Hey everyone. Happy Wednesday, and welcome back.
Our top story today: many of us feel Washington is broken and nothing ever gets done. But this week, Congress actually did its job. Republicans and Democrats came together to pass the most comprehensive housing bill in 30 years. Then, in breaking news this morning, the President got in the way, refusing to sign it until his bill to address made-up election fraud is passed. This is the second time in the last couple of weeks we’ve seen the President refuse to sign bipartisan legislation just because he isn’t getting his way.
We’ll also get into the Senate’s rebuke of the Iran war, the mess Pete Hegseth is making at the Pentagon, an administration that keeps burying the truth about people’s health, and the reflecting pool story falling apart.
Ok, let’s get to it.
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1. Congress Passed the Biggest Housing Bill in 30 Years. Then Trump Refused to Sign It
This week, Congressional Democrats and Republicans did something they almost never do. They agreed. Both chambers passed the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, the biggest housing bill in 30 years. The Senate passed it 85 to 5. The House passed it 358 to 32. Those are clearly not party-line numbers. Those are the numbers you get when Republicans and Democrats look at a crisis that’s crushing families and decide, for once, to actually try and fix it.
The bill would tie federal dollars to new home construction, turn vacant buildings into housing, and even put new limits on the Wall Street investors who’ve been buying up single-family homes and pricing regular families out.
As is with all bills that Congress passes, the President had to sign it and was scheduled to do so this afternoon. This morning, his own party’s leaders were on stage taking a victory lap.
Moments later, while they were still standing there, by the way, the president put this up on Truth Social:
“Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT”
So, let’s translate. The President is refusing to sign the most popular thing his party has done all year, until Congress passes a completely different bill, the SAVE Act. That bill would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, to stop a wave of noncitizen voting that study after study has shown does not exist. And Republican leaders have already said countless times they don’t even have the votes to pass it.
He didn’t stop there. He called this landmark housing bill “of minor importance,” and because Senator Elizabeth Warren helped write it, he wrote it off as a “Warren centric housing bill.” Then he demanded Republicans blow up the Senate filibuster to ram his voting bill through.
Look, these are political games at their absolute ugliest. There’s a real opportunity here to help working-class Americans by addressing a true issue in our country. There is a housing shortage in this country. People can’t find somewhere to live that is affordable for them. And this president has the nerve to hold all of those people hostage, tell them their lives and problems finding a home to live in aren’t important, and instead argue that rigging the midterms in his favor is more important. It’s frankly disgusting.
Bipartisanship is so rare in this country right now that you would think any President would sprint to put his name on it, be encouraged by it, and sign it into law. But this one enjoys the chaos. He enjoys the dissent and the partisanship, because all it has done is benefitted him ever since he took office in 2016 and polarized American politics.
We’ll keep an eye on this for you over the next few days, and hope that GOP leaders do the right thing and don’t capitulate with this latest demand.
2. Four Republicans Join Democrats to Tell Trump His Iran War Should End
Yesterday afternoon, the Senate passed a war powers resolution 50 to 48. It directs Trump to remove U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran unless Congress authorizes it.
The House passed its own version earlier this month, and now the Senate has joined it. That makes this the first time in American history that both chambers of Congress have passed a war powers resolution on the same conflict, and they did it during the levels of political polarization we mentioned.
Four Republicans broke ranks to get it done: Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul. One Democrat, John Fetterman, voted no.
The resolution is mostly symbolic. It doesn’t carry the full force of an actual law, and it won’t land on the President’s desk. But the message is impossible to miss.
Just consider the moment this lands in. Trump’s Iran war is now the least popular American war in modern history. Even from the start of the war, less Americans backed it than any U.S. military action going back decades.
The cherry on top? It’s about to get even more expensive. The Pentagon is asking Congress for roughly eighty billion dollars, mostly to pay for this war and refill weapons stockpiles. A reporter asked the President whether Americans really support spending that kind of money while so many families are struggling. What do you think the president said?
Did you catch that? You don’t just support this war, according to your president. You “demand it.” By the way, a Reuters poll found that a mere 24% of Americans think the war in Iran is worth the cost.
When you have a president that is totally out of touch with what the American people want, that’s the exact moment Congress is supposed to step in, and yesterday it finally did. It’s unfortunate that it came in the form of a symbolic resolution, but it’s a step in the right direction.
3. The Pentagon Is Being Run by a Fox News Host, and It Shows
For years General Chris Donahue was widely seen as a future Army Chief of Staff, with the resume to prove it: he was the last American soldier to leave Afghanistan, commanded Delta Force in the fight against ISIS, and was among the first senior U.S. officers on the ground when Russia invaded Ukraine. Few people in the American military understand modern drone warfare better than him. But yesterday, Pete Hegseth forced him into retirement with no public explanation.
