Hey everyone. Welcome back. Thanks for being here.
Real quick, I was reading the comments on yesterday’s show and I saw someone ask whether we tape these shows a day or two ahead. We don’t. Everything you’re about to hear was written today and recorded an hour or two before it was posted. Good question, and now you know!
Our top story today: the Pentagon is revolting against Pete Hegseth. The Secretary of the Army walked into the White House last week, told the President exactly how many generals Hegseth has fired, and then resigned. At the same time, the service chiefs are telling Hegseth that the Iran war can’t go on like this.
We’ll also get into the Postal Service whistleblower who says Trump’s mail ballot system was built to fail; the immigration crackdown that’s shrinking the American workforce; the Republican donors panicking because Trump won’t spend his 400-million-dollar war chest on anyone but himself; and the Republican House candidate who got caught betting on her own election.
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Let’s get to it.
1. The Pentagon Revolts Against Hegseth
Dan Driscoll is not a Never Trumper. He’s an Army veteran, a Yale Law classmate and close friend of JD Vance, and a guy Trump trusted enough to send overseas to restart the Russia-Ukraine talks. Last night, the White House confirmed he’s out, 18 months into the job.
The Atlantic reports how it happened. Last week, Driscoll went to the White House and took his concerns straight to the President. He told Trump how many generals and senior officers Hegseth had fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion. Trump was reportedly surprised by the number. Driscoll’s argument was simple: the Army can’t modernize when the people responsible for modernizing it keep getting fired. Then he told the President he was leaving.
The White House asked him to stay through the midterms. But he said no.
So look at where that leaves the Army. Hegseth fired the Army Chief of Staff, General Randy George, in April without explanation. Now, with Driscoll gone, the largest branch of the United States military has no Senate-confirmed civilian leader and no Senate-confirmed top general. In the middle of a war.
And that war is the other half of this story. The Washington Post got a look at the classified Secretary of Defense Orders Book from August 14th, the document that moves American forces around the world. In it, the chiefs of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, along with the four-star commanders for Europe, the Pacific, and Latin America, warned Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and is weakening our ability to respond to threats elsewhere, including here at home. The Navy’s top admiral and three of those combatant commanders formally wrote “non-concur.” In military language, that means: we will follow the order, but we want it on the record that we disagree.
Hegseth extended the deployments anyway. Some units stay at least through September. Others are now ordered to stay into 2027. The 82nd Airborne’s deployment just got stretched to a full year.
Yesterday, the Vice President was asked about the munitions we’ve burned through. Watch how he handled it.
It’s always Biden’s fault. They really need to come up with a new excuse. This war started on February 28th of this year. Every missile fired since then was fired on this administration’s orders. And as I’ve said many times, they have been reckless in the way they’ve used our munitions. It’s almost like the people running the military have no idea how to run the military. That’s the reason we are in this position. Not Biden.
2. USPS Insider Says the Ballot System Was Built to Fail
Mail voting for the midterms officially starts this week. This morning, a Senator released a whistleblower report from a USPS official with knowledge of the agency’s plan to carry out Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots.
In case you missed our show on that executive order last week, here’s some quick background. In March, Trump ordered the USPS to impose his preferred restrictions on mail voting. For ballots to go out, states would have to submit voter information to a federal portal and print a high-security barcode on the envelope, among other restrictions.
Last week, a federal judge in Boston blocked key parts of that plan, finding the Postal Service has no authority to control voting by mail. The administration is appealing, and the whole thing will probably land at the Supreme Court.
But according to the whistleblower, despite the court’s freeze, the USPS kept drafting their plan anyway, hoping to have some parts ready by September 1st. That’s today. According to the whistleblower, the compressed timeline resulted in pure chaos: insufficient testing, shifting goals, and sloppy mistakes. In the final stretch, multiple officials described the project with a two-word phrase I can’t say on this show.
So what are the consequences if this rush job makes it through the courts? The most important point is the new system’s zero tolerance policy. If one ballot doesn’t pass verification, the whole batch goes back. The whistleblower says that could delay ballots by the thousands and keep states from mailing even more. The report says that “catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug.” The Senator who released the report called it “a system that is intended to fail.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if Trump really thought voting by mail was insecure, he wouldn’t trust the USPS with his own ballot. But he does. That’s because this isn’t about the handful of fraudulent ballots among the tens of millions cast every cycle. It’s about the millions of Democrats that vote by mail. They want to suppress Democratic votes, and if that fails they’ll settle for injecting as much chaos as they can into the process.
We saw the same thing with redistricting. This administration will reach for any dirty trick in the book to cling to its majorities, and they’ll do it fast. Because apparently we need these security measures ASAP. But the Iran war? The cost of living? No rush there. Where you find that sense of urgency tells you a lot about what this President truly cares about. It’s not our troops abroad, and it’s certainly not your wallet. All he cares about is him and his buddies staying in power.
3. Trump's Deportation Machine Is Shrinking the Economy
The Congressional Budget Office now expects 2.3 million fewer working-age Americans this year than it projected at the start of 2025. Federal Reserve economists think total population growth could come in under two-tenths of a percent, the slowest since 1951, when the Korean War pulled young men out of the count. Since January, the labor force has shrunk by more than a million people.
Job numbers tell the same story. From 2022 through 2024, employers added more than 230,000 jobs a month. Over the past year and a half, that’s down to about 30,000. The unemployment rate hasn’t budged. Trump’s economy isn’t handing jobs to Americans; it’s running out of workers.
So the administration went looking for a win. Yesterday Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin held a press conference in Michigan to announce what they billed as an unprecedented fraud crackdown on truck drivers. They’re shutting down 110 commercial driving schools, demanding licensing data on immigrant truckers from every state and citing thousands of violations of English proficiency requirements.
