors just posted an embarrassing tirade on social media in an apparent public meltdown over the flood of leaks coming out of the Trump White House. Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton is facing a fresh round of criticism over how his office sought to protect a research lab that tortured hundreds of puppies. And the U.S. Navy may strip the name of a heroic Black World War II sailor from a new aircraft carrier so it can be renamed for Trump instead.

Before we get to the news, let’s talk about why you’re getting your news from Raw America instead of from a cable network or newspaper owned by a MAGA billionaire. Those news outlets are incapable of truly holding this administration accountable, because they’re beholden to ultra-rich Trump donors to keep their doors open. Raw America is different. We only answer to you, the reader. But whether we keep this work going is also completely up to you. Independent journalism can only work if its readers believe in it enough to financially support it. The fact that you’re reading this shows you know how important independent media is right now. So make your support official by becoming a paying subscriber, which you can do right now for just 22 cents a day. Don’t wait.

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Natalie Harp’s Bizarre and Intimate Letters to Trump Leaked in Their Entirety

The Daily Beast recently published the full text of a pair of bizarre handwritten notes that presidential aide Natalie Harp wrote to Donald Trump back in 2023. They read less like communications from a White House staffer and more like something out of a lovestruck teen’s diary.

When Harp was 31 and Trump was 76, she told him, “you are all that matters to me… I don’t want to ever let you down.”

The letters appear to have been written during or right after a golf trip to Scotland and Ireland in May of 2023. Harp revealingly told Trump she was jealous of women “whose only job seems to be to talk with you and look pretty,” adding “I want that job!!”

She went to talk about how she forgot to eat and sleep, all while worrying that she would somehow upset Trump during their trip. One letter reads like a lengthy apology, in which she recalled how she was left behind by Trump’s entourage, sitting alone in a van outside customs without her passport and panicking instead of calling the Secret Service.

Harp is referred to as the “Human Printer” as she became known for carrying around a portable printer to print flattering news articles and social media posts to hand to Trump. More revealingly, she’s also become the point person for foreign leaders who want to reach the president. Harp also somehow went for more than a year without seeking the routine security clearance typically required of West Wing staffers.

Trump biopgrapher Michael Wolff, who was handed the letters by 2024 Trump campaign staff while writing his book “All or Nothing,” opined that Harp’s relationship with Trump “is not a relationship that should exist in a professional setting.”

Wolff added that at the time, there was “a revolt” among Trump’s staff, because tose in his orbit could see Harp’s influence growing without having actual experience to justify her proximity to the president.

White House spokesman Davis Ingle called Harp “one of the most loyal and hardest-working aides” on Trump’s team. After Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia mentioned Harp by name during a recent campaign rally, Ingle attacked Ossoff a “feminine theatre kid cosplaying as Barack Obama.”

Longtime Barack Obama advisor David Axelrod called the Trump-Harp relationship “a deadly serious issue” due to her going for more than a year without a security clearance. He’s not wrong: Harp has no formal national security background and yet has access to Trump’s Truth Social account, which is his primary method of communication. She also accompanied him when he was smuggled via catering truck to a separate military aircraft after ditched Air Force One to escape a reported Iranian threat, leaving his own Cabinet officials behind as a decoy.

The framers wrote Article II so the people around a president would answer to the Senate and to the public, not just to the president himself. When the person deciding what a president reads and which foreign leaders reach him holds no confirmed office and answers to nobody but him, we’ve quietly rebuilt the exact arrangement the Constitution was written to prevent.

Top Trump Advisor Has Public Meltdown Over Leaks

The fallout from the last week of nonstop Natalie Harp coverage has apparently gotten to one of Trump’s most senior staffers.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, who also runs the office that decides who gets appointed to nearly every job in the federal government, posted a Thursday night rant on his official X account aimed at unnamed former staffers.

Scavino wrote that staffers who “get fired for doing a spectacularly s—ty job at an agency” and have their badges deactivated and building access revoked should accept that they have “the full ‘you’re dead to us’ package” instead of running to every media outlet willing to give them a microphone.

He added that those unnamed former employees should “just take the L, and move on,” calling them “LOSERS” in all-caps, refraining from naming any particular individuals.

Nobody close to Trump seemed to know who he was talking about. But with the ongoing exodus of top aides from the West Wing, there are plenty of names choose from. Just 19 months into Trump’s second term, White House officials have been leaking on an almost-daily basis on everything from the Epstein files to the Iran war.

But the timing of Scavino’s public meltdown also lines up with the most recent news cycle dominated by coverage of Natalie Harp. It started when Jon Ossoff told a crowd in Atlanta that Trump doesn’t actually want to do the job of president, but “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie” on a “flying palace” gifted by Qatar’s royal family.

Trump notably didn’t refute Ossoff’s main line of attack about him not wanting to govern, but instead resorted to calling the Georgia senator a “Pee-wee Herman look-alike.” His communications director decided to use a weirdly sexual line of attack. But that only guaranteed Harp would stay in the headlines for the rest of the week.

We’ve since learned of Harp’s other bizarre behaviors, like reportedly setting up a bed in the maids’ quarters at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey gold club in the summer of 2023 after staff wouldn’t give her a room, then moved herself to the women’s locker room to get even closer to Trump. Wolff said Harp seems convinced that she’s the president’s “higher purpose bride.” That all came as First Lady Melania Trump finally resurfaced yesterday after being out of the public eye for almost a month. Melania’s press conference came just after it was reported that Harp was the leading advocate for the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, which has traditionally housed the Office of the First Lady of the United States.

Former Trump press secretary Sarah Matthews told CNN that Harp’s closeness to the president has apparently unsettled even his own Secret Service detail. The network also recently reported that in 2023, Harp once climbed into the trunk of an SUV just so she could ride along to court with Trump when there was no room for her in his motorcade.

In their book “Regime Change,” New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan published their own excerpts from the letters. Haberman called Harp Trump’s “human binkie. So when you put it all together, Scavino’s meltdown is simply because the dam is leaking like a sieve from a dozen different places.

Back in 1931, in Near v. Minnesota, the Supreme Court told government it doesn’t get to shut down a publication it finds inconvenient, and every administration since has had to live with reporting it can’t stand. When a White House treats its own leaks as betrayal rather than accountability, it’s telling you it wants back the one power that ruling took away.

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Paxton Protected Research Lab That Tortured Hundreds of Puppies

In Texas, the U.S. Senate race between Republican Ken Paxton and Democratic state representative James Talarico has become one of the most closely watched contests in the country. Talarico has been leading in recent polls and has a real chance of giving Democrats their first U.S. Senate seat in Texas in three decades.

Talarico has a long list of potential attacks on Paxton. There’s the securities fraud case that hung over Paxton’s head for years before the charges were finally dismissed in 2025, after he completed a pretrial diversion deal. There’s also Paxton’s 2023 impeachment by the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives, which ended with an acquittal from the state Senate. There’s also whistleblower allegations from Paxton’s former senior staffers. But Talarico’s campaign may have finally found something that could cause lasting damage to Paxton’s chances: puppies.

Animal rights advocates have been calling for the release of veterinary records pertaining to roughly 400 puppies used as lab animals in various horrific experiments at Texas A&M. The university has steadfastly refused, citing confidentiality rules, and a 2015 report found the school leaned on a legal opinion issued by Ken Paxton’s office to justify keeping the documents under seal.

Talarico has turned that into a blunt campaign message, recently posting to X, “I wish Ken Paxton would protect puppies the way he protects pedophiles.” That’s a reference to a plea deal Paxton’s office cut with convicted child molester Adam Hoffman, who only had to serve a few weeks in jail and didn’t even have to register as a sex offender. Paxton’s team has defended that deal by saying the first trial ended in a hung jury and the victim didn’t want to testify a second time.

Political strategist Mike Fahey told Newsweek that modern politics is “increasingly a battle for memory,” adding that “the most effective political stories are the ones you can explain at the dinner table in 15 seconds.” He further observed that if any line of attack “requires a law degree and a flow chart to understand, you’ve probably already lost most voters.”

Whether a story about puppies moves more Texas voters than a complex securities fraud case is still an open question, but it demonstrates that Talarico’s messaging strategy is continuing to evolve.

When Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act in 1966, the whole point was that a government working for you doesn’t get to pick and choose which of its own files you’re allowed to see. An attorney general’s real job is enforcing that principle, and every time an office finds a fresh reason to keep the folder closed, ordinary people lose a little more of the power to check the government they pay for.

Navy May Name Aircraft Carrier After Trump Instead of Heroic Black Sailor

U.S. Navy leadership is now discussing the possibility of renaming an aircraft carrier after Donald Trump, instead of a Black World War II hero.

The carrier was initially meant to honor Doris Miller, who performed heroic acts during the attack on Pearl Harbor that eventually prompted the U.S. to throw its weight behind the Allies in World War II.

Miller was a mess attendant with no anti-aircraft weapons training. But during Japan’s attack on the base, he grabbed a gun anyway and shot down at least one Japanese plane. Miller also dragged wounded sailors to safety while under fire. He became the first Black service member in American history to be awarded the Navy Cross, which is the branch’s second-highest honor.

The U.S.S. Doris Miller was set to make history as the first aircraft carrier ever named after a Black man, and the first named after an enlisted service member rather than an officer or a president. Ironically, Trump made that call himself during his first term.

According to CNN, the renaming discussions have apparently been going back and forth for months. The Navy has reportedly stopped using Miller’s name internally, and are instead only referring to the ship by its hull number, CVN-81. Two unnamed officials told NBC that Doris Miller may be posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, though the White House hasn’t officially approved it as of Friday. Aircraft carriers are almost always named after presidents, while destroyers tend to be named for Medal of Honor recipients. The shuffle of names is looking less like tradition and more like a deliberate swap to appease the man in the Oval Office.

The final decision on the ship’s name rests with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao. If the name change becomes official, a ship meant to honor a working-class Black sailor who put his life on the line at Pearl Harbor would instead carry the name of a man who had his doctor tell the military that he couldn’t be drafted to Vietnam because of bone spurs.

In 1941, the same year Doris Miller picked up that gun, A. Philip Randolph had to threaten a march on Washington just to force Franklin Roosevelt to open defense jobs to Black workers. Miller’s name on that carrier was a small and very late payment on a debt this country still hasn’t settled, and taking it back tells you exactly who’s expected to keep sacrificing and who’s expected to be celebrated.

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Thanks to our paying subscribers, we’re able to give you the unfiltered truth that the news outlets owned by billionaires with Mar-a-Lago memberships would either water down or bury entirely. MAGA oligarchs like Jeff Bezos and David Ellison would rather you not hear about Trump keeping a staffer around who writes him gushing love letters. They don’t want you to know about Texas’ Republican U.S. Senate nominee protecting pedophiles and people who tortured puppies. They won’t report on the Pentagon disrespecting the memory of a heroic Black sailor all to appease the president’s fragile ego. But Raw America can, because we don’t answer to any of them. We only answer to you.

Our independence is our greatest strength, and it’s what sets us apart from every other outlet that has to run their stories by a pro-Trump billionaire before they’re published. But whether we’re able to keep this work going is completely up to you. The fact that you’re still here means you appreciate hard-hitting independent journalism. We’re hoping this newsletter convinced you to become a paying subscriber. Upgrade your free subscription for just 22 cents a month. That’s less than a cup of coffee, and it’s all we need to stay independent and accountable only to you.

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for watching, and thanks for supporting independent media.

Here are some stories you may have missed:

• ICE Detains 5-Year-Old Boy on His Way to a Soccer Game. Five-year-old Liam Tadeo and his father were both recently detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Austin, Texas, and are currently being held at the notorious Dilley, Texas immigrant detention center. That’s the same detention facility where another five-year-old boy named Liam was jailed after ICE agents in Minneapolis arrested him and his father as he was taking him to school. Advocacy groups have accused Dilley of housing immigrants in deplorable conditions, with insect-ridden cells, spoiled food and a pattern of guards failing to give detainees their prescribed medication.

• Former Obama Aide Sounds Alarm Over Natalie Harp’s Access. In an op-ed for the New Republic, Greg Greene — who ran former President Barack Obama’s social media accounts — said 35 year-old Trump White House staffer Natalie Harp’s level of access “should concern everyone.” Greene recounted how when he held Harp’s job, every post had rigorous standards and underwent thorough review before being blasted out to the public. He also pointed out that no one person had the power to both write the president’s social media posts and send them, but that the process relied on a collaborative effort from a team of professionals who sought to use the correct language to make sure the voice of the president was always sound and reasonable. Greene lamented that those standards seem to have gone out the window in Trump’s second term, pointing out that Harp is the same aide who posted the video depicting the Obamas as apes and the AI-generated video of Trump dropping feces on “No Kings” protesters.

• Outraged Americans Across the Country Are Vandalizing Flock Cameras. The propensity of AI-powered Flock cameras, which are the automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that have been installed on street corners across the U.S., have caused outrage and concern among Americans on both sides of the political aisle. More Americans have started to attack the cameras with saws, lasers and spray paint, while critics have shown up at city council meetings to pressure officials to cancel their contracts with Flock Safety, which has installed more than 100,000 of the ALPRs in all 50 states. Police officers in multiple cities have been fired and criminally charged for misusing Flock cameras to track significant others and family members, and one woman from Texas was reportedly tracked with Flock cameras as she traveled out of state to obtain an abortion.

Top staffers in Donald Trump’s White House keep heading for the exits, and the latest to go is the president’s key point of contact for Congress. White nationalist organizers held a strategy summit in Rome and openly celebrated the collapse of local newspapers as a golden opportunity to organize in rural America. Nearly every major podcaster who helped deliver young men to Trump in 2024 has now turned on him, and Trump continues to embrace the same politically toxic data centers that Republicans are desperately trying to distance themselves from before November.

Before getting to the news, a quick ask, because we need your help: between MAGA billionaires buying up legacy media outlets and crucial local newspapers shutting down, independent media is becoming the last place of refuge for people looking for the real news that’s either getting censored or buried. Raw America is committed to bringing you the high-quality independent journalism you’ve come to count on. But we can’t do it without readers like you who believe in the power of media not beholden to billionaires stepping up and chipping in. Help us stay independent by becoming a paying subscriber for just 22 cents a day. We can’t do any of this without you.

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Trump White House Exodus Continues After Another Top Staffer Quits

White House legislative affairs director James Braid is out. His entire job was building bridges between the White House and the razor-thin Republican majority in Congress. He only lasted 19 months. The timing could not be worse for Trump.

There are just 75 days left before the midterms, with Republicans bracing for what could be a bloodbath even worse than the 2018 Blue Wave in Trum'p’s first term. And the man most responsible for ushering through Trump’s big ugly bill through Congress is calling it quits.

Braid is merely the latest key White House official to leave just this month, after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced she was leaving at the end of August to spend more time with her new baby and her husband — who is 30 years her senior. Additionally, deputy chief of staff James Blair left the White House to run Trump’s political operation from outside Washington. DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin left last year.

The list of former White House officials who have left in less than two years is staggering. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi was fired, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was forced out along with her senior advisor and rumored paramour, Corey Lewandowski. Former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is also gone. Tulsi Gabbard resigned as Director of National Intelligence. Joe Kent resigned from the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of the Iran war back in March.

That war could be a big reason for Braid’s departure. Trump attacked Iran alongside Israel in February without getting approval from Congress, and now even top Republicans are refusing to fund it as it’s dragged on far longer than the president initially promised. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll has his approval rating sitting at a dismal 33 percent, tying the lowest point of both presidencies. 64 percent of Americans say they don’t trust him at all. Trump losing his key legislative liaison is the last thing he needs right now.

Sponsored Kalshi Prediction: Will Trump Be Impeached?

White Nationalists Say Death of Local News Makes It Easier for Them to Organize

While Washington is engulfed in chaos, white nationalists were organizing in Rome. Roughly 50 racists gathered inside the headquarters of an Italian neo-fascist organization to discuss how to grow their ranks in the United States. Nashville reporter Phil Williams broke the story for the Confront the Hate Substack.

Far-right activist Kevin DeAnna told the audience that vanishing local newsrooms in rural America meant there’s no one left to hold local elected officials accountable, and told the crowd they should find that development exciting.

DeAnna specifically called on attendees to run for county sheriff, leaning on the widely debunked “constitutional sheriffs” theory that a sheriff can somehow disregard both state and federal laws. He added that organizing in rural communities gave racists the best return on investment, since there’s less scrutiny from the media and fewer reporters left to call attention to their activities.

The meeting also served as a fundraising strategy session. One attendee at the summit floated the idea of finding a sympathetic billionaire to fund their movement. Another pitched directing money toward lawsuits designed to bankrupt their opponents in legal fees. This is all happening while Northwestern University’s Medill School has identified 213 “news deserts,” which it defines as counties with no local newspapers.

The fact that racists are celebrating the absence of local media and are trying to recruit billionaires to their cause is just further proof that independent journalism is more necessary now than ever before. Become a paying subscriber to Raw America right now and help us keep this work going.

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Nearly All the Bro Podcasters Who Backed Trump in 2024 Have Turned on Him

The so-called “manosphere” was largely responsible for cultivating the Gen Z male cohort in Trump’s 2024 coalition. This includes podcasters and YouTubers like Joe Rogan, Theo Von, the Tate brothers and the Nelk Boys. The podcasters’ warmth toward Trump was made possible with the help of the president’s 20 year-old son Barron, who personally connected to alleged sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate to build the network. The strategy was successful, as approximately 56 percent of young men broke for Trump in the last election.

Now, that same network of podcasters are all making great efforts to distance themselves from the Trump administration. Rogan, who endorsed Trump in October just as voters prepared to head to the polls, called his Iran war is “crazy” and “insane” and said Trump has betrayed his own followers. Theo Von, who attended Trump’s second inauguration, is calling the war “diabolical.”

The Tate brothers are the most high-profile manosphere figures to threaten to abandon Trump and the MAGA movement. They were released from Romanian custody after Vice President JD Vance and special envoy Ric Grenell pressured Romanian officials. The brothers both attended Trump’s UFC birthday event alongside FBI Director Kash Patel. In June they flew to Russia as guests of Vladimir Putin, and a few weeks later Britain charged them with 59 criminal counts including human trafficking, rape and child pornography. The White House has since gone silent on them.

Their lawyer gave Trump an ultimatum: if he doesn’t come out in support of the Tate brothers, they’ll publicly break from MAGA and the GOP. Democratic Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari of Arizona is already pushing for a formal investigation, and has Barron Trump’s name on her subpoena list. If Democrats win back control of the House in November, Trump’s youngest son could find himself in front of a congressional panel.

Trump Embraces Data Centers Even as Republicans Admit They’re Politically Toxic

Trump recently stood next to crypto executives at the White House and told everyone that if he were a local elected official, he’d be first in line to greenlight data center development because of the jobs and the tax revenue. Of course, Trump’s financial disclosures also show that he personally has roughly $25 million invested in construction companies that build data centers. And while Trump’s remarks may sound fine to a bunch of suits in a corporate boardroom, it’s absolutely poisonous on the 2026 campaign trail.

This is a common fact for both Democratic and Republican candidates in both red and blue states. The GOP’s own Senate campaign arm warned that data center backlash could cost them a Senate seat in reliably red Ohio. Communities are furious about sky-high utility bills, strain on freshwater resources, constant and excessive noise and tax breaks handed to companies that build facilities larger than football stadiums while somehow also only providing a negligible number of permanent jobs.

In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown is hammering incumbent Republican Jon Husted with ads branding him “the face of data centers in Ohio.” Local residents are organizing for a statewide ban. The NRSC’s own memo called data centers a “sleeper issue” and said if Husted loses, it will signal to politicians everywhere that data centers are a political loser and that everyone should avoid them like the plague.

This scene is playing out in other states as well, like Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin. Governors who once bragged about landing big AI investments are now promising tougher rules, fewer tax breaks and stronger protections for water and power supplies.

Trump is continuing to double down, even telling Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott that going against data centers is “a mistake.”

This is what happens when a president who only cares about lining his own pockets cares more about Big Tech’s profits than the people who’ll actually live next to the noisy, polluting monstrosities.

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These four stories prove why independent journalism is important. Big Tech billionaire Jeff Bezos would never let the Washington Post talk about how data centers have become political kryptonite. MAGA oligarch David Ellison doesn’t want CBS covering how white nationalists are rooting for the collapse of small-town newspapers. But Raw America is able to bring you these stories precisely because we don’t have a billionaire owner telling us to pull stories they don’t like. We only answer to you, our readers.

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I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. We’ll see you tomorrow.

Here are some stories you may have missed:

• Reliably Red States Are Now Senate Battlegrounds Thanks to Trump. The 2026 Senate map is looking increasingly more favorable for Democrats as President Donald Trump’s approval ratings continue to sink to new depths. Cook Political Report — one of the leading political forecasters in the country — has now changed their assessment of Iowa and Texas’ U.S. Senate races from “lean Republican” to “toss-up,” with those states’ gubernatorial races also moving from “solid Republican” to “lean Republican” in Texas, and “toss-up” to “lean Democrat” in Iowa. Democrats only need to flip four Senate seats in November to win back the majority, and have plenty of opportunities in states like Alaska, Maine, North Carolina and Ohio, in addition to Iowa and Texas.

• U.S.S. George Washington Arrives in Middle East to Relieve U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. The beleaguered crew of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier will finally get a break after the arrival of the U.S.S. George Washington on Thursday. The approximately 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard the ship have been at sea for more than 200 days without a port call, and have complained of no working toilets, dysfunctional laundry facilities, meager food and mail delays stretching on for days. When asked about the length of the deployment, Trump said he felt the deployment hadn’t gone on long enough.

• Publisher of ‘Stars and Stripes’ Resigning, Citing Differences with Pentagon Leadership. Max D. Lederer, who has been the publisher of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes for multiple decades, is now stepping down from his role citing fundamental differences with the Trump administration’s Department of Defense. Lederer’s exit comes just months after the paper’s ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, was fired. Smith was in charge of making sure the paper had proper editorial independence and minimal interference from Pentagon leaders. Sean Parnell, a spokesperson for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, wrote on social media earlier this year that Stars and Stripes would soon return to its “original mission” of “reporting for our warfighters” while steering content away from “woke distractions.”

• Gary, Indiana Residents Will Finally Have Power Turned Back on After 9 Days. After a wave of severe storms rocked Indiana, residents of poverty-stricken Gary, just southeast of Chicago, are finally expected to have their power turned back on after nine days of darkness. The majority-Black city of roughly 65,000 residents have been contending with food pantry shortages and a lack of federal resources in the wake of the storms. Public schools in Gary have been closed all week.

An active-duty Air Force major who went on cable news and directly accused Donald Trump of violating the Constitution was arrested less than 24 hours later, making that the second time he’s been arrested for upholding his oath. Senate Republicans are quietly panicking that the growing backlash against data centers could cost them a crucial Senate seat in a reliably red state. A Department of Justice whistleblower is now saying the DOJ’s antisemitism probes into Ivy League schools were pretext to shake down colleges Trump doesn’t like. And failed Minnesota gubernatorial candidate and pillow magnate Mike Lindell says he’ll spend up to a million dollars of his own money proving what everyone already knows: he lost fair and square.

