Hey everyone. Welcome back and happy Monday. Hope you had a great weekend.
Our top story today: the President was completely humiliated at the White House Correspondent’s Association Dinner on Friday night. He bombed on stage, he attacked journalists by name, and then he had to sit and watch as the journalists that exposed his Epstein letter won the top award of the night.
We’ll also get into a fired 60 Minutes reporter who says she was told to report things that never happened, the President halting his Iran war because we’re low on missiles, new reporting that those deadly boat strikes haven’t stopped any drugs, and warning signs going up outside the Smithsonian as the President continues to try and re-write history.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Trump Bombs the Correspondents' Dinner
It was supposed to happen back in April, but it was postponed to Friday after a gunman opened fire outside the original event. So this was meant to be a somber occasion where the freedom of the press was to be celebrated.
The President, for the first time across his two terms, attended the dinner. And by nearly every account, he bombed it. He rambled, insulted reporters by name, told fat jokes that landed with silence, and was so comedically bad overall that he had to literally ask the room if his jokes were good:
But aside from the President being a terrible comedian, the night played host to a really important moment as well: when the Wall Street Journal won the night’s biggest award for its reporting on the birthday letter the President sent to Jeffrey Epstein. That reporting helped force the Epstein files into public view. Trump is literally actively suing the Journal over that very story for 20 billion dollars. And Friday night, he had to sit in that ballroom and watch the very people he’s suing win an award for it.
He was so butthurt that Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary, actually had to pat him on the back to comfort him. Take a look:
Well that certainly reveals some of what goes on behind the scenes, doesn’t it?
During his monologue, Trump singled out CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, who won an award for her coverage. He called her reporting fake, said she didn’t deserve it, and made a disgusting joke comparing her to a transgender person on a beer can:
As terrible as it is, Trump attacking the press is not new. But I also watched some of those journalists laughing it up with the very administration officials working to tear the free press down. There was a clip going around of NBC anchor Kristen Welker laughing it up with Stephen Miller.
Our free press exists to hold power accountable. The President spent Friday evening mocking the reporters who do that job, and Welker was giggling with one of the proponents of the President’s crazy rhetoric. We don’t know the context but it’s still bizarre to see.
Regardless, the night served its purpose. It was a powerful moment for those journalists to be acknowledged like that in front of a president that we know loves winning awards himself. It’s a step in the right direction, and good on the White House Correspondents Association for not letting the President’s attendance shake them from celebrating a free press.
2. Fired Correspondent Breaks Her Silence on CBS Pressure
Cecilia Vega spent years as a correspondent there, the first Latina in that role in the program’s history. She was fired in May. Last week, at a journalism conference, she spoke out about some of the things they pressured her to do.
Apparently, the new leadership at CBS directed her to put misinformation and political bias into her reporting. She says they pushed her to report things that, in her words, never happened.
She says she was pressured to find and add footage of protesters assaulting ICE agents from the Minnesota killings in January, which would have made the shootings look justified. Her team went looking for that footage. But it didn’t exist.
Vega also said that she was told to find comments from the mayor of Minneapolis that suggested he wanted local police to fight federal agents in the state, even though what he actually said was that that shouldn’t happen.
CBS has said her claims are not based in reality. And of course, this is all alleged.
But if Vega’s claims are even slightly rooted in reality, this is a terrifying prospect to face. Trump yelling fake news from a podium, we can see from a mile away. But this is the free press getting hollowed out from the inside, probably by owners who would rather cut a deal with the President than run a story that makes him angry. And it’s important to note all of this happened after CBS’s parent company settled a lawsuit with Trump and installed new management. That timing isn’t a coincidence.
3. Pentagon Halts the Iran Escalation Over Missile Shortages
For two weeks, we’ve bombed Iran every single night. And the President’s talk was apocalyptic. He kept talking about knocking out their bridges and power plants if they dared to toss one more missile at us.
Then, Friday night, everything stopped. No strikes Saturday. None yesterday. As of today, that’s three nights of silence, and Iran has held its fire too.
According to CNN and the New York Times, at a White House meeting Friday, his own commanders told him that we are running low on Patriot missiles. The CENTCOM commander said the bombing had hit the limit of what it could accomplish, because we had basically run out of targets.
