Hey everyone. Welcome back. Hope your week is off to a good start.
We’ve got breaking news as President Trump announced the U.S. military has assessed that Iran shot down an Apache near the Strait of Hormuz — and that America is going to retaliate.
Amazingly, the two U.S. soldiers on board were pulled out of the water alive by an unmanned Navy drone boat — and that rescue deserves a minute on its own.
I want to speak to you as a former military pilot for a second: when you put on the uniform, the thing you hold onto is that if something goes wrong, somebody is coming for you. Nobody gets left behind. It’s a promise that serves as a foundation for the entire U.S. military and the men and women who risk their lives for our country. For a long time, keeping it meant risking more lives to save the ones already in trouble. This time, we sent a machine into harm’s way instead of another crew — and two soldiers are alive this morning because of it. That’s a glimpse into the future of warfare, and we’ll see a lot more of it soon. So let’s celebrate that our soldiers are home safe as we look to the top stories of the day.
We will also get into Trump getting booed at the NBA Finals. Ken Paxton’s lawyer endorsing a Democrat. Mike Johnson on cutting Social Security and Medicare. And Republicans crying fraud in LA.
One quick thing before we dig in. Yesterday was our first day as a podcast, and we shot straight up the charts and we’re sitting right alongside some pretty big shows. So thank you so much for the support and if you haven’t yet, go follow and rate the show on whatever platform you get your podcasts.
1. President Trump says that Iran shot down an American helicopter — and that we're going to retaliate.
Here’s what happened. A U.S. Army Apache went down off the coast of Oman overnight with two soldiers on board. Both were rescued within about two hours and are in stable condition.
For most of the day, that rescue was the story. The crew wasn’t picked up by a ship or another helicopter — they were found and pulled from the water by an unmanned Navy drone boat. Central Command says it’s the first time American forces have ever carried out a rescue like that.
That Apache was patrolling the Strait of Hormuz — the channel that Iran has effectively choked off since this war began. Our aircraft are out there enforcing a U.S. blockade on Iranian oil, squeezing Tehran to force a deal. So this wasn’t an accident in quiet skies. It was an American helicopter going down in just about the most dangerous water on the planet right now.
Until moments ago, we weren’t sure what brought it down. Now we’re being told it was Iran — and President Trump is saying we have to strike back. Iran hasn’t claimed the attack, but the President says the assessment is clear, and he wants to respond.
We’ll have to wait and see what that retaliation actually looks like, and what it means for the peace deal that was supposedly days away from being real. All I know for sure at this juncture is that the war is far from over and our troops will likely be in much more danger in the days to come. Let’s keep them in our thoughts.
2. Trump Got Booed at the NBA Finals, Then Fell Asleep in His Seat
Trump went to Game 3 of the NBA Finals on Monday night, the Knicks against the San Antonio Spurs, in his hometown of New York City. It made him the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals game.
When his face went up on the jumbotron during the national anthem, the building booed. Loudly. Take a look.
Reporters inside the arena described it as thunderous. The boos were constant until the camera moved off of Trump and onto the players below.
Then, later in the game, the cameras caught the President with his eyes shut, head dipping, for the better part of a minute:
Keep in mind that Trump attending the game was quite the ordeal. It shut down 10 square blocks of midtown Manhattan, which is already notoriously over-congested, and forced fans through TSA-style screening that took hours to get through.
After the game as the president was getting ready to board Marine One, a reporter asked him how he thought the reception went. “I think mostly cheers,” he said. “It was loud, and it was very enthusiastic.”
Well it was definitely loud. Enthusiastic? Only in its disdain.
And there’s no way to prove that Trump’s attendance caused this, but the Knicks lost for the first time in the series. This guy really can’t stop winning.
None of us are surprised at Trump’s lying about the boos at this point. But he does the same thing with stuff that actually matters. Same move every time — if the facts are inconvenient, he just describes a different set of facts. And nobody around him pushes back. They just repeat it.
3. Ken Paxton’s Impeachment Lawyer Endorses Opponent Talarico for Texas Senate Seat
As a refresher, Ken Paxton is the attorney general of Texas, and the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, after he was endorsed by Trump and able to beat longtime Senator John Cornyn in the primary. Back in 2023, the Texas House impeached Paxton over multiple allegations that included bribery. He survived the eventual trial in the Senate.
