Hey everyone. Welcome back and happy Tuesday. Good to have you here.
Our top story today: for a decade, crossing Donald Trump inside the Republican Party was political suicide. I found that out the hard way. My own party censured me for saying out loud what most of them believed in private. I lost my seat over it and I’d do it again. Now Trump’s own political operation is telling Republicans to distance themselves from him. Because with the midterms closing in, he is hurting their chances at being elected. Not helping.
We’ll also get into disturbing new allegations against a Republican congressman that really show the GOP’s hypocrisy, a report showing Trump has made more money in this one term than in the previous 60 years of his life, and the President pushing to cut childhood vaccines just as measles hits a 35-year high. We’ll close with something personal. It’s about why I do this every single day, and how it is only possible because of your support.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Trump's Own Operation Tells Republicans To Run From Him
MS NOW reported yesterday that with the midterms just under 100 days away, the President’s own people are giving Republican candidates the green light to break from him. This has been a career death sentence for Republicans, something I know very well.
Why are they doing this? Because he’s completely underwater on almost everything that matters to voters right now.
An anonymous source said candidates won’t be rushing out to defend his handling of the economy or the war, because the polling shows most people don’t agree with him. Another GOP operative called the Iran War “a Democrat trap”.
Meanwhile, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is completely oblivious to this and is telling us why he’s so confident Republicans will hold Congress:
Apparently there are intercessory prayer warriors on the ground at the Capitol. Now, I’m a man of faith and believe in prayer. But prayer is not a midterm strategy, and it’s a pretty weird comment from a pretty weird dude to suggest it is.
Here’s what this tells me. Behind closed doors, the people who actually run these campaigns know they’re in trouble. And they know exactly who put them there. But until now, you didn’t push back on their dear leader. Not even a little. So when his own operation is the one telling candidates to do exactly that, it proves how bad things have gotten.
2. Republicans Stay Silent On Max Miller's Abuse Allegations
Let’s take a look at how Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, talks about the opposition:
Freaks, weirdos, losers, and crazies. Okay. So let’s talk about Congressman Max Miller, an Ohio Republican, who was one of Trump’s own aides before Trump endorsed him for Congress.
The allegations against Miller are horrifying. His ex-wife, Emily Moreno, who happens to be the daughter of a sitting Republican senator, told police that Miller held a gun on her while she was changing their daughter. Court filings allege he threw burning hot water at her, shoved her against a wall, and struck her during a custody handoff in front of their little girl.
A second woman has accused Miller of the same thing. His ex-girlfriend, Stephanie Grisham, who was Trump's own White House press secretary. She’s suing him right now for breaking the agreement they signed over it.
So how has the mighty Republican Party responded to credible abuse allegations against one of its own, from two women out of Trump’s own White House? Silence.
These are allegations, and Max Miller is entitled to his defense. But it isn’t hard to see hypocrisy here.
Three weeks ago, Graham Platner was accused of rape in Maine. Democrats pulled their support fast. He was out of the race in days. And Republicans spent that week criticizing Democrats for not moving quicker. Kevin McCarthy went on Fox News and bragged that Republicans walk away from bad candidates. Well, here’s your chance to back that up.
And let’s be honest, Democrats did the right thing. But think about what it cost them. They lit their best shot at the Senate on fire because of the allegations.
But Max Miller is just a random Republican Congressman from Ohio who Trump happens to like. And that is enough for the party to look the other way.
3. Trump Is Making More As President Than He Ever Made In Business
A new analysis this week found that Donald Trump has made more money in the last two years than in the previous 60 years of his life combined. Six decades as a so-called business mogul, and he’s made more since re-entering the White House.
His net worth has roughly doubled since 2024. The majority of that comes from crypto. Remember that Trump meme coin he launched days before his inauguration? He takes a cut every single time somebody buys or sells it. Among the people pumping money into that was a Chinese-born crypto billionaire whose fraud charges the administration dropped.
There has never been anything like this before. Obama’s wealth rose from book royalties he earned before office. Biden’s went up about five percent.
Here is Trump telling a crowd exactly how he sees his own record and why he might deserve this fortune:
This guy has the nerve to stand on a stage and tell Americans he’s done more for you than your own mother and father, while your groceries and gas cost more than they did before and his net worth triples. It’s disgusting. The presidency isn’t public service to this man. It’s just another business deal to him, and the most profitable one he’s ever made.
4. Trump Ignored MAHA For 18 Months. Now He Needs Them.
It was revealed yesterday that President Trump has been pushing his health secretary, RFK Jr., to cut childhood vaccines back harder and faster. He wants fewer shots on the schedule. And he wants to break up the MMR, which is the combined measles, mumps and rubella shot. Scientists say there’s no medical reason to do that, and that splitting it means more kids miss doses.
