Hey everyone. Welcome back. Happy Friday.
Our top story today: the President got caught manufacturing his own voter fraud. The Census Bureau just published a report claiming thousands of noncitizens voted in 2020. It has no author, no methodology, and it was built by Trump’s own political operatives. He spent six years looking for fraud, and when he couldn’t find it, he had the government try to just make it up.
We’ll also get into the Navy moving to strip a Black Pearl Harbor hero’s name off an aircraft carrier, a new congressional report showing Trump’s pardons have cost crime victims 1.7 billion dollars, Republicans tweeting their outrage over a 40 trillion dollar debt they just voted to grow, and Trump betraying some of his most loyal voters in an attempt to save himself and his party from being embarrassed in the midterms.
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 Couldn't Find Voter Fraud, So He Made It Up
Earlier this week, the bureau published a seven-page report claiming that more than 24,000 noncitizens voted in the 2020 election. Trump jumped on it immediately, posting that the report proves he won in 2020 and predicting the numbers will, quote, “explode,” as more records get processed.
But here’s what Trump didn’t mention. The report has no author, which former bureau officials say is unheard of for an agency built on layers of review. It doesn’t explain its methodology. And according to reporting from NPR and CNN, it wasn’t produced by the bureau’s career statisticians at all. It came from partisan analysts the administration installed from the America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded by Trump’s own former officials.
The experts who work with this stuff every day are being pretty blunt about it. David Becker, one of the country’s leading election lawyers, put it this way: “This analysis is laughable. Census data cannot reliably be matched to voter data.” And even if you took the report at face value, 24,000 votes out of 128 million is about two hundredths of one percent.
Even Republicans aren’t buying it. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, ran an intensive audit in 2024 and found fewer than a dozen noncitizens who had ever voted in his state. This report claims Georgia had 400 in 2020 alone. So this week, Raffensperger wrote to the bureau with a simple request: show me the names.
Nevada’s a good example of what happens when these numbers actually get checked. Last month, Homeland Security claimed nearly 16,000 noncitizens were registered to vote there. This week, on a recorded call with state election officials, DHS’s own staff admitted they had confirmed just 185 potential noncitizens and hadn’t even reviewed more than 14,000 of the names on their list.
This is the playbook. Announce a giant number, stamp a federal seal on it, and hope nobody reads the fine print. The 2030 census depends on every American trusting this agency, and this President is burning that trust to prop up a six-year-old lie.
2. Navy Moves to Strip a Pearl Harbor Hero's Name for Trump
CNN reports the Navy is working to rename the future USS Doris Miller, a carrier under construction right now. Internally, Navy leadership has reportedly stopped using the name altogether. They just call it CVN-81. And two sources say there have been conversations about renaming it after Donald Trump, which would make it the first carrier in American history named for a sitting president.
So who is Doris Miller? He was a sharecropper’s son from Waco, Texas, who enlisted in 1939, when mess attendant was one of the only jobs the Navy would give a Black man. On December 7th, 1941, when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, Miller carried wounded shipmates to safety, then manned an anti-aircraft gun he had never been trained to fire and shot back at the enemy until he ran out of ammunition. Admiral Nimitz personally pinned the Navy Cross on his chest. Two years later, Miller was killed in action when his ship was torpedoed in the Pacific.
In 2020, during Trump’s own first term, the Navy announced this carrier would bear his name. It would have been the first carrier ever named for an enlisted sailor, and the first named for a Black American. Now the Navy says it may put Miller’s name on a smaller ship and recommend him for the Medal of Honor instead. His family says nobody even told them the carrier was in question. They found out the way you just did.
And this isn’t the first time this Pentagon has quietly pushed a Black military hero out of the frame. Remember what happened to the portrait of General Chappie James, the first Black four-star general in American history? I talked about it last night on CNN.
Think about the contrast here. Trump has spent his whole life slapping his name on anything he can. Doris Miller earned his place on that hull with his own blood. And now this Pentagon wants to trade that in for a little flattery. That’s who they are.
3. Trump's Pardon Spree Robs Victims to Reward Donors
House Judiciary Committee Democrats are releasing a 25-page investigation today, first reported by Scott MacFarlane. The finding: Trump’s pardons have wiped out 1.7 billion dollars in fines and restitution that convicted criminals owed to the people they hurt. When Trump pardons someone, the court-ordered debt to their victims disappears with the conviction. The report calls it a “massive redistribution of wealth in favor of convicted criminals.”
