Hey everyone. Happy Thursday, and welcome back.
Before we get into it, I just want to take a quick moment for the people of Venezuela, who got hit with two terrible earthquakes back to back last night. To everyone there, and everyone here with family and friends in Venezuela, we’re thinking of you.
Our top story today: the President went up to Capitol Hill yesterday to meet with his own party, and the meeting boiled over into a shouting match. At one point, the President of the United States told a sitting Republican senator to sit down. These are supposed to be the people on his side. He treated them like the enemy.
We’ll also get into two Republicans flipping their Iran war votes, the President admitting he leaned on a prosecutor over election results, the post office threatening to hold back your mail ballot, and NATO’s leader buttering up the President with fancy gold charts.
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 Visit to Capitol Hill Gets Heated, Ends in Shouting Match
Yesterday, Trump went to the Capitol for a private lunch with Senate Republicans. On paper, it was supposed to be a show of unity. What actually happened was a blowup.
The fight was about Iran. A day earlier, four Senate Republicans had broken with the President to support a resolution reining in his war powers, and he wanted to know why. According to senators in the room, he spent most of the lunch going after his own party.
Punchbowl News reported that he spent roughly 90% of the meeting railing against the Republicans he calls RINOs, among them Lisa Murkowski, Bill Cassidy, and Mitch McConnell.
Then it got personal. When Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy stood up to push back, Trump told him to sit down. Multiple outlets reported the President called Cassidy a lunatic to his face. Cassidy, who lost his primary this year after Trump endorsed his opponent, did not deny it.
On his way out, the President told reporters it had been a great meeting. Then he said this:
Lisa Murkowski walked in late, right as the President was airing his grievances about her. She was not impressed. And on the voting bill Trump keeps demanding, she had a message for him: “If you don’t have the votes, sir, you don’t have the votes.”
Even his allies could not pretty it up. Senator John Cornyn, who also lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, said the President closed by preaching unity after spending the previous hour doing the opposite.
You don’t scream at the people who already agree with you. Unless the point was never agreement. The point was obedience, and he wanted everyone in that room to see what happens when you don’t fall in line.
2. The GOP Bends the Knee When the Vote Actually Matters
Walking through the Capitol complex after the GOP lunch with the president, Bill Cassidy sounded like a man who would not back down. But by midnight, it was a different story.
After the blowup, Cassidy was invited to the White House for a private briefing on Iran from Vice President JD Vance and special envoy Steve Witkoff. He came out saying it had addressed “many of my concerns.”
Then he went back to the Capitol to vote.
Tuesday’s resolution, the one that rebuked this war, was symbolic, and it still stands. But a second resolution was moving through the Senate, a version that would actually carry the force of law and land on the President’s desk. Last night, that one came up for a vote.
This time, Cassidy voted no. Rand Paul, who has voted to rein in this war again and again, voted present, saying he wanted to give the President “more space and leverage to negotiate a lasting peace.” Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski held their ground and voted to keep it alive. The motion failed, 47 to 50.
The President was thrilled. He went on Truth Social, thanked Cassidy and Paul by name for switching, and wrote “This vote puts Iran on notice!”
Look, standing up to the president means nothing if you just immediately sit back down. Cassidy has nothing to lose at this point. Obviously we don’t know what was said to him during his briefings on the war, but this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Cassidy take a stand and then back down the second he has the opportunity to actually make a difference.
3. The President Just Bragged About Pressuring an Election
Earlier this month, California held its primary for governor. Under the state’s system, the top two finishers advance regardless of party, and the count takes time because California processes a massive number of mail ballots. The President’s endorsed candidate, former Fox News host Steve Hilton, advanced alongside Democrat Xavier Becerra.
Now of course, that should’ve been the end of it. Instead, the President offered his own account of how his candidate got there.
Hold on. The President is saying he called a federal prosecutor, told that prosecutor to go look at the votes in an election that was still being counted, and is taking personal credit for the result. And bragging while doing so.