Before we dive into the news, a quick ask: we’re up against a small group of billionaires using their endless resources to devour major legacy media outlets and cable networks and we need your help. Raw America was founded because the billionaire-owned press proved that it’s unable to hold the rich and powerful accountable when they’re at the mercy of those same people to stay in business. We don’t answer to a MAGA oligarch. We answer to you. But that independence can only be sustained if readers like you, who understand how necessary independent media really is, chip in to keep this work going. A paying subscription only costs 22 cents a day. That’s less than a cup of coffee. And that’s all we need to stay independent and accountable to you and you alone.

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Air Force Officer Arrested Again After Calling Out Trump’s Corruption

Major Jason Watson is a 17-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force. In July, he was arrested on the Capitol steps while calling for Donald Trump and JD Vance to be impeached over the Iran war. He even did it in full uniform, with a sign that read “Impeach. Convict. Remove.”

Watson recently sat down with CNN’s Erin Burnett and told her the president is “violating the Constitution, breaking the law, engaged in rampant corruption.” He said Trump is “killing Americans” and called it unacceptable.

One day after that interview, Watson was arrested yet again. He’s now in pretrial confinement in Maryland. The Air Force says it’s over “allegations of continued misconduct,” but it won’t elaborate further.

Watson’s own attorney thinks the timing is particularly notable. A service member goes on national television, criticizes the commander-in-chief, and gets handcuffed within 24 hours.

Watson knew the risk going in, telling Burnett that nothing worthwhile is free, and that everything worth doing comes with a cost. That’s an airman putting his career, his pension, and his freedom all on the line to say publicly what many service members are probably thinking but too scared to say out loud. And the response from the institution he serves was to throw him in confinement. This also feels like a great time to remind everyone that while an airman upholding his oath to defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic has been arrested twice, while no one named in the Epstein files has been arrested so far.

And here's why the Framers put the oath in Article Six of the Constitution instead of leaving it to whoever happened to be in charge. They bound every officer of this country to the document itself, never to a man, because they'd just finished fighting a war against the alternative. A government that jails somebody for keeping that oath has already surrendered the thing the oath was written to protect.

Republicans Fear Data Center Backlash Will Cost Them a Key Senate Seat

An internal memo from Republicans’ Senate campaign arm that was recently leaked to ABC News shows the GOP is genuinely worried that Republican Senator John Husted of Ohio is in danger of losing reelection to Democrat Sherrod Brown. Their own internal polling shows Husted in a dead heat in a state Trump comfortably won just two years ago. Husted’s biggest obstacle isn’t inflation or the war, but AI data centers.

Brown has made his opposition to data centers a core piece of his campaign. The Republican memo begrudgingly admits Brown’s rhetoric is brutally effective, saying Husted’s support for data centers is an “anchor” hanging around his neck. The memo even warns that if Husted loses and the defining narrative is that data centers were to blame, politicians across the country will avoid them like the plague.

The reason for all the data center hate in Ohio is pretty clear. The Buckeye State already has more than 200 data centers, which is the fifth most for any state in the country. These facilities are known to eat up valuable farmland, guzzle freshwater resources and put a sever strain strain power grids all for a negligible number of long-term jobs relative to their size. And this is all while Ohioans are watching their utility bills continue to climb.

Husted has tried proposing rules that would require data center operators pay for their own power. Ohio’s GOP governor also paused new tax breaks for the AI data center industry in May. But none of that has shaken Ohioans’ perception that Husted gave Big Tech corporations a free ride while making everyday residents pay more.

Trump is still all-in on data centers, telling anyone who will listen that local officials should welcome data centers because of the jobs and additional property tax revenue. He did however admit that the industry could use “a little public relations help.” He’s not wrong: a Gallup poll from earlier this year found 71 percent of Americans oppose new data centers in their own backyard.

Outside of Ohio, Democratic governors in New York and Pennsylvania have signed orders limiting data center construction. And even in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott — who is in a tight reelection race of his own — ordered an audit of data centers and paused new grid approvals after facing pressure over utility prices. Voters across the country are united against an effort that promised jobs and prosperity and instead delivered higher utility bills and dirty water.

We've broken this pattern before. Congress passed the Public Utility Holding Company Act in 1935 to tear apart the utility trusts that had rigged the whole system so insiders collected the profits and ordinary families paid the freight. The lesson from 1935 is the lesson right now, which is that when an entire industry needs the government to keep hiding its costs from the public, the problem was never public relations.

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DOJ Whistleblower Says Trump’s Antisemitism Crusade Was Pretext to Defund Universities

A longtime career Department of Justice civil rights attorney named Haley Van Erem has went public with a whistleblower complaint to Congress. She’s arguing that the Trump administration’s antisemitism probes last year targeting Ivy League universities like Harvard, Brown, and Columbia were all a pretext for Trump’s political retribution agenda.

The complaint comes just days after a federal judge tossed out the DOJ’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard. The judge found the allegations relied on incidents that were, in his words, too isolated and episodic to prove Harvard committed systematic violations of civil rights law.

Brown and Columbia didn’t fight back and instead settled with the DOJ. Columbia agreed to pay $200 million over a three-year period while Brown agreed to put $50 million toward workforce development in Rhode Island. Neither university admitted to any wrongdoing.

According to the whistleblower complaint, the administration was inspired to go after the universities after a New York Post article about antisemitism at medical school graduation ceremonies went viral. In most presidential administrations, a single article isn’t enough to trigger a federal civil rights investigation. Not for this one.

Van Erem’s complaint alleges that when investigators found no actual civil rights violations at Brown University, a top Trump administration official in the Department of Health and Human Services quietly agreed but said there was “no way” they’d let that conclusion stand. Instead, officials pushed hard for a settlement until they eventually got one.

Van Erem added that DOJ investigators were told to interview Middle Eastern studies professors — particularly Muslim faculty members — not as a part of a fact-finding mission but just to see if they’d say anything revealing. That sounds a lot more like a fishing expedition than an honest inquiry.

Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, told the head of the Trump DOJ’s Civil Rights Division that her office was committing “large-scale fraud.” He acknowledged that while there can be antisemitism on college campuses, the DOJ’s probe was a political operation aimed at harassing professors, chilling free speech and stripping universities of federal grants they’d already applied for and earned fair and square.

Van Erem left the DOJ last year because she didn’t want to participate in what she calls politically motivated investigations built on nothing. She’s now asking three separate inspectors general across the federal government to get to the bottom of the matter.

Back in 1957, in Sweezy v. New Hampshire, the Supreme Court threw out a contempt conviction against a professor whom a state attorney general had hauled in to answer for the content of a lecture. The Court's warning was that scholarship withers in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust, and that atmosphere is precisely what this administration set out to manufacture.

Election Denier Mike Lindell to Pay for His Own Public Humiliation

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who is a longtime 2020 election denier, recently lost Minnesota’s Republican gubernatorial primary by more than 45,000 votes in a double-digit blowout. In Minnesota, candidates only get an automatic recount if the winner’s margin of victory is under a quarter of a percentage point. Lindell’s margin isn’t anywhere close to that, which means that he has to fund his own recount if he wants one.

Lindell still hasn’t conceded his race and said he’s willing to pay for a recount from his own pockets. He’s aware that such an effort could cost anywhere from $825,000 to as much as $1 million once he factors in hiring investigators and hiring observers to witness recount efforts firsthand.

The pillow manufacturer’s financial state is already questionable, given that he was reportedly late paying approximately $48,000 in property taxes last year. He also still owes voting machine company Smartmatic more than $56,000 from a defamation judgment, which has accrued daily fines the longer he refuses to pay it. A jury also ruled against him in his lawsuit against a Dominion Voting Systems, putting him on the hook for another $2.3 million. Dominion itself sued Lindell for $1.3 billion before reaching a confidential settlement in July.

Lindell claims this recount isn’t really about his own campaign, but rather a “gateway” to eliminating electronic voting machines. This is of course the same conspiracy theory that’s already ruined him financially with both millions of dollars in court judgments and declining MyPillow sales.

Trump endorsed Lindell’s campaign, and said during a recent gala at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club that nobody has worked harder for “free and fair elections.” This is obviously due to Trump and Lindell’s shared belief that Joe Biden didn’t win the 2020 election despite dozens of court rulings — including ones issued by federal judges Trump himself appointed — saying otherwise.

Robert La Follette pushed Wisconsin to adopt the country's first statewide direct primary in 1903 for one reason, which was to take the choice of nominees away from party bosses in back rooms and hand it to ordinary voters. Lindell just lost one of those primaries by eleven points, and now he wants to spend a million dollars convincing people that the machinery of self-government can't be trusted.

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Think about why you had to come to Raw America to find out what’s really happening. We all know Jeff Bezos won’t let the Washington Post report on AI data centers costing Republicans major Senate seats. Just like we know David Ellison won’t let CBS talk about a decorated service member getting arrested for calling out Trump’s corruption while Epstein’s accomplices go unpunished. Raw America is only able to give you these stories because our readers believe in independent journalism enough to invest in its future. And every dollar of every paying subscription goes directly toward keeping this work going. Not just newsletters like these, or our live interviews with the biggest names in the news, but on-the-ground original reporting like Raw America White House correspondent Brian Karem’s latest explosive report, which you can read below if you haven’t yet.

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for keeping independent media alive.

Read Brian Karem’s latest report below:

Donald Trump was caught on camera this week holding a “cheat sheet” in the Oval Office, the same kind of note card Republicans once said was proof Joe Biden had dementia. Newly surfaced video shows Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky sitting almost completely motionless for hours during a Senate vote session just days before he completely vanished from public view. DOJ lawyers are now arguing in official court filings that the Justice Department not being independent from the president is a net positive, all while claiming the prosecution of James Comey isn’t political retribution. And Trump’s intensely devoted young blonde staffer reportedly climbed into the trunk of an SUV just to stay close to the president’s motorcade.

Before we go deeper, a quick request: Raw America can only cover these stories the way they need to be covered because, unlike most legacy media outlets, we don’t rely on a pro-Trump billionaire to stay operational. We’re able to give you twice-daily newsletters like these, live interviews with major public figures and exclusive reporting from Washington — including today’s original scoop from our very own White House reporter, Brian Karem — because readers decided that high-quality independent journalism was important enough to fund.

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Trump Caught Using ‘Dementia Cheat Sheet’ in Oval Office

On Monday, while Trump was honoring a teen lifeguard from California who rescued a 10 year-old boy, Trump was seen clutching a note card. When zooming in on the photo, the card appeared to be a staff-prepared “cheat sheet” with photos of the two guests and instructions on what to say to them.

Progressive commentator David Pakman highlighted the card on his podcast, and wondered out loud why the president can’t even remember the names of two people.

This matters because for years, conservative media figures treated Joe Biden’s use of note cards during Oval Office meetings as a national emergency. Fox News circled the photos in red while random doctors who’d never examined Biden a day in their lives diagnosed Biden with advanced dementia from 3,000 miles away.

Pakman pointed out that according to recent polls, some 60 percent of Americans don’t think Trump has the mental sharpness to be president. The fact that an 80 year-old president with a habit of falling asleep in public needs a laminated card to remember who he’s meeting with should be a huge story, but apparently it’s nothing to the same outlets that threw a fit when Biden did it.

The progressive podcaster then noted that the hypocrisy over the note cards was jusy the latest example. Fox also minimizes high gas prices despite hyping them during the Biden administration. The same can be said for Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s use of a Teleprompter, and the silence over Trump’s constant golfing despite them crowing nonstop about Obama’s occasional golf games.

According to Pakman, Republicans never actually believed in the rules they set for other people, nor do they actually care about fitness for office. At the end of the day, it’s all about whatever the guy in the red hat says.

New Video Shows Mitch McConnell Was Almost Motionless Before Hospitalization

New video just surfaced from June 4th, ten days before 84 year-old Senator Mitch McConnell disappeared from public view entirely.

While McConnell’s Senate colleagues are seen talking and moving around him during a marathon voting session, C-SPAN’s cameras caught McConnell sitting almost completely still. A staffer appeared to be pushing him in a wheelchair for parts of the session. Between 11 PM and 4 AM, the Kentucky senator barely moved at all, and almost never spoke. No one approached him. And it remains unclear how much he understood what was happening around him.

Ten days later, an ambulance drove him from his home to a hospital. Leaked 911 audio referenced a cardiac arrest.

McConnell hasn’t been seen in public since then, recorded a video or even called into a news show. His office has released three statements attributed to him. Two photographs show him propped up in a hospital bed next to his wife, Elaine Chao, in nearly identical poses.

Kentucky’s two-term Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, says he’s still been able to reach McConnell. He’s repeatedly demanded the senator be more transparent about his health with his constituents, to no avail.

McConnell has served in the Senate since 1985 and is one of the longest-serving senators in American history. And right now, Senate Republicans are trying to ram Trump’s agenda with a narrow majority without one of their most reliable votes. And as of right now, there’s still no clear answer about whether McConnell is even able to cast one.

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DOJ Lawyers Argue Not Being Independent from Trump Is a Good Thing

In a Tuesday court filing this week, federal prosecutors made an argument that should be much bigger news than it is. They wrote that Donald Trump directing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to carry out “core Executive functions” is “a feature, not a bug” of the constitutional system. They then insisted that the very idea of an independent DOJ that the president doesn’t control is “a myth.”

The most ironic part? That very same filing is in regard to the prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, with prosecutors arguing that U.S. Attorney Ellis Boyle acted completely on his own, with no coercion from the White House.

Comey is fighting to have the case dismissed. His lawyers argued that the prosecution was a blatant act of political retribution, pointing to Trump’s own Truth Social post demanding that then-Attorney General Pam Bondi slap Comey with criminal charges. Trump also asked Secret Service agents to send him their notes after they questioned Comey.

All of this is about a fairly innocuous photo Comey posted seashells on the beach arranged to spell “86 47,” with “86” being a common restaurant term to say an item has been removed from the menu,” and “47” referring to Trump’s second presidency. The government has been trying to convince the court that the seashell photo constitutes a criminal threat against the president.

Comey says the case is the final chapter in a years-long campaign to punish him for refusing to pledge his personal loyalty to Trump while he served as FBI director in Trump’s first administration. Given what the DOJ itself just admitted in writing, it’s getting harder for them to argue that Comey is wrong.

Natalie Harp Rode in Trunk of SUV After Being Told There Was No Room in Trump’s Motorcade

35 year-old Natalie Harp is one of Trump’s closest aides, known as the “human printer” for her penchant of carrying around a portable printer to hand Trump flattering news articles and social media posts. Now, a new report shows just how slavishly devoted she is to the president.

CNN reported that in October of 2023 while en route to a court hearing in New York, there was no room for Harp in Trump’s motorcade, leading to a screaming match breaking out in the lobby of Trump Tower. When she was still unable to get a seat, Harp climbed into the trunk of an SUV so she could still be in the vicinity.

The news caused her estranged brother, Preston Harp, to burst out laughing when CNN’s Erin Burnett told him the story.

“That’s obsession,” Preston Harp said. “That’s like an unhealthy obsession with someone if you’re going to jump into the trunk of their car.”

Harp’s brother said their mother raised them with an emphasis on American exceptionalism, and that Trump represents everything she taught them to respect. Preston Harp said his estranged sister’s devotion likely stems from that upbringing.

One unnamed White House advisor told CNN that this is exactly why Trump likes having her around, because “she doesn’t second-guess, doesn’t question.”

The White House has doubled down on its defense of Harp this week after Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia said during a Sunday speech that Trump seems more interested in “traveling with Natalie” aboard the “flying palace” gifted to him by Qatar than he does in actually doing his job.

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Think about why you had to come to Raw America to read these stories. David Ellison’s CBS would never report on Trump’s Justice Department arguing in court that the DOJ being a tool of the president is a good thing. And you won’t hear about Trump using a dementia cheat sheet on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox. We’re able to cover stories like these precisely because we have no billionaire owner telling us what to report and what to bury.

Our paying subscribers make all of that possible, along with our live interviews and our exclusive reports from Washington. Today, Raw America White House reporter Brian Karem wrote this bombshell report featuring exclusive quotes from a source inside of Trump’s Pentagon, confiding that officials are worried Trump may use nuclear weapons against Iran. You can read that full report below.

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Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. I’m British Chris, with Raw America. We’ll see you tomorrow.

Read Raw America White House Correspondent Brian Karem’s Latest Exclusive Report:

Here are some additional stories you may have missed:

• Trump Tells Supreme Court His Ballroom Is a ‘Military Complex.’ In his appeal of the D.C. Court of Appeals decision halting construction of his $400 million ballroom, President Donald Trump’s lawyers are now arguing to the Supreme Court that the ballroom is actually a “military complex” whose construction is necessary for national security purposes. Judges previously ruled construction couldn’t continue given that Trump never obtained permission from Congress to demolish the East Wing of the White House to build the ballroom.

• CNN Pundit Who May Replace Karoline Leavitt Called a ‘Massive Hypocrite’ by Former Student. In an op-ed for the Daily Beast, former Harvard student Kaivan Shroff recalled taking Jennings’ class at the university in 2020. According to Shroff, Jennings was quick to criticize Trump for incidents like the January 6 attack, and lamented his pivot to being one of Trump’s biggest defenders on CNN. Shroff called Jennings a “massive hypocrite” who must not be allowed to be the next White House press secretary in the wake of Karoline Leavitt’s pending exit.

• FDA Issues Highest Risk Warning for Blueberries in Yet Another Food Recall. The Food and Drug Administration has recalled GreenWise organic whole blueberries sold at Publix grocery stores, while also issuing the highest risk warning possible for E. coli contamination. The blueberry recall comes amid separate recalls for eggs and granola products due to salmonella contamination, and in the midst of the ongoing explosive diarrhea outbreak linked to Taylor Farms’ bagged lettuce due to the cyclospora parasite. The wave of recalls comes just a year after Elon Musk’s DOGE effort led to mass firings of federal food safety inspectors.

U.S. President Donald Trump listens as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks during a cabinet meeting at Camp David in Thurmont, Maryland, U.S., July 31, 2026. REUTERS/Daniel Heuer

President Donald Trump’s increasingly hostile strategy toward Iran is alarming even some top officials in his own administration’s Department of Defense, with one DoD official calling the president “a madman who can’t be trusted,” Raw America can reveal.

Both Republican leaders and generals have known and discussed the possibility of Trump considering using nuclear weapons against Iran for at least the last two months. One unnamed Pentagon official confided to Raw America that the president’s threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” which he posted to his Truth Social early last month, was seen as particularly alarming within the DoD.

“After what Trump said back in July, everyone should have known this is on the table,” the Pentagon official said. “What do you think he meant by that?”

The DoD official’s comments come just after former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) posted to her X account on Sunday that Trump was contemplating using nuclear weapons against Iran in recent strategy meetings, calling him “pure evil.” Greene lamented that despite Iran being “nowhere near creating a nuclear weapon,” the U.S. military nonetheless “killed their leaders and innocent little children in a school, and Iran has controlled the Strait of Hormuz ever since and punished the region for their part in it.”

”And now our government is the one actually discussing lowering the nuclear threshold in order to use nuclear weapons against Iran even though Trump claims he’s won the war like 40 times and says the U.S. controls the [Strait of Hormuz],” the former Georgia congresswoman wrote.

”Trump promised no more foreign wars, but may actually be the one who delivers a nuclear holocaust that would likely drag the entire world into major conflict, economic depression, and mass human suffering we’ve never seen in our lifetimes and maybe throughout history,” she added.

Joel Rubin, a former member of the State Department in the Barack Obama administration and a prominent Middle East expert, still doubts that Trump would actually push the button.

“I think that’s way off. It’d kill the oil there. No way. He needs to keep the oil companies happy,” Rubin said.

Rubin and others believe Trump is merely using the Nixon-esque style of negotiating known as “the madman strategy.” The 37th president of the United States employed it during the Vietnam War to appear so erratic that nothing could be ruled out, including the use of nuclear weapons.

“The problem with that strategy is that can actually destroy your credibility,” Rubin said.

While Nixon was unsuccessful with that strategy, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from relying on it, with several White House sources confiding to Raw America that Trump “seeming unstable could help spur the Iranians to negotiate.”

Trump’s recent decisions have spurred multiple Republicans in Congress to re-think their support of the Iran war, though most have refrained from publicly criticizing Trump. Republican consensus seems to have centered on naming Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a convenient scapegoat for the war the longer it drags on.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) is among those who have said publicly that they’ve “lost confidence” in Hegseth, who insiders say has been keeping a “lower profile than usual” in the halls of the Pentagon. One source said Hegseth “doesn’t even preen in front of the mirror like he used to.”

Rubin said the administration’s credibility is on “a rapid slide downward,” noting that Trump has since threatened to bomb a key ally in Oman, while publicly distancing the U.S. from South Korea.

“NATO has been getting it for years,” Rubin said. “He’s maneuvering tactically every day which makes it impossible for our allies to keep up. The problem with Trump is that it’s all so personal and not national.”

The lack of strategy has prompted several anti-Trump Republican groups to gain some traction among the traditionally Republican base. Former Sen. John Danforth’s (R-Mo.) “Our Republican Legacy” (ORL) project is among those claiming that “Trump is in the Past.”

Chris Vance — a senior advisor to ORL and former Republican elected official in Washington state — said Republicans are “seriously searching for sanity” and trying to shake off the Trump stigma. But given that Trump has had the party firmly in a vicegrip for the past decade, that’s easier said than done.

“Those remaining with him know better,” Vance said. “They definitely know he’s dangerous, but because of greed or personal interest they aren’t going to come forward. Those who have are those he’s pushed out of office.”

“Trump is incredibly and increasingly insulated,” Vance continued. “There are Republicans on the outside who are trying to effect change, but those left inside are as delusional as he is.”

Pentagon officials have largely avoided speaking out against the war as Hegseth has indiscriminately fired several generals, but Raw America’s Pentagon source said the pressure against Hegseth is “mounting.”

“We could see movement on that front against Hegseth sooner rather than later, particularly if the current negotiations fail to produce any tangible results,” the source said.

Insiders say the lack of confidence in Hegseth, along with the rapid depletion of America’s missile arsenal, both contribute to a growing unease that will only “ease somewhat” if Hegseth is forced out.

Before You Go, Support Raw America’s Original Reporting

Raw America’s Washington D.C. team is committed to diligently maintaining contact with sources, constantly working to develop new ones and keeping our finger on the pulse to know who’s willing to say what and when. Our White House reporter, Brian Karem, brings decades of experience and careful cultivation of confidential sources throughout the federal government so we can bring you the stories no one else can.

But this kind of on-the-ground, shoe-leather reporting is only possible because of readers like you, who understand the importance of high-quality independent journalism. And because we don’t have a billionaire backer or corporate sponsors, we can only do this with financial support from our audience. You can upgrade your free subscription to a paying one right now for just 22 cents a day. It’s all we need to stay independent, and keep us working only for you. Upgrade today.

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A new book claims Trump White House staffer Natalie Harp was perhaps the biggest driving force behind the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, which houses the First Lady’s office. New FCC documents show Chairman Brendan Carr has been in constant contact with right-wing media executives and White House officials while refusing to discuss any of it in public. A new state-by-state approval tracker finds Donald Trump is underwater in almost every state in the country with the exception of three. And Democrats just narrowly flipped a Pennsylvania state House district that Republicans had held for nearly three decades, which Trump won by 18 points less in 2024.

