BREAKING: Trump Unleashes His Spy Chief on the 2020 Election, Dems Expose Trump's Shakedown of America's 250th Birthday, The Economy Is Getting Worse, and more..

Top Stories for July 2, 2026.

Note: I am on airplanes all day today and not able to film the show. Below is the normal newsletter portion of the show. Thank you for understanding!

Hey everyone. Welcome back and happy Thursday. I hope you’re planning a nice holiday weekend with friends and family.

Our top story today: President Trump is telling his hand picked and temporary spy chief that he is free to declassify, in Trump’s words, almost everything, including all records tied to the 2020 election. This is the President turning the tools of our intelligence agencies loose to relitigate a race he lost more than five years ago. He lost the vote, he lost in court, and he is still at it, claiming there are mysterious documents that need to be declassified.

We will also get into a congressional report on Trump’s shadow-funded takeover of America’s 250th birthday, a June jobs report that came in at half of what economists expected, an active duty Air Force major arrested at the Capitol for calling to impeach the President, and troubling new questions about Mitch McConnell’s health.

1. Trump Tells His Temporary Spy Chief to Declassify “Whatever You Want”

On Wednesday, Trump told reporters that Bill Pulte, his inexperienced acting Director of National Intelligence, has his blessing to declassify just about whatever he wants, including material tied to the 2020 election. Take a look:

Remember who Pulte is? He’s the random housing agency guy Trump put at the top of the entire intelligence community last month. No national security background at all. He has already moved to cut hundreds of intelligence jobs. But sure, he can declassify whatever he wants!

And think about how backwards this is. Trump had to backtrack on Pulte after bipartisan backlash and nominate someone else for the job. Then he held up that guy’s confirmation hearing. So Pulte is just running the show in the meantime, and Trump is handing him the keys to our most sensitive secrets and telling him to declassify whatever he wants.

NBC News reported a White House task force has been gathering thousands of pages of documents, most of them about the 2020 election, with the goal of declassifying them in a way that supports Trump’s fraud claims.

And the FBI is in on it as well. The Bureau has been running a probe out of Fulton County, Georgia, built on fraud claims that state investigators, the courts, and Trump’s own former attorney general already looked at and rejected.

It’s important to note that declassifying carelessly can burn our sources, expose how we gather intelligence, and ultimately put our own people in harm’s way. A former intelligence expert said the NSA and CIA are “losing their minds.”

Friendly reminder: the election happened six years ago. Has anybody ever pouted over something that long, let alone a president of the United States? It’s ridiculous and obviously dangerous rhetoric that seems like it’ll never end. He needs to get over it, but we all know he never will.

2. House Democrats Expose Trump’s Shadow Takeover of America’s 250th Birthday

On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee, led by Ranking Member Jared Huffman, released an investigation into how the country’s 250th anniversary got taken over.

Trump, ironically, created Freedom 250 by executive order. He chairs it, JD Vance is the vice chair. The Trump loophole is that they tucked it inside the National Park Foundation, a nonprofit that technically doesn’t have to disclose a single donor.

Congress set aside about 150 million dollars for a bipartisan commission that spent a decade planning an anniversary for everyone. Instead, that money got routed through the Interior Department to Trump’s Freedom 250. By this spring, Freedom 250 had pulled in tens of millions in federal dollars, while the real bipartisan commission was left staring at a 100 million dollar shortfall.

And it wouldn’t be Trump’s project without being pay-to-play. Sponsorship packages reportedly start at half a million dollars for VIP access and speaking slots. Give a million bucks and yay, you get a picture with the president! You really can’t make this up.

And that brings us to Saturday, the Fourth. Trump is throwing himself a party on the National Mall, and yesterday he told a bunch of matching cowboys what to expect:

Perfect, who wouldn’t want to watch a rambling Trump speak for hours in 107 degrees? And his speech is slotted so late that the fireworks, billed as the largest display in the country’s history, could slip past midnight into July 5th.

I mean, this is all insane. The president has managed to Trumpify something that is sacred. The country’s 250th birthday should belong to all of us. Instead, the President of the United States built a shadow company to sell access to it and scheduled the whole thing around a really long speech about himself. Trump has planned a celebration of Trump, as if he’s the one celebrating a 250th birthday. It’s not about you Mr. President, and history will show that.

3. Economic Numbers Continue Keep Getting Worse

This morning, the June jobs report came out, and it was a miss. Economists expected around 115,000 new jobs. We got 57,000. That’s half. And it gets worse: the government also went back and revised April and May down by a combined 74,000 jobs. So the past few months were weaker than we were told.