Listen to the terrible spin-job from UN Ambassador, Mike Waltz:
What did all the tough talk actually buy us? Iran said today that it still controls the Strait of Hormuz, and that it isn’t even interested in talking. Americans have been killed. Gas is once again over four dollars a gallon.
This is what happens when you put people in charge who have no idea what they’re doing. The only tool this President has is threats on social media, and it turns out that doesn’t actually do much at all.
4. DEA Assessment Guts Trump's Drug Boat Victory Lap
Since last September, our military has been striking alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, destroying more than 66 of them and killing more than 200 people. The campaign cost more than half a billion dollars in just three months, and to this day, the government has shown no public evidence that any of these boats were even carrying drugs at all.
The administration sold it as a war on fentanyl, but fentanyl doesn’t come here by boat. What moves along those water routes is cocaine. And if you listened to Trump, you’d think not a gram of if was reaching our shores:
But today the Washington Post revealed the administration’s own DEA assessment of the campaign, which found that months of deadly strikes have done nothing to reduce cocaine smuggling. The DEA’s own analysts wrote that price and availability of the drug “have not been noticeably affected,” because the smugglers simply adapted to new routes. And the strikes are actually making it worse, by undermining real drug investigations. Informants have been pulled from the field to avoid our own attacks, and it’s been harder to trace drug networks after killing everyone aboard.
Look, this is the same pattern the administration always follows. It looks tough. It makes a big explosion on video. And it accomplishes nothing, except a body count and an enormous bill. If you actually wanted to stop drugs, this is not how you’d do it. But it was never really about stopping drugs. It was about looking strong, with more than 200 people dead for the show.
5. Trump Orders Warning Signs Outside the Smithsonian
On the Fourth of July, while most Americans were at cookouts and watching fireworks, the White House released a report accusing the Smithsonian’s American History museum of “extreme political activism.” It was an escalation of Trump’s fight with our nation’s keepers of history, and we all know exactly where it started: his ego.
The President has long hated the Smithsonian for accurately displaying details of his impeachments. After pressure from the White House in January, the Portrait Gallery cut those details from his portrait. But after significant backlash, the truth was restored in May. Two months later came this report.
And last week, House Republicans hauled the museum’s director in to answer for it. But in that hearing, it was clear they didn’t really know much about the building they were describing:
As always, MAGA can’t win the argument with facts. Facts are what’s in our museums, and that’s what scares them. So on Friday, the President tried to discredit those facts. Trump signed an executive order putting warning signs outside the museum, telling visitors it contains “inaccurate information.” And he instructed the Interior Department to build its own exhibits on that sidewalk, to overrule the museum standing behind it.
The President of the United States, telling citizens to trust his approved history over our own national history museum. This is what authoritarians have always done. They rewrite the past because they cannot survive the truth. But no matter how hard they try, we will always remember. And we’ll never let it go.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Newly released court documents show that the Trump administration told a federal court it canceled clean energy grants for purely political reasons. In a July 15 filing in a class action brought by University of California researchers, the Energy Department accepted that the grants terminated last October were selected “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state,” meaning whether Kamala Harris carried it in 2024 and whether it has two senators who caucus with Democrats. These cuts affected 284 grants, and were made by the Office of Management and Budget in October 2025. At the time, budget director Russ Vought described the money as “Green New Scam funding” and the White House said it was stopping tax dollars from being wasted. The Energy Department had recommended canceling more than 600 grants, but hundreds of those in states that Trump won were left alone. The administration conceded the point now to avoid discovery, which would have forced it to turn over internal documents to the researchers’ lawyers.
Trump’s order directing the Postal Service to hold mail ballots from states that refused to hand DHS their voter rolls was kept frozen by a federal appeals court on Saturday. The First Circuit ruled 2-1 against the Justice Department’s request to pause a lower court decision, which found the order’s central provisions unconstitutional and blocked them in the 23 states that sued and the District of Columbia for November’s midterms. The administration told the court the challenge was premature because the agencies have not finalized the rules yet, and that the order “does not change anything at all about elections in any State.” But the panel found the states are already absorbing real costs and that the order reaches into their sovereign authority over elections. The case may continue, as the Justice Department has warned it may ask the Supreme Court to step in. Regardless of the outcome, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said publicly that he will pursue criminal charges against state election officials who refuse.
