Hey everybody. Happy Friday. Thanks for being here.
Our top story today: Trump spent yesterday handing out medals to the CEOs of Big Tech and declaring a new Golden Age of American science and innovation. What he didn’t mention is that his own administration is gutting research labs and experienced scientists are leaving the country. And some of the companies paying for his supposed “golden age” are sitting in his stock portfolio. How convenient. We’ll break it all down.
We’ll also get into Democrats’ fiery debate performances, Ken Paxton’s taxpayer-funded vacations, Trump’s own voters telling Republicans to break with him, and the Texas ranchers fighting Trump’s border wall.
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Let’s get to it.
1. Trump Cashes In On Big Tech Deals
At a summit in Washington, Trump gave out the National Medals of Science and Technology. He also announced what he called a “Golden Age” of American innovation, six billion dollars in new science initiatives. Golden for his inner circle of tech companies, maybe. Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, and AMD are putting up most of that money. In return, they get medals and a seat at the table with the most powerful person in the world.
But as for everybody else? The Washington Post reports that the White House is squeezing them dry. Last year, they froze or canceled more than three billion dollars in grants that had already been approved, including 2,500 NIH medical research grants. They tried to cut the National Science Foundation’s budget by more than half. And the list goes on and on.
That’s having a knock-on effect. Faced with such a hostile administration, top universities are cutting admissions to PhD programs. American scientists applied for jobs overseas at a rate 32 percent higher than the year before. And two thirds of research scientists are now telling their best students to stay out of the field.
That’s how Trump plans to drive innovation. By cutting off the people who actually make the discoveries.
So what explains the contrast? Why would Trump hand the keys to a small club of tech companies while starving everybody else? Just look at his stock portfolio.
Trump made 517 trades in August, according to a recent financial disclosure. His largest was Meta stock, somewhere between five and 25 million dollars. He also bought between one and five million dollars of SpaceX bonds. Which is significant because, just two days later, he signed a national policy on commercial space launches. SpaceX is the biggest commercial launch company in the world.
And that’s just one month. Since he took office, Trump has traded about 3.2 billion dollars in securities. More than 21,000 purchases. That’s over 34 a day, every day, including weekends. According to Common Cause, every member of Congress combined has traded about 1.2 billion dollars this year. The president’s total? Nearly three times that amount.
So the next time he stands up and announces a “Golden Age,” think about who it’s for. Grants have been canceled, and the labs are emptying out. But the CEOs have medals, and the president is raking in the dividends.
2. Democrats Win Another Debate Night
We’ll start in Georgia, where Jon Ossoff and Mike Collins had their first debate. Collins spent the night calling Ossoff a woke radical. Ossoff had some attacks of his own, hitting Collins on white nationalist ties and his refusal to recognize that Trump lost in 2020. But he spent most of his night on the meat and potatoes of how the MAGA agenda is hurting Americans. Have a listen:
Gas, groceries, foreign wars and trade wars. Those are the issues that will define this election. Collins defended the administration on every issue, including the Canada tariffs. Ossoff pointed out that a hospital in Collins’ district had to close its labor and delivery unit after Medicaid cuts. Collins brushed that off, along with a question about the House ethics committee investigating him for misappropriation of funds. Collins says the probe is a nothingburger. We’ll see what Georgia thinks.
Now onto Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers duked it out last night in Grand Rapids, and this one got ugly. Rogers went after El-Sayed’s medical credentials and even his mother. El-Sayed said Rogers was a Trump puppet who owns two yachts and a house in Florida.
According to the moderator, they even went back and forth during the commercial break. Once again, beyond the personal attacks and the viral moments, the Democrat had an obvious edge on the issues that matter. Have a listen to this exchange, where El-Sayed grills Rogers over his flip-flop on tariffs.
There’s a common thread linking both these debates. The Republicans kept trying to make it about the Democrats. But the Democrats wouldn’t let them run away from the disastrous record of the president they’ve been defending at every turn. They’re holding MAGA’s feet to the fire, and I’m all for it.
3. Paxton’s Taxpayer-Funded Vacations Exposed
When it comes to corruption, Paxton is the gift that keeps on giving. ProPublica and the Texas Tribune went through his travel logs and published the findings today. Since he became Texas attorney general in 2015, Paxton has taken nearly 1,000 trips with a taxpayer-funded police detail, racking up a 3.3 million dollar bill.
Only 138 of those trips involved documented state business. The rest, more than 800, had no stated purpose at all. Fifty-three trips to Florida, and only two of them for work. Twenty-four trips to Utah, where his family trust owns five properties. Park City. Vail. Last year alone, 91 trips, and only five of them with a listed reason.
Just for some comparison, when Greg Abbott was AG, his security fees totaled about 7,400 dollars a month. Paxton’s averages more than three times that: about 24,000 dollars a month. Most of it comes down to frequency. Paxton took more protected trips as AG than Abbott did as governor, and nearly as many as the governor and lieutenant governor combined.