We’ve seen this before folks. In 2020, the President called Georgia’s secretary of state and asked him to find the votes to flip the state. He was criminally charged over that call, and we all know what happened a few months later on January 6th.
This, among other things, should be a wake-up call for the midterms. He’s telling you he’s going to challenge results, call prosecutors, lean on whoever he can. So the job is simple. We don’t win these by a little. We win them by so much that there’s nothing left for him to contest. You don’t give a guy like this a close one to play with.
4. The Post Office Could Stop Delivering Ballots This November
Yesterday, Postmaster General David Steiner testified in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, and he confirmed something that should worry every voter in the country. Take a look:
The questioning came from an executive order the President signed in March, which would force states to hand the federal government a list of everyone who requested a mail-in ballot. If a state refuses, the Postal Service would stop delivering that state’s ballots.
This is the same President holding a crucial bipartisan housing bill hostage until Congress adds new hurdles between voters and the ballot box. It’s the same President who just bragged about pressuring officials over a vote count in California. And it’s the same President who gave the keys to our national intelligence to a loyalist, so he could hunt for alleged election fraud they have never been able to find.
Every one of these moves points in the same direction, toward an administration trying to pick its voters instead of the other way around. None of this should be possible in America. In a healthy democracy, no one gets to stand between you and your ballot.
And our legal system agrees. Just as we were preparing the show, a federal judge in Boston ruled the President’s order unconstitutional, blocking the government from withholding ballots this November in states that sued. That is a real win for now. But the White House is expected to appeal, so it is far from settled and we need to keep an eye on this one.
5. Keeping Trump in NATO Now Takes Flattery and Gold Charts
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte sat down with the President in the Oval Office yesterday, with one job to do. Trump has been furious that our European allies sat out his war in Iran, a war he launched in February without consulting them. Ahead of a key NATO summit in two weeks, Rutte had to keep him from turning his constant threats to leave the alliance into reality.
Knowing Trump, Rutte came prepared with flattery:
Obviously the President ate it all up, calling Rutte a “great guy, great leader, great secretary general.”
Look, I want a strong NATO. I am not going to knock Rutte for any of this. He is trying to hold an alliance together with a raging narcissist, and flattery has been his best strategy. And to his credit, he did push back on some of Trump’s Iran claims, reminding him that thousands of American planes flew out of European bases during the war.
The embarrassment here doesn’t belong to Rutte or NATO, it belongs to us Americans. For many years, we led this alliance proudly. We were the steady hand the rest of our NATO allies counted on. But those days are gone. Now, our President’s ego has to be managed like a toddler just to keep us in the room.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Senator Thom Tillis said this week that he regrets casting the deciding vote to confirm Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary, telling the NOTUS podcast that Hegseth “just doesn’t have the experience” and pointing to a “sophomoric sort of execution” at the Pentagon. On the same day, Tillis unloaded on Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, who began mass-firing intelligence officials just days into his new job, calling him “an incompetent sycophant” and predicting his tenure will be “another hot steaming pile of DOGE s***.” Pulte has no prior intelligence or national security experience and did not previously hold a security clearance, which is the first time since the office was created after 9/11 that it has been led by someone in that position.
An internal memo issued by the Interior Department in December, reviewed by the Washington Post and reported Tuesday, instructs National Park Service staff and other department employees to no longer confirm deaths, suspected deaths, or details about severe injuries, which is a direct break from the agency’s longstanding disclosure practices. The Interior Department said the policy is designed to “create a more consistent approach to incident communications across the Department” and is “not intended to conceal fatalities.” Seven current and former park staffers told the Post the policy marks a sharp departure from how the agency has operated in the past. The previous standard was to release as much information as quickly as possible after an incident, because transparency was helping to keep other visitors safe. About 350 people die in national parks every year, or roughly seven per week, across a system that sees more than 300 million visitors annually.
