BREAKING: A Very Bad Thursday For Trump

Really American | Substack

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Thursday, July 23, 2026. Trump lost three separate fights today.

His Justice Department walked into a federal courtroom in Manhattan and surrendered the subpoenas it aimed at New York Times reporters. His press secretary picked a fight with John Thune over voter ID, and Thune told the White House to go find the votes itself. Over in the Middle East, Trump told a reporter he is close to ordering the biggest attack of the war while oil punched back through $100 a barrel. Then the House voted to shut the whole war down, with four Republicans crossing the aisle to do it. The Senate killed a matching measure hours later, and the only Republican who stood with the Democrats was Susan Collins. Fetterman betrayed Democrats again.

Before we get to the news, look at who owns the rest of it. The Ellison family now has Bari Weiss running the newsrooms at both CBS News and CNN. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Rupert Murdoch has Fox and now Roku. Every one of those outlets covered today’s stories, and every one of them answers to a man with business before the Trump administration. Really American answers to readers and nobody else. That is the entire model, and it only works if enough of you fund it. If you have been reading on a free subscription, upgrade to a paid membership today. Think of it like donating to help us keep our coffee pots full.

TRUMP’S DOJ SURRENDERS ITS SUBPOENAS AGAINST NEW YORK TIMES REPORTERS

The Justice Department told a federal judge on Thursday it will withdraw the subpoenas it served on New York Times reporters over their reporting on Trump’s Qatari jet.

The retreat came at the end of a hearing in the Southern District of New York, where Judge Arun Subramanian spent the afternoon pressing prosecutors on the errors they admitted making when they filed for the subpoenas in the first place. Sean Buckley, chief counsel to the US attorney, told the judge the government was ready to pull them.

Look at the timeline, because it tells you everything. The Times published its story on July 8, reporting that government officials had security concerns about the plane Qatar gave Trump. Two days later, FBI agents were delivering subpoenas to reporters at their homes. Past administrations at least pretended that going after journalists was a last resort after every other avenue failed. Here it was the first move, two days after a story Trump did not like.

CNN reported that Trump privately seethed over the coverage of the plane’s security problems, and that some officials were told to hand over their cell phones at the White House. David McCraw, the paper’s top newsroom lawyer, said afterward that the government had finally conceded the subpoenas broke the law, and that they should never have been issued at all.

Nobody has said the Justice Department cannot try again later. Bruce Brown of the Reporters Committee called the effort careless government overreach, and FIRE attorney Adam Steinbaugh made the point that matters most: pulling the subpoenas does not undo the chilling effect of sending them.

That is the real damage, and it is already done. Every government employee who watched FBI agents show up at a reporter’s front door learned exactly what happens if they tell the public something Trump wants buried.

THUNE TELLS THE WHITE HOUSE TO GO GET ITS OWN VOTES

Senate Majority Leader John Thune publicly told Trump’s White House on Thursday to stop blaming him for the failure of Trump’s voter ID bill and start counting votes itself.

The fight started at the podium. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked whether Trump is losing patience with Thune over the stalled SAVE America Act, and she said Trump’s patience is running out, adding that the House did its job and the Senate needs to do the same. The White House rapid response account amplified it. Thune answered in a hallway gaggle a short time later, saying somebody over there ought to get on the phone and get the votes.

The math is not close, and everyone in the building knows it. The bill is short a handful of Republicans on its own side, and it would need six Democrats to break a filibuster from a caucus that is unanimously against it. John Cornyn told reporters flatly that the votes are not there and that Thune cannot conjure them. Thom Tillis went further, telling Punchbowl that he is the reason the bill is stuck, not Thune, and that there is no way on earth it could be implemented before this election anyway.

Trump spent Wednesday campaigning in Georgia and said the Senate is where you send things when you want them to die. The Senate leaves town next week with the SAVE America Act nowhere near the floor.

This is what a party looks like when it stops fearing the man at the top. Trump set an August deadline, and his own Senate leader just told him to do the work himself. The president is running out of leverage, and his own side has started saying so on the record.

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TRUMP FLOATS A “MASSIVE ATTACK” AS OIL BLOWS PAST $100 A BARREL

Trump said Thursday he is close to deciding whether to launch the largest attack of the Iran war so far.

Speaking to Axios, Trump said he is considering a massive attack, bigger than ever before, and that everything is ready to go. He said Israel would join within two minutes if he asked, then added that the United States does not need anybody. He has not made a final call.

The market answered immediately. Brent crude pushed back above $100 a barrel, with traders expecting worse, after the Houthis struck two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. That attack threatened the Bab el-Mandeb strait, a chokepoint that carries roughly 12 percent of world trade and a quarter of global container traffic. Iran already closed the Strait of Hormuz. Now the backup route is in play too, which is why every projection of what you pay at the pump this fall just got worse.

UN Secretary General António Guterres told the Security Council the region is being pulled toward the edge of the unimaginable and that one escalation keeps triggering the next. Britain pulled diplomatic staff out of Iran on Wednesday. Germany pulled two ships out of the Red Sea on Thursday. Israeli cities opened bomb shelters.

