Hey everybody. I’m Terry Virts, and I’m filling in for Adam for the next few days while he’s traveling overseas. I’m super excited to be back on the show.
Anyways, onto the news.
Our top story today: the Trump administration wants to change who counts as a person in the census. A proposal released yesterday would exclude millions of immigrants from the 2030 count, including people here legally, and drop questions about race that have been on the census since 1790. That count decides how many House seats and electoral votes each state gets, and how federal money is divided. The Constitution says to count everyone. But this proposal would skip the people Trump doesn’t want counted.
We’ll also get into the desperate promises Trump is making to save the midterms, a mystery group dumping 50 million Trump-aligned dollars into tight races, an Elon Musk website harvesting voters’ personal data, and the European investigators who say the DOJ has stopped answering their questions about Jeffrey Epstein.
So 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's Census Power Grab
Yesterday, the Commerce Department released a proposal to overhaul the 2030 census. Under the plan, the count would include only U.S. citizens and green card holders. Everyone else would be excluded, including people here legally on temporary status. The proposal would also drop the census questions on race and ethnicity, which have been asked in some form since the very first count in 1790.
The census is much more than a headcount. It decides how House seats and electoral votes are divided among the states, and how hundreds of billions of federal dollars get distributed. Leave millions of people out, and states with large immigrant populations lose seats and lose funding. Drop the race questions, and it becomes much harder to know when a group is getting left behind.
And the proposal ignores the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment says House seats are divided based on the “whole number of persons in each State.” Not citizens. Persons. When Trump tried to add a citizenship question in his first term, the Supreme Court shut him down. New York’s attorney general has already said she’ll sue over this one.
The census may sound boring, but it’s the bedrock of representative democracy. While the President floods your feed with AI images and memes, he’s pursuing structural changes like this one. All the noise is meant to distract us from the real damage he is doing to our country that will take years to clean up.
2. Trump Tries to Buy Your Vote
Last night, in his convention speech, Trump reached a new level of grift, offering a 5,000 dollar payout to every adult citizen if Republicans keep control of Congress in November. He’s calling it the “Trump Dividend.”
A payment like that requires congressional approval, which seems pretty unlikely when you do the math. Estimates put the cost at about 1.3 trillion dollars, which is roughly 70 percent of the entire discretionary federal budget. Chip Roy, a Republican congressman from Texas, said he’d like to know how anyone plans to pay for it.
And Trump has done this before. Last November, he promised 2,000 dollar tariff checks by the middle of this year. But it’s September and those checks never went out.
On Hannity last night, JD Vance was asked whether the plan is an attempt to buy votes. Here’s his response.
So the answer is tariffs. But even before the Supreme Court struck down most of Trump’s tariffs in February, they brought in about 200 billion dollars a year. Now it’s a fraction of that. These checks will never go out, and Trump knows it. But just one more lie can’t hurt, right?
He made an even bigger promise before the speech. Asked about the war with Iran, now in its seventh month, Trump told reporters it would end immediately after the election, and that oil prices would come tumbling down. Have a listen:
Compare that with new reporting from the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s own top advisers, including Vance and Rubio, have warned him the war could last through the end of his term. These aren’t Trump critics. This isn’t TDS. This is his own cabinet.
So voters are being offered two things: a new check from a guy who never sent the last one, and an end to a war that the President’s own advisers don’t expect. In case you couldn’t tell, this is what desperation looks like.
3. Trump's Mystery Midterm Money
For months, Republicans in tough races have been asking Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., to open its 400-million-dollar war chest. This week, money finally started flowing. But not from MAGA Inc.
On Tuesday, a brand-new group called No Going Back PAC reserved about 25 million dollars in ads. By Wednesday, that had grown to roughly 47 million, spread across several races.
The New York Times reports the group is linked to MAGA Inc., according to two people familiar with the plans. It has the same treasurer. Its website is nearly identical.
Here’s the loophole. No Going Back PAC was incorporated on September 1st. Because of that timing, it isn’t required to file its first report on donors until October. By then, early voting will already be underway in a number of states. In campaign finance circles, this is called a pop-up PAC. It spends now but doesn’t have to make any disclosures until later.
So the money Republicans were begging for is arriving. But the voters watching those ads won’t be able to see who paid for them until ballots are already being cast. As usual, “the most transparent administration in history” would prefer to keep you in the dark. So just what are they hiding, and where is that money coming from?