Before we go deeper, a quick request: the MAGA billionaires devouring legacy media outlets aren’t slowing down, and neither can we. We can’t compete with David Ellison’s CBS or Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post on audience size alone, but we can beat them by being the one thing they can’t buy. Our independence allows us to cover the news the way it needs to be. But because we don’t have an ultra-wealthy owner, we’re counting on readers like you who understand how important independent journalism is right now to become paying subscribers. All it takes is 22 cents a day, and it’s all we need to remain independent and accountable only to you. Upgrade your free subscription to a paying one right now for less than a cup of coffee.

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Young Blonde Trump Aide Made Direct Move Against Melania

Last fall, we all watched in horror as construction crews tore apart a piece of the White House that had stood for more than a century. Trump said the destruction of the East Wing of the White House — which he did without congressional approval — was necessary for his $400 million ballroom project. But what no one knew was that Trump’s devoutly loyal 35 year-old staffer, Natalie Harp, was one of the loudest voices calling for the demolition. That’s according to the book “Regime Change” by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.

Author Michael Wolff and journalist Joanna Coles recently discussed Trump’s penchant for surrounding himself with young female aides like Harp, with Coles calling them “mini-Melanias.” Wolff said he’s heard from people around Trump that Harp is positioning herself as the woman closest to the president.

This is a significant development, as the East Wing houses the Office of the First Lady. Former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci said that office is now virtually non-existent compared to Trump’s first term. Melania spends most of her time at Mar-a-Lago rather than the White House.

Scaramucci added Trump marriage’s has been rocky for awhile. He believes Melania’s approach during her husband’s second term is to only show up when she needs to. The first lady has spent most of her time on her own documentary project and has largely stayed out of the public eye.

This may sound like a strange, small story on its face. But it reveals a lot about how this White House is actually run. Access and loyalty seem to be what determines outcomes the most, even if that means demolishing a piece of American history.

Here's the thing. The last time the White House lost a chunk of itself, it took a foreign army to do it. British troops put the place to the torch in 1814, and Dolley Madison stayed behind long enough to get the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington out the door, because she understood that house wasn't her husband's property. It was ours. Two centuries later nobody had to invade. All it took was a staffer who figured out that proximity to Trump is the only currency that spends in this building, and a president who treats public property like it's a line item on his personal balance sheet. That's not palace gossip. That's what it looks like when a government stops thinking of itself as a trust and starts behaving like a court.

Trump FCC Chair’s Deep Ties to Right-Wing Media Revealed

Brendan Carr, who Trump appointed as chair of the Federal Communications Commission, has remained cagey about his relationship with the Trump White House. But now, new documents show just how closely intertwined Carr’s FCC is with the Trump administration and suggest he’s not only Trump’s point person on his offensive against the media, but that he’s also acting in concert with far-right media outlets.

Politico’s Dasha Burns directly asked Carr whether he’d spoken with the president before or after calling on ABC to apply early to renew their broadcast licenses for local affiliate stations. That order notably came just one day after Trump and Melania publicly called for ABC to be punished over a Jimmy Kimmel joke.

Carr refused to give a direct answer, telling Burns he won’t discuss conversations with the White House.

But thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by advocacy group Democracy Forward — whose CEO, Skye Perryman, recently appeared on Raw America — and reported on by the Guardian, we have real answers.

Between March of 2025 and February of this year Carr was present for at least eight White House meetings and had at least three scheduled calls with Trump administration officials, including two with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. He’s also had phone calls with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The records also show Carr has had numerous meetings with major media executives. Carr has had sit-downs with Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch and Sinclair chairman David Smith, who briefly yanked Jimmy Kimmel off the air over a joke about Charlie Kirk. Carr has also hosted former Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida in his office, who now hosts a show on the MAGA network One America News.

Democracy Forward special counsel Dan McGrath said these documents show a the administration’s political allies and conservative media figures have a significant level of direct access to the FCC. He added this should raises significant concerns about the FCC’s independence as a federal regulatory body.

Carr — who authored the section of Project 2025 pertaining to the FCC — has publicly admitted that independence doesn’t really matter anymore since the president can fire commissioners at will. ABC pointed to that very same admission in its lawsuit challenging the FCC’s license renewal order.

It’s also revealing that most of Brendan Carr’s meetings with media figures are with extremely conservative ones like Fox, Sinclair and OAN. Carr is also using his regulatory power to squeeze the legacy media networks that Trump has called “enemies of the people.”

This is the real story. This isn’t just a late-night joke. It’s about a key federal regulator who appears to be coordinating closely with the industry he’s supposed to regulate, while telling the public to not look behind the curtain.

When Congress passed the Communications Act of 1934 and created the FCC, it handed out broadcast licenses on one condition, that the airwaves belong to the public and have to be used in the public interest, convenience, and necessity. That standard is in the law for a reason. Lawmakers had watched the early radio era and understood that whoever controls the spectrum controls what a country believes about itself. Now we've got a chairman who admits his own agency isn't independent, who fills his calendar with Murdoch and Sinclair and OAN, and who reaches for license renewals the minute a comedian annoys the president. That's the 1934 bargain running backwards. The public's airwaves are being used to punish the president's critics and shelter his friends, and the people who wrote that law would know exactly what they were looking at.

This has always been their plan: buy up all dissenting voices and turn them into propaganda mills, while making sure all the regulators are in your pocket. This is exactly why we created Raw America, because only independent media can be trusted to tell the plain truth without fear of being censored or shut down. Become a paying subscriber and help keep this work going.

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Trump Only Has Positive Approval Rating in 3 States

New data from The Economist and YouGov shows Trump’s approval rating is positive in only three states. Wyoming has the highest net approval at +14, while Idaho comes in at +9. Trump’s approval is at +6 in ruby-red West Virginia.

But everywhere else, the president is underwater, with 47 states plus Washington D.C. all showing more disapproval than approval. D.C., which has been under military occupation for more than a year, is the worst for Trump at -83. Vermont and Maryland come in second at -50, while Trump registers at -48 in Hawaii.

But Republicans shouldn’t just be worried about the president’s approval rating in deep blue states, but the battlegrounds. He’s at -23 in Arizona, -31 in Georgia, -27 in Michigan, -27 in Nevada, -26 in Pennsylvania and -28 in Wisconsin.

These are all states that broke for Trump in 2024. They’re also the states that will almost certainly decide which party controls Congress after November’s midterms.

The White House is making the argument that the 2024 election was the “ultimate poll.” Pulling up two year-old data is certainly one way to respond to bad numbers, but it doesn’t change much worse numbers showing the current picture.

Polling data will continue shifting as more numbers come in, but these trends matter a lot more than any single data point. Dissatisfaction with the Trump administration has spread far beyond the blue states Trump has never won. It’s now showing up in the places that will determine which party controls committee gavels when the next Congress comes in session.

There's a reason statewide numbers hit differently than national ones. Before 1913, senators didn't answer to voters at all. State legislatures picked them, which meant a few machine bosses in a statehouse back room could hand a Senate seat to whoever paid the freight. The Seventeenth Amendment ended that and put every senator on a statewide ballot, and what we've had ever since is something close to a rolling referendum on whether an administration still holds the consent of the people it governs. So when a president is underwater in forty-seven states and the District, that isn't a rough news cycle. That's the machinery the Progressives built doing precisely what they built it to do, telling us ahead of time that the governed have stopped consenting.

Democrats Win Deep-Red Seat Republicans Have Controlled for Decades

Democrats just won a special election for a Pennsylvania state House of Representatives district that Republicans have controlled for almost thirty years.

In the 12th District, Democrat Brandon Dukes narrowly defeated Republican Scott Timko by fewer than 100 votes, 8,434 to 8,346, with 99 percent of the vote officially tallied.

Dukes, who is a commercial loan administrator, told the local Cranberry Eagle he was ecstatic, about the win and that he was still processing his victory. He pointed out that Donald Trump won the district by 18 points just two years ago.

This district sits in deep-red Butler County, which is also where a gunman tried to assassinate Trump in the summer of 2024. Democrats haven’t been competitive there for a generation, but they just won it anyway.

Pennsylvania Democratic Party chairman Eugene DePasquale said the result shows the benefit of Democrats compete everywhere up and down the ballot, and he framed it as a bellwether of November’s midterms.

Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro also celebrated the win, saying residents of the Keystone State are using their power to push back against what he called the chaos, cruelty and corruption of the Trump administration.

It’s not over, as Dukes will have to face Timko again in the November general election. But this special election result alone sends a message to both Trump and the GOP that they aren’t safe anywhere.

Before You Go, Support Journalism That Will Never Bow Down to a Billionaire

Raw America has spent the first seven months since our founding to doggedly pursue the stories that the billionaire-owned legacy media outlets are either burying or watering down beyond recognition. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox won’t report on a Democrat flipping a deep-red district in rural Pennsylvania. David Ellison’s CBS won’t report on Trump being deeply underwater in all the major battleground states. Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post won’t cover how Trump’s FCC is in bed with right-wing media. But Raw America will, because we don’t answer to a billionaire owner. We answer to you, and you alone.

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.

Here are a few stories you may have missed:

• Natalie Harp Wrote Fawning Letter to Trump Signed ‘With All My Heart.’ Natalie Harp — the 35 year-old Trump White House staffer known for her fierce devotion to the president — once wrote a gushing letter to Trump painting a picture of her slavish loyalty to him. The letter described how Harp always wanted “things to be right between us” and how she sometimes forgot to eat and sleep while working for the president. She ended the letter by writing, “with all my heart, Natalie.”

• Alaska U.S. Senate General Election Will Feature Two Dan Sullivans and Mary Peltola. Alaska’s Tuesday U.S. Senate primary concluded with Democrat Mary Peltola winning her party’s nomination, while incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) will also have to contend with a general election opponent who shares his same name. Peltola led on Tuesday night with 48 percent of the vote, while Sen. Sullivan came in second with 43 percent. Because Alaska’s general election features four finalists, a Republican candidate also named Dan Sullivan, who came in a distant third place, will also be on the November ballot.

• Trump Administration Finally Explains Reason for Tarp Covering Kennedy Center. Lawyers for the Department of Justice told a federal judge Tuesday that the scaffolding and large tarp covering the facade of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will have to remain in place due to damage to the marble facade that was caused by workers removing Trump’s name from the building. The tarp has been in place for more than two months, after a judge ruled that Trump’s name had to be removed as any official name change had to first be approved by Congress.

A far-right Florida congressman was just caught on video rifling through a voter’s mailbox, which is a textbook federal felony. A Republican congressman in South Carolina is turning on Donald Trump for endorsing his primary opponent, accusing the president of abandoning his MAGA base. Minnesota is suing Texas’ Republican governor for refusing to extradite an ICE agent charged with shooting a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis. And a new bombshell report finds that ICE has knowingly hired and even promoted agents with histories of sexual violence against women and children.

Before getting to the news, a quick ask: you’re getting your news from Raw America because you’re sick of the right-wing billionaires gobbling up news outlets deciding what you get to know. We’re doing what CBS, the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal could never do: give you the unvarnished truth without having to worry about a wealthy MAGA oligarch censoring our coverage. But our work can only continue if readers like you, who believe in the importance of independent journalism, chip in to help keep it going. A paying subscription only costs 22 cents a day, and it’s all we need to be able to keep working for you and you alone. Upgrade your free subscription to a paying one right now.

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GOP Lawmaker Caught Committing Felony on Camera

Republican Congressman Randy Fine of Florida has built his political career on making bigoted remarks, especially about Muslims and the LGBTQ+ community. Now he’s facing accusations of committing a federal felony, which a voter caught on their doorbell camera.

The video shows Fine canvassing ahead of today’s primary in Florida’s 6th Congressional District. He seen ringing a voter’s doorbell. When nobody answers, he opens the mailbox and looks through the contents for several seconds before walking away.

Fine’s office confirmed to TMZ that it’s him in the video. Legal experts note that 18 USC Section 1702 clearly states that makes tampering with someone else’s mail is a federal felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Fine is running with Trump’s endorsement. Democratic Congressman Mark Pocan of Wisconsin mocked the video, joking that MAGA’s newest hero is now breaking federal law “just like Daddy Trump.” Former Florida candidate Barbie Harden Hall called it creepy and said Fine was a menace to basic decency.

I know the news is a lot these days but it’s worth just stating for the record that we’re talking about a sitting congressman getting caught digging through a stranger’s mail while trying to win their vote. Whether he’ll be charged remains to be seen, but the video will last forever.

MAGA Congressman Turns on Trump for Endorsing His Primary Rival

A real rift is opening up inside the Republican Party in South Carolina.

GOP Congressman Ralph Norman, who is vice chairman of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, is running in a two-way Senate primary runoff against Darline Graham, sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham. Trump endorsed her over Norman in next week’s runoff, and Norman is furious.

Norman told Bloomberg the president’s decision is “an enigma,” insisting that true South Carolina conservatives are backing him while “so-called Republicans” back Graham and Trump. Norman has the endorsement of Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Rick Scott of Florida, along with the support of outgoing Congresswoman Nancy Mace.

Norman also questioned why Trump was spending time in a deep-red state campaigning against one of his biggest supporters, arguing Republicans would be better served by the president focusing on races in swing districts in New York, Minnesota, or Virginia. He also pushed back on the idea that a Senate seat could be inherited, saying Darline was a great sister to Lindsey Graham but that alone shouldn’t qualify her for the job.

Graham finished first in the August 11th primary but didn’t clear the threshold to avoid the runoff. Norman says he hasn’t heard from Trump since first asking for his endorsement, and the White House has referred to Trump’s posts praising Darline Graham as the one to honor her brother’s legacy.

The Freedom Caucus’ second-in-command publicly accusing the president of siding with the establishment over the base shows a genuine crack in MAGA world that’s likely to widen even more between now and November.

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Minnesota Sues Texas to Force Extradition of ICE Agent Charged in Shooting

Minnesota is now officially suing Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott, after he refused to extradite U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer Christian Castro. Hennepin County prosecutors charged Castro in the shooting of a Venezuelan man in Minneapolis earlier this year, and he faces four counts of second-degree assault with a deadly weapon and one count of falsely reporting a crime. Texas Rangers arrested him in May, and he remains jailed in the Lone Star State.

Democratic Governor Tim Walz initially sought to extradite Castro in June. Abbott still hasn’t signed off, even after prosecutors in Minneapolis formally requested extradition in July. Democratic Attorney General Keith Ellison escalated this week with the lawsuit, arguing Abbott’s refusal to extradite Castro is unconstitutional. Ellison added that Abbott is trying to prevent Castro from being held accountable in the jurisdiction where the alleged crimes occurred.

The shooting happened in January during Operation Metro Surge, which was the name the Trump administration gave its ICE crackdown in Minneapolis. Prosecutors say Castro was chasing a man who fled into his home. The ICE agent then fired through the front door, hitting the man’s roommate, Julio Sosa-Celis, in the leg. Federal prosecutors initially charged the two immigrants based on Castro’s claim of self-defense, but dropped the charges once body camera video debunked Castro’s version of events.

The shooting of Sosa-Celis happened just a week after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed U.S. citizen Renee Good, sparking nationwide protests. Minnesota clearly isn’t backing down, and now the ball is in Texas’ court. Abbott is running in a tight reelection race against Democrat Gina Hinojosa, and is likely doing his best to shore up his MAGA bonafides by stiff-arming prosecutors in the blue state Trump has gone out of his way to antagonize.

New Report Reveals ICE Knowingly Hired and Promoted Agents Convicted of Sex Crimes

A blistering new report from the Ohio Immigrant Alliance (OIA) has found that the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly hired, retained and even promoted ICE agents despite multiple documented warning signs of violent and/or predatory behavior.

The OIA looked at six decades of cases involving ICE, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and related contractors charged or convicted of violent or sexual offenses. Of 152 people identified since 1982, more than 86 percent were charged with or convicted of sex offenses. 78 of the cases in question involved children. 45 percent were directly tied to the person’s law enforcement work.

The OIA report concludes that federal agents used their badges as a weapon for coercion and access to vulnerable people.

Some of the cases are jaw-dropping. One agent, who was convicted of assaulting a child as a juvenile, was later hired by Border Patrol and worked there for nearly 20 years before being caught again. Another, whose job was conducting background checks for DHS, was eventually convicted of soliciting a minor. Another agent allegedly assaulted two teenage sisters inside a CBP office. A former special agent for ICE was even sentenced to life in prison for assaulting two women and using his badge to threaten and silence them.

DHS’ pattern of enabling and protecting predators appears to be accelerating at a rapid rate. OIA documented 14 cases in 2025 alone and 22 more in just the first eight months of this year. That’s nearly a quarter of the entire dataset packed into two years. ICE reportedly doesn’t include family court records in its background checks, and recruits have even shown up to training without completing any background checks at all.

The OIA is now calling on Congress to freeze hiring for ICE and Border Patrol, rescreen the entire workforce and create independent oversight with real subpoena power. If Democrats retake Congress in the fall, this could be near the top of their list.

Before You Go, Support the Journalism That Rejects Billionaire Money

We may not have the resources of Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post or David Ellison’s CBS, but we’re able to do what they could never do by honestly reporting stories they would never touch. You’d never read about Trump’s DHS hiring and promoting sexual predators in an outlet owned by a MAGA billionaire, and we all know Rupert Murdoch’s Fox would never talk about Texas’ governor intentionally shielding an ICE agent from accountability. Raw America can, because we have no billionaire owner telling us what we can and can’t report. We have you.

But we can only keep doing this work if readers like you who value independent media chip in to become paying subscribers. If just one in twenty people reading this right now subscribed, we could fund our entire newsroom through next year. That’s it. Just one in twenty. And you can do it for 22 cents a day. Will you be that one in twenty?

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I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.

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Here are some stories you may have missed:

• Federal Judge Order Release of Files Pertaining to Most Prominent Epstein Victim. A federal judge in Manhattan this week ordered that Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre’s 2025 lawsuit against Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell be unsealed, following eight years of litigation. Maxwell’s attorneys had fought to keep the lawsuit’s contents sealed, but U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska, a George H.W. bush appointee, ruled that the Epstein Files Transparency Act necessitated the unsealing process.

• ICE Detains Mom While U.S. Citizen Husband and Their Baby Watch. Federal immigration authorities recently detained Kentucky resident Armelle Bondonga, who is originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, during an immigration interview while her 18-month-old child and her U.S. citizen husband were present. Bondonga’s attorney said his client went to the hearing in order to abide by the legal process for her to obtain residency, given that she was married to a U.S. citizen. Bondonga, who is 21, entered the U.S. 13 years ago on a visa.

• Judges Strike Down South Carolina’s Restrictions on Mail-In Voting. The 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that a South Carolina law imposing restrictions on voters under 65 casting ballots by mail was unconstitutional. The law had required voters under 65 to obtain permission from their employer saying they wouldn’t be able to vote in-person on Election Day, or obtain documentation that they are caring for a sick or disabled person, are incarcerated, or will be out of their home county, in order to obtain a mail ballot. U.S. Circuit Court Judge Roger L. Gregory, a Clinton appointee, ruled that the law “constitutes an abridgement of the right to vote on the basis of age and contravenes the Twenty-Sixth Amendment.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could soon be out the door, as Donald Trump is in need of a scapegoat for the failed Iran war and desperate sailors on an aircraft carrier trying to jump overboard. Disney and ABC just filed a lawsuit against Trump’s FCC over what they say is a retaliation campaign against the network’s coverage of his administration. Trump’s own former press secretary just called him an “80-year-old man-child” over his recent Oval Office tantrum directed at a female reporter. And GOP lawmakers are in a state of panic as Trump’s war is cratering his approval ratings and the midterms shaping up to be a historic shellacking.

But first, a quick ask: you’re here because you know the billionaire-controlled legacy media is incapable of giving you the full truth. Raw America is doing what David Ellison’s CBS and Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post could never do by fearlessly covering stories the way they need to be, without fear of a call from upstairs threatening to pull a story. We stay one step ahead of them because we only answer to you, not a MAGA billionaire. But this work can only continue if readers like you — who understand the power and importance of independent journalism — chip in to keep it going. You can upgrade your free subscription to a paying one right now for just 22 cents a day. That’s less than a cup of coffee. Independent journalism can only survive with reader support.

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Trump Officials Say Pete Hegseth’s ‘Job Is in Danger’

Multiple sources inside the Trump administration recently told the South China Morning Post that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may not be in his job for much longer.

Donald Trump is apparently eyeing Hegseth as a scapegoat for his administration’s failure to resolve the Iran war, which is quickly becoming a quagmire. Trump is reportedly furious that there hasn’t been a “solid breakthrough” on the war, with the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed to shipping traffic and oil prices continuing to keep gas prices at roughly $4 a gallon on average.

Hegseth has also been blamed for the conditions on board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, where increasingly desperate crew members have reportedly tried to jump overboard due to persistent food shortages and an unsanitary environment after nine straight months at sea. It’s also been recently reported that a U.S. Navy destroyer lost power for four straight days in the South China sea, leaving sailors stranded with no working toilets or air conditioning.

One source told the Post that Hegseth’s “job is in danger.” Another official confided that the defense secretary is “on the verge of losing his job.” Zhao Minghao, who is an international studies professor at China’s Fudan University, told the Post that Trump might need “someone to take responsibility” for the rapidly unraveling war.

For now, these reports are little more than speculation, but it shows the level of panic within the Trump administration over a war that’s quickly eating through all of his political capital.

Back in 1941, Harry Truman got in his own car and went out to look at the defense plants himself, and the committee he built out of that trip saved the country billions of dollars and God knows how many lives. That's what it looks like when somebody actually wants to fix the problem instead of shopping for someone to blame it on.

Disney Sues Trump’s FCC Over Threat to Revoke Broadcast Licenses

Disney and ABC are now suing the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC), trying to block what they say is a politically motivated attempt to strip local ABC stations of their broadcast licenses. The lawsuit accuses the White House of trying to coerce and punish a network that refuses to cave to its demands.

Trump has continued to demand networks pull shows he doesn’t like, and he’s pushed his FCC more than once to yank ABC’s licenses entirely. FCC Chair Brendan Carr — who authored the section of Project 2025 pertaining to the FCC — ordered an early review of eight ABC stations in April, even though those stations’ broadcast licenses weren’t due for renewal until October of 2028. This is the first time in over 50 years the FCC has done anything remotely like that. And that review order came just one day after Trump demanded ABC fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.

Disney and ABC want the court to issue a temporary restraining order freezing the license review process before the FCC can schedule a hearing. The companies’ legal team argues the administration is violating the First Amendment, and the lawsuit points out that the president has repeatedly attacked ABC’s journalism and viewpoints aired on the network.

License revocations are almost unheard of in American broadcasting. But legal experts say that even just the threat of losing a license can be enough to result in a network into softening its news coverage. That’s exactly the kind of government interference the First Amendment is supposed to prevent.

Trump’s FCC is also investigating “The View,” suggesting the all-female daytime talk show may fall under equal airtime rules due to its political discussions. And last November, Trump demanded ABC’s licenses be pulled after an ABC News reporter asked Saudi Arabia’s crown prince about the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump called that question insubordinate.