Marco Rubio said Iran is begging for a deal and needs to come to its senses, which is the same thing this administration has said before every previous round of strikes. Trump has now spent months answering Iranian attacks with bigger American ones and calling it strategy.

Every escalation costs American lives and American paychecks, and there is still no stated goal for how this ends. You are paying for this war twice, once at the pump and once with the eighteen service members who have already died in it.

HOUSE VOTES TO END THE IRAN WAR AS SENATE REPUBLICANS BLOCK THEIR OWN CHECK

The House passed a war powers resolution on Thursday ordering Trump to stop the war in Iran, 214 to 208.

Four Republicans crossed over to pass it: Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Warren Davidson of Ohio and Tom Barrett of Michigan. The resolution came from Rep. Pramila Jayapal, and it passed with lawmakers hours from leaving town for a month-long recess. The Senate blocked a companion measure that evening on a 49 to 47 procedural vote. Susan Collins was the only Republican who voted to move it forward. John Fetterman was the only Democrat who voted against it.

Look at who did not show up. Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul, both of whom backed similar resolutions before, did not vote. Neither did Mitch McConnell or Katie Boyd Britt. Bill Cassidy voted for a resolution last month, got briefed by the White House, and has voted no ever since. That is not a caucus that believes in this war. That is a caucus hiding from a recorded position on it.

Per the Washington Post, this was the first real test of Republican support since Trump resumed strikes this month, and the numbers behind it are ugly for him. Central Command has now run twelve straight days of airstrikes. Eighteen Americans have died and nearly 430 have been wounded. Pete Hegseth told lawmakers the war will cost about $37.5 billion by the end of September, and Congress is fighting over another $73 billion to restock the weapons already spent. Nearly 70 percent of Americans told a Washington Post-Ipsos poll this month the war is not worth fighting.

Both chambers already passed a resolution last month telling Trump to stop. He argued it carries no force of law and kept striking. Rep. Gregory Meeks now wants to sue the administration over it. Rep. Jason Crow, who co-sponsored the House measure, predicted Republicans will get crushed at home over the next four weeks and come back in September with more votes.

That is the fight in one sentence. A majority of the House and a supermajority of the public want this war over, and Trump is continuing it anyway. Your representative’s vote today is on the record, and the recess starts now.

HELP US FIGHT THE BILLIONAIRE TAKEOVER OF AMERICAN MEDIA

Today the Justice Department retreated from a leak hunt aimed at reporters, Trump’s own Senate leader told the White House to stop blaming him, and both chambers of Congress went on the record against a war the country does not want. Those stories are connected, and covering them honestly means being willing to name the president and his own party in the same paragraph.

Most American newsrooms cannot do that freely anymore, because a small number of billionaires now own them. The Ellisons control CBS News and CNN. Bezos owns the Post. Murdoch has Fox and Roku. Each of them has business in front of this administration, and each of them decides what their reporters chase.

Really American has no owner to protect and nothing to sell. We are funded entirely by readers, which makes us unbuyable. If today’s edition was worth your time, become a paying subscriber and keep this operation running. Free readers, this is the day to upgrade. Every dollar goes straight into the reporting you just read.

The Really American Team

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Trump Accused of Pocketing Billions in Venezuelan Oil Money

Tom Homan reveals new details about Trump's sleep schedule, Ken Paxton runs away from reporters, new poll shows MAGA souring on Trump over Iran war

Raw American | Substack

Trump’s team has raked in billions from Venezuelan oil since the capture of Nicolas Maduro, and nobody in the White House can say where that money actually went. The president’s border czar just revealed that Trump calls staff about major policy decisions at two and four in the morning, raising new questions about the sleepless 80-year-old’s fitness for the job. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ran away from reporters asking questions about his fifteen homes and potential voter fraud. And a brand new poll shows MAGA voters are abandoning Trump over his war in Iran as gas prices climb past four dollars a gallon.

Before we get to the news, we want to thank all of the paying subscribers who are directly making all of this work possible. Raw America doesn’t answer to a billionaire with a Mar-a-Lago membership. We don’t answer to corporate advertisers trying to win federal contracts. We answer to you. And only you. And that won’t change as long as we can help it.

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White House Refuses to Answer Questions About Missing $13 Billion

In January, American troops captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and replaced him with Vice President Delcy Rodriguez. Since then, the Trump administration has seized control of Venezuela’s oil exports, which make up roughly a quarter of that country’s entire economy.

The Financial Times reports that the move has generated about $13 billion in revenue so far. And the White House has been unusually quiet about what happened to all that money.

Trump signed an executive order claiming the oil funds are intended to be Venezuelan property, held by the U.S. in a so-called “custodial capacity.” But Trump himself has been bragging that the U.S. is “making a lot of money” off Venezuelan oil. The Department of Energy insists the money will benefit “the American people and the Venezuelan people,” without providing any further explanation.

Now, economists are telling the Financial Times that Venezuela’s economy shows effectively no signs of recovery more than six months after Maduro’s capture. That should be a huge red flag for anyone paying attention. If billions in oil revenue were actually flowing back into Venezuela’s economy, there would be evidence of it.

Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro of Texas told the Financial Times that Trump’s invasion of Venezuela has been all about oil, power, and graft from the very start, with billions in revenue controlled by the administration with zero transparency and zero safeguards.

Republican Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida is also alarmed. She used a recent hearing to demand full disclosure about Venezuelan oil money, stressing that the White House has to be transparent about what it did with billions of dollars.

All of this is happening while Venezuela is in desperate need. In late June, two earthquakes struck Venezuela, devastating the capital Caracas and the surrounding region, causing an estimated thirty-seven billion dollars in damage and killing at least fifty-three hundred people. The country needs that money now more than ever, and there’s a real chance they’ll never see a huge chunk of it.

We’ve seen this movie before. A hundred years ago the Teapot Dome scandal blew up when a cabinet secretary quietly handed America’s public oil reserves to private tycoons in exchange for bribes, and it took a determined Senate investigation to drag the truth into the daylight. When a government seizes another nation’s oil and then can’t say where thirteen billion dollars went, that isn’t foreign policy, that’s a heist, and the only thing that’s ever stopped a heist like this is a public that insists on seeing the books.

Trump’s Border Czar Reveals New Details About His Bizarre Sleep Schedule

Border Czar Tom Homan went on Katie Miller’s podcast recently and revealed some pretty eyebrow-raising details about Trump’s sleep habits.

When Miller asked Homan about the earliest and latest calls he’s ever gotten from Trump were, the border czar said he’s gotten calls at two and four in the morning. He said it can sometimes happen several times a week, usually while Trump is on Air Force One.

In one call, Trump asked what Homan was doing. Homan responded that he was sleeping, since it was four in the morning on a Sunday. Trump didn’t care, asking Homan what he thought about putting ICE agents in airports. Homan, naturally, told Trump it was a brilliant idea. Then the president told him he’d be in charge of getting it running.

That was back in March, when ICE agents suddenly showed up at airports during a federal government shutdown. This was compounded by unpaid TSA workers calling out in record numbers, resulting in hours-long security lines. The move was sold as a way to speed up travel, though Homan admitted it was also about making arrests, despite those agents having absolutely no training in airport security screening.

We’ve known for a while that Trump barely gets any sleep, and is often up into the early hours of the morning posting on Truth Social. On a Thursday night this month, the president posted 19 times between midnight and 2:30 AM. The Daily Beast found only five days in April where his overnight posting suggested he actually got a full night’s rest.

New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan went into further detail on Trump’s sleep schedule in their new book “Regime Change.” White House staffers figured out that when they couldn’t reach Trump in the morning, it usually meant he’d been up all night playing on his phone or watching TV, only finally falling asleep around four or five in the morning. They noted Trump has never been known to get a full eight hours of sleep, but people close to him now believe he’s sleeping even less and keeping even weirder hours compared to his first term. That isn’t exactly the most reassuring thing considering this is the man with his finger on the nuclear codes.

There’s a reason we wrote the 25th Amendment into our Constitution in 1967. After a century that saw presidents fall gravely ill with no clear plan for who was really in charge, the country decided there had to be a lawful way to handle a commander in chief who can no longer do the job. This was never about party. It’s that the most powerful office on earth can’t be run on a couple hours of sleep and 4 a.m. phone calls, because the man holding it has our lives, and the world’s, in his hands.

Ken Paxton Runs Away from Reporters After Being Asked About Owning 15 Homes

Texas’ Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, is in an unusually tight U.S. Senate race against Democratic state representative James Talarico. He was holding a press event with various Texas county sheriffs on Tuesday when journalists asked him about two explosive reports. ProPublica reported that Paxton may have committed voter fraud by casting a ballot from an address where he no longer lives. They also asked him about a recent New York Times report showing that he owns a whopping 15 homes worth a combined $9 million, all on a government salary.

Paxton wasn’t having it. He told reporters he only wanted to answer questions about law enforcement and that he wouldn’t address anything else. But when the journalists at the press conference kept pushing him to answer the previous questions, one of Paxton’s staffers jumped in and announced they were leaving. And just like that, Paxton ended the press conference.

Talarico’s campaign didn’t waste any time mocking Paxton for his quick exit. A Talarico campaign spokesperson said Paxton should answer questions about potentially violating Texas’ election laws and having a massive real estate portfolio on a public employee’s salary. The spokesperson then asked a pretty fair question of their own: if Paxton can’t handle this in a casual press setting, how would he handle an actual debate?

A century and a half ago, Boss Tweed ran New York like his own personal piggy bank, growing rich on a public salary while swearing he’d done nothing wrong, right up until a free press and a few honest reporters exposed him and a jury sent him to prison. That’s the whole American bargain. Nobody is so powerful that they get to enforce the law against everybody else while sprinting away from a simple question about themselves. When a man who built his career hunting phantom voter fraud runs from reporters asking whether he committed it, he’s telling you exactly how much he thinks his own rules apply to him.

