Hey everyone. Welcome back. Good to have you with me.
Our top story today: the Supreme Court just cleared the way for President Trump to rewrite the rules on mail voting right before ballots go out the door. Three justices warned it will inject chaos into an election already on the horizon. And the Postal Service is now arguing your ballot needs to be handled like a replica bomb.
We’ll also get into a trade war with Canada so far off the rails the President is renaming lakes, the United States refusing to condemn Russian strikes on Ukraine’s Independence Day while the CIA Director takes a trip to Moscow, a six figure price tag on skilled worker visas paired with the largest mass visa revocation in American history, and a judge slamming the door on Ghislaine Maxwell while the Justice Department fights to keep the Epstein files redacted.
Do me a favor. Like this video, share it with someone who needs to see it, and subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Let’s get to it.
1. Supreme Court Clears Trump's Mail Voting Crackdown
On Monday, the conservative majority lifted a lower court’s freeze on Trump’s executive order from March. That freeze had been preventing the order from going into effect in twenty three states and the District of Columbia. The Court’s three liberal justices dissented.
So what does this executive order actually do? It directs the Department of Homeland Security to generate lists of eligible voters in each state, and tells the Postal Service to only mail ballots to people on those lists. It also requires those envelopes to be upgraded with security features like barcodes.
It’s important to note that the Supreme Court still hasn’t ruled on whether the content of the executive order is actually legal. The justices simply said that the lower court didn’t have any business blocking the executive order because the states hadn’t been harmed yet. Even the majority acknowledged that only “time will tell” whether the order eventually stands.
But Justice Jackson recognized that lifting the freeze has consequences, writing in her dissent that the majority’s ruling “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”
For now the Postal Service is still frozen. Another nationwide injunction from a court in Boston holds. But the administration is scrambling to get that one tossed out, too.
Which brings us to how the Postal Service is defending all of this. On Friday, it published its plan to carry out the executive order if the courts let it stand. And to justify the new restrictions, it reached for some strange comparisons. The Postal Service says your ballot should be handled like cremated remains or like a replica explosive.
Now, of course ballots deserve careful handling. Nobody disputes that. But the whole premise here is that mail voting is dangerous, and it just simply isn’t. Study after study finds noncitizen voting and mail ballot fraud to be extremely rare.
Look, this is a complicated case with a lot of legal nuances. But strip all that away and the question is simple. Should a president get to decide who receives a ballot? Because that’s what this executive order does. I don’t care which party is in the White House. That answer has to be no.
2. Trump Answers Trade War Fears by Renaming a Lake
Trade talks with Canada collapsed Friday night, starting a full blown trade war as 50% tariffs hit about twenty billion dollars of Canadian goods. On Monday, Trump told Canadian leaders to “fall in line” or face consequences far worse, threatening to expand those punishing duties to Canadian vehicles, auto parts, and steel.
Prime Minister Mark Carney said the American demands showed Washington wanted to destroy Canada’s major industries. Then he delivered a line that should worry anyone who cares about American leadership. He said Canada is finding reliable partners everywhere in the world except the United States. And Russia, of course.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford gave his own two cents. Listen to this:
This trade war is not only a foreign policy disaster. There are going to be real domestic consequences, and Ford knows it. Canada just announced its own retaliatory tariffs, and they’re going to hit Republicans where it hurts. The most important states for Republicans to hold this November are right on the border. Susan Collins said that new tariffs on Canada are a mistake, pointing to Maine lobster, blueberries, and lumber. Republicans in Michigan have to be sweating too.
So how did the President respond to these concerns? He announced he is giving serious consideration to, drum roll, renaming Lake Ontario.
He wants to call it Lake America. He even posted a map with the new name in his favorite color. How nice.
We’re in an economic brawl with one of our largest trading partners. Families are going to pay for it at the register, and Republicans are going to pay for it at the polls. And once again, our president is playing with names.
3. Fifty Countries Back Ukraine, Trump Won't Sign
Yesterday was Ukraine’s Independence Day. Thirty five years since it broke from the Soviet Union, and four and a half years since Russia tried to take it back.
At the United Nations, fifty countries marked the day with a joint statement reaffirming Ukraine’s sovereignty, condemning Russia’s invasion, and calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Nothing radical. Every EU member state signed, even the Moscow-friendly ones like Slovakia. Britain, Japan, Canada, Australia, and South Korea also joined.
But the United States did not. Fifty countries asked for a ceasefire, the same thing this White House says it wants, and Trump would not put his name to it. And this is not the first time. He passed on a similar statement in May, and another back in the fall of 2025.
But while the administration stayed quiet in public, they were busy talking to Russia in private. This morning, CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a secret trip to Moscow, and neither government will say why. To facilitate the meeting, administration officials reportedly asked Kyiv not to strike Moscow, St. Petersburg, or northern Russia early this week, and Ukraine agreed.
It appears to be Ratcliffe’s first visit to Russia since his appointment. The last time a CIA director made that trip was back in November of 2021, to warn Putin against invading Ukraine. So what is Ratcliffe doing there? Right now, I’m honestly not sure, and I think it could go either way.