4. Musk Is Harvesting Voter Data
If you’ve seen ads telling you to verify your voter registration at Vote Safe, be careful. In the past week, Elon Musk’s super PAC, America PAC, has spent over 180,000 dollars driving people to the site ahead of the midterms.
What does Musk want? Judd Legum reports on his substack that he’s after your private information.
When you use Vote Safe to “check your registration,” the site collects your home address, cell phone number, IP address, voter registration status, and every link you click. In short, Musk learns far more about you than you learn about your registration status.
And he stands to profit at your expense, as if he needs any more money. Vote Safe shares your information with business partners so they can track your online activity and push targeted advertisements. And the site just changed its privacy policy, stripping out the language that limited what it could do with your data.
This isn’t a first. In 2024, America PAC spent 800,000 dollars sending voters to a similar site, which collected their information without ever helping them register. And just this summer, North Carolina election officials flagged another Musk-linked group for mailing out outdated registration forms.
The pattern is hard to miss. Musk is capitalizing on the chaos orchestrated by the Trump Administration around who can vote and how. Worried voters land on his websites looking for answers, which he abuses for personal gain.
If you are concerned about your voter registration, please visit the Election Assistance Commission’s website, vote.gov, which sends you directly to your state’s registration page. They will give you information without taking yours.
5. DOJ Blocks the Epstein Investigation
The first batch of the Epstein files, released last fall, includes named associates from countries around the world. Several of those countries have since opened their own criminal investigations, but they face a significant obstacle: the U.S. Justice Department.
Last month, a spokesperson claimed that the DOJ “has not refused to assist any jurisdiction investigating potential criminal conduct related to Jeffrey Epstein.” The Washington Post found otherwise. When foreign investigators ask for help, the Justice Department refuses or ignores them. European allies in particular have come away empty-handed.
In Norway, a former prime minister and two former diplomats are under corruption investigation over their ties to Epstein. Prosecutors there asked for records. But the request hasn’t been approved.
In Poland, the prime minister and his government are investigating possible links between Epstein and Russian intelligence. Polish prosecutors requested unredacted documents in April, and have yet to receive a response.
And in Britain, where a former ambassador and a former prince are under investigation, the Telegraph reported last month that the Justice Department wouldn’t hand over unredacted files.
Such requests typically move through mutual legal assistance, a routine procedure countries use to share evidence in criminal investigations. The DOJ office that handles them has long faced operational challenges, from high staff turnover to oversized caseloads.
Refusing to help our allies investigate the world’s most notorious child predator fits a pattern we’ve seen at home. This administration has dragged its feet and resisted releasing information at every turn. The same government that promised to share this evidence is doing everything in its power to keep it secret. And Trump sits at the center of it all, protecting himself and his powerful friends.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
James Talarico held a food drive in South Dallas on Wednesday, positioning it as direct counterprogramming to President Trump’s midterm convention happening just miles away. The Democratic Senate nominee stood beside more than 20,000 pounds of donated groceries with a clear message for supporters: “while we’re here serving our neighbors, they are toasting to their own corruption.” His campaign noted that the 20,000-pound figure was a deliberate contrast with the $20,000 ticket price reportedly charged to some Republican convention attendees. The counterprogramming push also extended beyond the food drive. The Texas Democratic Party ran its own Dallas event Wednesday, paid for a mobile billboard attacking Paxton, and rallied behind on a former Republican county judge who called Paxton the most corrupt politician in Texas. Meanwhile, Ken Paxton spoke at the convention in order to rally traditional conservative voters that may have become disengaged by his record of corruption. Amid this stark contrast in approach, polls currently show a tight race. Talarico carries a narrow lead according to most surveys, as Paxton has recently softened his hard-right messaging to carve into the moderate base
President Trump said Wednesday he would consider pardoning Michael Cohen, his former personal attorney who served prison time and later became one of his most prominent critics. Speaking to reporters before departing for the GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Trump said “if everything checks out, it’s something I would consider,” adding that “what they did to Michael Cohen was a disgrace.” Trump claimed that Cohen recanted the testimony against him, after his former attorney admitted that prosecutors had coerced his initial statement. Even though Cohen has made no formal retraction of anything in the legal or congressional record, the two have been on a reconciliation path lately. Trump appeared on Cohen’s radio show last month, and Cohen was spotted at the Dallas convention on Wednesday. That’s a stark turn from 2019, when Cohen called Trump a racist and a con man before Congress. And from 2024, when he served as the primary witness in the Stormy Daniels hush money trial that made Trump a convicted felon.