One of the lawyers who defended him in that impeachment is a man named Dan Cogdell. He didn’t represent Paxton just once. He defended him in the impeachment and in a long-running securities fraud case.
This week, he endorsed Paxton’s opponent. State lawmaker James Talarico. The Democrat in the November election.
Cogdell said his old client has “lost sight of his core mission, which is to represent the people of Texas.” He said Talarico believes in unity over division, and that the country needs that right now. This is the same lawyer who, just last year, called Donald Trump the greatest threat to democracy this country has ever seen.
Talarico welcomed him in. “Even if you’re Ken Paxton’s impeachment lawyer, you have a place in this campaign,” he said.
Political handicappers still think the TX Senate race favors Paxton. But the GOP will have their hands full as long as former Paxton allies are publicly defecting to Talarico.
4. Johnson: GOP Plans to cut Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security Next Year
Here’s Speaker Mike Johnson on a radio show yesterday talking about the future of Social Security and Medicare:
He went on to justify this plan, saying “desperate times call for desperate measures.”
He’s right that these are desperate times. They just don’t show up where he’s looking. They show up at the kitchen table. In the grocery bill. In the rent. That’s the emergency people are actually living through.
When you’re 40 trillion dollars in debt and you decide it’s finally time to get serious about money, where you choose to look says everything. And Mike Johnson looked at Social Security and Medicare — things people paid into their whole working lives — and decided that’s the place to start.
Not the war. We’re nearly 30 billion dollars into the fight with Iran, by the Pentagon’s own count, and that number keeps climbing. Not the tax cuts, the ones that mostly landed with the people at the very top. That money was apparently fine.
So this isn’t really about the debt. If it were, everything would be on the table. It’s about which Americans get asked to sacrifice — and which ones never do.
5. Pratt Loses LA Race, Republicans Echo Trump’s Fraud Claims
In Los Angeles, the Trump-backed reality star Spencer Pratt was headed for the November runoff — until yesterday, when a Democratic candidate passed him for the second spot as more votes were counted. Now, Pratt is out.
We walked you through the president’s reaction yesterday, as he cried about “rigged elections” with no evidence in his eventful NBC interview. Unsurprisingly, the party has fallen in line behind him since then. Here’s Speaker Johnson:
Democrats vote by mail far more than Republicans do, so the ballots counted last lean Democratic almost every single time. Political operatives and election officials predicted this exact pattern before one late vote was tallied. But when Trump’s preferred candidates lose, he cries fraud and the party falls in line.
With one notable exception: the Republican candidate in California’s election for governor is saying these claims of fraud are baseless:
Funny how that works. When the Republican wins, there are no cries of foul play.
Look, a Republican reality star finished third in a Los Angeles election, as anyone would expect. But it was enough to have the entire Republican party pointing fingers, with no evidence at all, just because the President is mad. And if the President is able to activate his operatives this easily for a Mayor’s race that Republicans were always going to lose, who knows what he can do in the races that actually decide who runs the country.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
President Trump has left the door open to taxpayer payouts for rioters who assaulted police officers during the January 6 attack, reviving a fight his own party thought was settled. Attorney General Todd Blanche had previously promised lawmakers under oath that the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund was dead, after a GOP revolt nearly brought Trump’s legislative agenda to a standstill. But on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump called the fund a “great idea” and declined to rule out payments to rioters convicted of assaulting police. Republicans like Josh Hawley and Nick LaLota pushed back hard, with LaLota saying people caught on video hitting cops “shouldn’t get a dime from our government.” Sen. Adam Schiff announced legislation this week that would bar anyone convicted of January 6-related offenses from receiving any taxpayer-funded federal payout.
On Monday night, President Trump told reporters that negotiations with Iran were in their “final throes” and that a deal was possible in “two or three days.” This morning, Israel and Lebanon exchanged fire again. Trump has made nearly identical predictions repeatedly since the war began in late February, and it’s unclear how much closer the two sides actually are to an agreement. Iran and Israel had just exchanged strikes over the weekend, with Iran launching missiles at Israel after Israeli strikes hit a southern suburb of Beirut, prompting Trump to post on Truth Social urging both countries to immediately stop “shooting.” Tehran has consistently said any deal must include a ceasefire in Lebanon, a condition Israel has so far refused.
