Hey everyone. Welcome back. Thanks for being here.
Our top story today: the wonderful Pete Hegseth went up to Capitol Hill yesterday to ask Congress for another 67 billion dollars for the war in Iran. It did not go well. Both Democrats and Republicans took turns demanding answers. But Hegseth couldn’t give them. Every question got a rambling deflection, and none of them got a straight answer. By the end, he wasn’t defending the war. He was just trying to get out of the room.
We’ll also get into Republicans quietly freaking out over the midterms, the President handing out favors to anyone who flatters him, a judge forcing Trump to give his financial records to the BBC, and a scammy little fundraising email aimed right at the president’s own supporters.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Senators From Both Sides Grill Hegseth Over His $67 Billion War Request
Yesterday, Pete Hegseth and the Joint Chiefs Chairman went in front of the Senate Appropriations Committee to ask for a massive new war funding package, including 67 billion dollars tied to the fight with Iran. Hegseth said the running cost of this war is currently at 37 and a half billion dollars.
Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff went right at the contradiction of this whole thing. He reminded Hegseth that nearly five months ago, the Secretary said Iran’s military was destroyed and combat ineffective. Take a look at Ossoff following up on that and Hegseth’s response, if you can call it that:
It doesn’t seem like Hegseth knows what combat ineffective means. If Iran has no navy, no air force, like he’s said, then why would American troops and bases still be under fire? And why would he need another 67 billion dollars?
Look, this was a sneaky messaging game from the very beginning. Trump and his allies have been saying that Iran’s air force and navy have been decimated. I’m sure that’s true. But that was always going to be the easy part. Iran’s air force was flying old jets. Their navy? We sank half of it in a single day back in 1988, and it never recovered. Those were never the threat. The threat was always the ballistic missiles, the mines, and the drones. You’ll notice they aren’t saying those capabilities have been destroyed. Because they can’t.
But it wasn’t just Democrats criticizing him. Republican Senator John Kennedy literally cut him off mid-ramble:
Meanwhile, the president is doing what he does best and not exactly making anything better. Yesterday, he posted a disgusting Truth Social post where he compared American deaths in other conflicts to the 18 so far in the Iran War, as if 18 is insignificant and something to brag about.
And just this morning, he announced that for every missile Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, one bridge or power plant in Iran will be blown up. And he made sure to add that it doesn’t matter if those bridges or power plants are in the capital city, home to almost ten million people.
We are more than four months into this thing, and not one person in this administration can tell you how it ends. Not Hegseth. Definitely not the President. They can’t define the goal, they don’t have a plan, and the American people know it. A recent Washington Post poll found just 28 percent of Americans think this war is worth fighting. The American people do not trust this administration, and performances like Hegseth’s yesterday are certainly not helping.
2. Republicans Are Panicking Over the Midterms
Trump’s unpopular war is dragging on, and Republicans can feel November coming quickly. Politico has reported that the party is entering a bleak new phase, with some allies openly saying they’re stuck in a quagmire heading into the election.
Democrats lead the generic ballot by around six points, and that lead grows to eight among voters who say they’re certain to show up. Historically, a lead like that in July points to Democrats picking up a whole lot of House seats. And the enthusiasm gap is even scarier for Republicans. One poll gives Democrats a ten-point edge on voter enthusiasm, bigger than that wave year of 2018.
So what’s the Republican master plan? Well, yesterday, Trump’s top political advisers gathered at a hotel in Washington to figure out how to spend the war chest. His super PAC and the party are sitting on around 530 million dollars.
And what’s just hilarious is that one Trump adviser told Axios that this is going to be, quote, “a hate election.” Their idea? Both parties are unpopular, so let’s give up on making Republicans look better and just make the Democrats look worse.
And here’s how desperate they’re getting. A few Fox News hosts, and even some people close to the President, are now floating the idea of suddenly ending the Iran war, not because it’s the right thing to do, but purely to help Republicans at the ballot box. As much as I want the war to come to an end, just picking up and leaving to try and help your chances in the midterms is desperation on a whole other level. And it is dangerous.
Republicans aren’t running on results in November. Because they can’t. They can’t run on the economy, they can’t run on this war, and they know it. So what are they planning to do with all that money? Maybe they will explain what they’d do with two more years. Nope. They’re going to spend it trying to make you angry. My question is, angry at who? Democrats don’t control anything in Washington. Republicans have the White House and both chambers of Congress. They’re spending half a billion dollars to point your anger at the only people in town without any power.
3. Trump Hands Out Favors to Anyone Who Tells Him He's Great
Our first example of this is from the World Cup. FIFA’s president spent the whole tournament just showering the President with attention. He handed Trump a made-up FIFA Peace Prize back in December, and made sure to sit right next to him at the final.
Well, now we know what all that can buy you. The President reportedly wants to nominate him to be the next Secretary-General of the United Nations. The top diplomatic job on the planet. Trump’s own envoy gushed that only “President Trump could have such a genius idea.”