I served with John Ratcliffe in the House. I don’t love the guy, and I don’t trust a single person inside this administration. But I will give him this: as Trump’s CIA Director, he has been the most pro-Ukraine voice in the room. He is the one keeping our intelligence flowing to Kyiv, and he reportedly keeps Trump on board by briefing him on Russia’s losses, more than forty thousand troops a month. His theory, according to one official, is that Trump does not like losers.
So it’s possible this is a real warning. That he went to Moscow to tell Putin, face to face, to stand down.
But with this administration, you really never know, and the timing is hard to ignore. On the same day the White House would not publicly support Ukraine’s sovereignty, its CIA Director showed up in the Russian capital. Is this a warning to Putin, or is it a deal being cut over Ukraine’s head? We’ll have to wait and see.
4. White House Celebrates Mass Visa Revocations
The Associated Press reported yesterday that the State Department is preparing to revoke up to two hundred thousand business and tourism visas, going back a decade, from people who have applied for asylum. If implemented, it would be the largest visa revocation effort in American history. Most of these people have cases still pending. They came here legally, asked for protection the right way, but now the government is punishing them while they wait.
But that wasn’t the end of it. The same day, DHS proposed charging employers over one hundred thousand dollars for most new H-1B visas, the program tech companies and hospitals use to hire skilled workers from abroad. A judge struck down the first version of this fee in June as an unconstitutional tax, so the administration is simply trying again.
So that is the policy. Now look at how the White House chose to tell you about it, from their official account.
White House employees, paid by you, decided the right way to announce the largest visa revocation in American history was to celebrate and make it look fun. Not necessary. Not regrettable. Fun.
These are real people with real cases still pending, and the official position of the White House is that their fear is a punchline. It’s pure cruelty, but that’s nothing new from this administration.
5. Judge Shreds Maxwell Appeal as DOJ Hides Epstein Files
Maxwell filed the petition herself without a lawyer, asking the court to throw out her conviction. But the judge said her claims were all meritless and frivolous, resting on speculation, distortions, and outright falsehoods. He warned that any further appeal would not be taken in good faith.
Maxwell argued that documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act proved her rights were violated. But the judge looked at the same documents and found the opposite. Where those new files were relevant, they actually incriminated Maxwell even more.
Let’s go through the history. Convicted in 2021 on five felony counts for helping Epstein sexually abuse girls, Maxwell lost on appeal and the Supreme Court refused to take her case. But in July of 2025, the second in command at the Justice Department interviewed her personally, and soon after she was moved from a federal prison in Florida to a cushier facility in Texas. Weird, right?
The DOJ also recently said it would appeal a court order requiring it to strip redactions from some of the Epstein files: email exchanges with Epstein about sexual activity with young women, including minors, plus FBI interview notes from a woman who says Trump abused her when she was underage. That court had determined the redactions violated the transparency law Congress passed and Trump himself signed.
In other words, a federal judge is telling Ghislaine Maxwell she’s exactly as guilty as the jury said. And at the same time, Trump’s own Justice Department is in court working to make sure you never get to read what she did, or who else was in the room.
As a reminder, releasing these files was one of Trump’s main campaign promises. And look, politicians say things to get elected and then ignore the issue once they’re in office. It wouldn’t be the first time. But this is different. While this administration calls the whole thing a nothingburger publicly, it is actively fighting its own campaign promise behind the scenes. In court. With your money.
So we have to ask ourselves, why are they working so hard to hide nothing? I don’t have the answer. But somebody in that building does.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Pennsylvania confirmed today that two unvaccinated Lancaster County residents have died of measles, marking the state’s first measles deaths in 35 years and the first reported anywhere in the United States this year. The deaths land in the worst measles year this country has seen since 1991. Pennsylvania’s health secretary, Dr. Debra Bogen, said the disease was largely eliminated for so long that many Pennsylvanians no longer understand how severe it can be. She urged people to get the MMR shot, calling it safe and the best protection available. Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order pushing doctors to split up that shot, claiming that “together there could be a possibility they are quite lethal.” On Sunday, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was asked on CBS’s Face the Nation to clarify the president’s comment. After host Margaret Brennan pressed him repeatedly, Oz said, “The MMR vaccine is not a lethal vaccine.” Brennan also asked GOP Florida gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds about the outbreak, which he blamed on “rampant illegal immigration.” CDC data says only 16 of the nearly 2,800 cases this year came from international visitors, and 94 percent involved people who were unvaccinated or whose status was unknown.
The Washington Post reported today that ticket sales and donations at the Kennedy Center collapsed after Trump put his name on the building. Confidential budgets and board documents show revenue had already slipped in the ten months after Trump’s takeover, but both ticket sales and fundraising fell off a cliff after the board voted in December to rename the center after him. The center was on track to miss its revenue target by nearly $100 million, with a projected $23 million deficit. A Kennedy Center spokesperson blamed prior management and said Trump’s name had brought in new donors, and the board’s own resolution this month insisted the center “would be in financial ruin” without him, but the documents say otherwise. In June, a Justice Department lawyer told a court that renaming the center after Trump was saving it from financial collapse. One week earlier, the center’s own projections showed the opposite. Trump took over the Kennedy Center in early 2025, replaced the board, and installed himself as chairman, and artists began canceling and patrons stopped showing up. The Trump-led board voted earlier this month to close the building for two years for renovations and put his name back on the front.
