Hey everyone. Welcome back. Thanks for being here.
Yesterday we told you that ICE backed down and suspended traffic stops after two deaths in a week. Well, that lasted 24 hours. This morning the President overruled his own administration in a rant on Truth Social and ordered agents back on the road.
We’ll also get into a judge finding documents about putting ICE agents at polling places, a bipartisan board finding Elon Musk broke the law trying to buy votes, our best AI chips going to a country that just happens to be invested in Trump’s crypto company, and a judge catching this administration censoring the very people it claims to be protecting.
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. Trump Overrules His Own Administration on ICE Traffic Stops
Yesterday, ICE told its agents to stop making vehicle stops after two men were killed in a single week. Neither man was the target of the operation.
This morning, the President decided that was too logical for him, and reversed his own administration’s decision.
In a Truth Social post, Trump said “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E. ‘s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”
He also ranted about how Democrats want the traffic stop gone, but that it won’t happen on his watch. He told agents to go back and do their job. And then he signed off with this: “Keep those Crime Stat Records coming!”
I wonder if the two men killed by ICE this week are in those crime stat records he’s talking about. He knows about the killings. But he hasn’t even addressed them yet.
This wasn’t even a rogue policy he had to stamp out. His own border czar, Tom Homan, called it a short pause to make sure agents are, quote, “doing the right thing.” Susan Collins, a Republican senator, personally asked Homeland Security to stop the vehicle stops after one of the killings this week happened in her state.
Yesterday I said that the traffic stops pause was an admission of wrongdoing, and even a sign of hope that ICE was on the way to being reformed. Today, Trump told us exactly how long an admission lasts around here. One day. Two men are dead, one of them shot in front of his 3-year-old daughter, and the President’s takeaway was to keep those crime stats coming. These innocent people are being turned into a sick, twisted scoreboard for this deranged president on a power trip.
2. ICE Caught Lying About Agents at Polling Places
Democrats have been suing to find out whether the Trump administration plans to put federal agents at polling places for the midterms. For months, ICE told the court it had no documents about that. None. Zero pages.
Then Democrats pointed out what ICE agents are already doing. Last month, two of them confronted a poll worker at a voting site in Syracuse, New York. During an actual election.
And suddenly, ICE’s lawyers changed their story. This week, a judge revealed that ICE is now saying it has more than 11,000 pages that fit what Democrats asked for. Zero pages, to more than eleven thousand. Someone wasn’t telling the truth the first time.
They still haven’t handed over a single page, by the way. And there’s less than four months until the midterms.
For the record, armed federal agents at polling places have been illegal since 1865. But when has the law stopped this administration? Never! Todd Blanche has endorsed the idea, and listen to how he dodged this question today:
Also, the President of the United States has literally said he should have sent the National Guard to seize ballot boxes in 2020.
If there’s truly no plan to put agents at your polling place, it should be the easiest thing in the world to disprove. Just hand over the pages. The fact that they won’t tells you plenty. It’s just another one more piece of how they’re planning to handle an election that they’re scared of losing.
3. Wisconsin Finds Probable Cause Elon Musk Bribed Voters
The Wisconsin Elections Commission, which has three Republicans and three Democrats, voted 5 to 1 to refer two complaints against Elon Musk to the Brown County District Attorney.
This is about the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Musk and his groups dumped more than 20 million dollars into it. And then he posted an offer online: a million dollars to people who voted. After he deleted it, he said he actually meant he would pay people who signed his petition against activist judges. And then he showed up in Green Bay handing out giant checks:
It’s a crime to offer anyone anything of value to convince them to vote. And the commission found probable cause that Musk’s post did exactly that.
His lawyers have said it was free speech, and that the money was about activist judges, not any candidate. The DA has 40 days to decide.
