Hey everybody. Happy Friday. Thanks for being here.
Our top story today: Fox News just fired Maria Bartiromo, one of Trump’s most loyal cheerleaders on television. For years she spread his conspiracy theories on air, and Fox let her, even after it cost them 787 million dollars. But when Fox told its hosts to stay away from the President’s renewed focus on 2020, she leaked those orders straight to the White House. And she got caught. Well, sort of. The White House ratted her out.
We’ll also get into the Justice Department firing the prosecutor who wanted to hold an ICE agent accountable, the Missouri Supreme Court throwing out Trump’s gerrymander, the administration breaking ground on a 250-foot arch nobody has approved, and the House of Representatives taking the rest of the month off.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Trump's Favorite Anchor Is Out
Maria Bartiromo has been at Fox for twelve and a half years. Three shows. Big ratings. And for the last decade, one defining trait: there was no Trump claim too far-fetched for her to put on the air. After 2020, her broadcasts were at the center of the Dominion lawsuit, the one Fox settled for 787 million dollars. And she’s still a named defendant in the Smartmatic case. Until yesterday, she was the only one of those defendants still on the payroll.
So what finally got her fired? According to CNN, NPR, and two media industry outlets, it comes down to July. Trump gave a prime time address pushing a new conspiracy theory that China rigged the 2020 election. Executives at Fox sent written guidance to their producers: don’t give those claims credence on the air. But Bartiromo wanted to cover them. The answer was no. So she took a screenshot of her bosses’ instructions and sent it to senior White House officials.
Fox found out because the White House called to complain. She hasn’t been on the air since August 9th. Yesterday, the network made it official, “effective today,” with no sign-off. Her executive producer was fired too. Fox’s only explanation was that it was a “business decision.”
The reaction from Trump was very predictable.
A true warrior. That tells you exactly what she was to him. Not a journalist. A soldier.
Step back and look at what actually happened. A major news network told its hosts that the President’s election claims were too dangerous to air. The people who know Trump’s audience best, who profit from that audience, saying we cannot repeat what this man says. Bartiromo couldn’t accept that, because somewhere along the way she stopped working for Fox and started working for Trump.
2. Fired for Doing His Job
Yesterday we told you about the ICE agent who shot a Venezuelan man in the leg this January during the Minneapolis crackdown. DHS claimed the agents were ambushed with a shovel and a broom. Video showed otherwise. ICE’s own director admitted the agents gave untruthful statements under oath. The men they tried to scapegoat had their charges dropped.
So what’s changed since yesterday? Two things. First, the Justice Department finally charged that ICE agent. Not for shooting a man in the leg, but for providing a false statement. That charge usually ends in probation. The victim’s lawyer called it grossly undercharged.
Second, the federal prosecutor who wanted to go further is gone. Matthew Evans, a career assistant U.S. attorney in Minnesota, had written to the victim’s lawyers that he believed the office had enough evidence to charge the agent with a civil rights crime. He said Washington blocked him over his strongest possible objections. ProPublica published that letter Wednesday. A day later, Evans was fired. If that wasn’t enough, according to the AP and CBS, he’s now under investigation for obstructing a grand jury.
It’s a pretty stark contrast. A career prosecutor tried to charge a federal agent for shooting a man and lying about it. The agent gets away with a slap on the wrist. The prosecutor gets fired and investigated. The DOJ expects us to believe that they’re carrying on his civil rights investigation, but nobody is buying that.
Meanwhile, the agent is a free man in Texas because Governor Abbott has spent months slow-walking Minnesota’s request to extradite him on state charges. He was released last week after hitting Texas’s 90-day limit for holding a fugitive.
It’s the same old story. What matters to this administration isn’t what you did. It’s who you are. If you’re on the right team, you can shoot a man in the street. But the moment you step out of line, even in the name of justice, your career is over.
The federal government has decided its agents are above the law. Minnesota disagrees. So does the Constitution. And in about nine weeks, the voters get their say too.
3. Missouri Court Throws Out Trump's Map
Quick background. Last year, Trump, knowing he was heading for an electoral disaster, told Republican states to redraw their congressional maps and squeeze out some extra House seats before the midterms. Missouri was one of the first to jump. The legislature carved up Kansas City, slicing Emanuel Cleaver’s district into three pieces to turn a 6-2 Republican map to 7-1. Cleaver has represented Kansas City for more than twenty years.
Residents weren’t having it. More than 305,000 of them signed petitions to put the new map to a statewide vote. The Republican Secretary of State sat on those petitions for months, then rejected them on primary election day, letting the primary go forward on Trump’s terms.
Yesterday, the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously overturned him. The justices wrote that the petition from the voters was “legal, sufficient, and timely.” The new map cannot be used this November, or ever, unless the voters approve it first. The old lines are back, and Cleaver gets to run in his own district again.
Trump quickly complained on Truth Social, calling the old map “Ancient history.” That map is from 2022, by the way. He says the ruling is unconstitutional according to some mysterious “legal scholars,” but argues there isn’t enough time to comply with it anyway. This is the same guy that’s still begging the courts to let him change mail voting rules across the country; apparently there’s plenty of time for that.