In 1931, the Supreme Court struck down a Minnesota law that let public officials padlock newspapers they'd decided were malicious, and the point of that ruling was that government doesn't get to sort journalism into acceptable and unacceptable. A broadcast license is just a modern padlock, and everybody in this business understands what it's for.

Raw America will never have to worry about appeasing the government with softer news coverage, because we have no corporate parent with business interests to protect. But our independence is only possible with the support of paying subscribers. Upgrade your free subscription to a paying one today and help keep this work going.

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Former Trump Press Secretary Calls Him an ‘80 Year-Old Man-Child’

Sarah Matthews, who was Donald Trump’s deputy White House press secretary in his first administration, tore into her former boss on Monday after he berated a female reporter in the Oval Office. Matthews called him an “80-year-old man-child” over his tantrum.

Matthews argued that Trump obviously gets rattled by strong women, especially reporters who ask him tough questions he can’t answer.

The incident that set her off happened earlier that day, when Trump snapped at CNN reporter Kristen Holmes after she asked him about Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff’s remarks during a recent speech. Ossoff said at a campaign rally that Trump doesn’t actually want to do the job of being president and would rather focus on his ballroom and “travel with Natalie” on a “flying palace” gifted to him by Qatar’s royal family. When Holmes tried to follow up with another question, Trump blew up at her, telling her to be quiet and accusing her of being a “fake reporter.”

This is merely the latest example of Trump going after female journalists who ask him hard questions. He’s previously confronted CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for not smiling enough, and even told Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey to be “quiet, piggy” when she asked him about Jeffrey Epstein. It’s a pattern that keeps repeating itself, and now even people who used to work for him are calling it out.

In 1892, a mob in Memphis destroyed Ida B. Wells' printing press because she wouldn't stop reporting the truth about lynching, and she kept publishing anyway from a thousand miles away. The urge to shut up a woman who asks the wrong question is very old in this country, and every generation gets to decide whether it rewards that urge or punishes it.

Republicans Panic as Trump’s ‘Mess’ of a War Appears Likely to End Their Majorities

Republicans are now staring down a political disaster of their own making, and they appear increasingly convinced that this president has doomed any chance of them holding onto their majorities after November.

Trump’s prolonged war with Iran is turning into exactly the kind of midterm liability Republican strategists feared most. Republican Senator Jim Justice of West Virginia called the administration’s handling of the conflict a “mess” and warning his party that they’re completely out of touch with working-class voters who are getting squeezed at the gas pump and the grocery store.

Justice said for months, Republicans just assumed things would work out, while he was a lone voice in the wilderness warning that regular folks are getting bled dry and that leaders are focusing their efforts elsewhere.

Arizona Republican strategist Barrett Marson didn’t hold back, saying Trump is apparently the one person in the country who doesn’t seem to care about stubbornly high gas prices, and that he is solely in control of the political fate of everyone else in his party. He said Republican candidates are in a delicate balancing act, trying to simultaneously stay loyal to the president while acknowledging voters’ pain.

Republican Congressmen Tom Barrett of Michigan and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania recently crossed party lines to support limiting Trump’s war powers when it comes to Iran. Republican Jen Kiggans of Virginia, who is trying to hold onto her swing district, is also pushing hard for a quick end to the war.

In the Senate, Republicans have criticized the White House’s request for another $70 billion dollars in emergency funding for the war, and are demanding more transparency from the Pentagon when it comes to munitions supply and an exit strategy. Vice President JD Vance reportedly tried to wave those shortage concerns away as misdirection meant to encourage the enemy in a closed-door briefing, but a lot of senators in the room apparent;y weren’t buying it. Some even said that denying the logistical reality of the war leaves them exposed out on the campaign trail with no good answers to constituents’ valid questions.

The polling backs up the grim outlook. A new survey from Reuters and Ipsos just found Trump’s approval rating has cratered to a career low of just 33 percent, with 64 percent of respondents disapproving of his performance as president. Only three in ten voters approve of how he’s handled the Iran war, while a staggering 80 percent of Americans — including 71 percent of Republicans — expect the U.S. to be mired in Iran for the foreseeable future.

Democrats are hitting Republicans hard on the war in both House and Senate races. But Trump is continuing to brush off Americans’ economic pain, telling supporters at a recent rally that paying a little more at the pump is a good trade-off to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. But GOP candidates in swing districts don’t have the luxury of shrugging that off, not with an election bearing down on them in less than three months.

Before You Go, Support Journalism That Only Answers to You

Even though we only have a fraction of the resources our billionaire-owned competitors have, this newsletter proved that we’re doing what they could never do: give you the full truth without fear of being censored or having our coverage watered down to please an advertiser. David Ellison would never let CBS News report on how Republicans are in full panic mode about this president’s reckless war. Rupert Murdoch would never allow Fox to report on how Trump is apparently trying to make Pete Hegseth the scapegoat for his disastrous war in Iran. But Raw America doesn’t answer to them. We only answer to you, the reader. And that won’t change as long as we’re in business.

But our independence is only possible with the financial support of readers like you, who understand that independent journalism is a vital necessity. The fact that you’re still reading this shows you value what we do. Now, we need you to make your support official by becoming a paying subscriber for just 22 cents a day. That’s all it takes to keep us independent. Chip in and help make sure we can continue doing this work.

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.

Here are a few stories you may have missed:

• Ron DeSantis Appointee Arrested on Child Sex Abuse Charges. 67 year-old Republican official Michael Allen Caruso was arrested by authorities in Palm Beach County, Florida for allegedly molesting a child. Governor Ron DeSantis appointed Caruso — a former Florida state legislator — as Palm Beach County’s clerk of courts and comptroller last August, and Caruso is running for a full term this November. DeSantis is reportedly planning to issue an order suspending Caruso of his duties in the wake of his arrest.

• Trump Votes By Mail in Florida Primary. President Donald Trump voted by mail in the Republican primary in his home state of Florida, despite repeatedly calling for an end to voting by mail and baselessly alleging the practice was fraudulent. The president has voted by mail in every election since his second term began, while his administration has pressed hard for Congress to pass the SAVE Act, which imposes severe restrictions on absentee and mail-in voting.

• Marjorie Taylor Greene Remarks That MAGA Hats Have Become Increasingly Rare. In a recent post to her official X account, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) wrote that she “can’t remember the last time” she saw someone in public wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat. Greene wrote the post while commenting on the recent news that a MAGA merchandise store in Tennessee was closing down due to a lack of business. That store is noq liquidating its inventory and offering a broad 50 percent off discount.

• Trump DOJ Seeks to Re-Introduce Criminal Charges Against Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The Department of Justice is now petitioning the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a decision by U.S. District Judge Beverly Crenshaw — a Barack Obama appointee — that dismissed the two-count federal indictment against El Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Last year, Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador and tortured in the country’s infamous CECOT mega-prison. The Trump administration sent him to El Salvador in spite of a 2019 court order preventing him from being sent back to his home country over the likelihood that he would be murdered by gangs if he went back. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have been petitioning the administration to deport their client to Costa Rica.

U.S. President Donald Trump's executive assistant Natalie Harp disembarks Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., August 16, 2026. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

Good evening. I’m John Byrne, in for British Chris.

The White House communications office is clearly in panic mode after a sitting senator pointed out Trump’s strange relationship with a young staffer. That same staffer, 35 year-old Natalie Harp, has given a new nickname from the New York Times’ White House reporter after she was revealed as one of the few staffers Trump brought along with him while leaving other senior officials on a decoy jet that could have potentially been shot down. Trump’s Justice Department is preparing to send an army of a thousand “election observers” ahead of the midterms, even as it keeps losing court cases over its push for state voter rolls. And a Navy ship sat dead in the South China Sea for four days with no power, no AC and no working toilets in what is merely the latest sign of a military stretched thin by a war no one planned well or asked for.

Before we go further: our independence is our biggest strength, because our billionaire-owned competitors could never speak the plain truth without a call from upstairs threatening their job. But whether we keep this work going depends entirely on you. We can only remain independent if free readers like you, who understand the value of independent journalism, chip in to keep us operational. You can upgrade to a paying subscription for just 22 cents a day. That’s less than a cup of coffee. That’s all it takes. You already read us. So make your support official.

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‘Touched a Nerve’: White House Explodes at Ossoff for Naming Young Female Staffer at Trump’s Side

Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia went after Trump over the weekend in a fiery speech, saying the president seems more interested in building his ballroom and “traveling with Natalie [Harp]” than actually solving America’s problems. It clearly stung the president, whose team has spent the entirety of Monday erupting at Ossoff.

The response from the White House noticeably wasn’t a denial. Communications Director Stephen Cheung fired off a post loaded with bizarre sexual insults, a deliberately misspelled version of Ossoff’s name and a line telling the senator to ask himself why he’s a “miserable person who hates this country.”

The White House’s over-the-top response didn’t go unnoticed. Podcaster Tommy Vietor said it looked like Ossoff had “touched a nerve” by naming Harp, who’s been referred to as the “human printer” for her habit of printing out flattering articles from right-wing news outlets to hand to the president. Capitol Hill staffer Aaron Fritschner agreed with Vietor and wrote that Ossoff seemed to have found one of Trump’s most sensitive buttons. Commentator Zaid Jilani said the administration’s response to Ossoff sounded like the hit dog was hollering.

Michael Linden, a former Biden administration advisor, said he almost missed the days when a communications director would get fired for posting something like what Cheung wrote. Former congressional staffer Michael Brodek pointed out that Cheung’s tirade omitted any mention of Ossoff’s chief allegation. Activist Hunter Dunn noted how Cheung quickly pivoted to insults the second Ossoff joked about a young female aide who never leaves Trump’s side.

Nobody in the White House press shop denied any of it. They just got angry someone had the guts to say it out loud.

NYT Reporter’s Nickname for Natalie Harp Goes Viral

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman just gave Natalie Harp a new nickname, and it’s already spreading across the internet like wildfire. Harp became a household name after she was one of just three staffers Trump brought with him during his secretive transfer off Air Force One in Turkey last month, while leaving top cabinet officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary on board the decoy jet, which could have been shot down.

Haberman told MSNOW that Harp made the cut because she was Trump’s “binkie,” which is what parents of infants sometimes call a pacifier. Harp isn’t an expert in classified logistics or national security. She’s his security blanket who keeps his ego inflated.

Harp is more than 40 years younger than Trump. Her own estranged brother has called her relationship with the president “unhealthy.” Even Trump’s own Secret Service detail has reportedly had concerns in the past about bizarre notes she’s left expressing her undying admiration for the president.

Harp doesn’t just print flattering news articles. She also has the keys to Trump’s Truth Social account and writes posts that he dictates. A documentary showed her taking on that role while Trump’s team watched Kamala Harris’s 2024 convention speech. And Harp was the aide who was ultimately responsible for posting the racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

So the country has an 80-year-old president who relies on a 34-year-old aide the Times says functions as a comfort object, who has access to his social media, and who was trusted with his secret plane switch. And when a senator points that out, the White House response is a slur-laden name and a question about his soul.

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Trump’s DOJ Readies Army of ‘Election Observers’ Less Than 3 Months Before Midterms

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Office, announced Monday that the DOJ plans to deploy roughly 1,000 election monitors across the country for the November midterms. She added the department could take its fight for state voter rolls all the way to the Supreme Court, despite failing to win a single case in the lower courts.

So far, DOJ is winless in all 23 district court cases pertaining to state voter rolls. Judges have all so far declined to greenlight the DOJ’s attempts to force states to hand over sensitive voter registration data, including driver’s license and Social Security numbers. Dhillon is signaling the Supreme Court might be next anyway.

She also claimed, without naming a single state or offering a shred of evidence, that hundreds of thousands of dead people and tens of thousands of noncitizens are on the rolls in states that have cooperated with the DOJ’s requests. According to Dhillon, two-thirds of states are refusing to hand over their voter data. She also accused unnamed state election officials of knowingly leaving non-citizens registered, calling it a federal crime. She again never once named any alleged instance of that crime occurring.

A thousand federal monitors showing up at polling places across the country isn’t about assuaging voters’ concerns about election fairness. This is simply an intimidation ploy aimed at keeping voters home.

Sailors Stranded at Sea for 4 Days with No Working Toilets or AC

The U.S.S. Benfold, a guided-missile destroyer, lost power in the South China Sea on in late July after what the Navy said was an engineering failure with its generators. The ship sat dead in the water for four days. Sailors had no galley service, no working toilets and no air conditioning. Another ship had to help feed the crew until the Benfold was towed on July 28th, with power restored two days later.

This comes as the George Washington strike group heads to the Middle East to relieve the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, where conditions are so dire that multiple sailors reportedly tried to jump overboard after more than 200 days without a port call. The roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines have complained of no working toilets, poor plumbing issues, not receiving mail promptly and other persistent issues affecting quality of life on board the vessel.

Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, a retired Marine, said the administration never planned for this war and clearly had no exit strategy in place. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called the reporting “completely misrepresented,” while families of sailors aboard the carrier called Hegseth’s dismissiveness of their loves ones a betrayal of his duty.

Before You Go, Help Raw America Stay Independent

I co-founded Raw America in the wake of the shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good because I saw how billionaire-controlled legacy media outlets routinely failed to give Americans the real story. And I did it with the bet that our readers would chip in to keep high-quality independent journalism funded so they could get the stories the corporate press buried. And I was right: thanks to our paying subscribers, we’ve been able to become one of the fastest-growing independent media outlets in the country in just seven months. We’ve interviewed U.S. senators, law professors, policy experts and even just did an exclusive sit-down with Hunter Biden. None of that would be possible without our paying subscribers.

If you’re still on the free list, I’m glad to have you here. And I really hope you’ll make today the day you officially become a paying subscriber. The fact that you’re still reading this shows that you value independent journalism. But we have to be honest: we’re short on our fundraising goals and need more of our free readers to chip in. You can upgrade your free subscription to a paying one right now for just 22 cents a day. That’s all it takes to keep us independent.

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A new report confirms that Donald Trump has stacked his administration with more centimillionaires and billionaires than the last three presidents combined. New polls shows that even the most hardcore Trump supporters are turning on him with less than three months to go before the midterms. Newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche just admitted out loud that his Justice Department will act in lockstep with the White House. And one senator just raised a lot of eyebrows with a pointed jab about Trump’s relationship with a young blonde staffer.

Before we get to the news, a quick request: the MAGA oligarchs who own the biggest media outlets in America aren’t slowing down, and neither can we. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch and the Ellison family are using their endless resources to make themselves the sole deciders of what you get to know and what gets buried. Raw America will never take a cent from a billionaire because we know that comes with the expectation that they get to control our coverage. But that’s why we need support from readers like you, who understand how important independent media is in this moment. We appreciate you reading these newsletters. But we can only keep this work going if you upgrade your free subscription to a paying one. It only costs 22 cents a day, and it’s all we need to stay independent. You already read us, so make it official today.

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Trump Under Heightened Scrutiny for Surrounding Himself with Billionaires

A new bombshell report from advocacy group Public Citizen just dropped, and its findings are staggering: Donald Trump has appointed 57 people worth at least $100 million to his administration. That includes 17 ambassadors and 40 top-ranking officials across the executive branch.

To put that in perspective, that’s more than four times the combined total of the previous three presidents. George W. Bush had five executive branch appointees worth $100 million or more. Joe Biden had five in his White House. Barack Obama only had three.

To repeat: Trump has 57.

Among those 57 include eight of the 23 people in Trump’s Cabinet. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Education Secretary Linda McMahon are both billionaires. Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg and Small Business Administration chief Kelly Loeffler are also billionaires. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and special envoy Steve Witkoff each have net worths in the hundreds of millions.

Public Citizen’s list doesn’t even include Trump himself, who has more than $6 billion to his name according to Forbes. It also doesn’t include Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who spent last year helping Trump gut federal agencies like USAID, leading to the deaths of millions of people in the poorest countries.

Trump has repeatedly said he conflates extreme wealth with “great competence” and said the super-rich are “some of the smartest business leaders.” He views a nine-figure net worth as proof a person knows how to run a country.

But Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert made the point that when the people running the government are pulled almost entirely from the top tenth of the top one percent, it’s worth asking who these people are actually working for.

Trump won back the White House in 2024 largely because a plurality of working-class voters believed him when he said he would bring down the cost of living. Now those same voters are watching him pack his government with people who almost certainly haven’t even thought about the cost of groceries in decades.

The disconnect is becoming even more apparent. A July poll found that only 32 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the economy. To compare, that’s down from 40 percent at the start of his second term last January.

Theodore Roosevelt spent his presidency warning that a government owned by the very rich would inevitably govern for the very rich, and he built an entire era of American reform around breaking that grip. We’re now running that experiment in reverse, handing the levers back to the exact people Roosevelt said democracy had to be protected from, and then acting puzzled when nobody in Washington seems to hear working families at all.

Even Trump’s Most Devout Supporters Are Bailing

Trump isn’t just bleeding out support from independents. He’s now watching support from inside his own party dwindle, even from the most diehard Republicans.

A new poll from the Economist and YouGov put Trump’s approval among Republicans at 79 percent. That sounds high until you realize that’s a steep 12-point drop from his second inauguration. And the number of Republicans who “strongly approve” of Trump has absolutely cratered, plummeting from 68 percent to just 48 percent.

An increasingly large number of Republicans who don’t identify with the MAGA movement are also disgusted with this administration. Only 51 percent of non-MAGA Republicans approve of Trump right now, with that approval rating dropping by 13 points in just one week.

Other polls are showing similar data. The Financial Times found Trump’s net approval among Republicans fell eight points in just 30 days. ActiVote pegged Republican approval at 79 percent, which is down from the 86 percent registered in January of 2025.

It’s also worth remembering that during the entirety of Trump’s first presidency, his approval among Republicans averaged 88 percent between 2017 and 2021, according to Gallup.

The economy is a big reason for the drop in support. Trump’s war in Iran, which he launched in February without congressional authorization, has also contributed significantly to his declining popularity among members of his own party. Iran war support has stayed gone above 40 percent since the bombing started, as gas prices have skyrocketed from roughly $3 a gallon before the war to more than $4 today.

Republican voters are feeling particularly squeezed right now. Consumer sentiment data compiled by the University of Michigan data shows that among Republican consumers, confidence in the economy plunged by 9.5 points just this month. That’s more than double the overall national decline, and it’s one of the largest monthly drops pollsters have recorded in decades.

This has big implications for the midterms. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll from last month gave Democrats a 10-point advantage among voters who say they’re certain to vote in November. Even conservative group AFP Action is warning that one in five core Republican voters could stay home this fall. Their own executive director used the word “scary” to drive the point home.

The Framers put the war power in Article I, Section 8 and handed it to Congress instead of the president, because they’d spent their whole lives watching kings send other people’s sons to die on a whim. When one man starts a war by himself and the bill shows up at the gas pump six months later, the country ends up learning the exact lesson the Constitution was written to spare us.

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Todd Blanche Confirms His DOJ Will Be a Trump Rubber Stamp

On Sunday, newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche — who was Trump’s former personal criminal defense attorney — told NBC’s Meet the Press that the Justice Department wouldn’t be independent of the White House.

Blanche didn’t say that the DOJ would side with the White House “under certain conditions,” or even offer an “it depends” to assuage concerns. He said it on the air, out in the open.

Blanche bizarrely tried to argue that having an independent DOJ would somehow mean refusing to prosecute violent crime if Trump made that request. No one is suggesting the DOJ shouldn’t prosecute violent criminals. We all know just as well as Blanche that questions about DOJ independence are valid, because Trump has openly communicated that he wants to use the Justice Department to go after his own political enemies.

Blanche insists Trump — who, again, is his former client — never asked him to do anything unethical or illegal. He also insisted that any suggestions that the president calls him up and tells him who to prosecute is a “false narrative.”

This all ignores the basic reality that when Blanche served as deputy attorney general under Pam Bondi, Trump repeatedly pressured Bondi on his own social media platform to charge his political enemies with crimes, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Democratic Senator Adam Schiff of California.

Trump said he meant to send that message privately and accidentally posted it publicly, but the intent was clear. And Bondi was eventually fired. If Blanche expects to keep his job, he won’t do it by saying no when the boss asks for something.

More than 1,200 former DOJ employees came out against Blanche’s confirmation for this exact reason. This includes career DOJ employee Stacey Young, who said Blanche has shown time and again that loyalty to the president Trumps his duty to uphold the Constitution.

Democratic Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey also stated the obvious, that Blanche was give the nation’s top law enforcement job specifically because he’s willing to cross any ethical or legal boundary to protect the president.

To get an idea of just how partisan Blanche’s DOJ is, it’s worth pointing out that just a few days after he was confirmed, the new attorney general showed up at a political rally with Trump and praised the Republican candidate running against New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul. He also spoke at the far-right CPAC summit in March, and dismissed concerns about federal agents possibly showing up at polling places this November.

In United States v. Nixon, a unanimous Supreme Court, including three justices Nixon had put on the bench himself, ruled that no president sits above the reach of the law. An attorney general who won’t promise independence is quietly telling us he’d like to find out whether that decision still means anything at all.

Ossoff Suggests Trump Having Affair with Young Staffer

Over the weekend, Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia tore into Trump over the Iran war, golfing while the country is in crisis, making billions from the stock market and falling asleep in public. But the line that stood out the most was about Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old White House staffer who has become nearly inseparable from Trump.

Ossoff said Trump clearly doesn’t want to do his job, but just wants to spend his time on vanity projects like his ballroom, and, most notably travel with “Natalie” on what Ossoff called Trump’s “apparently defenseless flying palace.” That’s a reference to the $400 million jet that Qatar’s royal family gave Trump as a gift in clear violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause.

That plane made headlines last month when Trump secretly swapped out jets after the NATO summit in Turkey over an alleged security threat. He was seen boarding the Qatari jet — remade into an Air Force One thanks to almost a billion dollars in upgrades — but was instead smuggled in a catering truck to a separate military jet. Harp was reportedly one of the only people Trump brought with him into that catering truck. He notably left Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the decoy jet, which could have potentially been shot down.

According to the bestselling book “Regime Change” by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump has boasted that Harp will “never leave” him. A 2024 story in the Times described how she often wrote “devotional” letters to Trump, which included bizarre lines like “you are all that matters to me.” She even called him her “Guardian and Protector in this life.” Some members of Trump’s inner circle reportedly nicknamed Harp the “human printer” because she travels with a portable printer just to hand him documents, most of which are flattery articles from right-wing media and pro-Trump memes.

Her own estranged brother, Preston Harp, told the Daily Mail that his sister’s relationship with the president looked “very unhealthy,” and that Natalie is “just like his fan club.”

Ossoff is apparently the first Democratic official to call out Natalie Harp by name. He probably won’t be the last.

When Woodrow Wilson was flattened by a stroke in 1919, this country was effectively governed for months through one unelected person standing at his bedside, and almost nobody in official Washington was willing to say so out loud. A republic can survive a president who isn’t up to the job, but it can’t survive a capital city that agrees to pretend everything’s fine.

Before You Go, Become a Paying Subscriber for Just 22 Cents a Day

It’s a virtual certainty that newsrooms in outlets controlled by MAGA billionaires would never cover how a Democratic senator implied that the 80 year-old president is cheating on the first lady with a 35 year-old aide. Just like you would never hear from David Ellison’s CBS or Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post that this president is losing support from even the most hardcore Trump supporters. But Raw America can cover these stories the way they need to be covered, precisely because we don’t answer to a billionaire or a corporation. We only answer to you, the reader.