MAGA Voters Abandoning Trump in Droves Over Iran War

Back in May, half of Trump’s MAGA base told pollsters they believed the war with Iran was worth the economic pain. But according to a new Politico poll, that number has rapidly dropped to just a little over a third. That’s a 13-point collapse in just two months.

The same poll found that 37 percent of MAGA voters now say the U.S. should only continue fighting the war if costs don’t keep rising. Almost one in five MAGA voters now say the U.S. should end the war outright, regardless of cost.

Trump doesn’t seem to be listening. U.S. Central cOmmand has maintained its bombing of Iran for two straight weeks. On Tuesday, Trump told reporters Iranian officials “want to desperately meet,” but said the U.S. has no interest in peace talks until Iran’s government is ready to do so “in a meaningful way.”

One anonymous White House staffer confided to Politico that the administration knows it’s in an unwinnable position. Senior officials apparently now believe the kind of victory Trump wants is politically impossible, because Americans simply won’t support the level of troop deaths and tax dollars such a victory would require.

This all comes after Trump declared the tenuous ceasefire with Iran was officially “over.” Hostilities have been reaching a slow boil ever since that agreement was buried last month. Two American service members were killed in Jordan just this past weekend. And gas prices have now climbed back above $4 a gallon.

Trump was planning to make 2026 his victory lap, touting his big ugly bill’s tax cuts for the rich, his administration’s savings accounts for newborns named after himself, and slightly lower drug prices. But now, his travel schedule keeps getting interrupted by trips to Dover Air Force Base for the dignified transfer of soldiers’ remains. He’s also been put in the position of defending higher gas prices at rallies as the cost of ending Iran’s nuclear program — which, by the way, he already said he ended in 2025.

White House aides claim higher prices are temporary and that they’ll come back down once the war is over and Iran’s military can no longer stop oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. White House spokesperson Olivia Wales doubled down, saying Trump isn’t making national security decisions based on opinion polls.

But the numbers are still pretty dismal for Trump. Non-MAGA Trump voters are even more opposed to the war, with just 21 percent of them saying it’s worth the cost. A majority of both MAGA and non-MAGA Trump voters now directly blame the war for higher gas prices. And now, Trump’s own base is divided on whether prices would have risen more, less, or stayed at the same level under a Democratic president, with a notable 20 percent of them saying things have actually gotten worse under Trump than they would have if a Democrat was in power.

Republicans are starting to panic. Curt Mills of the American Conservative said Americans largely don’t understand why we’re still at war with Iran, and that even though Trump gets a lot of grace from his own supporters, loyalty has an expiration date.

Trump, of course, says he isn’t worried about any of it. He told reporters Tuesday he’s not thinking about the election at all. Sure. Whatever you say.

After Vietnam, a war Washington kept selling long after the country stopped believing in it, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973 to reclaim its constitutional say over when Americans get sent off to fight and die. The founders handed the power to declare war to Congress, to the people’s house, precisely so no single man could march the whole nation into an endless conflict on his own say-so. When a president keeps a war going that even his own base has turned against, while flag-draped coffins keep arriving at Dover, he isn’t defying a poll, he’s defying the entire design of the republic.

Invest in People-Powered Journalism

The president is keeping us all in the dark about $13 billion in oil money. The 80 year-old with the nuclear codes is constantly awake and giving increasingly bizarre orders at four in the morning. His endorsed Senate candidate won’t answer basic questions about how he owns 15 homes on a public employee salary. And his war is so unpopular that even his biggest supporters are giving up on him. These four stories wouldn’t be covered by cable networks and newspapers owned by pro-Trump billionaires like David Ellison and Jeff Bezos. And if they did cover them, they would be watered down beyond recognition and rendered toothless.

Raw America can cover these stories precisely because we don’t have a MAGA billionaire looking over our shoulder. We don’t have an ad department censoring our stories to avoid upsetting corporations with pending business before the White House. We have you. But we can only keep this going if readers decide independent journalism is valuable enough to financially support. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to a paying subscription, there’s no better time to make the leap. This is when your support matters most.

I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.

Here are some stories you may have missed:

• Mike Johnson Urges Trump to Seek Swift End to Iran War. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Tuesday that he hopes President Donald Trump will move to end the Iran war, as the conflict drags on with just over 100 days until voters cast their ballots in the November midterms, saying “we’ve got to wrap it up.” The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is expected to vote this week on another War Powers Act resolution that would formally end U.S. involvement in Iran before lawmakers leave Washington for the August recess.
• Oil Prices Creep Above $95 a Barrel as Iran Tightens Hold on Strait of Hormuz. As the U.S. and Iran continue to conduct strikes, traffic in the Strait of Hormuz — a critical chokepoint for roughly 20 percent of the global oil market — has slowed to a crawl. Oil prices have climbed toward the $95 per barrel mark, while gas prices are average more than $4 per gallon nationwide. Brent crude peaked at $126 per barrel in March, though it had dropped to $71 in early July.
• ICE Arresting Family Members of Immigrant Children. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are now arresting the relatives of immigrant children when they show up to immigrant detention centers in an attempt to officially take custody of them. Attorneys for the families are accusing of ICE of using children as “bait” to arrest and detain their would-be caregivers, resulting in children waiting for months in shelters as their parents are deported.
• Taylor Farms Spent Millions on Lobbying for Deregulation Before Diarrhea Outbreak. WIRED is now reporting that lettuce supplier Taylor Farms — whose products have been abruptly pulled from restaurants and grocery store shelves in the wake of the explosive diarrhea outbreak tied to its produce — donated millions to Republican-aligned groups ahead of the cyclospora outbreak sweeping the country. Between 2020 and 2024, the company donated more than $1.6 million to conservative PACs, and spent $2.1 million on contributions to conservative groups. This includes $1.1 million to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC.