The administration claims these immigrant drivers are a hazard on the highway. A reporter questioned that narrative, noting that foreign-born truckers were involved in only 17 fatal crashes last year. That’s about 1% of the total by the Department of Transportation’s own numbers. Unsurprisingly, Mullin dodged the question.
Obviously, big rigs are dangerous. If a driver doesn’t have the right training, they shouldn’t be on the road. I don’t think anyone disagrees with that. I hear a plan to get a few bad drivers off the road. But I don’t hear a plan to get good drivers on the road. As usual, the administration would rather point the finger and make flashy edits on X. Immigrants are the usual punching bag, of course. But sometimes old habits die hard. Listen to a comment Mullin made at that same press conference:
The Biden administration is failing the American people. Present tense. In September of 2026. This administration loves to talk about “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but it looks like they have some hang-ups of their own. Mullin is a little newer, so maybe he needs a reminder: this administration has been in power for almost two years. It has a majority in both houses. If something’s not going well, maybe you need to take a look in the mirror.
4. GOP Begs Trump for Cash
MAGA Inc., the President’s super PAC, is sitting on more than 400 million dollars. It’s September. And Republican donors want to know why the money isn’t moving.
So far Trump’s war chest has backed Darline Graham with 827 thousand dollars to help a wildly incompetent candidate win her Senate runoff in South Carolina. And it has even been weaponized against other Republicans, most notably helping sink Thomas Massie in Kentucky. That’s just about it.
Politico talked to seven GOP donors and fundraisers who each echoed frustrations. Some chided his lack of urgency, stating, “He’s sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars... And we’re in September”. Others accused him of greed. “This is for him, this is for his purposes. It’s not about getting other Republicans elected. He doesn’t care about that.”
What did they expect? Trump has only ever been interested in serving himself.
No GOP candidate is hurting worse than Ken Paxton in Texas. After pledging blind loyalty to Trump, Paxton secured his endorsement and a victory in the primary. Now he is tied with Democrat James Talarico ahead of the November election. And Trump still has yet to repay his loyalty.
Here’s Louisiana’s GOP Senator John Kennedy on Fox News Sunday:
“We need help from the President… but he hasn’t committed to it.” Hear that? From a party that has refused to denounce its dear leader, that’s a cry of desperation. Trump has forced their hand. While Republicans try to preserve seats made vulnerable by the President’s atrocious record, he has refused to offer a dime for seats that will actually decide the majority.
But the story only gets worse for the GOP. The Washington Post reports that Trump is only interested in touting his own record. While advisers have hoped to invest in individual races and local issues, Trump has told aides he wants ads to feature his name, his reputation, and his second-term record. And let me remind you: his approval rating is at a historic low.
The Democrats are going to make this election about him. And he is determined to make it about him, too. The GOP is tied to the mast of a sinking ship.
5. GOP Candidate Caught Betting on Her Own Race
Having once served as Trump’s assistant Secretary of War for cyber policy, Laurie Buckhout is currently the Republican nominee in North Carolina’s First District. She initially lost to a Democrat before mid-decade redistricting handed her another shot at the seat.
But she may have exhausted her political lifelines. Yesterday, the prediction market Kalshi announced that it had suspended her for three years and fined her about 2,600 dollars. Why? Because she had placed bets on her own race.
Kalshi bars candidates from wagering on contests they can influence. She admitted to violating that rule and released a statement: “I bet on myself. Literally.” She called it a dumb mistake. Her opponent called it something else: a candidate treating a congressional election as a chance to cash in.
Time and again, Republicans fall into the same line of thinking. That political office is not about representing constituents or serving the country. It is simply the means for financial gain. And that understanding comes from the very top.
The same day that she faced suspension, Kalshi handed down the first lifetime ban in its history. That went to former GOP Congressman George Santos, who made about 17,000 dollars betting that he would not attend Trump’s State of the Union. Let me repeat: he bet on his own attendance, which is entirely under his control.
This is the same George Santos who got seven years for fraud. Trump commuted his sentence last year. So don’t be surprised when that permanent ban disappears. Trump’s son is an advisor for the company. And the corrupt playbook never changes.
Dozens of federal judges say they are working in an “increasingly hostile landscape of threats, harassment and intimidation,” according to a Brennan Center report released Monday. The report draws on interviews with 35 sitting and retired federal judges appointed by every president since Jimmy Carter. Asked about Trump’s attacks on judges, a White House spokeswoman told the Washington Post they are a form of free expression and that the administration “cares deeply for the safety of all members of the Judicial Branch.” The judges tell a different story. One built a safe room and drilled the family on what to do if someone got in after their home’s floor plan was posted online. Another had anonymous pizzas sent to the homes of his children and siblings after the president and his allies accused him of bias, and the Marshals ended up guarding his house for four months. Security incidents of “significant concern” jumped 57 percent last fiscal year and are on track to rise again, according to the judiciary’s own numbers. Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, said what is new is having the executive branch itself openly hostile to the courts.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Monday that Trump may keep building his White House ballroom, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the three liberal justices in dissent and calling the project “likely unlawful.” The unsigned majority order said the historic preservation group that sued lacks standing. They argued national security concerns favor letting construction continue, while declining to say whether the project itself is legal. Trump posted that he was “pleased” and that the ballroom can now be finished “without any further contingency, doubt, or threat.” And Attorney General Todd Blanche called it a “no-brainer for national security.” Crews demolished the East Wing last October on Trump’s orders, but Congress never appropriated money for the $400 million project or approved it. A Circuit panel ruled 2-1 earlier this month that the construction violates laws requiring congressional sign-off for building in Washington, and Roberts wrote that his colleagues were twisting precedent to toss the suit on standing grounds. The practical result is that the ballroom will almost certainly be finished before any court decides whether it was legal to build.