You’re reading this right now because you understand how crucial it is to have an independent press that can tell the plain truth without a billionaire owner looking over the shoulders of reporters and editors. But we can only keep this work going if our free subscribers believe in independent journalism enough to fund it. You can upgrade your subscription right now for just 22 cents a day, less than a cup of coffee. Chip and and help us stay independent and only accountable to you.

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.

Here are some stories you may have missed:

• Trump Threatens to Bomb Key U.S. Ally as Iran War Drags On. President Donald Trump said Monday in an interview with Fox News that he wouldn’t hesitate to “bomb the s— out of” the Gulf Arab nation of Oman if it interfered in his war with Iran. In that same interview, Trump also revealed he had a communications back-channel with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), while the Iranian regime continues to deny it’s in talks with the U.S. However, Iran’s government has said it’s finalizing a deal with Oman to move ships through the Strait of Hormuz, which has remained closed since Trump relaunched his war last month.

• Supreme Court Again Rejects Trump’s Attempt to Overturn Sexual Abuse Verdict. Despite its 6-3 conservative supermajority, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) once again rejected Trump’s attempt to overturn a New York jury’s 2023 $5 million verdict finding him civilly liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll. SCOTUS previously denied Trump’s appeal of the verdict last month. The Court released its latest decision Monday with no further explanation from justices. Trump is still challenging an $83.3 million defamation judgment a separate New York jury awarded Carroll in 2024.

• Trump Accuses BBC of Harassment as Network Aims to Subpoena His Adult Children. With the discovery process underway in Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC, the president is now accusing the broadcaster of harassing his family as it seeks to issue subpoenas to Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Trump’s lawsuit against the BBC stems from a BBC documentary about the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which prompted Trump to launch a $10 billion defamation lawsuit. The BBC’s lawyers are arguing that obtaining documents and sworn testimony from Trump’s children could provide new insight on Trump’s thought process leading up to his infamous January 6 speech, in which he called on his supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.”

Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m on my second cup of coffee and I’ve spent most of the morning thinking about a well.

First, to everyone who subscribes and keeps this thing running: thank you. You’re the reason we don’t have a billionaire’s thumb on the scale. We answer to you, and that’s exactly how we like it.

If you’re reading this free and you’ve been meaning to jump in: today’s the day. We put Hunter Biden on the record this week, and we did it because you make it possible. You can subscribe to Raw America for just 22 cents a day — less than a cup of coffee. Make the investment today. Your support keeps us in the fight.

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Hunter Biden Sat Down With Us, And Gave Me Hope

On Friday, Raw America Managing Editor Carl Gibson sat down with Hunter Biden. The interview was fantastic, and you can watch the full thing here.

Asked about Republican corruption claims, Hunter said: look what’s actually in front of your eyes. He sat on a board. He got sober. He sold paintings. And every person who bought a painting had to testify under oath by name before Congress.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital and its companies are swimming in Pentagon contracts, and Jared Kushner is making a fortune from a Saudi wealth fund.

But the real meat was what Hunter said about addiction, and his father’s love.

Carl asked Hunter about a 2018 voicemail from President Joe Biden.

“It’s Dad,” Joe Biden said. “I called to tell you I love you. I love you more than the whole world, pal. You got to get some help. I don’t know what to do.”

Lots of families, mine included, struggle with addiction. Hunter said that message wasn’t a one-off: it was one of dozens, maybe hundreds, his father left him during the worst of it. Picture that: a father calling into the dark again and again. His messages unanswered, but calling anyway.

When Carl asked what he’d say to someone in the grip of their own addiction, Hunter refused to offer a formula. “I don’t have a prescription for anybody else,” he said, “and I’m here to tell you, if anyone tells you that they do have, like, you go from A to Z, they’re not telling you the truth.”

What he could speak to was the one thing that saved him: a family that never let him go: his dad, his mother, and more than anyone, his three adult daughters.

The standard advice about addiction is that you have to let a person hit bottom before they’ll change. Hunter’s response was quiet and devastating: “The people that have hit bottom are dead.”

What pulled him back wasn’t the crash. It was that someone stayed. His family, he said, “kept shining the light down the well I had fallen into.” Recovery, he said, lives in the narrow moments when an addict can suddenly see clearly what they’re doing to themselves. And it matters whether there’s a hand reaching down when that window opens.

Hunter wouldn’t take credit for surviving. The people who get clean without the family he had, he said, “are the bravest, most amazing people in the world.” He wasn’t holding himself up as a success story. He was holding up the light. Telling anyone out there that the hand reaching down is what makes the difference, and that nobody has to climb out alone.

We’re Still Keeping Our Eye on ICE

We’ve stepped away from ICE for a few weeks, but I wanted to give you a grim update.

The Department of Homeland Security is planning to spend up to $20 million to outfit immigration agents with gloves that deliver electric shocks. Some jails and police departments already use them. Now they’re being directed to the agents carrying out the largest deportation campaign in modern American history.

Advocates are sounding the alarm that these things will eventually end up being used on protesters and on people held in custody. It’s time someone speaks out; we need to keep these in the box.

Also, a Guardian investigation this week found the administration used court orders to force-feed ICE hunger strikers on U.S. soil: a tube down the nose and throat. Trump’s team sought orders against roughly ten detainees; at least three were actually force-fed. One Kurdish asylum seeker was force-fed for nearly eight months. In six of the cases, the detainees had no lawyer. Human rights groups call it torture.

It makes me think of something Hunter Biden said about Trump: he’s not a president behaving badly, he’s “a one-man crime wave.” Look at the twenty million dollars, then look at what it’s for. Tell me that’s a man who respects democracy.

None of this reporting reaches you if outlets like ours don’t stay in the fight. We don’t have a corporate parent deciding the shock-glove story is too hot. We have you. Subscribe today.

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Democrats Are Finally Making Plans for the Supreme Court

Here’s some good news this week.

For years, the Supreme Court has felt like a dark cloud: a 6-3 machine handing down decisions on voting rights and presidential power that most of the country never asked for.

This week, Democrats stopped complaining and started legislating. They proposed several bills. One would expand the court from nine justices to thirteen. A second would cap lifetime appointments at eighteen years. Other legislation would create an enforceable ethics code and drag the court’s “shadow docket” into daylight.

Would they pass a Republican Congress? No. But Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who’s led the term-limits push, says the point is to “keep trying the case” with the American public.

Term limits for justices poll above two-thirds nationally. More than three-quarters of Democrats support it, as well as two-thirds of independents. Even Republicans support term limits by more than a majority. This isn’t a fringe demand.

Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries says everything’s on the table. Given its recent poor decisions, it’s great to watch people treat the court as something that can be changed.

Which brings me back to the well.

One Last Thing

The bottom of the well is dark right now. Shock gloves. Force-feeding. A Supreme Court that feels beyond anyone’s reach. And there’s a real temptation, on a Sunday like this one, to look away and wait for things to bottom out.

But Hunter reminded me that the people who wait for the bottom don’t come back. The ones who make it are the ones somebody kept a light on for.

That’s the whole job of a free press. Not to save anyone. There’s only us; we’re the hand reaching down into the well.

We can only do that because of you. Yes, I mean you, specifically. For 22 cents a day, less than the coffee I’m finishing right now, you can keep this light burning. Keep us in the fight.

Restore Independent Journalism

If you’ve been meaning to subscribe, let today be the day. Somebody down in the well needs to know we’re still up here.

Keep the door open. We’ll keep the light on.

I’ll see you next Sunday.

—John Byrne / Founder, Raw America and Raw Story

P.S. If you want to check out the full interview with Hunter, click below. With your help, we’re making moves!

Good morning. Happy Saturday! I’m John Byrne.

David Ellison, the MAGA billionaire buying Warner Bros., is having a temper tantrum about the “needless costs” of the antitrust suit standing between him and CNN. A cyclospora outbreak that poisoned more than 24,000 Americans was worsened by a food-safety rule Trump delayed. Melania Trump just landed at the top of a Democratic subpoena list as House investigators circle the Epstein files. And here in Miami, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner still can’t buy their way into the island club where money, for once, isn’t enough.

Raw America exists to be something legacy media can’t be: a newsroom that doesn’t answer to corporate boardrooms, doesn’t recycle the same talking points every outlet is handed, and doesn’t let gatekeepers decide what you get to know and when. Our reporters stay up late tracking incoming reports, chasing down documents, and verifying what’s real before it hits your inbox. None of that happens without you. A paid subscription costs about 22 cents a day, and every one of them goes straight toward keeping this work independent. If you’ve been reading on a free subscription, this is the week to change that. Subscribe or upgrade today.

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Exposed: How Trump Made Cyclospora Outbreak Worse

Here’s what Trump’s budget cuts mean when it hits your lunch. More than 24,500 Americans have been sickened this year by cyclospora, a parasite that causes explosive diarrhea, cramps, and dehydration. The bug killed two people in Michigan. The source: iceberg lettuce from a Taylor Farms plant in Mexico, served at Taco Bell.

It took nearly two weeks to nail that down: two weeks during which Michigan health officials wrote Taco Bell’s parent company three separate times begging for supply-chain records.

Here’s why: a federal rule, drafted under the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act and set to take effect this past January, that would have forced the company to hand those records over in 24 hours. But the Trump administration delayed it until mid-2028, saying companies needed “more time to prepare.” Then Republicans in Congress went further; they barred the FDA from spending a dime to enforce it.

“Time translates into illnesses and lives,” one food-policy expert told the New York Times.

And there’s more. The delay wasn’t the only cut. Trump’s FDA also fired staff who supported food inspectors and coordinated with foreign governments. In addition, Trump killed a program that specifically tracked cyclospora. Foreign food inspections last year hit a 15-year low.

This is what happens when you treat the agencies that keep food safe as waste to be trimmed: people eat lunch, and some of them die.

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Melania Tops the Epstein Subpoena List

No matter how hard Trump’s White House works to bury them, the Epstein files aren’t going away. Katie Phang, the lawyer and journalist suing Attorney General Todd Blanche to force the release of remaining records, said this week that if Democrats retake the House in the midterms, one name sits at the very top of the subpoena list: Melania Trump.

Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, explained it this way. Republicans set a precedent, he said, when they subpoenaed and questioned first ladies, former first ladies, and presidential family members going after the Clintons and Hunter Biden. Garcia intends to use that same precedent.

“Does anyone here across the country think that the first lady doesn’t have additional information?” he asked. Melania and Epstein were photographed together with Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago in February 2000.

Melania’s strange April press conference where she denied being Epstein’s friend while at the same time calling on Congress to let survivors testify only sharpened investigators’ interest.

“If Melania Trump wants real justice for the survivors, then she would work with us to try to get the truth,” Garcia said. The midterms will decide whether he gets to ask.

The One Thing the Trumps Can’t Buy

For all the corruption that money greases open in this administration, here’s a small, delicious exception. And it’s happening a few miles from my desk, here in Miami Beach.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have spent years trying to break into the Indian Creek Country Club, a century-old Miami institution on the 300-acre island known as the “Billionaire Bunker.” The members still won’t have them.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the couple owns a lot on the island and got sponsored for membership by the widow of legendary Dolphins coach Don Shula, and still only about half the club’s board bothered to show up to their own housewarming party. When the message is that blunt, you’re not getting in.

They’re not the only rejects. Jeff Bezos recently spent $234 million to buy three properties on the island and still hasn’t landed an invite. This comes six months after personally working the room at a February dock party. Even the CEO of Goldman Sachs had to survive an organized petition against his membership before he got in.

Kushner, ever the player, has hit on a novel angle: fix the sewage. The president’s son-in-law took a seat on the Indian Creek Village governing board and helped broker a deal to repair the island’s aging septic system, which has been leaking waste into Biscayne Bay for years. A new pump station is conveniently going in across from his own house.

Ivanka, meanwhile, is playing golf with members and turning up at events. There’s something hilarious about the family that bent the entire federal government to its will reduced to handling everyone’s raw sewage.

Ellison Complains About the Cost of the Empire He’s Buying

Speaking of money: there’s a special kind of nerve required to spend $111 billion swallowing American media and then complaining it costs too much.

On Friday, Paramount announced that Mexico had approved its acquisition of Warner Bros., joining the European Union, the UK, and Trump’s own Justice Department. The only thing left in Ellison’s way is a coalition of 12 Democratic state attorneys general, led by California, which sued in July to block the deal.

Trump lackey David Ellison — the buyer — is furious. In a Friday news dump, Paramount whined that the states are inflicting “needless costs from penalty fees, litigation expenses and business disruption.”

Ellison’s problem? A $7 million-a-day “ticking fee” owed to Warner Bros. shareholders that kicks in October 1. Ellison would like the states out of his way before then. He’s even threatened to yank Paramount out of California, to Texas, Tennessee, or Georgia, if Sacramento won’t play ball.

California’s Attorney General isn’t blinking. His office says the merger means “higher costs, less competition, lower wages, job cuts, and fewer movies and TV shows.” A judge has already found the states likely to win at trial, and Ellison has conceded that the deal may take a year.

This is the same David Ellison whose family circled CNN and now controls CBS. When we tell you a handful of MAGA billionaires are vacuuming up the outlets that control what Americans see and hear, this is the man we mean. And he’s mad the law is slowing him down.

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Donald Trump is now telling families of sailors trapped on an aircraft carrier with reportedly horrid conditions that their deployment hasn’t gone on “nearly long enough.” He also bragged to a crowd that “beautiful young girls” can’t stop fawning over him at the White House. A massive MAGA merchandise store in Tennessee is now closing its doors because, as the owner himself admits, business has simply dried up. And two top White House officials have left the administration in just the last 48 hours, with insiders saying more resignations could be on the way.

Before we get to the news, a quick ask: the billionaires with Mar-a-Lago memberships aren’t slowing down in their conquest of the media. David Ellison controls CBS and is trying to take over CNN. Jeff Bezos runs the Washington Post. Rupert Murdoch owns Fox and the Wall Street Journal. If they have their way, the only media outlets left standing will be MAGA propaganda mills. Raw America will never take a dime from a billionaire because we refuse to let a wealthy oligarch have final say over what we get to cover. But we can only stay independent if readers like you, who understand the importance of independent journalism, chip in to keep this work going. Become a paying subscriber right now for just 22 cents a day.

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Each subscription goes directly toward our team of reporters on the ground in Washington, our video hosts, producers and editors, and allows us to remain independent. Your subscriptions also make it possible to broadcast live conversations with newsmakers like Hunter Biden, who we spoke with earlier this afternoon. You can watch that interview below, or by clicking here. Now let’s get to the news.

Trump Shrugs Off Military Families’ Concerns About U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln

The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier has been at sea for 244 consecutive days, with no port visit since December. Five thousand sailors and Marines are reportedly living in squalor on a ship that reportedly ran out of basic amenities like working toilets and laundry facilities months ago. Military families have described how their loved ones are having to make do with dwindling food supplies, scarce hygiene supplies, and a mental health crisis so severe that several sailors have even tried to jump into the sea.

One sailor’s mother told NBC News the situation reminded her of an episode of America Horror Story where everyone is already dead but doesn’t know it yet. She said her son went from upbeat to withdrawn the longer his deployment dragged on.

When a reporter asked Trump whether the carrier’s deployment had gone on for too long, and whether he’s worried about the mental health of service members on the ship, he waved it off, saying, “No. No. No. Not nearly long enough.”

That’s the president of the United States, talking about actual human beings serving their country, trapped on a ship without adequate food or supplies.

The Pentagon insists that leadership prioritized food first, then hygiene, then mail. U.S. Central Command says the ship still has clean water and working air conditioning. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the reports “completely misrepresented” the true situation. But families are worried their loved ones are so depressed they’re jumping off the side of a warship.

More than 50,000 troops have been deployed to support Trump’s war with Iran. A typical carrier deployment runs six to seven months, with occasional stops to restock. The Lincoln blew past that timeline months ago, and the White House is only now sending a replacement ship as scrutiny ratchets up.

Democrats in Congress are demanding answers. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut wants to know whether the Navy can even sustain this kind of pace. Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who was a corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps, is calling for a bipartisan congressional visit to the carrier to see what’s actually happening for themselves. The commander in chief saying desperate troops haven’t been deployed long enough suggests he’s grossly out of touch with reality.

Trump Brags About ‘Beautiful Young Girls’ Visiting Him at White House

During a political rally disguised as a law enforcement event in Long Island, New York, Trump found time to brag about something particularly bizarre.

While talking about crime in Washington, D.C. — which has actually been falling for since long before he took office — Trump veered into a rambling story about “beautiful young girls” approaching him at the White House to thank him for making the city safer.

Trump wouldn’t stop talking about “beautiful young girls” in vivid detail. He went on about how young women kept coming up to him and thanking him, telling him they used to be scared to leave their apartments and can now walk to the White House with no fear at all. He even acted out both sides of the conversation for the crowd of supporters.

While there’s never any shortage of crazy news from this administration, it’s nonetheless remarkable that the president of the United States went onstage, in front of police officers, to comment at length about young women’s appearances when he was supposed to be talking about public safety.

It’s also worth pointing out that the data tells a very different story than the narrative Trump wants to spread. The Council on Criminal Justice found that homicides dropped 18 percent nationally over the past year, amounting to 254 fewer killings. This trend is consistent in cities run by mayors of both major parties, and it started well before Trump’s deployed National Guard troops to Washington.

FBI Director Kash Patel still gave all credit to Trump anyway, telling the crowd the American dream is now “a reality” thanks to his leadership. It doesn’t seem to matter to this government that all available numbers say otherwise.

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‘We’re Not Busy’: Massive Trump Merch Store Going Out of Business

A massive Trump merchandise store off near Knoxville, Tennessee has repeatedly made headlines for its garish appearance, including a giant Trump mannequin with a “Trump 2028” hat and a fake outhouse labeled the “Democrat Superstore.” Now, that store is closing down, and having an everything-must-go sale with its entire inventory discounted by 50 percent.

Initially, the closure was reportedly because the owner, 80 year-old Bill Hays, was retiring to Florida. But an employee named Dan confided to Slate that the real answer was much more simple: Business dried up. According to Dan, “we’re not busy anymore.”

Dan said in the store’s heyday, it would pull in 86 customers in a single 24-hour period. This was especially true after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania and after the initial bombing of Iran. But those days are now over.

Hays got defensive about reports that referenced his age and his condominiums in Naples, Florida. But he eventually admitted the obvious: the doors are closing because of consistently slow business.

Dan was even more blunt, telling his boss that Trump’s popularity is “dwindling, dwindling, dwindling” as more working-class people are forced to choose between buying groceries and paying their utility bills. Even a MAGA store employee is admitting the movement’s retail enthusiasm is collapsing rapidly.

West Wing Exodus Continues as 2nd Top Trump Official Leaves in as Many Days

Trump’s West Wing is continuing to bleed staff, even high-ranking ones.

White House deputy national security adviser Andy Baker announced on Friday he was leaving the Trump administration, just two days after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed she was also leaving too. Both offered glowing farewell statements, and both are saying they’re stepping down to spend more time with their families.

Baker wasn’t just an ordinary staffer. He was integral to Iran peace negotiations, and was the main point of contact for Vice President JD Vance in Pete Hegseth’s infamous leaked 2025 Signal chat about strikes on Yemen. Politico called Baker a key architect of Vance’s foreign policy.

Politico’s Playbook reports that even more departures are likely before the end of 2026. This is all happening with the midterm elections in less than three months, with Republicans bracing for the loss of one or both congressional majorities in November.

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Thanks for watching. I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Have a great weekend.

Watch Raw America’s interview with Hunter Biden below:

Gibson and Biden covered various topics including:

• The double standard between Republican attacks on the “Biden crime family” and the Trump family’s shady business dealings during his first and second terms

• Whether Democrats should pursue a third Trump impeachment or a more deliberate strategy of hearings and subpoenas if they retake Congress in the fall

• Whether there should be a “Nuremberg 2.0” reckoning and whether America needs a formal accountability process to move past the Trump administration

• Who could lead the Democratic Party in 2028, including Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other figures

• His remarks calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “evil incarnate” and describing Gaza as a genocide, and his disagreement with his father

• His journey through addiction recovery and his father’s support through it all

Conversations like this one, with one of the biggest names in the news right now, are only possible with the support of our paying subscribers. Raw America isn’t beholden to a billionaire owner or a corporate parent, and answer only to you, the reader. We’re only able to speak at length with guests like Hunter Biden thanks to our paying subscribers who make it possible. Chip in and help keep independent journalism like this going. You can do it right now for just 22 cents a day.

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Hunter Biden Calls Out Republicans Over Corruption Double Standard

Gibson opened the conversation first by pointing to economist Dean Baker’s recent comparison of the Biden and Trump families’ finances during each administration. Baker noted that while Hunter Biden had a board seat on a Ukrainian energy company and sold paints, Trump’s family was raking in $1.4 billion in profits from cryptocurrency-related ventures, while the president himself boasted about taking $13 billion in oil money from Venezuela and received a $400 million jet as a gift from Qatar’s royal family.

Biden pushed back hard on Republicans’ allegations against him, noting that buyers of his paintings were forced to testify under oath about the actual prices they paid, while the president’s son went out of his way to pursue an income in ways that couldn’t possibly be perceived as political. He added that his income during his father’s presidency averaged around $215,000 to $220,000 a year, and that the scale of scrutiny he faced looks absurd next to what’s happening now.

Hunter Biden pointed to Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital fund and its portfolio companies’ billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts. He also drew attention to Jared Kushner’s exorbitant compensation from a Saudi-backed investment fund.

“It’s such a target-rich environment that I don’t know if I could add anything more than what is also obviously directly in front of their eyes,” Biden said.

‘Yes, And’: Hunter Biden Calls for Both Impeachment Proceedings and Hearings

Gibson noted that there’s a debate right now among Democrats about whether to pursue an unprecedented third impeachment of Trump, or whether to pursue a more focused strategy of subpoenas and congressional hearings.

Biden replied with “yes, and,” indicating he prefers an all-of-the-above approach. Former President Joe Biden’s second son noted that he’s skeptical anyone in the Trump administration will play by the old rules at all, suggesting Democrats shouldn’t feel compelled to hold themselves to what he called “Marquess of Queensberry” rules.

“Donald Trump is the singular existential threat, because he’s broken it all,” Biden said, adding that the current president was a “one-man crime wave.”

He described how he and his wife have talked about the struggle Democrats have on whether to abandon procedural restraint entirely to fully pursue accountability or bind themselves to rules Republicans have long since abandoned. In one example, he noted that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons paid pennies on the dollar to buy companies’ tariff refunds in the event tariffs were overturned and rebates were issued, leading them to eventually make billions in profit once those rebates were finally paid out.

‘There has to be a reckoning’: Biden Supports Calls for ‘Nuremberg 2.0’

Gibson then asked Biden how would prefer to see Democrats move beyond the Trump administration should they regain control of the executive branch in 2028. He noted that some prospective presidential candidates have called for Americans to unite and move on, while others have stressed the need for public accountability measures, citing Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.) call for a “Nuremberg 2.0” process.