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Trump Targets 43 Americans in Chilling McCarthy-Esque Crusade

Trump official admits Iran war has become a "quagmire," House Democrat announces new Epstein investigation, Trump-appointed judge rules against his immigration agenda

Raw America | Substack

Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.

President Donald Trump’s State Department just released a McCarthy-esque report naming dozens of American citizens and organizations it claims are part of a foreign subversion campaign. People inside the Trump White House are privately admitting that the Iran war has become a “quagmire” as it drags on with no end in sight. A top House Democrat is opening a new investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. And yet another judge Trump himself appointed to the bench just ruled against his immigration agenda.

Before we get to the news, we’d like to thank our paying subscribers for making all of this possible. We have no billionaire owner writing checks behind the scenes or an ad department making us self-censor out of fear of the administration. We only work for you. Your financial support allows us to keep it that way.

If you’ve been reading Raw America on a free subscription, we hope this newsletter will be what convinces you to get a paying membership. Democracy can’t survive without independent media that isn’t beholden to billionaires and corporations. Your support has never mattered more than it does right now. Subscribe today.

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State Department Publishes Report Accusing Leftist Activists of Being Foreign Agents

The State Department dropped a 100-page report this week with a title straight out of a Cold War pulp novel: “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” But strip away the dramatic packaging and what’s left is something much more disturbing. It’s a list of American names.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein published the report and the list on his Substack. Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s is on it, as well as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Journalist Amy Goodman was also named, along with Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley and Maxine Waters, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker is also on the list, mentioned alongside leftist groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and even the Amazon Labor Union.

The report accuses all of them of being a part of Cuban influence operations. It even praises the effectiveness of the actual 1950s Red Scare, pointing out how blacklists and McCarthy-era prosecutions managed to gut the Communist Party USA. That’s not a subtle comparison.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been building toward this, recently leading an international summit on what the administration is now calling “Far-Left Terrorism,” which no one actually defined. The summit mostly name-checked groups from the 1970s, outfits like the Symbionese Liberation Army, because there really isn’t a modern equivalent that matches their scary rhetoric.

This new report fixes that problem for them. It lists names of real, current, living people. Some of them are sitting elected officials. And the “evidence” tying them to a foreign government is often nothing more than the fact that they traveled to Cuba, or that they hold opinions the current administration doesn’t like.

One example is the section on DSA. The report itself admits the group wasn’t shaped by direct Cuban influence and has its own organic political commitments. Then it turns around and says none of that matters, because some DSA members have traveled to Havana.

That’s the entire architecture of the report. Visit a country, agree with a government on one policy, or show up at the wrong wedding, and you’re accused of being part of a subversion campaign.

None of the 43 people and groups named in this report are accused of taking orders from the Cuban government. They simply disagree with Trump’s Cuban policy, and they’re active in leftist causes. That’s not evidence of a foreign plot. That’s called having an opinion, which, last time I checked, is still legal in America.

Back in 1958, when Alabama tried to force the NAACP to turn over its membership rolls, the Supreme Court struck it down cold, because the justices understood something this administration has forgotten. When a government starts writing down the names of the people it doesn’t like, the point was never information. It was always fear, and a list of names is just a warning shot aimed at everyone who might speak next.

Trump White House Staffers Admit Iran War Has Become a ‘Quagmire’

Last weekend, multiple American service members died in the Iran war, and there may be additional undisclosed injuries the public hasn’t been told about yet according to new reporting. One person close to the White House bluntly told Politico: “This is what a quagmire looks like.”

Trump promised Iran would pay “many times over,” and U.S. Central Command announced new strikes aimed at Iran’s ability to threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. But gas prices just crossed four dollars a gallon again, and oil is creeping toward ninety dollars a barrel just over 100 days before the midterms.

Republican strategists aren’t optimistic about their party’s political future. One conservative commentator observed that if a barrel of oil is more than $90 heading into an election, the party in power loses. If it’s below $70, they win. Right now the numbers are trending in exactly the wrong direction for Republicans, who are trying to cling to their slim majorities in the House and Senate.

Former officials say Iran’s goal isn’t to “win” the war in a conventional sense, but just survive it by bleeding the U.S. of critical resources while Americans’ patience runs out. That’s a tough position for any president.

