Hey everybody. Thanks for being here.
Before we start, today marks 25 years since September 11th, the day that changed our country forever. May we remember the nearly 3,000 people we lost, and the firefighters and police officers who ran toward the danger to save them. We will never forget their heroism. With that, let’s get started.
Our top story today: the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s enemies just lost the man running it. Joe diGenova, a longtime Trump loyalist, was brought in to speed up the so-called grand conspiracy case against the people who dared to investigate Trump. That investigation led to dozens of subpoenas but zero charges. And yesterday, he quit.
We’ll also get into the GOP officials fighting Trump’s mail ballot scheme, the FCC censoring James Talarico again, Democrats competing in deep-red states, and Vice President JD Vance inching away from Trump on his unpopular war with Iran.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Trump's Hand-Picked Prosecutor Walks Out
Since last summer, the Justice Department has been running what it calls the grand conspiracy investigation, based out of the U.S. Attorney’s office in South Florida. The theory is that the officials who investigated Trump over the past decade, from the 2016 Russia inquiry to the Mar-a-Lago documents case, were part of a criminal plot against him. Dozens of subpoenas went out, reaching all the way up to former directors of the FBI and CIA.
In April, Trump brought in Joe diGenova to take over the investigation. DiGenova is a longtime Trump ally who helped with the effort to overturn the 2020 election, and he hadn’t worked as a prosecutor in decades. According to ABC News, he pitched himself to Trump as the man who could get this case moving.
Yesterday afternoon, he resigned by letter to the Attorney General. And on his way out, diGenova told the Post, quote: “if you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.”
By the time the AP reached him, he was walking that back. He said the quote was taken out of context, that there’s plenty of evidence, and that it just takes time to get there. But then he added that some people want to get there faster than others.
Either there’s no evidence, or there’s evidence but the President wants charges faster than a prosecutor can responsibly bring them. Neither is a good look for a case that’s supposed to be about restoring the rule of law.
And this keeps happening. In the last year and a half, this case has burned through an Attorney General, a career prosecutor, and now the man hired to save it. Trump and his allies have always sold this as a slam dunk. Blatant corruption against him, obvious to anyone who looked. But their own hand-picked prosecutors keep coming back with nothing. If a decade of blatant corruption were really sitting there in plain view, somebody would have found it by now.
2. Republicans Fight Trump's Ballot Scheme
This one has been a little confusing to follow, so let’s start with a quick recap. Back in March, Trump signed an executive order that would make every election office in the country redesign its ballot envelopes and check voters against a new federal portal before mailing ballots. The courts stepped in and blocked it. But the administration keeps asking the Supreme Court to bring it back. So far the Court hasn’t budged, and the rule is on hold.
Then on Wednesday, something remarkable happened. Six Republican secretaries of state, the people who actually run elections in their states, asked the Supreme Court to keep Trump’s rule blocked. In total, thirty-eight current and former election officials from ten states signed the brief.
They’re not making a political argument. They’re not even arguing the legality of the rule. They’re just saying it’s too late. Some states have begun mailing absentee ballots, and others are preparing to in the next few weeks. Their argument is simple: late changes breed confusion, confusion keeps eligible voters from voting, and a chaotic election erodes confidence in the result.
The New York Times reports that election officials are in limbo as they wait for the courts to act, unsure whether they’ll have to make major changes in the middle of an election.
The White House says this is about election integrity. But the Republicans who are actually on the ground running the elections say the fastest way to break an election is to change the rules while it’s happening. And they are exactly right.
3. Trump's FCC Censors Talarico Again
On Wednesday night, Jimmy Kimmel told his audience that his interview with James Talarico would not air on ABC. It went up on YouTube instead. Kimmel said the reason was pressure from Trump’s FCC, which he said has threatened him, his show, ABC, and its local affiliates over guest bookings the administration doesn’t like.
For almost a century, the FCC has had an equal time rule to prevent broadcasters from favoring candidates from a particular party. But talk shows have always been treated as one of the many exceptions to this rule. That’s why Kimmel could interview Trump himself in 2015 and 2016 without a problem. But in January, Trump’s FCC changed that guidance, and talk shows lost their exemption.
Since then, the FCC has been particularly interested in Texas, opening an inquiry into Talarico’s appearance on The View. Under pressure, CBS lawyers blocked Stephen Colbert from airing his interview with Talarico. In April, the FCC ordered early reviews for eight ABC-owned stations years before they were due. And now Kimmel has been targeted.
So twice this year, a candidate in one of the most important Senate races in the country has been pushed off network television by a federal agency.
But why is the administration so scared of Talarico? It probably has something to do with his opponent. Even the GOP is struggling to make the case for their nominee, Ken Paxton.
Fox interviewed Paxton this week. Take a look at what they put on screen.
It’s a long list indeed. Fox News is as friendly as it gets for Ken Paxton. And even they couldn’t interview him without putting his investigations on screen the whole time.