Biden agreed with the latter option, saying that whether it’s framed as “Nuremberg 2.0” or another truth and reconciliation process similar to post-apartheid South Africa is necessary, calling attention to the Trump administration’s direct defiance of federal court orders pertaining to the Epstein files and oversight requests related to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“We’ve lost the constitutional republic as we’ve known it already,” Biden said, adding that Trump’s comments about a third term shouldn’t be dismissed as jokes.

“If [Trump] leaves and he does not have power, there will be a reckoning. And he fully 100 percent knows that,” Biden added.

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Biden Bullish on AOC and the Democratic Party’s Next Generation of Leaders

Gibson noted that Biden previously referred to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) as “the future of the Democratic Party.” He then asked whether Biden believes the country is ready to elect a female president, given that highly qualified female presidential candidates like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Vice President Kamala Harris each lost to “an adjudicated rapist and a convicted felon.”

Biden responded by saying that no one thought in 2008 that America would elect a Black U.S. senator from Illinois who was born in Hawaii as president, but that those ceilings were meant to be shattered. Hunter Biden also said he rarely disagrees with Ocasio-Cortez, and heaped praise on her for being able build relationships across the aisle. He also lauded Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Texas state representative James Talarico, and called on Democrats to stop fussing over who belongs in its “big tent.”

“People just want you to be authentic, like truly authentic,” Biden said. “You can’t fake authenticity.”

Biden Calls Netanyahu ‘Evil Incarnate’ and Gaza a ‘Genocide’ — While Defending His Father’s Record

Gibson pointed out that when Hunter Biden told Tucker Carlson that he viewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “evil incarnate” and described Israel’s war in Gaza as a “genocide,” those positions were contradictory to the policies his father’s administration embraced. He then asked Hunter if he ever confronted his father over his Israel policy.

Biden acknowledged that Israel was carrying out the “wholesale murder of children,” he noted that his father’s approach was centered on securing the release of hostages taken during Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in which 1,400 people were killed in one day. He also noted that President Biden privately clashed with Netanyahu, called him a “crazy motherf—ker” to his face, and withheld 2,000-pound bombs and only agreed to supply defensive weapons like Patriot missiles.

Hunter Biden then turned the question back on his father’s critics, asking where Palestinian solidarity protests are now given how much worse the Trump administration is on Gaza. He also accused Gulf Arab states were silent even as Palestinian civilians were being slaughtered, and emphasized that the whole conflict is intensely complicated. However, he insisted that the most obvious villain was Israel’s far-right regime.

“If you can’t see that Bibi Netanyahu is evil incarnate, then I don’t know what you’re looking at,” Biden said. “It is the wholesale murder of children. Of children!”

Biden Credits His Support Network with His Recovery from Addiction

To close the conversation, Gibson asked Hunter Biden about the viral 2018 voicemail Joe Biden left his son urging him to get help, and what he would say to people currently struggling with addiction battles of their own.

Biden said that voicemail was one of dozens or even hundreds his father left him while he was in the throes of addiction, and credited his recovery to his family — including his father, aunts, uncles, mother, and daughters — who he says never gave up on him. He also pushed back on the oft-repeated advice to first let addicts “hit bottom” before offering to help, saying that in his experience, that’s usually fatal.

“The one advantage that I had is that my family never closed the door on me,” Biden said. “They kept shining the light down the well I had fallen into.”

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Read the full transcript of Gibson and Biden’s conversation below:

CARL GIBSON: Well, Hunter, let’s get right into it. I know one thing I’d love to get your perspective on is the fact that the very same Republicans who spent the last four years accusing you and the “Biden Crime Family” of corruption are suddenly a lot more silent when it comes to this current president and his family making billions off of the presidency. Economist Dean Baker, he wrote a great piece this week, which I’ll link to in the write-up of this conversation. But he broke down the differences between your family and the Trump family, and the contrast is pretty astounding. So, real quick, just to recap: so you know, you sold a painting, you got a board position on a Ukrainian energy company. Trump has bragged about stealing $13 billion worth of oil money from Venezuela, the Trump family has made $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency since just last January. Of course, he was gifted a $400 million jet from the Qatari royal family, which then got almost a billion dollars in upgrades, courtesy of we the taxpayers. And now he’s doing what some would say is insider trading by selling early access to his truth social posts. So, Hunter, I guess my question is: What would you like to see from Democrats when it comes to tackling Trump’s corruption should they win back control of Congress in the fall?

HUNTER BIDEN: It’s it’s such a target-rich environment that I don’t know if I could add anything more than what is also obviously directly in front of their eyes. Here’s the thing, okay? What I say is that, regardless if you believed all of the lies that they told about me and my family — and they’re all lies, there’s not a single piece of evidence that I ever involved my dad in any of my business — 90 percent of the things that they talk about occurred during a period of time when my dad was neither vice president nor president. I sold paintings. I did because I’m a painter, and that’s what I chose to do. I chose to do something while my dad was president that was literally the furthest thing that I could think of that was away from politics, away from any idea that there could be any influence or anything, and they created this lie that I was selling paintings for $500,000 to, you know, shadowy people. Every single person who bought a painting from me was named, and had to go and testify before Congress before an impeachment investigation, under oath, and talk about the fact that they bought a painting from me for $35,000 or whatever it may be.

My income was during the period of time when my dad was president was, basically averaged over the four years, about $215,000 to $220,000 a year. That’s it. I didn’t do any other business while my dad was president. Anything. But [if you] believe everything that that they spun about the “Biden crime family,” it doesn’t even remotely compare. It almost pains me to, like the idea that they’re mentioning that supposed corruption in the same breath as we’re watching the country get completely and utterly fleeced. And just the few things that you named, I mean, that’s not even the tip of the iceberg.

Think about this: Don Jr. and Eric Trump, or Don Jr. in particular, started a venture capital fund called I think 1789 Capital a few days before their dad gets inaugurated. That fund — I believe this is the numbers, I’m not positive — but that fund, the underlying companies have received over $3.4 billion in [Department of Defense] contracts to companies, many of them that never existed before they became companies under the umbrella of 1789 Capital, which means Don Jr. got the largest single loan ever granted by the Department of Defense. $620 million pushed through. We’ve seen the communications by Peter Navarro inside the White House for a rare earth minerals company. They used to say like, what did Hunter Biden know about natural gas? What the hell does Don Beavis Jr. Trump know about rare earth minerals? They got a $1.2 billion deal in Kazakhstan. In Kazakhstan. I mean, and it goes on and on. And forget about Jared Kushner, you know, our unelected, non-Senate confirmed spokesperson and policymaker in the Middle East. Well, he’s literally getting paid by the Saudis of at least $6.2 billion, and over $100 million a year, just annually, and it’s all out in the open. They don’t care anymore.

And so, what I say to the members of. Congress that are about to come into, I hope, a position of oversight and chairmanships, at least in the House of Representatives and hopefully in the Senate, is do not let anything go. Don’t let any of this go. They’re not going to participate. It’s not going to be as as straightforward as a lot of people think, because you see what Todd Blanche just did. Todd Blanche says that he will adhere to the Constitution. He gets his nomination goes through. He gets Senate-confirmed, and within 24 hours, he writes a memo to the White House that says executive privilege applies not only to discussions with senior White House staff — which, for the last 250 years, that’s what executive privilege meant — it now applies to anyone basically that the president designates as an outside senior advisor.

So every single person that his family is doing business right with right now, whether it’s Saudis or whether it’s in Indonesia or whether it is in Azerbaijan, or Albania, or in Turkey — by the way, all places that they’re doing business with right now, all places that they’re doing business with — and many more, Qatar, Oman, and keep going down the line, is that they now are senior advisors and will not have to, according to Todd Blanche, will not have to comply with congressional subpoenas in oversight or any investigate investigatory body.

CG: You know, whether Democrats sweep back into Congress or not, some people have called for another impeachment trial. Of course, the list of impeachable offenses is a mile long. Like I think we could agree any other president who did half of what this administration does would be facing impeachment, and rightly so. Now, Jamie Raskin, the who would be the chairman of the Judiciary Committee if Democrats win back the majority, has talked about instead pursuing a strategy of hearings and subpoenas and dragging people before Congress rather than another impeachment trial, which, you know, 67 votes in the Senate, not likely. Do you have any thoughts on like that strategy? Is it like yes, and? Is it one or the other? Like, what do you think about that?

HB: Yes, and, I don’t, look, I think that this idea that we’re going to play by any set of rules that, and, I have this discussion with my wife all the time. She says, “just lock them up.” You know what I mean? And I say, “well, what about the Constitution?” And she says, “they don’t follow the Constitution.” They don’t follow the rules. They run roughshod over everything. And by the time people wake up to the idea that all the rules have changed, they get away scot-free and everything. And by the way, that’s January 6. That’s everything that happened before January 6. I mean, people’s memories are so short. The level of corruption that occurred in the first Trump administration was beyond what every single other president combined had ever done, and that’s in the first administration. We forget how many cronies of theirs took advantage of COVID and were selling masks and getting contracts with the government and the DoD and the DHS and all of that.

And by the way, we’re talking about the Trump family alone. Think about what Howard Lutnick is doing right now. Think about the one instance of this. Okay, the Secretary of Commerce decides that he’s going to go out and he’s going to push for these tariffs, and his sons, at the same time, are going to go and they’re going to buy up the rights that companies potentially have if the tariff gets overturned by the [Supreme Court]. So pennies on the dollar, they go to these major corporations and they say, “if the tariff gets overturned and you’re due a refund, we’ll buy that from you now for 10 cents on the dollar.” So when it got overturned, the tariffs — that he said were completely constitutional — Howard Lutnick and his sons just made billions, billions of dollars when they knew it was unconstitutional. They knew that it was going to get overturned. And so my point is, is that I just, I don’t fully know the answer, and I don’t pretend to know the answer. I don’t know. What’s your opinion? What’s the opinion of people that are listening to this right now? It’s like, you know, sorry, I talk too much, but I’ve had four cups, I’m on my fourth cup of coffee.

CG: It’s all good.

HB: Exactly! So do you remember, there’s a famous play, and then also a movie called “A Man for All Seasons,” and here’s a scene in the play where the son goes to Thomas More, and the king is about to basically eventually execute Thomas More, and his son says, “You have to go after the king.” And he said, “by what law?” And he says, “what does it matter with the law?” And Thomas More says to his son-in-law, Roper, he says — and it’s an overused thing — but he says, “when you chase the devil into the forest and you cut down every tree to get to him, what tree do you hide behind when he turns on you?” And that I think is the question of our time. What is it that we can do to stop the lawlessness of this president within the bounds of the of the Marquess of Queensberry rules of Congress, of oversight of the Constitution as it exists right now? And I don’t know the answer to that, and that’s why I say that Donald Trump is the singular existential threat because he’s broken it all. What does he do? He’s literally a crime boss. We are going through a one-man crime wave globally right now. Okay? He’s making money off the Iran War. He’s making money off of Gaza. He’s making money off of the death and destruction of thousands of people, and that’s not even the tip of the iceberg. So what do we do? He’s broken it. He’s broken the whole system. The question is, how do we rebuild it in a way that it never it never happens again?

CG: Well, aside from the corruption issue, which obviously we could talk about all day, but you look at ICE. I know they just spent $20 million to equip agents in the field with electric shock gloves. Of course, you know the shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, no accountability has happened for them. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who we had here on Raw America last week, he’s used the phrase “Nuremberg 2.0,” which calls up images from the post-World War II trials of Nazi officials. Do you think we need something like that to heal as a country before we can move forward? I know a lot of people who are going to run for president in 2028 will say, you know, let’s let’s not rehash the past, let’s move forward, let’s unite. And some people would say we have to have trials, we have to have accountability. If we’re going to have the rule of law in this country, we have to enforce those laws and show that no one is above the law. Like, what direction would you be leaning in?

HB: 100 percent, I believe that whether you call it Nuremberg 2.0, whether you call it Truth and Reconciliation, whatever it is, you don’t have to be punitive to the degree that there’s not a chance for healing, but they they have to be held accountable. And I know that there are a lot of people out there say, “Oh, well, you got a pardon in this, that, and the other thing.” Well, I’m here to say this. They’ve broken the entire system. They have broken it to a degree that there has to be a way in which we are all at least able to come to a common set of facts and truth about what just occurred. And I’m just hoping that we get there. I’m hoping, I want people to understand that this battle — and we should call it a battle — the battle that is occurring right now isn’t to sustain or save our democracy. We’ve lost the the constitutional republic as we’ve known it already. It’s that it’s happened. It’s not a matter of whether we will lose it. I truly believe that.

Think about it. What are the ultimate guardrails? Is it that he ignores court orders? Look what he’s doing as it relates to the Justice Department and the Epstein files right now. They are literally in Judge [Emmet] Sullivan’s court completely ignoring all a congressionally mandated oversight and the release of the files, and they’re just purely ignoring it. They’re doing that in I don’t know how many cases as it relates to the DHS, as it relates to ICE, they’re doing it. They’re doing it in terms of any oversight, as it relates to what [former DHS Secretary] Kristi Noem did… the guy that dressed up in the Nazi uniform—

CG: —Gregory Bovino.

HB: They are completely ignoring the rule of law, and when you have a president of the United States that continues to go out and “joke” about running for a third term and calls himself a king, I would suggest to people that it is not a joke. He can’t leave. If he leaves and he does not have power, there will be a reckoning, and he fully 100 percent knows that. And I’m not here to say that I have the answer to it, but I think that Senator Wyden is 100 percent right, and whether you call it Nuremberg 2.0 or, you know, or Trump 1.0. I don’t know, but but there has to be a reckoning.

CG: We’re here with Hunter Biden. Hunter is joining us. We’re talking about everything from Trump’s corruption to the midterms and everything else in between. If you’re just joining us, I’m Carl Gibson, managing editor of Raw America. If you like independent media that doesn’t take a dime from billionaires and doesn’t have a corporate owner deciding what you get to know. Please support, subscribe to Raw America. We greatly appreciate it. You can also follow and subscribe to Hunter Biden on his Substack as well.

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Hunter, I want to get into now as we’re talking about 2028. Who could be the [Democratic] Party’s standard bearer in the next presidential election? I noticed in your most recent interview you referred to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “the future of the Democratic Party,” and that she isn’t afraid to acknowledge that the system is broken and that we need radical change. She hasn’t ruled out a run for the White House in 2028, but, you know, a lot of people would say that America is too sexist to vote for a woman, seeing as highly qualified candidates like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Vice President Kamala Harris, lost to an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon. What would you say to those people who are hesitant about running a woman in 2028?

HB: I would say that I remember a time when America wasn’t ready for somebody named Barack Obama, a Black United States senator from the state of Illinois who was born in Hawaii. I mean, I think that those rules are meant to be broken, and they better be meant to be broken because it’s time that we have a woman as president of the United States. I think that just for the pure reason that I think that there is so much leadership that has been provided out there by women — and mainly, in my opinion, in the Democratic Party — women of color. And so, look, I don’t have any time for anybody that tells you that we have to figure out right now who’s going to be the leader. You know, that’s what a primary process is for. I always say to people, you know, Will Rogers’ words, “I’m I’m not a member of any organized party. I’m a Democrat.” It’s true, and it’s been true for a very long time.

It’s because we are the Big Tent Party. We do welcome a plethora of voices, and then we go and we form circular firing squads, and and we decide that these talking head arbiters that have never really done much, but spend a lot of time talking on cable news shows, tell us that this person should be in and that person should be out, and the label of socialist is going to be the thing that kills us, and we’re going to lose with rural voters. And you know what? I think that we’re going to we will land on our leadership by the process that we’ve always gone through as a party, by a competitive race, by people expressing their vision of what this country should look like. I listen to AOC a lot, and I very, very, vary rarely disagree with her, and I think that she is an incredible communicator, and I think that she also has proven that she is able to talk to people outside of her direct constituency or her perceived constituency. Look at the way that she has relationships across the aisle, even in this environment, and is able to sit down and talk with other people. And so, I mean, I just really love her.

That being said, I also love Gretchen Whitmer. I and I know that a lot of people in the Democratic Party right now are mad because she didn’t do this, or did this, or did that. But you know, it’s the same way, I say we’re crazy if we all don’t just get behind Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, you know, 100 percent. We have a a Michigan-born Rhodes scholar who is this incredible athlete. On top of that, who is also a a board-certified doctor, who’s also an epidemiologist, who also talks to people the the way that they talk to each other. The same way that I think that [Texas state representative] James Talarico is an incredible candidate.

I think that we have this incredible cast of leaders that are out there, that are young, that are, you know, that have an enormous amount of energy, and we just all need to get behind them rather than sitting around talking about, you know, whether Hasan Piker should be a part of the party. Like, I look at somebody like Hasan, and I realize that he’s grown up on these platforms, and he’s created an incredible constituency that he has, and he’s said really stupid things in the past that he’s taken back, and, I don’t know about you, but there’s a whole generation from 18 to 35 years old that understands politics in a very, very different way than anybody like James Carville, the Pod Save America guys, understand politics. And they’ll say, “Oh, Hunter doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”

But you know, I’ve been out there, I’ve been talking to people, I’ve been on these shows, and one of the reasons I so enjoy being on these shows is because I’ve figured out that, you know what? People just want you to be authentic, like truly authentic. You can’t fake authenticity, and more than anything, they can sniff out a bullshitter from a mile away. Ane so anybody that’s going out there, and figuring out that with their political analysts, like you know their eight-point plan … you know, doesn’t interest me. And I and that’s why I like AOC. It’s a long answer about AOC. Sorry.

CG: Well, you talk going on all these different shows, and you know, as I was is watching different appearances that you’ve done, you went on Tucker Carlson’s podcast earlier this month, and I thought it was really interesting. You referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “evil incarnate.” You called what the Israeli military is doing in Gaza as a “genocide.” I know your dad caught a lot of heat for his support of Netanyahu in spite of the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, which is ongoing. Did you ever talk to him to try to get him to see the other side of that issue? And I’m just curious, like your journey on that issue, like when you started really seeing what was happening and speaking out about it.

HB: Look, I’m not here to defend my dad’s position on anything. I’m here to defend my dad as a dad and as a person. And I think that obviously there were some mistakes made. But one of the things I do know is that what my dad was doing with Netanyahu was not embracing him during that period of time. There was one instance after October 7, where a horrific massacre occurred… let’s all realize how complicated it is, and not very complicated in that moment. Over 1400 Israelis, Israeli Jews were murdered, and I don’t remember the exact number, but well over 100 that were taken as hostages. Okay? My dad’s first principal goal was to get the hostages released, and that’s what he began to do. And he had to work directly with the Israelis to do that.

And, by the way, I’m of the belief that that Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israelis and the Mossad knew that an attack was coming. I don’t see any other way that it could possibly have happened that the response time could have taken 10 hours, and so I think that. I believe in that conspiracy, by the way. But regardless, a response was due, and then from that point on, I know that my dad — and he gets to write about this in his book — I mean, I don’t know how many times he kicked Benjamin Netanyahu out of his office and called him, you know, a crazy motherfucker, literally to his face. I mean, all they did during that time, he took away the 2000-pound bombs… The vast majority of the weaponry that they did provide at that time was the defensive weaponry as it relates to the Patriot missile system.

People can all agree with that, but let me ask this question: for all the people that were out there protesting my dad, that were in front of the White House on a daily basis, and I understand their passion and the reason why. Where are they now? Where are they now? Is there a permanent Palestinian protest outside of the White House right now? Because Donald Trump has literally posted images that he’s going to turn Gaza into a Trump-themed golf course. Literally! They are literally advocating the removal of the remaining million-plus Palestinians from Gaza, to where nobody knows, so that they can turn it into a resort designed by Jared Kushner, and that isn’t even a joke. That’s literally what they’re saying. So where are they now?

And here’s another question that I have for all of these people that out there that are saying that this is, you know, such a cut-and-dry thing. Where are the Saudis on this? Where are the [United Arab Emirates]? They’ve never lifted a finger to be able to do anything for the Palestinians. Not a finger from any single other place. The only place that ever did anything was Lebanon, and Lebanon was ended up becoming destroyed by it. And so, the history of this is far more complicated then they’re right or wrong. But I know this in this moment, if you can’t see that Bibi Netanyahu is evil incarnate, then I don’t know what you’re looking at, because what he is doing, the way in which he has gone about organizing his government, the IDF, and the Israeli people, to, I don’t know what other word to use than genocide. I don’t know what other word. If somebody can come up with a better word that that that that appeases their sense of justice, then please let me know what it is. But whatever it is, it is the wholesale murder of children. Of children! And so, I don’t know the solution to this, and it is one of the most intractable and painful things to watch. But that’s why I like going on and talking to people that I don’t agree with.

CG: Well, and I’d love to talk to you more about that. We’re a little short on time. I did want to ask, Hunter, just as we’re closing out here, I wanted to talk about your journey as a recovering addict. I remember the audio of the voicemail that your dad left you back in 2018. I’ll link to this in the write-up as well. He said, “It’s Dad, I called to tell you I love you. I love you more than the whole world, pal. You got to get some help. I don’t know what to do.” And I know you started your recovery journey in 2019. I’m curious to know if that voicemail like helped start you on that path, and also what you would say to people watching right now who may be in the middle of their own struggles with addiction, whether it be alcohol or drugs or anything else.

HB: Yeah, you know the thing is, that was just one of probably, I don’t know, tens, if not dozens or hundreds of voicemails during that period of time that my dad left me on my phone. And the thing that I talk about as it relates to my recovery, I don’t have a prescription for anybody else — and I’m here to tell you, if anyone tells you that they do have, like, you go from A to Z, they’re not telling you the truth — all I can say is what helped me, and one of the things that I had an incredible advantage over anybody, and I was incredibly privileged, is this: I had a family that never let me go. Not just my dad, but it also included my aunts and uncles, and my mom, and included my daughters more than anybody else. My three adult daughters that never let me go.

And one of the things that people say often in recovery is, when you get these people, the advisors, and it’s well meaning, and I understand it because there’s a lot of pain, that addiction is a family disease. It is not just the disease of the individual. It affects it. There’s a blast radius around it, and one of the things they say is, you just got to let them hit bottom. Well, from my experience, the people that have hit bottom are dead. And the one advantage that I had is that my family never closed the door on me. Not only did they not close the door on me, but they kept shining the light down the well I had fallen into, and in order to get better, you have to have some sense of connection… These windows in addiction that I’ve experienced, at least, in which you get this kind of clarity of what you’re doing to yourself, and and in that window, if there’s no hand reaching out to you, it’s so much harder. And that’s why I always say, like, my God… comparatively to so many people that I know have gotten clean and sober on their own, without the family that I had, without the love that I had — and that those people I think are the bravest, most amazing people in in the world — and but for me that voicemail is indicative, but it does not paint the whole picture. Just how much my father’s always been there for me.

CG: We’ve been here talking to Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden is joining us here on Raw America. We’ve been talking about politics, world affairs, everything else here on Raw America. If you’re just joining us, I’m Carl Gibson, managing editor of Raw America. We are fully reader supported. We are editorially independent. We are not for sale. If you like supporting independent journalism that doesn’t take orders from billionaires or corporations, please subscribe and follow us. We greatly appreciate it. Hunter, I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us, and I hope this isn’t the last time that we talk to you.