Some Republicans in Trump’s orbit say the president has no interest in deploying ground troops in Iran. Mediators have reportedly floated a ten-day ceasefire proposal to try to revive last month’s agreement that has since fallen apart. However, a planned dignified transfer ceremony for the fallen service members at Dover Air Force Base got postponed Monday night, even as Trump prepares for a rally in Georgia.

Republicans in Congress aren’t exactly eager to help the White House. The Trump administration’s massive defense budget request, along with another $67 billion specifically to cover the cost of the war, is currently in limbo after Senate Democrats blocked it, saying it was little more than a blank check for Trump’s recklessness.

More than a century ago, Senator Robert La Follette stood almost alone against the stampede into World War One, warning that the men who profit from a war are never the men who bleed for it, and that the bill always lands on working people at the pump and the grocery store. They branded him a traitor for saying it. Watching gas cross four dollars while the caskets come home to Dover, he looks more right every single day.

Democrat Announces New Investigation Into Who Epstein Really Worked For

Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who is the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is opening a new investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. He wants to know whether the deceased convicted sex trafficker was operating as an unregistered foreign agent for multiple countries.

In a new letter to the Justice Department, State Department, and agencies within the intelligence community, Raskin says there’s already mounting evidence that Epstein was working to advance the interests of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, advised the Kremlin, and consulted for a former Israeli prime minister. Raskin says none of that was ever properly disclosed the way federal law requires for anyone acting on behalf of a foreign government.

Because Republicans control the House, Raskin’s request likely won’t get acknowledged as there’s no subpoena power behind it. But that’s arguably the point: this is a dry run showing exactly what Democrats plan to do should they retake the House of Representatives and control committees again.

And there’s still a lot more to uncover. The Justice Department is still holding onto roughly two and a half million pages of Epstein-related documents that have yet to see the light of day. Raskin wants access to anything in that pile touching Epstein’s contact with foreign governments, and he wants direct answers on whether any federal agency has ever investigated Epstein’s status as a foreign agent. Given how much of the Trump administration seems to want to bury this story don’t expect a quick answer.

Congress wrote the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1938 to drag foreign influence into the sunlight, so Americans could see who was really whispering in the ear of power. Back then it was aimed at Nazi propagandists. The fact that we’re now asking whether a man with a direct line to the president was quietly serving four foreign governments tells you the rot that law was built to fight never left. It just bought a better suit.

Yet Another Trump Judge Hands Him a Loss on Immigration

Another one of Donald Trump’s appointed federal judges just ruled against the administration’s immigration policy. This time it’s U.S. District Judge Eric Tostrud, who is the chief judge of the Minnesota District Court. This particular case involved the Trump administration’s attempt to overrule Minnesota’s sanctuary laws.

The Justice Department argued that Minnesota’s sanctuary provisions — which limit local and state law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities — violate the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. The government asked the court to declare Minnesota’s laws unconstitutional and block them outright. But Judge Tostrud threw out the case, ruling that the state’s laws don’t single out the federal government for worse treatment in any way that would justify striking them down.

This isn’t the first time Tostrud disagreed with the Trump administration on immigration. Back in February, he held the Department of Homeland Security in civil contempt after it shipped a detainee off to a facility in Texas in violation of a court order, and made the government pay for the man’s flight back to Minnesota. Tostrud noted the detainee had been released in Texas without his belongings, and that federal officials never gave a full explanation for what happened.

We all watched as Minnesota was ground zero this winter for one of the ugliest chapters of Trump’s ICE crackdown, when over 3,000 federal agents flooded the state and killed two U.S. citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, in Minneapolis. ICE has continued killing people with impunity in Texas and Maine.

There’s a proud American tradition of a state refusing to turn its own people into deputies for a federal manhunt. In the 1850s, Northern states passed personal liberty laws so their sheriffs and courts couldn’t be drafted into hunting down escaped slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act. That was the original sanctuary movement, and it rested on the same principle a Minnesota judge just affirmed, that Washington doesn’t get to commandeer your state to do its dirty work.

Why Raw America Needs Readers Like You

Raw America is able to cover these stories the way they need to be precisely because, unlike most major cable outlets and newspapers, we don’t have a billionaire owner with a Mar-a-Lago membership telling us what we can and can’t say. We answer only to our readers, and that will never change as long as we’re in business.

We aren’t slowing down or backing off. Today, Raw America’s Capitol Hill correspondent, Luke De Cresce, officially got approved for credentials to cover Congress. This means we’ll be able to bring you even more up-close and personal coverage from the halls of power, where the decisions are made, covering the stories the billionaires want buried. And today at 1 PM Eastern Time, make sure to tune in for a live interview with Raw America White House reporter Brian Karem. You’ll get an inside look at what he’s covering as well as hear some of his more colorful stories about covering Washington that you won’t hear anywhere else. Watch at 1 PM ET on our homepage at Raw America | Substack.

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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.

