BREAKING: Trump Fires Every Election Commissioner, Another ICE Murder, Grassley Demands Kash Patel's Receipts, and more...

Top Stories for July 10, 2026.

Note: I am traveling today and not able to film the show. Below is the normal newsletter portion of the show. Thank you for understanding! I’ll be back on camera on Monday.

Hey everyone. Welcome back. Happy Friday.

Our top story today: yesterday, the President fired every single remaining commissioner on the Election Assistance Commission. That’s the bipartisan agency Congress set up after the 2000 recount mess. Its whole job is helping states run their own elections. As of this morning, nobody is legally in charge there. Just a reminder: we are four months away from the midterms.

We’ll also get into ICE killing a Houston father who wasn’t even their target, an airport that now carries the President’s name, Chuck Grassley demanding answers on Kash Patel’s spending, and a Colorado GOP nominee for governor who won’t say how many people he’s killed.

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Let’s get to it.

1. Trump Fires Every Remaining Election Commissioner

Yesterday afternoon, the White House fired the last three members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The two Democrats, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, found out by email.

The lone Republican, Christy McCormick, was asked to resign. A fourth seat had already gone empty in April.

So now this all-important commission has zero commissioners. It takes three of four to approve anything. Which means it cannot approve anything.

Congress created the commission in 2002 after Florida had to recount their ballots in the Bush-Gore election, so it would never happen again. It literally certifies the voting machines your county uses and maintains the national voter registration form. By law it has four members, no more than two from either party, and most of its decisions come down unanimously.

So last year, Trump ordered that commission to rewrite the national voter registration form to require proof of citizenship. They didn’t do it. Why? Because it’s quite literally unconstitutional. And two weeks ago, the Supreme Court handed him the power to fire the leaders of independent agencies. So that’s what he did.

The White House has said the President has the right to remove people who are not “totally aligned with securing America’s elections”. Replacements need Senate confirmation, which always takes months.

Look, this agency helps county clerks buy voting machines and train poll workers. That’s it. The President could not make it do exactly what he wants, and you know what happens when he doesn’t automatically have control over something. This should be a massive red flag to all of us. Trump and his allies seem to be doing everything they can to try and put a finger on the scale in November, including moves like this. We can’t let these stories go quietly, and part of my job here is to highlight them. I will continue doing that.

2. ICE Kills a Houston Father Who Wasn’t Even Their Target

On Tuesday, an ICE officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. A construction contractor who had been in this country roughly thirty five years, and who put three American citizen sons through college. And guess what? Like most of the ICE arrestees, he had no criminal record and was working with lawyers to get his legal status sorted out.

So Tuesday morning, he was picking up the last of his crew to go finish building some houses. And then he was killed.

ICE called it a targeted enforcement operation, but he wasn’t even the target. The New York Times reports the agents were actually looking for two Guatemalan men who weren’t in that van. A Homeland Security official said Salgado Araujo “resembled the target” because agents had spotted white vans at an address weeks earlier.

ICE says he ignored commands, rammed one of their vehicles, and tried to run over an officer, who fired in self defense. His family says his work van and his tools had been stolen before, so he thought he was being robbed. His son says he was scared.

We can’t check either account, because the officers weren’t wearing body cameras. Homeland Security blamed that on government shutdowns.

What do we know? The Harris County Medical Examiner ruled his death a homicide. A neighbor’s video shows him on the pavement beside an SUV, bleeding from the abdomen, calling out for help. The Harris County District Attorney is investigating, but says the key evidence, surprise surprise, is under federal control. Mexico is now moving to pursue criminal charges.

Hundreds of people have marched through the neighborhood protesting the killing. Here is his son:

Look, I’m not going to stand here and tell you I know exactly what happened in that intersection. I wasn’t there and we don’t have footage to look at. But a fifty two year old father with no criminal record, who was not the man they were hunting, is dead on his way to work. The other high profile killings by ICE in January of Renee Good and Alex Pretti were unjustified, as has been most of the aggressive action taken by ICE. We thought things would calm down once Kristi Noem was ousted, but clearly this is a problem intrinsic to the agency, not who is running it. It’s terrible.

3. Trump Gets an Airport Named After Himself, While in Office

Yesterday, Palm Beach International Airport officially became President Donald J. Trump International Airport. The FAA signed off. The airport code is changing from PBI to DJT.

This happened because Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill in March that stripped Florida counties of the power to name their own airports and handed it to the state. The rebranding will cost about five and a half million dollars. Florida taxpayers are putting up half. The airport’s own budget covers the rest.

More than eight million passengers a year go through this airport. And Donald Trump is now the first President in American history to have an airport named for him while he is still in office.