To understand why he’s doing this now, you have to understand who he’s doing it for.
Trump credits the MAHA movement with helping him win back the White House. Early on in his second term, MAHA was viewed as an important bloc, one that could make it possible for Republicans to hold Congress in the midterms. But as time has gone on, Trump hasn’t just ignored MAHA’s priorities. He’s actually consistently gone against them.
MAHA wanted him to do something about pesticides. Instead his EPA kept a weedkiller linked to cancer on the market, and put a guy who used to lobby for the soybean industry in charge of pesticide policy. MAHA wanted microplastics out of the drinking water. His EPA said it was looking at that in April, then quietly took it off the list in June. MAHA got so fed up they tried to get his EPA administrator fired, and he calmed them down by promising them a written plan. That was eight months ago. There’s still no plan.
Then the Supreme Court took up Roundup. MAHA activists were out protesting on the courthouse steps. The Trump administration filed a brief for the chemical company, and the Court threw out a cancer verdict a jury had already awarded. Sixty thousand claims are now effectively dead.
So MAHA is angry, and they’re saying out loud they’ll vote issues over party in November.
Trump is underwater on the economy. He’s underwater on the war. His own political operation is telling Republicans to run away from him. He is losing ground everywhere. So he turned around to the one group he spent a year and a half ignoring and is trying to win them back.
But here’s the thing. Delivering on MAHA’s priorities cost his donors money. Big money. But your kid’s vaccine schedule doesn’t cost him or his donors anything.
And the timing could not be worse. Days ago we learned measles has hit its highest level in this country in 35 years. A disease we eliminated in 2000 is roaring back, and 93 percent of the cases are in people who weren’t vaccinated or whose status nobody knows.
As a reminder, we beat measles. It was gone. It’s back because of exactly this kind of fear-mongering. And the people pushing it aren’t just on the internet anymore. They’re running the government. And they answer to a President who doesn’t care about anything except winning.
5. Your Support Is Making An Impact
On Friday, while the President continued his fight with the Smithsonian, I put out a column about why that should worry all of us. I called it one of the oldest moves in the authoritarian playbook, because museums are exactly the institutions built to contradict their lies.
Yesterday, those words reached an even larger audience on MSNOW. Take a look:
Anchor Nicolle Wallace made sure to tell her audience that this wasn’t some hit piece from a left-wing journalist. It was a dire warning from a former Republican, someone who watched authoritarianism take over his party from the inside. Me.
This is exactly why I choose to do this show every day. Standing up to Trump in Congress was one way to fight for our country. In this moment, spreading the truth as far as I can is another.
And that only happens because nobody can muzzle this show. There’s no party feeding me talking points. No corporate bosses telling me what I can’t talk about. What you hear on this show is what I believe. Period.
That freedom exists for one reason: you. Your support built this show, and your support keeps it independent. It’s a small operation, but we’re growing every single day and making a real impact. Thank you for being part of it.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
The Pentagon formally launched its Europe Posture Review, a six-month study that will decide the future of U.S. troop levels, bases, and military access across the continent. Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official, announced the start Monday and called it a real review designed to push NATO “fast and irreversibly toward Europe taking primary responsibility for its conventional defense.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth first announced the review at a NATO ministerial in Brussels last month, warning that some allies would fail it. About 80,000 American troops are stationed in Europe, and the drawdown has already begun. The Pentagon pulled around 5,000 troops in May and canceled an armored brigade’s deployment to Poland. But Congress already built a floor into December’s defense bill, barring cuts below 76,000 troops without a formal certification to Congress, which this review is not. The review gets underway the same day President Zelenskyy sat down with Trump at the White House, with Russia firing roughly 1,700 drones and 95 missiles at Ukraine over the past week by Zelenskyy’s count.
Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte announced a fifth round of terminations at ODNI this morning, just hours before the Senate is expected to confirm Jay Clayton as his permanent replacement tonight. It was his second announcement in three days, after a fourth round Sunday evening. Pulte says the cuts add up to a roughly 30 percent staff reduction in about five weeks, and he accused the intelligence community of serving “the political whims of the bloated and corrupt elite class.” Pulte still runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency and has been acting intelligence chief only since June 19, after Tulsi Gabbard’s exit. Gabbard had already cut about 500 positions, roughly 30 percent of the office, during her tenure. Trump said publicly that the acting role left Pulte less constrained and that it might be good to shake up the office before a confirmed director arrives.