This ruling is a big one for Democrats, and makes Missouri one of the only red states to push back against MAGA’s redistricting blitz. Ten other states redrew their maps on Trump’s orders, and most of those maps survived. But Missouri’s citizens found a way to make their voices heard, and they won. It’s a good reminder that MAGA doesn’t get the last word, even in deep red states.
But redistricting isn’t the only dirty trick Missouri Republicans are reaching for this cycle. Thomas Ross, the Republican nominee for a state House seat, was charged in federal court this week with conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance. Prosecutors say he gave his campaign manager a black glove containing a bag of cocaine, and told him to plant it in his primary opponent’s purse or car. He texted that he wanted “extreme egg on the face” of his rival. The campaign manager went to the police instead. Ross won the primary by 33 votes, but the state party chairman is now begging him to drop out.
This is what happens when your prophet is an election denier: the whole party stops caring about the rules. If you can’t win the midterms, just redraw the lines. If you can’t win your primary, no problem: just plant some drugs. Everybody’s doing it!
Luckily, it’s not working. They’re desperate, of course. But as long as the courts stay vigilant and the people make their voices heard, no cheap trick is going to save the MAGA majority this November.
4. Trump Breaks Ground Without Approval
Yesterday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced that excavation will begin on what the administration calls the Great Triumphal Arch within the next two weeks. The 250-foot monument is planned for construction at Memorial Circle, towering over its neighbors, the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.
Burgum called the construction project the end of “a very long wait.” 125 years, to be exact. But he still lacked the patience to wait for basic permission.
The National Capital Planning Commission controls what gets built on federal land in Washington. After a meeting yesterday, it has yet to approve the arch. And it isn’t scheduled to meet again until October. So the administration found its window: build now, and let the commission catch up to the hole in the ground later.
The arch also needs an exception to the city’s 130-foot building height limit, because it’s nearly twice that. The Commission of Fine Arts signed off on the design in May, but only after recommending a smaller version within the limits. Trump refused.
Why 250 feet? The President has given two answers. One is supposedly symbolic: the height marks a foot for every year of American independence. The other seems far more likely, given how he actually thinks. Have a listen:
“Slightly larger than Paris?” For the record, the Arc de Triomphe is 164 feet. His monument is 250. That’s not slightly larger. That’s the whole point. For Trump, bigger is always better, especially when it reflects his monumental ego. Nobody else could surpass him by that measure.
Let’s take a step back and look at the broader pattern. The ballroom went up while the Supreme Court was still deciding whether it was legal. Lake Ontario got renamed by executive order. Now his arch is getting dug into the ground before any vote of approval. The strategy is always the same: pour the concrete first, argue about the permits later.
5. And finally, the GOP is taking the House into vacation for the rest of the month, while the country sinks further into mismanagement.
On Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson was asked a question raised by Thomas Massie about whether he would cancel any of September’s legislative schedule. Here was his response:
Let me reiterate what he said: “Republicans are here to work.” And they will work every day on the calendar, all the way through the end of the month. But Speaker Johnson has never been known as a man of his word.
On Thursday, he canceled the last two weeks of September. After this weekend, the House will work for just four days before leaving on the 17th for six weeks of campaigning. That’s eight voting days, gone.
Johnson offered a timid excuse for the paid time off, claiming that members are “jostling a lot of different priorities” ahead of the midterms. I’d argue the GOP should have only one priority right now: fixing the country they’ve helped Trump sink.
Massie certainly isn’t buying the excuse either. He ran the numbers.
Four full working days between July 24th and November 8th. One hundred paid days off. And this is the same President, he said, who complains that Americans take too many holidays. That we don’t work hard enough. Hypocrisy is Trump’s first language.
So why cancel? Listen, light September schedules aren’t unusual in an election year. But to cut the schedule entirely? That’s revealing. Republicans don’t want their members casting votes on this President’s record two months before the election. Every day the House is in session, they might have to answer for the war, or the prices, or one of his construction projects.
If your best campaign strategy is avoiding your job, that says everything about the job you’ve been doing.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
According to the New York Times, researchers released a 91-page report last week on the OpenAI incident from this summer, when the company’s AI agents escaped their containment, hacked through multiple systems over two months, and breached a major open-AI source hub. The report revealed that the agents coordinated their plans on a covert message board, spoke in code words, and covered up evidence of their actions. OpenAI says it invited the researchers and supported the report’s publication, calling the collaboration “an important precedent for the industry.” But OpenAI also dictated the terms. Investigators only had six days on site and access to a single week of the two-month incident. That period leaves out the part where the agents compromised OpenAI’s own infrastructure. As of now, the reporting of such incidents is completely under the discretion of companies developing AI, and a bipartisan bill designed to create independent oversight is still just a proposal.
Hospital executives told Politico this week that two proposed rules from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would cut their funding even deeper than Congress did last year. The rules crack down on a financing tactic where states tax their hospitals, use that revenue to claim greater federal matching funds, and then the money back to hospitals as higher payments. CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz has defended the changes, claiming “misaligned payment incentives and opaque financing arrangements are driving up costs without delivering better care.” Hospitals are already expected to lose $340 billion through 2034 from the GOP’s Medicaid cuts. If these rules are finalized as proposed, they estimate losing $681 billion more. Some systems are already cutting staff, ending contracts, and slashing beds. One rural Missouri hospital, for instance, has cut its maternal beds in half.