HB: No, thanks, and I really, really, really appreciate it. And I love this Substack. Go to my Substack too, guys. You know? No billionaires for me either.

CG: Yeah, Hunter Biden is on Substack. Follow and subscribe to him as well. Everyone.

HB: By the way, I listen to you guys all the time, and just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s truly amazing, and you know, it’s not like I agree 100 percent of the time, but I appreciate it 100 percent of the time. So I really mean it. Thank you, and I’m honored that you would have me on.

CG: That means a lot, Hunter. I appreciate it.

HB: Thank you. Thanks, man.

U.S. President Donald Trump walks to speak with reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Michigan, U.S., July 27, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci

Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious lives.

Last week we learned that Capital One Bank closed over 300 Trump Organization accounts back in 2021 because, they said, their internal fraud department had flagged illegal money-laundering activity. But on who’s behalf?

We know from the Mueller Report and public reporting that Putin spent millions and did his best via social media and hacking the DNC to get Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, and was probably doing the same in 2020 and 2024.

But what if there was a way for him to simply drop, say, $100 million right into political campaigns here in America that would back up or benefit Trump and his notorious crime family? Or simply give the money to Trump himself as thanks for screwing Ukraine and destroying America?

The Hartmann Report

A Daily Newsletter of Renaissance Thinking about Progressive Politics, Economics, Science, and the Political News Issues of Our Day

By Thom Hartmann

While federal law prohibits foreign governments, citizens, and corporations from spending money to influence our elections, the reality is that laws only work when there’s somebody to investigate crimes and enforce them.

And Trump is, right now, tearing apart the very institutions and transparency rules that we’d need to expose such a crime.

Specifically, our Treasury Department — run by Trump’s billionaire crony Scott Bessent — just this week put into place a new rule that would hand Putin that ability. Or any other foreign oligarch who wanted to use a shell corporation to buy his very own American politician.

Senator Sherrod Brown’s Corporate Transparency Act required corporations and LLCs to tell the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN, who actually owns or controls them. That remote control, often handed through multiple shell companies, is called “beneficial ownership.” It’s all about finding out who, ultimately, benefits from the corporation or LLC’s activities.

This week, though, Bessent issued a new rule that not only ends that requirement but also directs the agency to delete all the beneficial-ownership information they currently hold on US persons (like Donald Trump and his kids) that could be used to prove past money laundering crimes.

This is critical stuff because money laundering is how drug money, bribes, stolen government money, tax evasion proceeds, or money belonging to a sanctioned oligarch can be pushed through corporations, trusts, real estate, banks, casinos, and multiple transactions until figuring out who originally supplied it becomes extraordinarily difficult if not impossible.

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And money laundering via real estate in America is a big, big business. As the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project notes in an report titled “U.S. Real Estate is No 1 Destination for Laundered Dirty Money,” we have “the weakest regulatory framework to counter real estate money laundering” among all of the G7 nations. They add:

“At least US$2.3 billion has been laundered over the past five years through U.S. real estate…” and “More than 80% of all U.S. cases involved money coming from abroad, and in 82% of cases, anonymous shell companies or complex corporate structures helped mask the identity of the property’s real owners.”

Most countries made this illegal decades ago, in some cases generations ago. And in the past decade Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom have tightened their own requirements to prevent this kind of money laundering, which in each of those countries and the US was mostly done through anonymous or all-cash real estate transactions done by shell companies.

And Trump and Bessent just killed off the cops on the beat here.

Trump’s apparently been up to his eyeballs in money laundering for much of his business career. As he pissed away the ~$400 million he got from his father, he repeatedly turned to Russian and other oligarchs to prop him up after multiple bankruptcies via these very kinds of real estate transactions that Treasury will no longer be looking at.

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In 2015, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino admitted to willful and repeated violations of federal anti-money-laundering laws. FinCEN fined Trump $10 million because, for some unknown reason (wink, wink), he failed to even bother to keep the required records that would have revealed criminal money laundering being done through his casinos.

Then there’s all that Russian money. Back in 2008 as Putin was consolidating his iron grip and quickly becoming a billionaire bloated with ill-gotten gains himself, Uday — er, Don Jr. — bragged to an audience at a real estate conference that Russians were “a pretty disproportionate cross-section” of the money flowing into the Trump Organization, adding:

“We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Qusay — er, Eric Trump — similarly bragged to Golf writer James Dodson, according to Dodson, that:

“We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Reuters looked into it all in 2017 and found that at least 63 people with Russian passports or addresses had bought $98.4 million worth of property from Trump, roughly a third of that being owned by LLCs that were so impenetrable that Reuters couldn’t discover who was actually behind the Russian front men. (This sort of deal is exactly why Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act in 2021.)

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Trump’s SoHo property is another example. A lawsuit brought by Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank alleged that Trump associate Felix Sater helped Ilyas Khrapunov disguise about $3 million as down payments on three Trump SoHo condominiums as part of an alleged international money-laundering scheme involving money stolen from Kazakhstan.

And now the Trump administration is weakening the exact system designed to tell investigators who is actually behind these opaque corporations that serve as real estate money-laundering fronts for offshore criminals like Putin and his cronies.

Treasury has now not only eliminated their previous domestic beneficial-ownership reporting, FinCEN has also given banks a pass on beneficial-owner verification requirements when companies open additional accounts, and Bessent delayed until 2028 a separate anti-money-laundering rule for investment advisers.

And if a foreign actor wants to use his ill-gotten gains to influence an American election? Thanks to Trump refusing to appoint a needed member, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) doesn’t even have the quorum it needs to conduct its own enforcement of rules against foreigners jumping into our elections. Its own website repeatedly says it can’t function again until “the Commission regains a quorum.”

So, suppose Putin or one of his buddies throws millions of dirty Russian money into a corporation in that country, which then transfers that money into an American shell company run by a Trump crony, which then “legally” (under Citizens United) puts that money into a Trump-aligned SuperPAC, say “Patriotic Americans for Freedom LLC,” to pay for political advertising, on-the-ground operations, etc.

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The required FEC filing says that the money came from “Patriotic Americans for Freedom LLC,” but who’s behind that company that’s funding the campaign? That’s exactly the question that the “beneficial ownership” laws were designed to answer, and will now lead to a door slammed shut in the face of any reporter, investigator, or law enforcement agency that tries to look into it. And the FEC itself is paralyzed from doing anything about it.

So, here we have a regime headed by a guy who made much of his fortune via opaque foreign money — apparently much of it from Russia — and now he’s dismantling our ability to see who’s behind it. And deleting all the previous records that might have offered a clue to his own past crimes.

For Putin, throwing a few hundred million dollars into an American election would be pocket change, as it would be for the murderous dictator of Saudi Arabia or any other country that wanted a particular outcome from Trump or his corrupt lickspittles in the GOP.

And we know these foreign billionaires and dictators have a vested interest in how our system works; if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be throwing literally billions of dollars into Trump family operations, from Trump’s crypto to Jared’s investment fund.

Forget making America great again; Trump is doubling down on making money laundering — which may have been the source of his financial survival throughout his 90s and early 2000s bankruptcies — great again.

This is truly the single most corrupt administration in American history.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing accusations from veterans in Congress of lying to military families about the horrendous conditions on the U.S.S Abraham Lincoln, where sailors have reportedly tried to jump overboard. Podcaster Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump in 2024, is now using his platform to condemn the president for using his office to add billions to his own personal net worth. Newly surfaced documents confirm that ICE and the Department of Homeland Security spied on left-wing groups protesting the execution of nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. And the White House is reportedly now considering yet another round of tax cuts aimed at making the wealthiest Americans even richer.

Before we get into the news, a brief ask: we’re up against a cadre of impossibly wealthy MAGA oligarchs tied at the hip to the Trump regime, who are all using their billions to buy as many news outlets as they can so they can quietly snuff out all dissent and make themselves the sole deciders of what we get to know. Raw America will never take a dime from a billionaire, because we know that means they get to control what gets reported and what gets buried. But to be perfectly honest, we’re short on our fundraising goals this month and need free readers like you who value the importance of independent journalism to chip in. The good news: you can upgrade to a paying subscription for just 22 cents a day. That’s it. For less than a cup of coffee, you can make sure we stay independent and answer to no one else but you, the reader.

Subscribe for Just 22 Cents a Day

Every dollar of every paid subscription directly funds our reporters, editors, video producers and on-air hosts working hard for you. That includes on-the-ground exclusives from Raw America White House correspondent Brian Karem, who wrote this bombshell report about what Trump’s inner circle is really saying about him leaving them on a decoy jet as sitting ducks for a potential missile attack. It also pays for our live interviews with top newsmakers like Hunter Biden, who will be sitting down with Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson today at 2 PM ET. Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com. Now let’s get into the news.

Veterans Say Hegseth ‘Lying’ to Military Families About Dire Conditions on Aircraft Carrier

Members of Congress who served in the military are accusing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of blatantly lying about what’s happening on board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. That’s the aircraft carrier that’s been on an extended deployment in the Middle East. The ship is carrying approximately 5,000 sailors and Marines who were expecting to be home three months ago.

Those service members are struggling to keep it together amid brutal conditions according to family members, veterans and reporting from multiple outlets. They’re having to contend with moldy showers, long stretches with no hot water, shortages of various crucial supplies, toilets continuously out of service and even laundry rooms that have been inaccessible for weeks.

There’s also a significant mental health toll for the Marines and sailors on the carrier. Family members say a medical professional on the ship warned commanding officers that the crew needed to reach port before people started — in their words — “losing their minds.” At least one sailor reportedly tried to jump overboard before other crew members intervened.

Hegseth’s response to these claims was to downplay and dismiss them. He said the reports about the ship’s conditions “completely misrepresented” what is supposedly happening. He told reporters during a press gaggle in Panama that every ship has every amenity the Pentagon can provide.

Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who served in the Iraq War as a Marine corporal himself, said he’s in direct contact with a military spouse who’s been forwarding him her husband’s text messages from the ship. Gallego told Hegseth to stop lying and fix the problem.

Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, a captain in the Marine Corps who also served in Iraq, also cast doubt on Hegseth’s claims. Moulton made sure to remind reporters that this is the same defense secretary who’s already been caught misusing classified information in last year’s “Signalgate” scandal. He also observed if everything’s fine on that ship, why is the Navy now rushing to replace it with the U.S.S. George Washington?

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees military operations in the Middle East, put out a statement last night pushing back on some unproven and debunked claims, like sailors reportedly dying in a brawl. But that statement notably never addressed the specific complaints from military families who have loved ones on board about the lack of food, showers and working toilets. CENTCOM did confirm one sailor went overboard, though the statement said he “fell” rather than addressing the accounts from families that described the sailor deliberately trying to jump into the sea.

The crew of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln has now spent more than 260 days at sea. That’s more of a stress test than a standard rotation, and it’s happening while the people at the top of the chain command try to tell us there’s nothing to see here.

George Washington spent the winter of 1777 at Valley Forge writing letter after letter to Congress about men with no shoes and no meat, because he knew a republic that hides what it's doing to its own soldiers has already started lying to itself. We didn't build a citizen military so the people running it could tell the families back home that everything's fine.

‘Literally Crazy’: Joe Rogan Calls Out Trump’s ‘Shady’ Corruption

Podcast host Joe Rogan, who endorsed Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, spent a significant portion of his most recent episode condemning Trump and his family using the office of the president to pad their pockets with billions of dollars.

Rogan honed in on Trump’s crypto ventures as one prime example of corruption. Since his second term, Trump has pushed pro-crypto policies all while his family’s businesses have aggressively expanded their footprint into the crypto industry. Trump has already profited to the tune of roughly $1.4 billion from crypto, including his $TRUMP memecoin, which has plummeted approximately 97 percent in value since it launched last year. This means that while the Trump family made out like bandits, everyone else lost their shirts in what appears to be a textbook rugpull scheme.

Rogan went on to say this president has brazenly done things no American president has ever done before, specifically pointing to Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, being entangled in a plethora of “shady” crypto deals. He told comedian Shane Gillis, his guest, that there’s so much money moving around that if regulators wanted to, they could dig deep and find real problems.

The podcaster added that while all of this is technically legal, he’s not sure it should be.

Florida Atlantic University political science professor Craig Agronoff told Newsweek that Rogan’s analysis is spot-on, pointing out that no modern president has ever reported personal income from one specific industry of this level while simultaneously shaping the regulations governing that very same industry. Past presidents put their assets in blind trusts to avoid the appearance of self-dealing, but Trump has notably refused to do the same.

Rogan also took aim at Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), which is the parent company of the president’s Truth Social platform. The company recently launched a subscription service charging between $60,000 and $100,000 a month for early access to Trump’s market-moving posts. A new lawsuit is making the argument that this amounts to selling privileged access to information generated through the president’s official duties. Several high-frequency trading firms have already subscribed.

Trump remains the largest shareholder of TMTG, with an equity stake worth approximately $1 billion.

Rogan’s reaction to Trump selling early access to posts for $100,000 a month was probably what most of us were thinking, called it “literally crazy.”

The White House response was, of course, a boilerplate denial of any conflicts of interest, with the president’s assets supposedly being held in independently managed accounts. Sure thing. Whatever you say.

After Watergate, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 to force presidents to open their books, because the country had just learned what happens when a man treats the office as personal property. Legal and clean aren't the same thing, and Rogan just said out loud what a lot of his own listeners have been quietly thinking.

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ICE Caught Spying on Left-Wing Groups After Killing of Alex Pretti

In Minneapolis, January’s fatal shooting of 37 year-old V.A. nurse Alex Pretti by federal agents triggered a uniquely ominous response from the Trump administration.

Rather than investigating the agents who pulled the trigger — as is standard in any fatal shooting across law enforcement agencies — the Trump administration instead turned its investigative power on the people protesting them.

The New York Times just reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proceeded to open investigations into labor unions, a climate change group, socialist organizations, and other leftists in an attempt to find out if they provided aid to “violent opportunists and agitators.”

This was a widespread effort. Government documents show federal agencies gathered intelligence on Americans who were never suspected or accused of any crimes. The Trump administration subpoenaed three years of financial records from the Sunrise Movement, which is a youth-led climate group. They did the same for the Communications Workers of America, which is the labor union representing journalists and editors at numerous media outlets, including at Raw America’s sister organization, Raw Story.

The Trump administration also investigated the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is the nation’s largest union of healthcare workers. Investigators demanded three years of the SEIU’s wire transfer records saying they were inquiring about “domestic terrorist financing.” But those time periods included in the government’s request predate the very operation the administration claims justified its crackdown in Minneapolis, suggesting this was more about intimidation than investigation.

Federal agents also reportedly conducted extensive surveillance operations at various libraries, parks and churches, as well as online meetings of these groups. They took down license plate numbers of vehicles at these locations, gathered names and assembled details of discussion topics. They even infiltrated private Signal group chats to get details of planned protests and even the political opinions of the organizers.

Federal prosecutors went on to present a grand jury with a slide alleging a massive conspiracy to obstruct immigration operations that involved eighteen separate groups, including the AFL-CIO, which is the largest labor union in America.

Again, none of the groups the Trump administration targeted were ever charged with a crime. But in June, the Justice Department charged 15 individual protesters with interfering with immigration operations, framing them as part of the antifascist movement as if opposing fascism is a crime. The protesters maintain their actions are protected by the First Amendment.

This all shows the motivations of the government isn’t to safeguard Americans’ constitutional rights. When a nurse was executed in broad daylight, the government’s response was to spy on people exercising their First Amendment rights rather than looking into their own agents’ conduct.

In 1958 the Supreme Court ruled in NAACP v. Alabama that a state couldn't force a group to hand over its membership lists, because the justices understood that exposure is itself the punishment and fear is the whole point. Swapping membership lists for three years of bank records doesn't change what's happening here, it just updates the technology.

Trump Wants to Cut Taxes for the Richest Americans — Again

With less than three months before a midterm election in which voters have the affordability crisis at the top of their minds, the Trump White House has apparently decided the best thing to do is to talk about potentially giving even more tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.

According to Bloomberg, the Trump administration is weighing two specific proposals: one would peg capital gains taxes (which are exclusively paid by investors rather than people who actually work for a living) to inflation. The other would exempt home sales from capital gains tax up to $2 million. That’s a significant increase from the current exemption of $500,000.

It’s worth remembering that tax cuts for the rich is a genuinely unpopular position with a broad swath of the American public. Gallup has tracked this question since 1939, and as of right now, 52 percent of Americans say the government should redistribute wealth by imposing higher taxes on the rich. Pew Research found in April that 61 percent of Americans — and even 41 percent of Republicans — think the richest Americans don’t pay enough taxes.

So naturally, the Trump administration is trying to characterize these proposals as a benefit to the middle class.

So what these proposals would actually do? The Yale Budget Lab estimates that tying capital gains taxes to inflation would cost anywhere from $170 billion to $1 trillion over the course of a decade, depending on how it’s applied. The benefits are also extremely slanted in favor of the super-rich, as anyone making less than $100,000 would get almost nothing, while people making over $3 million a year would get a tax cut of roughly $350,000 annually.

As for the $2 million capital gains exemption, the National Association of Realtors says that would only help the richest 15 percent of homeowners, which is already far wealthier than the rest of the U.S. population. The other 85 percent are already not subjected to any capital gains taxes from home sales.

This proposal comes after last year’s tax cuts in Trump’s Big Ugly Bill already slashed federal tax revenuesby an estimated $570 billion. Trump’s tariff rebates, which the Supreme Court allowed after striking down Trump’s tariffs as unconstitutional, amount to billions more in lost revenue. Those tariff rebates, by the way, went to the same corporations that gouged us with higher prices, and yet consumers got no rebate at all.

If this government truly wanted to bring down housing costs, they could consider real solutions like zoning reform, new investments in infrastructure, scrapping tariffs on imported construction materials like lumber and steel and increasing subsidies for low-income housing. Handing out even more tax breaks to millionaires isn’t one of them.

Americans ratified the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 for one reason, and that reason was the conviction that great fortunes owe something back to the country that made them possible. A century later we're being told the way to fix housing costs is to hand another break to the people who already own most of the housing.

Before You Go, Support Journalism That Doesn’t Take Money from Billionaires

We all know the MAGA billionaires who control the biggest news outlets in America — like David Ellison at CBS, Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post, Rupert Murdoch at Fox and the Wall Street Journal and Patrick Soon-Shiong at the Los Angeles Times — would never cover these stories this way. If it were up to them, they’d be watered down beyond recognition or buried entirely. That’s why here at Raw America, we’ll never take a penny from a billionaire owner or corporate parent. We refuse to allow ourselves to be silenced or censored just to stay funded.

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for watching, and thanks for supporting independent media. Have a great weekend.

Here are some stories you may have missed:

• Trump Treasury Department’s New Policy Is a Gift to Money Launderers. This week, President Donald Trump’s Treasury Department announced it would be scrapping its registry of shell company ownership. In her latest column for the Bulwark, Catherine Rampell pointed out that this flies in the face of existing federal law requiring the Treasury Department maintain a shell company database in order to crack down on money laundering operations. Not only is the Treasury eliminating future gathering of shell company data, but its destroying its current database, meaning no future administration or law enforcement agency can access it.

• Female Federal Employees Accuse Trump Administration of Blocking Sexual Harassment Lawsuits. A new lawsuit from Deanna Chelette and Alexzandria Boyd, who are employed as guards at the federal prison in Pollock, Louisiana, alleges that Andrea Lucas, the Trunp-appointed chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is deliberately refusing to investigate sexual harassment claims. Chelette and Boyd say their superiors at the prison are refusing to restrain and discipline inmates who are harassing correctional officers. Lucas implemented a policy on December 10 of freezing all class-action complaints from federal workers.

• CNN MAGA Commentator Gives Update on Mitch McConnell. CNN commentator Scott Jennings — the one-time political director for Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recently provided an update on the 84 year-old senator during a recent appearance on “The Arena with Kasie Hunt.” Jennings said McConnell “seemed to be doing a lot better” since his return home from a rehab facility. McConnell still has yet to make any public appearances since his June 14 hospitalization, which his staff attributed to a fall and a brief episode of pneumonia. McConnell staff has said he’ll continue to work from home while he continues his recovery. His lengthy absence from the Senate has meant missed votes on everything from War Powers Act resolutions and confirmation votes for federal judges.

Donald Trump’s handpicked Kennedy Center board is openly defying a federal court order by voting to close down the complex and put Trump’s name back on the building. The Trump administration could blow up a mountain in a national park in order to build a road that nobody actually needs. Top Democrats are now saying that if they win back control of Congress in November, they’ll be considering “dramatic” changes to the MAGA Supreme Court. And a federal judge just threw out Trump’s lawsuit against Harvard, ruling the government never actually proved its case.

Before we go further, a quick ask: we’re up against a cartel of pro-Trump billionaires using their bottomless wealth to buy up as many news outlets as they can, because they want to decide what we get to know and what gets buried. We rely solely on reader support because we refuse to let a billionaire owner or corporate parent dictate what we get to cover. But we’ll be honest: we’re behind on our fundraising numbers and need free subscribers like you who believe in the importance of independent journalism to chip in to keep this work going. Take a moment and upgrade your free subscription to a paying one. You can do it for just 22 cents a day.

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Trump’s Handpicked Kennedy Center Board Violating Court Orders

On Thursday, the Kennedy Center’s board — which is almost entirely made up of Trump loyalists — met on Zoom and voted for a second time to shut down most of the arts complex. The official reason for the closure is so the Kennedy Center can undergo a two-year, $250 million renovation. But in that same meeting, the board also voted to put Trump’s name back on the building, this time with the words “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”

This is despite a federal judge already ruling in May that the board had no justification to close the Kennedy Center in the first place. A separate appeals court ruling struck down Trump’s push to keep his name on the building facade. This new vote directly violates both of those rulings.

Democratic Congresswoman Joyce Beatty of Ohio, who sits on the board as an ex-officio member, called the vote was a blarant effort to circumvent the court rulings.

Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center has already led to the Washington National Opera withdrawing from the institutions. Major performers have canceled shows. Ticket sales have plummeted. And the National Symphony Orchestra, whose budget is tied to the Kennedy Center, is now reportedly in the midst of its worst financial crisis in recent history.

The Kennedy Center board hasn’t shied away from petty gestures. Jazz musician Chuck Redd canceled last year’s planned Christmas Eve show that he’d hosted at the facility for almost two decades in response to Trump slapping his name on the building. The board sued him for it, but he fought back. And this week, a Washington D.C. judge ordered the Kennedy Center to pay more than $252,000 to cover Redd’s legal fees. The board says it plans to appeal the decision.

A tarp has covered the Kennedy Center’s entrance since June, shortly after the order to take Trump’s name off the building was handed down. As of Thursday, that tarp is still there.

Trump May Blow Up Mountain in National Park to Build Road No One Asked For

Federal maps show U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is aiming to build a patrol road across Mariscal Mountain, which is inside Big Bend National Park. The terrain is so rugged that environmental groups say the only way to build the road would be with dynamite and heavy use of bulldozers.

Local sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland told Newsweek he’s hiked that exact trail, and said no one crosses there. He noted that anyone who did would have to walk for 110 miles before reaching a place where they could actually be picked up. He also said that he regularly gets tips about people trying to cross the border in that region, and said a road at that location would be both impractical and unnecessary.