Take Trevor Milton, the former CEO of the truck company Nikola, convicted of defrauding investors. A federal judge was about to rule on nearly 700 million dollars in restitution for his victims. Then came the pardon, and that money vanished. The report notes Milton and his wife had donated more than 1.8 million dollars to committees backing Trump’s reelection.
Or Jason Galanis, an admitted fraudster whose victims were owed more than 80 million dollars. Days after his pardon, Galanis went to court to demand back the 2 million he had already paid those victims. A federal judge threw it out.
And the January 6th rioters? Their pardons erased roughly 3 million dollars they owed for ransacking the Capitol.
None of this went through the traditional pardon process, because that process is gone. Trump fired the career Pardon Attorney and handed the office to Ed Martin, an ally so extreme that Senate Republicans wouldn’t even confirm him as a US attorney. The pardon power exists for mercy. In this White House, it’s a favor for friends, and the people they hurt are the ones left paying.
4. Republicans Discover the Debt Problem They Created
This Wednesday, the national debt hit forty trillion dollars. I talked about the scale of that number on CNN last night:
That’s where we are. The debt now works out to more than 300,000 dollars for every household in America. So how did Republicans, who control every branch of our government, respond?
Well, they tweeted. Bill Cassidy, Ron Johnson, Rick Scott and plenty more all posted their outrage about Washington’s spending problem. As if they were innocent bystanders. Of course, each post came with a community note reminding everyone that they all voted for Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which is projected to add 4.7 trillion dollars to deficits over the next decade.
But the administration only has one culprit to blame:
Apparently, it’s all “inherited from Biden.” That’s their line, nineteen months into this presidency, after signing one of the most expensive bills in American history.
Look, both parties built this debt over decades. That’s true, and I’ve said it. But Republicans don’t get to vote for trillions in new borrowing, blame the last guy, and then tweet like they just discovered the problem. Right now, they are the problem.
And think about the timing here. It’s almost like they see the writing on the wall that their days in power are numbered, and they’re rehearsing the outrage they’ll need when they’re back in the minority.
5. Trump Betrays His Own Ranchers Again
In a Truth Social post this morning, Trump announced a deal to bring down the price of ground beef. He says that for the next 90 days, America will let in up to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef to be “sold at 25 percent below current market prices.”
So the President obsessed with tariffs is suspending his own tariffs to lower prices. Hmm… it’s almost like he knew who actually pays them all along. And despite all of his rants about “communist” Democrats, Trump now wants to fix the price of a hamburger. That’s about as communist as it gets.
For the record, beef prices are a real problem. Ground beef is pushing seven dollars a pound, up more than 50 percent in five years. Families are hurting, and I get it.
But so are our ranchers, who are only just recovering after years of drought and brutal costs. Flooding the market with cheap foreign beef pulls the floor out from under them, and this is the second time Trump has done it this year. Remember, these were his people. They wore the hats, they took the hits on soybeans and cattle, and they were told to keep the faith. But he keeps betraying them anyway.
And for what? Well, do the math on that 90-day window. It runs through mid-November, right past Election Day, and then the discount disappears. Trump is turning on some of his most loyal followers to try and score cheap political points right as voters head to the ballot box. He’s not doing this because he cares about what you pay at the register. He’s doing this because he is trying to save himself and his party from an embarrassment in November.
Some other stories that caught my eye:
President Trump’s director of legislative affairs, James Braid, is expected to leave the White House in September, just before the midterm elections. Trump confirmed the news on Truth Social Thursday morning, crediting Braid with “a critical role in our many accomplishments with Congress,” and an administration official says he’s headed to the private sector. Braid has been the West Wing’s top liaison to Capitol Hill for the entire second term, and White House officials widely credit him with wrangling the votes for Trump’s biggest legislative wins, including the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. His exit follows press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s announcement last week that she’s leaving at the end of August, all as Trump sits on low approval ratings amid the war with Iran and high prices.
The Wall Street Journal published a deep dive yesterday into the collapse of PublicSquare, the Donald Trump Jr.-backed “anti-woke” online marketplace that launched on the New York Stock Exchange in 2023. The company has lost nearly $160 million since going public, its stock is down roughly 99 percent, and the NYSE has warned it could be delisted. Meanwhile, Trump Jr. started collecting $42,000 a month in consulting fees in 2024 and took home more than $500,000 last year, out-earning the CEO, and firms tied to his friends Omeed Malik and Nick Ayers pulled in hundreds of thousands more. Executives now admit the business model fell apart after President Trump embraced the same tech companies he had attacked on the campaign trail. This year, PublicSquare shut down the marketplace entirely and cut 41 percent of its staff.