Donahue is the latest in a line of senior military leaders pushed out under Hegseth, who likes to say he wants fewer generals and more boots on the ground. For contrast, before his appointment to lead the Pentagon, Hegseth only made it to the rank of major. His full-time job was hosting a show on cable television.
And his lack of leadership experience is clear across the board. Back in April, Hegseth scrapped the military’s flu vaccine requirement, a rule on the books since 1945. He said the flu was no threat to readiness and called it a matter of personal choice. Thanks to old Fox News footage, we can probably guess what choice he made:
Before the mandate was dropped, nearly every trainee was vaccinated. But by the time a flu outbreak tore through Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, only about 40% were. More than 200 recruits got sick. So what did the Pentagon do? It started requiring the shot again for new recruits across the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
This is what it looks like when you hand the most powerful military on earth to a cable TV host. Your best generals gone. Your own recruits are getting sick because you want to look tough about the flu shot. And the country is less safe for all of it.
4. The White House Hid Proof the COVID Shot Works.. What Else Are They Hiding?
In April, the CDC was set to release a study on the effectiveness of this year’s annual COVID vaccine. That is, until Trump appointees suspiciously pulled it, citing issues with its methodology.
But a major medical journal did not find these same issues, and published the study itself on Tuesday. Unsurprisingly, it confirmed what MAGA won’t admit: the shot works. Very, very well. It cuts the likelihood of COVID-related trips to the emergency room in half.
Vaccine denialism is nothing new from this White House, unfortunately. But another medical story circling the administration is new, and a lot stranger.
Yesterday, it was reported that the FDA and drug company Eli Lilly gave one patient special access to an experimental weight loss drug, an unusual move under a program that typically recruits larger groups. The patient was a 79 year-old man when the request was made in April. The diagnosis was severe obesity, sleep apnea and dangerously high blood pressure. And sources indicated that the person seemed very well connected. You can see who this appears to point to.
The White House denies that it was the President, but weirdly Trump himself can’t stop talking about the drug:
And the questions about his health aren’t coming out of nowhere. They’re coming from moments like this:
Now, I’m not saying for certain this mystery patient is actually our bumbling Commander in Chief. There’s not enough evidence for that right now. But this Administration has given us no reason to trust them when it comes to these sorts of things. Or anything, really.
5. The Government's Own Records Say Trump Botched the Reflecting Pool
We’ve been following the saga of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. I sure wish we didn’t have to. But here we are. The paint peeled. The water turned green. And the President keeps insisting this is the work of vandals who slipped in under cover of darkness with knives and box cutters.
Yesterday, the New York Times reported on internal government documents that tell a very different story. Park Service workers did find two small cuts, but they had nothing to do with the issues we’ve seen. Workers watched chunks of paint float to the surface on their own. They tried to kill the algae and couldn’t. And the whole time, administration officials were calling the pool pristine.
In plain terms, the government’s own records point to a botched renovation, not a crime scene.
So how is the White House responding? They are doubling down on the vandalism excuse. Last night, crews started putting up a chain link fence around the pool, along with a solar-powered surveillance tower packed with AI cameras, spotlights, and a loudspeaker. Take a look.
The Interior Department says the fence was always part of the Fourth of July plan, but admits it went up early because of the supposed vandalism.
When the evidence says you botched the job, you can admit it and fix it, or you can build a surveillance tower to guard your own peeling paint and start arresting tourists, and they’ve clearly chosen the second one.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Yesterday federal judges in Texas sentenced eight people the Justice Department called an “antifa cell” to a combined 450 years in prison for an attack last year outside an ICE detention center near Dallas. The DOJ called it the first sentencing tied to antifa since President Trump designated the group a domestic terrorist organization last fall, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said attacks on federal facilities will be met with uncompromising justice. Defense lawyers say the antifa label is being stretched to punish protest, and legal experts have called the sentences “stunningly severe”. The same Justice Department is prosecuting Rep. LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, who faces up to 17 years for allegedly impeding officers during an oversight visit to a Newark ICE facility. Her appeal went before a federal appeals panel today, while twenty former members of Congress, including seventeen Republicans, warned the case threatens Congress’s power to conduct oversight at all.
A lobbying shop founded by former Trump campaign and administration officials has opened a profitable new line of work: lobbying for presidential pardons. Federal disclosures show the firm, Mo Strategies, has already collected $500,000 from its first pardon client. The firm’s president told CBS News he counsels clients on which cases are likely to appeal to this White House, and the numbers suggest a booming market. CBS found more than two dozen pardon-related lobbying registrations during Trump’s second term. The largest, $960,000, was filed for a nursing home operator who pleaded guilty in a $39 million tax fraud scheme and then walked free after serving three months of a three-year sentence. House and Senate Democrats are now investigating whether clemency is being sold in a pay-to-play arrangement.