Now, the unemployment rate actually ticked down to 4.2 percent, and I promise you the White House will wave that number around. But be careful with it. When hiring is this weak and the jobless rate falls anyway, it usually means one thing: people are giving up and dropping out of the workforce entirely. They’re not counted as unemployed because they’ve stopped looking. That’s not a healthy economy.

And then there’s your paycheck. Wages are growing about three and a half percent a year. Sounds decent, until you look at prices. Groceries, rent, gas, all rising faster than that. So even if you have a job, even if you got a raise, you’re falling a little further behind every single month.

Ask Americans what they care about most right now, and the answer isn’t even close. It’s prices. It’s the cost of living. Poll after poll, it’s the number one issue in the country, and Trump’s approval on the economy just hit a record low. So what is the President focused on this week? Declassifying documents about an election from six years ago. Planning his fireworks show.

Whether it’s because he doesn’t have an answer or because he’s just that easily distracted, I honestly don’t know. But he isn’t spending his time talking about fixing the economy. And the rare times he does bring it up, he’s telling us everything is great. It’s not. We all feel it, and the numbers back it up.

4. Air Force Major Handcuffed at the Capitol After Demanding Trump’s Impeachment

Yesterday, an active duty Air Force major named Jason Watson stood outside our nation’s Capitol, with powerful words about our nation’s leaders:

And he laid out his case well: the military strikes that went around Congress and got service members killed, the handing of sweeping power to an unelected donor, the trading of pardons for donations.

After his speech, Major Watson walked up the steps to Congress holding a sign that read “Impeach, Convict, Remove”. Moments later, he was put in handcuffs.

Look, I wore that same uniform, and I know that there are rules for officers. Under military code, an officer cannot publicly attack the President. Troops stay out of partisan politics while in uniform. For good reason.

But Watson knew all of that too. He knew he was likely ending a 17 year career, his pension, maybe risking his freedom. And he did it anyway.

I am not going to tell you an officer breaking military rules is a small thing, because it’s not, and he will pay for it. But we all took that oath to the Constitution. Not to any one man. And he put everything on the line to stand up for it. How many people in Washington can say the same?

5. McConnell’s Health Problems Continue as Questions Grow

Reports yesterday revealed that back on June 14th, Senator Mitch McConnell was found unconscious at his home in Washington. He was apparently rushed to the hospital in response to a possible cardiac arrest.

First and foremost, I will say that I sincerely hope he is okay. And I mean that. Nobody should wish ill on a man fighting for his health.

But at the time of the incident, his office only released a very brief statement: “Senator McConnell was admitted to the hospital this morning. He is receiving excellent care”. A week later: he’s working with staff and “continuing his recovery,” but won’t be voting. That’s it. No timeline. Nearly three weeks later, we don’t know his condition or whether he’s even been discharged.

Look, McConnell is 84 years old. He chairs the subcommittee that funds the entire Defense Department. And this is his second hospitalization just this year, on top of years of falls and freezing episodes we all saw on camera.

I said this about Congressman Kean yesterday, but I’ll say it again. These are public jobs. America deserves much more than two sentence statements. We deserve leaders who can actually show up and do the job. McConnell has already announced he’s retiring, but he still has six months left on this term. If you can’t do the job, then focus on your health and resign, so the people of Kentucky are properly represented.

And by the way, if this was a Democrat, we all know how this would be going.

Some other stories that caught my eye:

• Amid a fuel crisis triggered by Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s oil refineries, Putin responded overnight with a barrage of nearly 500 drones and more than 70 missiles, killing at least 20 people and wounding scores of others. Residents sheltered in metro stations after President Zelenskyy warned Ukrainians about a major attack hours earlier. The Kremlin claimed it hit only military sites, even as rescuers pulled civilians from collapsed apartment blocks. Rattled by growing fears of a coup or drone assassination, Putin has refused any compromise with Ukraine and expanded his personal security detail to roughly 800 officers.

• Federal immigration officers arrested Sister Leticia Ugboaja, a 56-year-old Catholic nun from Nigeria, on Sunday as she walked to Mass in McAllen, Texas. They took her rosary, handcuffed her, and drove her to a detention center an hour away. She was released hours later after lawmakers from both parties intervened with the Department of Homeland Security, which never explained why it detained her. Ugboaja is a registered nurse who has served local hospitals for more than a decade and is in the country legally. Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz joined Democrats calling for the nun’s release, saying “a Catholic nun on her way to church is not a threat to our community.”