His office says he faces threats from cartels. Maybe there is some truth to that. But that doesn’t explain why he left the detail at home during at least two dozen actual business trips, but brought it along when he went skiing.
Paxton is asking Texans to send him to the Senate, where he’d get a vote on a multi-trillion dollar federal budget. This is how he uses taxpayer money in Texas. Can you imagine what he’d do in Washington? Let’s just hope the polls are right, and we never have to find out.
4. Republicans Running Away From Trump
We’ve talked a lot recently about how President Trump has been hitting the campaign trail for Republican candidates, many of them struggling in deep red territory. That includes a trip to Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Nebraska.
But the GOP is struggling exactly because of the President, who remains deeply unpopular with the public. Which begs the question: are Republican candidates better off without him? Ken Paxton certainly thinks so. And a surprising number of the President’s voters think so, too.
Politico ran a poll asking Trump voters whether Republican candidates should break with the president to win. The results? One in four said yes. And another quarter said “don’t know.”
That’s half of Trump’s base that isn’t convinced he should lead the GOP through the midterms. Because he is the losing issue for the party’s candidates.
And Republicans know it. “It’s all dictated by the data,” said a GOP strategist working on a Senate campaign. “They see the writing on the wall about the gas prices and the inflation,” he explained, before adding: “Running as a Trump sycophant is not going to work in 2026.”
Florida’s Republican candidate for governor, Byron Donalds, is the latest example. Having recently scrubbed Trump from his website, he announced on a Politico podcast: “I’m allowed to have my own viewpoint about how we’re gonna govern Florida.” How about that for a novel idea? I don’t think we would have heard that coming out of Byron Donalds’ mouth six months ago.
For a decade, Republican candidates had one rule: never cross Trump. The base wouldn’t allow it. Now that base is giving them permission. Which tells you something about where this is headed in November.
5. Texas Ranchers Stop Trump’s Wall
Last year, Republicans spent another 46 billion dollars on the border wall. The plan is a barrier from the Pacific to the Gulf. And 7.5 billion of it is going to one stretch, the Big Bend region of West Texas.
The environmental problems are glaring. Much of that stretch runs through protected land, including Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park. Homeland Security waived 28 environmental and historic preservation laws in June to expedite construction.
And according to the AP, it’s also a huge waste of money. The Big Bend region is more than 500 miles of river, cliffs, and desert. It’s already its own natural border.
In August, Border Patrol arrested 8,870 people along the entire southern border. In Big Bend, they arrested 161.
A rancher who voted for Trump twice says spending billions on barriers in the region is unnecessary. “I didn’t vote for a wall,” she added. And the local sheriff, who spent 26 years in the Border Patrol, agreed.
But the White House isn’t giving them much of a choice. It has sent landowners letters saying it needs to get onto their property. And it’s threatening eminent domain for anyone who says no.
When this administration can’t work with the American people, it bullies them into submission.
But the locals are fighting back anyway. More than 200 landowners have joined a coalition and sued. Families are refusing survey crews. And a federal judge has paused construction in the region, at least while the case plays out.
And look, these aren’t activists. They are retirees and ranchers whose families have lived on the land since the late 1800s. Many of them are Republicans. And they’re going to court against a Republican president, who is demanding that they give up their land for a senseless project. If only more Republican leaders would put up that kind of fight.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
The Justice Department has taken its case against Cassidy Hutchinson, a key witness in the Jan. 6 hearings, to a federal grand jury. The Washington Post reports that prosecutors presented evidence against the former White House aide in D.C. this week. They accuse her of lying to Congress. And they have weighed a civil rights charge, a far more unusual case. The investigation stems from a referral by Reps. Jim Jordan and Barry Loudermilk, who allege she gave false testimony. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. But the probe initially began under Pam Bondi, whom Trump reportedly fired in April partly for moving too slowly against his adversaries. It is now run by the Civil Rights Division under Harmeet Dhillon, a staunch Trump ally, rather than the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office. Hutchinson’s televised testimony in June 2022 drew 13 million viewers. Her most explosive claim, that Trump lunged for the steering wheel of his SUV, came secondhand from another aide, and the Secret Service driver later disputed it.
The Pentagon is drawing up plans to restart the war with Iran, but Trump says he won’t strike before the midterms. According to the New York Times, senior officials led by Vice President JD Vance reviewed the options at Camp David last Friday. The plan calls for a short, intense campaign of about three days. Targets include Iran’s rebuilt missile and drone arsenal, its energy facilities, and Revolutionary Guard command posts. But Trump is uncertain. On Thursday, the President posted that he would not attack Iran before the November vote, adding that the two countries were “having productive discussions.” His national security team has pitched him five major operations against Iran or the Houthis in recent months. He vetoed every one. Meanwhile, Iran has struck at least 13 ships since September without a major U.S. response. By late October, three U.S. carriers will be in the Middle East for the first time since 2003.