It’s also worth noting that illegal border crossings in that area are already down by 85 percent compared to a few years ago. So there’s essentially no security case for blasting through a national park.

Wildlife biologists are also warning against detonating the mountain, given that Mariscal Canyon likely has the densest population of nesting peregrine falcons in Texas. Peregrine falcons are known to be highly sensitive to any disturbance near their nesting cliffs.

Ten House Democrats have already a letter demanding the administration disclose its actual plans for the area before any blasting starts, warning that debris from blasting could end up in the Rio Grande and trigger a decades-old boundary dispute with Mexico. CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott argues this isn’t a wall project and that the only thing happening right now is survey work, not construction. But no one outside the agency can verify that without the plans being released to the public.

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Top Democrats Say ‘Dramatic’ Changes to Supreme Court in the Works if They Retake Congress

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) recently told reporters that “dramatic” reform of the Supreme Court is necessary. He characterized the Roberts Court as a subsidiary of the MAGA movement, and that no option is off the table should his party win back control of Congress after the November midterms.

That’s a remarkable shift in tone from even the most recent election cycles. Democrats have floated various ideas for Supreme Court reform ranging from adding new justices to the nine-member court, imposing new term limits and putting a binding code of ethics in place. Former Vice President Kamala Harris suggested adding four new justices to the Court. Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed correctly pointed out that the U.S> Constitution never actually set the number of justices at nine members.

The public may be ready to talk about shaking up the Supreme Court. A recent Marquette University Law School poll conducted earlier this year found the public split right down the middle on court expansion, 50 to 50.

But there’s a signifiant obstacle in the White House even if both American voters and a Democratic Congress want changes to the nation’s highest court. Even if Democrats take both the House and Senate, most of these changes would need 60 votes to get over the filibuster hump. And they would need a two-thirds majority vote to get past a likely Trump veto. Real change would likely require Democrats to get rid of the filibuster altogether, which they’ve so far been unable to do.

Judge Throws Out Trump’s Lawsuit Against Harvard

A federal judge in Boston has thrown out the Trump administration’s civil rights lawsuit against Harvard University.

The government accused Harvard of ignoring the harassment of Jewish students during pro-Palestine protests on campus in the wake of Hamas’ October 7th attacks on Israel and Israel’s resulting massacre of Gaza, which is ongoing. The Trump administration sought to claw back billions of dollars in federal research funding over the alleged antisemitism.

U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns — an appointee of former President Bill Clinton — ruled that the incidents the government cited were, in his words, too isolated and episodic to prove an ongoing civil rights violation. Most of what the administration’s lawsuit pointed to happened in the 2023-24 school year and hasn’t continued since then.

This is all part of the Trump administration’s ongoing offensive against Harvard, which has also included attempts to cut research funding and make it harder for the university to enroll international students. In a separate court ruling, a federal judge previously ordered the administration to reverse more than $2.6 billion in funding cuts to Harvard, ruling the White House used antisemitism as a pretext to justify an ideologically motivated assault on America’s top universities.

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Your subscriptions not only fund newsletters like these, but original reporting like Raw America White House reporter Brian Karem’s latest piece featuring exclusive quotes from both Trump administration staff and an interview with a former White House press secretary, which you can view below or by clicking here. Your support also makes it possible for us to broadcast live interviews with the people shaping the news like Hunter Biden, who will be sitting down with Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson tomorrow at 2 PM ET. Watch on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.

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Thanks for watching. I’m British Chris, with Raw America. We’ll see you tomorrow.

Read Brian Karem’s latest original report:

Here are some additional stories you may have missed:

• Judge Warns Trump DOJ Could Be Held in Contempt Over Epstein Files. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan — a Bill Clinton appointee — warned Justice Department lawyers Thursday that he is planning on holding the government in contempt of court for continuing to stall on the release of millions of pages of documents relating to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Sullivan sided with attorney Katie Phang, who is accusing President Donald Trump’s administration of violating the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump himself signed into law last fall. Sullivan said if the DOJ continued to sit on the documents, contempt proceedings weren’t a “threat,” but “a promise.”

• Judge Rules Mamdani’s Empty Mansion Tax Can Stand While Legal Challenges Play Out. A New York state appellate judge ruled Thursday that New York City Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax, which applies to vacant homes valued at $5 million or more, can continue its planned rollout while lawsuits challenging it play out in court. Roughly 17,000 residents received letters stating the new tax may apply to them, which is estimated to generate more than $500 million in annual revenue.

• DNC Committee Approves Resolutions on Abolishing ICE and Cutting Off Military Aid to Israel. A Thursday meeting of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) Resolutions Committee concluded with the approval of resolutions supporting the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and for barring further U.S. military support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime. The resolutions will now move to a full vote by the full DNC in Austin, Texas on Saturday.

• Voters Prefer Socialist Over MAGA Candidate in Hypothetical 2028 Matchup. A new survey by independent pollster Jeremy Zogby found that if the 2028 election were held today, 55 percent of respondents would prefer a socialist candidate over a MAGA candidate. Only 33 percent of respondents indicated they would support the MAGA candidate, while 22 percent of those polled said they were undecided. Self-identified independent said they would back the socialist candidate over the MAGA candidate by a 48-18 margin.

President Donald Trump boards Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., August 7, 2026. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz

President Donald Trump’s secret ploy to escape an Iranian missile attack is drawing fire from both a former White House press secretary and even senior members of his own White House staff, Raw America can reveal.

During a recent press gaggle, Trump confirmed he was a target of a potential Iranian attack after leaving last month’s NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, as were the reporters in the traveling press pool. The president even joked he would “go first” if someone were to shoot the jet out of the air.

“Apparently not,” one high-ranking member of Trump’s staff told Raw America. “He got off the plane and left us there.”

Trump’s surreptitiously coordinated switch of airplanes was done without the knowledge of members of the press, and even left Cabinet members, high-ranking staff and reporters aboard Air Force One as potential sitting ducks in the event of a missile attack.

Trump’s actions have clearly caused a rift among some senior staff. When reporters asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week about the ruse, Rubio turned around, gave a slight grin, and then left the room with a disgusted expression on his face.

“How would you feel if you were cannon fodder?” one senior staffer told Raw America.

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At least two members of the press anonymously confided that they also didn’t enjoy being “cannon fodder” for Trump, with one even saying they had gotten their “affairs in order” for the next time they’re in the traveling press pool.

“What does it say that our president cares so little for those around him?” The Trump staffer explained.

The incident drew comparisons to a 2000 incident in which then-President Bill Clinton switched planes in Pakistan due to the threat of an attack, following a nuclear summit between Pakistan and India. But former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart says the comparisons are inaccurate.

“I’ve read a lot of fiction about what President Trump did and what Clinton did in Pakistan in 2000,” Lockhart told Raw America in an exclusive interview. “I was there with Clinton and I know what happened.”

Lockhart said he felt compelled to come forward following Trump’s month-long gaslighting of the press following the incident in Turkey (you can watch the full interview with Lockhart below).

As the Washington Post reported this week, Trump left the Ankara summit in a separate military aircraft after being smuggled in an airport catering truck. Secret Service employed the strategy amid threats from Iran, which borders Turkey and had been vowing to take revenge against Trump in response to his attacks on Tehran over the last six months.

Trump had been using a new version of Air Force One — a repurposed $400 million gift from the Qatari royal family. But the new jet didn’t have the necessary anti-aircraft defense systems needed to repel a missile attack, so the old Air Force One Boeing 747 was put back in service.

The president told the press the “new” Air Force one was sent to Europe on a sightseeing tour. Upon departure from Turkey, passengers aboard were told the aircraft window shades needed to be drawn because of credible threats against Trump.

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“I just did what [the Secret Service] told me,” Trump said Tuesday night in Ohio.

“The Secret Service doesn’t make presidents do anything,” Lockhart said in response to Trump’s comment. “They can suggest [solutions], but the president ultimately makes the decisions.”

Former President George W. Bush famously rejected Secret Service advice following the 9/11 attacks. Bush refused an opportunity to sneak back into Washington, telling the Secret Service and assembled reporters, “I’m not hiding from anyone.”

While Trump lied for more than a month about the swapping out of the jet, Lockhart, noted that Clinton was much more transparent following the 2000 incident in which he brokered peace talks between the two regional nuclear powers.

“It was one of the most frightening times I spent in the White House,” Lockhart said.

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The morning Clinton left for Pakistan, the Secret Service presented a plan during a senior staff meeting to reduce the risk of an attack on the president. They aimed to use a C-17 aircraft to carry Clinton, White House staff, Secret Service, military personnel and journalists to Pakistan. Lockhart noted that Air Force One was never even once considered as a mode of transportation or decoy.

The idea was to load the C-17 up with support staff and media, have the president board the plane, then secretly get off on the opposite side and board a smaller military jet that couldn’t be seen from the cameras because of the size of the C-17.

While the swap-out was similar to Trump’s plan in Ankara, Lockhart said that’s where the similarity ends.

“That plan simply didn’t work for me, and I made that clear in the meeting. A couple of us from the White House staff adjourned to the hallway and met with the two top officials in the Secret Service,” Lockhart explained. “I made the point clearly and strongly that we could not use the media and other civilians as decoys to protect the president. It was that simple.”

“After a tense, yet respectful conversation, the service promised a plan that would address their needs, our concerns and certainly what the president would have wanted had he needed to be brought into the conversation,” he added.

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The Secret Service then decided to park the C-17 on the tarmac, allowing Clinton to be seen walking around it so everyone watching on television or in person could see he wasn’t climbing aboard. However, three smaller military passenger jets on the tarmac weren’t seen, and Clinton got into one of them. The smaller three jets were the first to take off. Reporters aboard the C-17 took off last so they could witness the three smaller planes taking off. They knew the president was on one of them, but didn’t know which one.

“I should note that senior members of the press were briefed in advance of this operation, by me, and although they didn’t know all the details it was made clear we would make clear the president was not going to travel on the plane they were on,” Lockhart said. “There was no attempt to hide anything, much less lie about it later.”

“This is the difference between a president who serves the people, and a monarch who thinks the people are there to only serve him,” he added.

Lockhart — who said he prefers to spend most of his time these days golfing at his favorite country club rather than commenting on politics — insisted that some things are not excusable in the name of national security.

“There is simply no reason why we should accept that behavior and the reporters and the staff who were left behind have every reason to be upset,” he said. “The president’s life is paramount. But that’s not an excuse for forgetting everyone else.”

The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) has so far not issued any public statement about the Ankara jet swap, but has told WHCA members they are in discussions with the White House about the incident.

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Before You Go, Support Raw America’s Independent Journalism

Raw America hired White House reporter Brian Karem in June, who brings decades of experience and vast array of sources to our team. Original reports like these, full of both on-the-record quotes from expert sources and quotes from inside sources close to the administration, are only possible with the support of readers who believe in independent journalism enough to fund it. Become a paying subscriber right now and help keep this work going.

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Senate Republicans are loudly warning Trump that voters are exhausted with his endless war in Iran as gas prices become a real problem for the GOP heading into the midterms. CNN employees are pushing back on MAGA billionaire David Ellison’s plan for an “independent” editorial board, calling it a toothless PR move. Democrats now have a real shot at flipping the Senate, with eight Republican-held seats genuinely in play less than three months before the election. And new reporting shows Donald Trump has personally pocketed roughly $2.2 billion in a single year, with ethics experts declaring Trump’s second term the most openly corrupt presidency in American history.

A quick ask before we get to the news: as billionaires continue their takeover of major media outlets, any voices criticizing this administration are getting quietly snuffed out. Raw America will never take billionaire or corporate money, because we know that means compromising our coverage in order to appease the people funding us. We only answer to you. And that won’t ever change. But that kind of independence requires resources, and that means we need more free readers like you to become paying subscribers. The good news? You can become a paying subscriber right now for just 22 cents a day. That’s less than a cup of coffee. And it keeps us fully independent and accountable only to you. Subscribe right now.

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Every dollar of every subscription directly funds our high-quality independent journalism, including twice-daily newsletters like these, on-the-ground reporting from Washington and exclusive live interviews with major public figures and experts offering perspectives you won’t get anywhere else. Make sure to tune in tomorrow at 2 PM ET to watch our live interview with Hunter Biden. You can catch it on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.

GOP Senators Say Their Voters Are ‘Exhausted’ with Trump’s War

Donald Trump launched his war on Iran on February 28th. He promised it would be over in a matter of weeks. That was nearly six months ago.

Now, Senate Republicans say their voters have had enough. Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia says her phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Her constituents are worn out. They don’t want boots on the ground, or billions of their tax money going overseas. And they definitely don’t want a war with no end date.

RepublicanJohn Cornyn of Texas wants Trump to actually explain what it’s trying to accomplish, saying the on-again, off-again messaging is confusing. He added the weeks-long timeline the administration floated at the start was the biggest mistake.

Meanwhile, Iran is keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed, which is a huge problem as it handles a fifth of the world’s oil supply. Tehran says it won’t reopen the strait to American ships until the U.S. Navy lifts its blockade, pays reparations for the war and withdraws troops out from the region. Gas prices are averaging around $4 a gallon nationwide. That’s roughly a dollar more than when the war started, with just a few months to go before voters head into a midterm election that was always going to be decided on the cost of living.

An August Reuters/Ipsos poll found just 35 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s war. 58 percent expect gas prices to keep getting worse. Last month’s survey from the same pollster found 69 percent of Americans think Trump never clearly explained his goal for the war.

Even Trump doesn’t seem totally sure. Last week he told Axios he was “low-keying it,” saying it will work out. That’s not a strategy. And Republican senators fighting for their political lives this fall know it.

Congress wrote the War Powers Resolution in 1973 because it had just watched a president stretch a limited action in Southeast Asia into a decade of coffins coming home. That law’s still on the books, and the Senate keeps voting not to pick it up.

CNN Staffers Sounding Alarm Over Ellison’s Plans for Network

Paramount Skydance — whose right-wing billionaire owner, David Ellison, has been trying to buy CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery — is now floating a new idea he hopes will assuage concerns about the network’s independence. Ellison wants to create an “editorial board” to oversee CNN if his purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery goes through. Paramount told the Wall Street Journal it’s always looking at “internal improvements to journalistic integrity.”

CNN staffers were quick to call BS on that proposal.

Veteran journalist and CNN contributor Kara Swisher said no actual journalist would suggest such a thing, and said these kinds of oversight boards are typically to toothless and useless by design.

It isn’t just Swisher. One veteran CNN staffer told Status News that the working assumption inside CNN is that any board would be stacked with people like right-wing opinion columnist Bari Weiss and UFC CEO (and devout Trump loyalist) Dana White. Working journalists are right to doubt the independence of a board that includes those names.

Another staffer anonymously told Status that no CNN journalists actually believe Paramount would let an independent board run the network. Additionally, that board wouldn’t do anything to ease the pressure from the Trump White House to fast-track the merger.

This all comes after a dozen state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, are suing to block the $110 billion merger. Paramount says the idea of an editorial board had been floated before the lawsuit was filed. But the idea only surfaced recently, and AG Bonta isn’t impressed. He called Ellison’s assurances “piecemeal promises” and that the lawsuit is necessary for antitrust enforcement to stop a whole host of major media properties from being owned by one man.

The New York Post is also reporting that Ellison — who owns CBS News — may move the network out of New York as payback against Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit along with Bonta. Ellison reportedly told senior Paramount Skydance executives he’ll start relocating the company out of California on October 1 if Bonta doesn’t negotiate an end to the suit by the end of September. Relocating out of both New York and Hollywood would be a massive and costly undertaking that would simultaneously cut off the company from top-tier talent in both the news and entertainment industries. Bonta likened the threat to blackmail.

Ellison recently penned an op-ed in the New York Times insisting he’d be a good steward of CNN, while arguing CNN and CBS News exist to play it straight down the middle. He notably didn’t mention whether CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss would have authority over CNN’s newsroom, and remains cagey about whether current CNN chief executive Mark Thompson would keep his job if the merger goes through.

Edward R. Murrow warned a room full of broadcasters in 1958 that television could teach and illuminate, but only if the people who owned it wanted it to. Otherwise, he said, it was nothing but wires and lights in a box.

This story is a perfect illustrator of why billionaire ownership is so toxic to media. And it’s why Raw America was launched to be totally independent of billionaire influence. Subscribe right now to help us stay independent.

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Democrats Need Just 4 Flips to Win Back the Senate. They Could Win 8

Democrats only need to flip four Republican Senate seats to take control of the upper chamber of Congress. But top election analysts like Cook Political Report say there are now eight genuinely competitive Republican-held seats, with several reliably red states now part of the conversation thanks to Trump’s sinking approval ratings. Growing fatigue with the Iran war and persistently high gas prices have also thrown various states into question.

In North Carolina, former Governor Roy Cooper, the Democrat, is ahead of Republican Michael Whatley in most polls. That even includes a Fox News poll from late July that had Cooper up by nine points. Cook rates the seat is a “likely Democratic” flip.

In Maine, Democrats got rid of scandal-plagued Graham Platner and replaced him with Troy Jackson, a logger and former Maine Senate president. Jackson is slightly ahead of longtime incumbent Susan Collins in the latest polls, with her current approval numbers among the worst of her career.

In Ohio, longtime former Senator Sherrod Brown is mounting a comeback and is aiming to oust Republican Senator Jon Husted. Brown’s campaign is using Husted’s support for data centers against him, blaming him for higher utility bills resulting from data centers’ heavy electricity usage.

In Alaska, former Congresswoman Mary Peltola is running a tight race against incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan, saying high gas prices are partially his fault due to his support for the Iran war. In Iowa, Democrat Josh Turek was just endorsed by Barack Obama and is competitive in the open seat being vacated by Republican Joni Ernst.

Texas Democratic state representative James Talarico is polling slightly ahead of Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who knocked off John Cornyn in the Republican primary thanks to Trump’s endorsement. Kansas pastor Adam Hamilton significantly outraised Republican incumbent Roger Marshall by roughly six to one last quarter. And in Nebraska, independent Dan Osborn is running again after coming within striking distance of Deb Fischer in 2024, and is aiming to upset incumbent Republican Senator Pete Ricketts.

There’s no guarantee Democrats will take back the Senate, and the map is still slightly favorable to Republicans. But eight competitive seats shows Democrats have a real opportunity in the midterms, and Republicans are on the ropes.

The Framers wrote Article One, Section Three so that a third of the Senate has to face the voters every two years, no matter how comfortable the majority has gotten. That was the entire point of staggering those terms, and in eighty-two days we find out whether it still works.

Trump Increased His Net Worth by Billions in ‘Most Openly Corrupt’ Presidency

This one should have been the biggest political scandal of the year, if the billionaire-owned media actually did its job.

Trump’s annual financial disclosure shows he added an estimated $2.2 billion to his net worth in 2025 from his numerous business ventures. That’s billions of dollars flowing straight into the president’s pockets while he’s occupying the Oval Office.

$1.4 billion of that money came from his cryptocurrency projects, including $636 million just in royalties from his own branded $TRUMP memecoin. According to the blockchain firm Nansen, roughly 989,000 people who bought $TRUMP were underwater by the end of June, losing a total of $3.81 billion as it plunged in value by 97 percent.

Trump’s Truth Social platform is now selling Wall Street firms early access to his market-moving posts, offering monthly subscriptions between $60,000 and $100,000. The buyers mostly include high-frequency traders who are paying to have access to announcements a few milliseconds before the public. Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia urged six major financial trade groups not to touch it, calling it a clear and unacceptable pathway for corruption.

Then there’s his IRS settlement. Trump initially sued the IRS for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns, and his own Justice Department settled it that allowed permanent immunity from future audits for him, his sons and his businesses for all of his previous tax returns. A federal judge tossed out that settlement out due to obvious conflict of interest issues. She also sanctioned two senior Justice Department officials and referred one of Trump’s lawyers to the Florida bar. Trump is appealing that decision.

And of course, Trump also received a $400 million jet gifted to him from the Qatari royal family, blatantly sidestepping the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause.

Historian Julian Zelizer of Princeton University says Trump has found new ways to monetize the presidency in ways no other president ever has. Former Federal Election Commission general counsel Larry Noble says this already looks like the “most openly corrupt” presidency in American history. A July poll from CNN found 66 percent of Americans already believe Trump doesn’t put the good of the country over his own personal financial gain.

Corporate media keeps burying that story under each news cycle. But it should be the headline.

The Supreme Court decided Tumey against Ohio back in 1927 and threw out a conviction because the judge stood to profit from it, and the justices said it didn’t matter whether he’d actually been swayed. What mattered was that he could be, and that nobody watching could tell the difference.

Before You Go, Support Journalism That Only Answers to You

All of these stories show the consequences of what happens when there are no guardrails reining in corruption and authoritarianism. A president can recklessly wage endless war while his puppets in Congress do nothing to stop him. A billionaire with ties to the administration can use their endless wealth to buy entire cable networks to decide what we get to know. And a shamelessly corrupt president can use the nation’s highest office to pad his own pockets.

You’d never hear these stories covered this way in the media outlets controlled by the billionaires, which is the entire point. And that’s why Raw America will never take a dime from them. But our mission can only continue if readers like you decide independent journalism is important enough to fund. You already read us. Become a paying subscriber and make your support official.

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Your subscription is what fuels all of our work, whether it’s videos like these, our exclusive reports from Capitol Hill and the White House or our live interview programming. Be sure to tune in tomorrow at 2 PM Eastern Time to watch our live interview with Hunter Biden. You can catch it on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.

I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.

Here are a few stories you may have missed:

• Third Immigrant Dies at Infamous ICE Detention Facility. An immigrant detainee being held at the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey was reported dead this week after experiencing a medical emergency, making him the third detainee at the facility to die in federal custody since it was reopened in May of 2025. A nurse reportedly witnessed the man, a Guatemalan national named Jose Chajon-Raxon, having a seizure. He was transported to a local hospital, which federal officials did not name. His death comes after 41 year-old El Salvadoran man Edwin Lopez-Cornejo died at Delaney Hall earlier this month, which officials attributed to an unidentified medical emergency.

• Immigrant Children Being Held at Texas Detention Center Five Times Longer Than Legally Allowed. The Texas Tribune is reporting that children are being held at the Dilley Detention Center as much as five times longer than the 20-day limit put in place by a federal judge. Advocates and attorneys for families being held at Dilley say their cells are often plagued with infestations from mosquitoes, cockroaches and spiders, with one detainee saying she’s only allowed to speak to her husband on the phone for 10 minutes every two weeks, under supervision from guards. Some children are being held at the facility for as much as 120 days.

• Texans Protest Trump’s Border Wall Construction in National Park. Bulldozers have started clearing trees and brush at the Big Bend National Park in South Texas in order to make way for border wall construction. Bulldozers have been greeted by crowds of protesters bearing signs with slogans like “Don’t Bulldoze My Church” and “No Big Bend Wall.” The Department of Homeland Security awarded a $1.7 billion contract to the Albuquerque, New Mexico-based firm Southwest Valley Constructors to build the section of the wall in the national park.

• Karoline Leavitt Caught Using AI on Her Exit Statement. Outgoing White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Wednesday she would be leaving the Trump administration to spend more time with her family. Two photos included in her exit statement show that Leavitt used AI to change her appearance. The Daily Beast reported that the post on her X account included a tag reading “made with AI.”