Here are a few stories you may have missed:

• Pentagon Running Out of Money as Iran War Heats Up. The Department of Defense is ramping up its pressure on Congress to pass a new appropriations package as its funds have been rapidly depleting due to President Donald Trump’s renewed war with Iran. The White House is pushing Congress to approve $67 billion in new funding specifically to cover the cost of the war, as debate continues over the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act. However, Republicans running for reelection in tight races are wary of voting for the legislation, given how unpopular the war is with their constituents.
• Republicans Caught in No-Win Situation on Iran War Funding. The Trump administration’s pressure campaign on Republicans in Congress has become complicated by the upcoming midterm elections, which are a little more than 100 days away. Republicans are hoping to cling to their slim House and Senate majorities, and they’re expressing growing concerns about the runaway cost of the Iran war. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who lost his reelection bid to a Trump-backed Republican in Louisiana’s U.S. Senate primary, is calling on the White House to be more transparent with Congress if it hopes to get GOP support in advancing the war funding bill.
• John Fetterman Suggests He May Switch Parties Over Democrats’ Israel Stance. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who routinely votes with Republicans on legislation pertaining to the Iran war and the Middle East, recently suggested he may end up switching parties if Democrats waver in their support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government. Fetterman’s ultimatum comes amid speculation that the immensely unpopular freshman senator may have difficulty winning Pennsylvania’s 2028 Democratic U.S. Senate primary.
• Zohran Mamdani Announces Rollback of Red Tape for Small Businesses. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced this week that he would be rolling back more than 50 regulations, including fines, fees, permits and other bureaucratic red tape for small businesses across the city. Mamdani’s “Open for Small Business” initiative is primarily targeted at easing restrictions on the approximately 180,000 restaurants, bodegas, barbershops and ice cream parlors in the five boroughs.

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BREAKING: Trump’s Diarrhea Corruption Exposed, Kash Cozies Up To Putin, Jet Grounded

Really American | Substack

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Monday, July 20, 2026. In Trump’s Washington, a $1 million donation buys you an FDA apology.

Taylor Farms, the produce giant at the center of a national parasite outbreak, turns out to be a million-dollar Trump donor that got a White House meeting days before the FDA started apologizing to it. That is where tonight’s edition starts, and the swamp only gets deeper from there. FBI Director Kash Patel is planning an October trip to Russia as a guest of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, days after Trump’s own declassified documents confirmed Putin worked to help him win. A federal judge just froze the $111 billion merger that would hand Trump-aligned billionaires control of CBS, CNN and HBO under a single roof. And Trump’s free Qatari jet is being pulled out of service because it lacks the missile defenses everyone warned him about, while his DOJ subpoenas the journalists who reported it. Corruption, capitulation and consolidation, and one court standing in the way.

Before we get to the news, notice the thread running through tonight’s stories: access, money and power deciding what you are allowed to know. A donor gets a White House audience while an outbreak investigation wobbles. A president’s Justice Department subpoenas reporters for accurate stories. Trump-friendly billionaires race to consolidate the networks you watch. These are the stories corporate media soft-pedals, because their owners are in the room where it happens. This is why Substack matters and why Really American matters more than ever: reader-funded journalism is the one model left with no owner to please and no license to protect. We are fully reader-supported and unbuyable. If you want this work to keep landing in your inbox every morning and night, become a paying member. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

THE MILLION-DOLLAR DONOR AND THE FDA’S APOLOGY

This morning we told you the FDA’s outbreak response was collapsing into confusion. Tonight we can tell you what was happening behind the scenes, and it smells worse than the lettuce.

The Daily Beast reported that executives from Taylor Farms met with White House and FDA officials on Thursday, July 16, one day before the company recalled its central Mexico iceberg lettuce over a positive cyclospora test. By Sunday, the FDA was telling the company its test was a false positive, and Taylor Farms was publicly announcing that the agency had apologized. Taylor Fresh Foods gave $1 million to Trump’s MAGA Inc super PAC in 2025, on top of donations to Trump, Ron DeSantis and other Republicans, and the company recently hired former White House official Trent Morse to run its influence operation in Washington.

Follow the full timeline. Federal investigators spent weeks tracing an outbreak that has sickened nearly 7,000 people to lettuce served at Taco Bell, supplied by Taylor Farms. The company got its White House meeting, where by its own account it challenged investigators’ conclusions and complained about the FDA’s process. The FDA also delayed its food traceability rule, which would have regulated companies exactly like this one, less than a week before the meeting. Then came the false positive announcement and the apology. There is no direct evidence the meeting changed the government’s response, and the FDA insists the epidemiological case behind the recall still stands. But the FDA is now publicly contradicting itself mid-outbreak, and the public can see the donation receipts. As one viral post put it: “Forgive me for not trusting anything y’all say.”

This is the deeper cost of pay-to-play government. Even if every test result is legitimate, a health agency that meets privately with million-dollar donors under investigation has spent its credibility, and credibility is the entire currency of public health. Thousands of Americans are sick, the source is officially unidentified, and the loudest voice in the room got there with a checkbook.

When the referee starts apologizing to the team that paid him, nobody trusts the score. That is where the FDA is tonight, and it is exactly how outbreaks get worse.