And Paxton’s biggest supporter? Here’s how he talks about him:
This is not a one off diss, by the way. Trump has gone on this tangent so many times that we had a hard time picking just one clip for the show. If that’s the best Trump can do for his handpicked candidate, it’s no wonder the administration is trying to keep Talarico off the air.
4. Democrats Surge in Red States
Last Friday, Kansas’s Republican senator launched an attack ad against his Democratic challenger, Adam Hamilton, in a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic senator in nearly a century. Hamilton considered it a compliment. Trump carried Kansas by at least 14 points in all three of his campaigns. Yet Hamilton is running a tight race for the seat, which he had considered a long shot a couple of months ago.
These unconventionally competitive races are taking place across the country.
The AP reports that Republicans started this cycle confident they’d hold the Senate. That control is now up for grabs. Democrats have to win four seats; and they are polling competitively in six states: Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio, followed by Alaska, Iowa, and Texas.
Control over the House is the same picture. Democrats need a net gain of just three seats to take the chamber. Their campaign committee just expanded its target list to 58 seats, including a dozen districts Trump won in 2024. And the latest Reuters poll puts Democrats up five on the generic ballot.
What explains this trend? Just follow the numbers. The days at war, the cost of gas, the price of groceries. And the historically low approval rating for a failing president.
During the Republican convention last night, that same president asked the crowd to raise their right hand and take a pledge. Have a listen:
A pledge to the greatest president in history. A pledge to vote whether registered or not. A pledge to cheat like hell. The White House will tell you it’s a joke. That Trump didn’t mean to encourage his supporters to do the very thing he has accused Democrats of for his entire presidency.
But that’s the closing message of a two-day convention built to save the Republican majority. Not a plan. Not a record. Just an oath to the worst president in history. And all the Democrats have to do is let him keep talking.
5. Vance Backs Away From Trump's War
Following the close of the convention, The Washington Post described JD Vance as looking more like Trump’s heir apparent than ever. Trump has continued a close working relationship with Vance. And his supporters have responded in kind, chanting “JD!” as he walked on stage and “48” during his speech, hoping that he might become the 48th president.
But at the same time that Vance has embraced MAGA support, he has attempted to subtly distance himself from Trump’s highly unpopular agenda. Nowhere is this more evident than the Iran War.
The New York Times reports that Vance recently called in U.S. military commanders for an unfiltered assessment of its progress. According to officials, what he heard was significantly worse than what Secretary Hegseth and the administration has led the public to believe.
And he made his thoughts clear during the convention by calling on Charlie Kirk. “Charlie hated war,” he said. A free thinker who often disagreed with the administration, he added. But they might as well have been his own beliefs. The Times reports Vance opposed this war from the very start.
Vance is the frontrunner to lead this party after Trump. And he sees the writing on the wall: a war facing bipartisan opposition, a president sinking in the polls, and an increasingly disengaged movement. So he’s making a bet. Keep the MAGA base close, but start building an exit from its least popular commitments.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
Congress is suddenly scrambling to catch up with regulations after a warning about the grave threat of AI systems. The Washington Post reports that dozens of lawmakers rolled out proposals to regulate advanced AI models. Rep. Ro Khanna called for a new federal AI agency modeled on nuclear and aviation regulators, House Democrats are weighing a select committee on AI, and Sens. Ted Cruz and Amy Klobuchar are pushing a bipartisan bill targeting AI-enabled nuclear and biological threats. A few Congressmen weighed in directly: Klobuchar said “it’s clear we need to act now and not wait,” while Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote that Congress is “far behind where we should be” on technology. This legislative activity was spurred by a viral warning from a departing Anthropic researcher, who claimed that the front-running developers of AI are building systems they won’t be able to control. Whether any of it becomes law is another question. Congress has never passed federal legislation governing AI models, past working groups have produced little beyond road maps, and lawmakers face a shrinking calendar ahead of the midterms
The Iran War’s economic shockwaves are redrawing the trade routes from and across the Middle East, which have shifted towards a return to land-based shipping. The Economist reports that six months of cyclical closure of the Strait of Hormuz has forced the region back onto land routes. Syria’s transport minister Yarob Badr confirmed that 1,300 Iraqi trucks are making a ten-day round trip through the desert each day to reach Syria’s Mediterranean port of Baniyas. That convoy now carries roughly 5 percent of Iraq’s pre-war oil exports. The shift also extends beyond trucking. Gulf leaders agreed mid-war to fast-track a $250 billion railway from Kuwait to Oman, Iraq’s prime minister just ordered expedited progress on a $4.6 billion pipeline from Basra toward Syria, and a Saudi telecom firm signed an $800 million deal to run fiber-optic cable from Europe to Asia through Syrian territory. Sea shipping is still far cheaper, six times cheaper than rail by Badr’s estimate, and many of these projects may never be built. But the war is pushing Middle Eastern neighbors to trade with each other in ways decades of diplomacy never managed.