The first plane to land under the new name touched down at five in the morning. It was Trump Force One, the private jet owned by the Trump Organization with Eric Trump on board. Listen to how he explained it:

Three times. Donald Trump has won two presidential elections by the way, Eric. He lost one!

This is happening everywhere. The same day, the Treasury Secretary stood in Tennessee and unveiled the Donald J. Trump Bridge. Earlier this year, the road from the airport to Mar-a-Lago became Donald J. Trump Boulevard. He tried to put his name on the Kennedy Center.

Look, this country names airports after presidents, among plenty of other things. But the difference is this: we do it after they leave office, when history has had a minute to weigh in. This President is doing it for himself, right now, on the public’s dime. And his own son stood on that tarmac and told America the man won three elections. Wouldn’t have the Trump branding without a lie baked in!

4. Even Republicans Now Want Answers From Kash Patel

Before Kash Patel ran the FBI, he had a lot to say about the man who ran it before him. His target back in 2024 was the bureau’s jet:

But according to whistleblowers, Patel has spent his time as director pressing FBI staff to line up recreation on official trips, from helicopter rides to jet skiing. One recalled the pitch he gave a field office: “If you have golf, hockey, fishing, or hunting and beautiful sights, you’re going to see a lot of me.”

And his people fell in line, or risked their jobs. As agents in Brussels were sidelined for not catering to him, he was flown to Milan to chug beers with the US men’s hockey team. The military set him up with a VIP snorkeling tour of a shipwreck. The head of the bureau’s international operations resigned this year, worn down by the demands of his travel.

And after a columnist laid out his lavish lifestyle yesterday, Patel fired back, posting “Nah, my jet ski is gold plated....dumb***.”

But the mockery is getting harder to sustain, because the questions are no longer coming only from the left. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been one of Patel’s most consistent defenders. But new reports revealed that Grassley quietly sent Patel a letter of his own back in May, asking him to list every flight he’s taken and whether he paid the government back. He also wants to know why the bureau bought Patel a fleet of BMWs when it has spent years buying Chevy Suburbans.

When even the man who vouches for you starts asking for the receipts, the problem is not the other party. The problem is you. And Kash Patel still having a job at this point says a lot about this Administration.

5. Colorado’s New GOP Nominee Shrugs at His Own Kill Count

After more than a week of counting, the Republican primary for Colorado governor was called yesterday for Victor Marx, as he narrowly defeated state senator Barbara Kirkmeyer.

A Marine veteran, martial arts instructor, and founder of an evangelical ministry, Marx calls himself a “high risk missionary.” He says he has led more than 150 missions in the world’s most dangerous places, including into ISIS territory to rescue kidnapped girls. He has never held public office. He has never worked in government. And reporters who have tried to verify his story describe most of it as “unprovable.”

His most explosive claim: at seven years old, his abusive stepfather apparently forced him to kill a man. But local police have no record of it, so naturally, questions followed.

So this man wants to run Colorado, control its police, grant its pardons, and command its National Guard. But when he is asked how many people he has killed, his answer is “does it matter?”

Yes. It matters.

Not long ago, the fact that this question even had to be asked would sink a run for governor. But now, it launches one. His own party watched him wave it off, and made him the nominee anyway.

I served over a decade in the Republican Party, but things like this I cannot even wrap my head around. Every week there is a new low, a new thing you would not have believed a year ago, and every week the base rewards it. This is just what Republicans are now. Not conservative. Not serious. Just flying further off the rails by the day.

Some other stories that caught my eye:

• A group of House Democrats released a report today finding that the Department of Homeland Security misused FEMA resources by pulling dozens of staff off disaster work and into immigration enforcement and administrative roles. The report says those diversions strained an agency that was already running short on people heading into hurricane season. DHS has maintained that the reassignments did not compromise disaster readiness, casting the personnel moves as temporary support for a broader enforcement mission. Last August, whistleblowers said roughly 100 FEMA employees, including much of its human resources team, were detailed to help ICE hire toward its goal of 10,000 new agents. That came just weeks after deadly July 4 flash floods in Texas, and while FEMA was already thinned out by hiring freezes and canceled contracts. Federal law passed after Hurricane Katrina was written specifically to stop reassignments like these.

• New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez accused the Justice Department this week of stonewalling his criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch. In a letter to Todd Blanche released Thursday, Torrez said the department has ignored six requests for unredacted Epstein files over more than 130 days. He warned that the delay is eroding the state’s ability to build a case for survivors. The DOJ pushed back, saying it substantively responded to New Mexico’s office last month and welcomes the state’s investigation, and it pledged to help pursue any federal crimes the probe turns up. New Mexico reopened the case in February after Congress forced the release of millions of Epstein files, and state authorities searched the ranch in March. Survivors have said the property was one of the places where they were abused, and emails released this year indicate the FBI never searched the ranch during its original investigation.