And just yesterday, another example. Trump met at the White House with the President of Lebanon. Take a look at this moment:
“Now he can have anything.” And Trump wasn’t kidding. Right after, he announced he’s lifting the 41-year-long ban on direct U.S. flights to Lebanon. And by the way, Lebanon is literally an active conflict zone right now. The State Department still as of this morning has it at Level 4, Do Not Travel, the highest warning there could be. The warning cites “risk of crime, terrorism, unrest, kidnapping, landmines, and armed conflict.” Level 4 is the same level as North Korea. But the President said Americans should go “enjoy this beautiful land.”
Flatter Trump, hand him a shiny trophy, tell him he’s great, and he’ll try to make you the head of the United Nations or greenlight tourist flights into a war zone. There is zero policy or strategy here. Just a man handing out enormous, sometimes dangerous favors in exchange for being told he’s a wonderful guy.
4. A Federal Judge Orders Trump to Hand Over His Financial Records
Last December, Trump sued the British Broadcasting Corporation for 10 billion dollars over an unfavorable edit of his January 6th speech. In that case, he claimed the broadcast had damaged his reputation, brand and businesses. But yesterday, a judge ordered him to hand over the financial records to prove it.
That ruling could allow the BBC to access the finances of over 400 companies managed by the Trump family. The President’s own lawyers spent the hearing scrambling, suddenly trying to shrink the lawsuit and calling the request a “fishing expedition.” They tried to retract the claim that his businesses lost money, but the judge wouldn’t let them erase Trump’s original complaint.
So what is actually in those books, and why are they so desperate to protect them? Nobody outside the family really knows, and that is not an accident. Trump broke fifty years of precedent by refusing to release his tax returns as a candidate, hiding for years behind an audit he said was ongoing. And that was before he spent the last eighteen months using the presidency as a personal ATM, while his earnings were recorded in the documents he now has to produce.
When you march into court claiming something cost you money, you have to prove it. No matter who you are. For the President, that means opening the books he’s spent his entire life trying to keep closed. Trump would rather gut his own ten billion dollar lawsuit than let anyone read his ledgers, but for now it seems like he doesn’t have a choice.
5. Trump's Fundraising Machine Has Crossed Into Outright Scam Territory
Earlier this week, someone shared a text with me that they had gotten from an unknown number. The text warned that a “Communist plot” had been found four miles away. It said the President was asking for 350 billion dollars to deal with it, with a link to make a contribution.
That is a donation ask disguised as an emergency alert. Any reasonable person could see right through it. But Trump’s fundraising machine isn’t hunting reasonable people. It’s hunting the vulnerable, and it knows exactly how to trick them.
This week, the Trump campaign sent an email warning supporters of technical difficulties with their application to something called the “Trump Inner Circle,” which the President expected them to fix before midnight. Then, it handed them a button that said “TRY AGAIN HERE.” But there was no application, no technical difficulty, not even a deadline. And the button went right to a donation page.
Think about who that email is built for. People so devoted to this President that they panic at the thought of letting him down. Supporters who open their wallet no matter how absurd the email sounds. This deception is how the President’s team raises money, and it’s nothing new.
Back in March, the President’s leadership PAC promoted a paid membership for access to the President’s private national security briefings. Listen to how our intelligence officials responded when they heard about that email:
The CIA director confirmed the briefings never happened. Tulsi Gabbard didn’t even know what Senator Kelly was talking about. Obviously, because it was never real. It was a trick. The donors paid for a thing that did not exist. And if it did exist, that would be very illegal. But it feels like Trump’s increasingly manipulative fundraising tactics should be illegal, too.
This is a President who has monetized the office itself, more than anyone we’ve ever seen. The businesses, the crypto ventures, the foreign deals, all of it moving billions into his pocket. But somehow it’s not enough. He’s still going after the twenty dollars in a retiree’s checking account. He just can’t help himself. The President of the United States is a scammer. Always has been. And always will be.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
President Trump approved a 30-year civilian nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could eventually allow the kingdom to enrich uranium on its own soil. Administration officials say the structure keeps American industry at the center of the Saudi program, with safeguards locked into a bilateral agreement with Washington. Talks on a Saudi nuclear deal have been ongoing since the Bush administration, most recently tied to a larger package under Biden that would have required Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel in return. This administration dropped that demand along with the enrichment ban and enhanced IAEA inspections the UAE accepted in 2009, terms nonproliferation experts have called the "gold standard" ever since. The Trump Organization has done business in the kingdom for years, and its Saudi partner is currently developing $10 billion in Trump-branded projects in Riyadh and Jeddah. The agreement now goes to Congress for a 90-day review.
The Trump administration is withholding more than $1 billion in federal Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota over what it calls “suspected fraud and noncompliance”, Health Secretary RFK Jr. announced yesterday. Kennedy said the states can unlock the money by documenting that the claims are legitimate, citing data anomalies without producing evidence of fraud. This is the latest in a run of payment freezes over the past six months that have landed almost entirely on states run by Democrats, including $259 million withheld from Minnesota in February and $1.3 billion from California in May, the largest deferral the agency had made at the time. In April, the administration acknowledged that it had significantly botched the figures behind a similar fraud investigation in New York. Minnesota’s own legislative auditor flagged the 14 high-risk categories now under review, and Governors Tim Walz and Gavin Newsom both called the action political retribution.