We haven’t heard Elon Musk’s name in a while. But remember how big of a role he had in the Trump administration before the president decided he was expendable. This race was before their falling out. Elon was a close ally of the president, and bribed people to vote. The fraud the Trump administration thinks is happening in elections has literally always come from them. They’re projecting what they see on a day to day basis. Not hard to do when it’s all you think about every day.
4. Our Most Sensitive Technology Goes to Trump's Business Partner
Last week, the Commerce Department quietly rewrote the rules on who gets advanced American AI chips. The UAE, which until now sat in the same restricted tier as China, was promoted to the group with our closest allies. Their companies can now buy chips license-free, an opening that could be worth billions.
The administration says the UAE earned it by pitching in on Trump’s Iran campaign, but even that questionable bargain is not the full story. Days before the President’s inauguration, the UAE’s national security advisor secretly bought a five hundred million dollar stake in the Trump family’s crypto company. That same advisor is the chairman of G42, a state-backed AI development company. When Todd Blanche was asked if it was a conflict of interest, watch where he goes:
He can’t actually answer the question, so he changes the subject to Biden. No surprise there. But Biden is the one who blocked these chips from the UAE in the first place, concerned that they could be sent to China. Even conservative commentators agree that the UAE has not “demonstrated the capability to keep a data center secure.”
Look, export controls exist for one reason: to keep our best technology out of the wrong hands. They are a national security tool, not a party favor. And this one got waved through over objections on the President’s own side, just to benefit his business partner. That is not an alliance being rewarded. It’s Trump paying somebody back.
5. Court Rules Trump's Researcher Crackdown Violates the First Amendment
Yesterday, a judge froze the State Department’s policy that denied and revoked the visas of some foreign researchers. Their offense? Studying disinformation and hate speech online. Several had already been deported.
Rubio rolled the rule out back in May of 2025, originally aimed at foreign officials responsible for censoring Americans. The first person it hit was a Brazilian judge who forced Elon Musk’s app X offline and jailed Brazil’s former president for trying to overturn an election. It was later used on an EU politician who wrote the online speech law used to fine Musk.
But the rule kept growing, sweeping in academics, fact-checkers, content moderators, and more. Private citizens, with no government power to threaten anyone. Only an interest in how lies spread online.
So the judge’s ruling was blunt, finding that the policy violated the First Amendment by targeting people “on the basis of viewpoint.” And the judge noted that the administration’s warnings had worked. Researchers stopped publishing. They skipped conferences. Some made plans to leave the country.
That is exactly how censorship works in a country that still has a First Amendment. They can’t pass the law, so they make an example and let the fear do it for them. Their rule may have been struck down this week, but the damage has already been done.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
New reporting shows President Trump’s holding company took a $2 million payment last year from Base Group, the lead investor in a South Korean aluminum company. The money surfaced in his annual financial disclosure in late June, labeled only a “nonrefundable development fee.” At the same time, that company’s affiliate, Korea Aluminium, was fighting steep penalties before Trump’s own Commerce Department for allegedly routing Chinese-made aluminum through South Korea to dodge tariffs. The Trump Organization says the payment is tied to an unannounced golf course project, not the trade case, and its chief legal officer called any other suggestion “pure fiction.” But Base Group has worked their relationship with the Trump family for close to decade, selling the family’s wine across South Korea and hosting Eric Trump at its Seoul offices all while that Commerce case stays unresolved.
The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday by a vote of 308 to 117. The bill would make daylight saving time permanent and end the twice-a-year clock change, but states could still opt out and stay on standard time if they act before it takes effect. Sponsor Vern Buchanan, a Florida Republican, says the switches disrupt schedules “for no good reason.” President Trump, who pushed for the bill, called its passage “Great News for America.” Now it heads to the Senate, where this fight has stalled before. The chamber passed a nearly identical bill in 2022, but this time the pushback is coming from senators like Tom Cotton, who does not want to lock in winter sunrises as late as 9 a.m., and Majority Leader John Thune, who says he does not want a mandate that was “tried once before and repealed.”