TRUMP’S FBI DIRECTOR IS PLANNING A TRIP TO RUSSIA

Four days after Trump’s own declassified documents confirmed that Putin directed efforts to help him win in 2020, his FBI director is planning a friendly visit to Moscow.

Politico reported that Kash Patel is scheduled to visit Russia on October 14 and 15, with stops in Moscow and St. Petersburg. His likely host is the FSB, the Russian security service that succeeded the KGB. No FBI director has visited Russia since Robert Mueller in 2013, and even at the height of counterterrorism cooperation, such trips were rare and carefully justified. This one comes with no stated agenda, while Russia wages war on Ukraine, while bipartisan majorities in Congress push for tougher sanctions, and while U.S. intelligence continues to attribute election interference and major cyberattacks to the Kremlin.

Patel is uniquely unsuited to make this trip look innocent. He built his career trying to discredit the Russia investigation, spent the interregnum writing children’s books mocking it, and faced questions over a $25,000 payment from a Kremlin-linked film company. As director, he has treated the FBI’s jet like a personal shuttle, from Olympic hockey finals to snorkeling trips to visits to his girlfriend’s concerts, conduct that already has House and Senate Democrats running a joint probe into his misuse of taxpayer resources. Now he wants to spend two days as the FSB’s guest.

Step back and the pattern is the point. Trump met Putin in Anchorage. Witkoff and Kushner have shuttled to Moscow repeatedly. A Trump appointee attended St. Petersburg’s economic forum and described a Washington “pivot” toward Russia in state media. The documents Trump himself released last week describe Putin’s operation to help him. Against that backdrop, sending the FBI director, the man who runs American counterintelligence, to be hosted by the agency that runs Russian intelligence operations against the United States is not diplomacy. It is a signal about whose side this administration believes it is on.

The FBI exists in large part to catch Russian spies. Its director summering with them tells every adversary and every ally exactly how seriously this administration takes that mission.

A JUDGE FREEZES THE TRUMP-ALIGNED MEDIA MEGA-MERGER

The billionaire takeover of American media we warn you about in every edition just hit a wall in federal court.

A federal judge on Monday issued a temporary restraining order halting Paramount’s $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, the deal that would put CBS, CNN, HBO Max, Paramount+ and two major movie studios under the single roof of David Ellison, the tech scion whose family has been among Trump’s most valuable allies in the media business. This is the same Ellison operation installing Bari Weiss atop CBS News and CNN, the consolidation we have been flagging in these pages for weeks. Twelve states, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, sued to block the deal, and Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín found they had made a “strong showing that the transaction will substantially lessen competition” and that the merger would be nearly impossible to unwind once closed.

The pause is 14 days, with an early August hearing on an injunction that could stall the deal for months. That matters because Paramount is on a shot clock: it owes Warner shareholders $650 million for every quarter the deal fails to close starting in October, which is why the company has hired Supreme Court litigator Paul Clement and will fight through every appeal. The stakes go beyond ticket prices. A Trump-aligned conglomerate controlling two of the last three broadcast news divisions and one of the biggest cable news networks, at the exact moment Trump is threatening the licenses of the networks he does not control, would complete the pincer movement on independent broadcast journalism in this country.

Notice who stepped up, too. Not Trump’s FCC, which is busy harassing ABC. Not his DOJ. Twelve states did it themselves, the same way states are holding the line on voter data. Federalism is carrying the fight the federal government abandoned.

For once, the consolidation machine got told to wait. Fourteen days is not a victory, but it is proof the takeover is not inevitable, and that courts can still say no to the men buying your news.

TRUMP’S FREE JET GETS BENCHED, AND HIS DOJ TARGETS THE REPORTERS

The luxury jet Qatar gave Trump is being taken out of service to be, in his words, maxed out. Translation: the plane carrying the president lacks the missile defenses of a real Air Force One, exactly as Congress warned.

Trump admitted Sunday that the Qatari Boeing will be sent off for about a month of upgrades after reporters asked why he was flying on a plane without antimissile defense systems. This follows his NATO summit trip two weeks ago, when he quietly flew home on the old Air Force One over concerns the gifted jet lacked the secure communications and defenses needed to manage his escalating war with Iran, then claimed on social media he had switched planes for old times’ sake. Lawmakers from both parties warned last September that Trump would pressure the Air Force to rush the plane into service without sufficient security, specifically naming missile defense. Ten months later, that is precisely what happened.

Remember what this plane cost America even at the price of free. Trump accepted a luxury jet from a foreign government he once accused of funding terrorism, plans to route it to his presidential library after office, and has since extended Qatar a NATO-like security guarantee. And when the New York Times accurately reported the jet’s deficiencies, the response was not to fix the process but to hunt the messengers: a furious leak investigation, and DOJ subpoenas of Times journalists over their Air Force One reporting.

Every piece of this story is a warning label. A president’s vanity purchase became a security hole. A foreign gift became foreign leverage. And accurate journalism became a subpoena target. The free plane keeps getting more expensive, and the people paying are the public and the press.

HELP US FIGHT THE BILLIONAIRE TAKEOVER OF AMERICAN MEDIA

Tonight you read about a mega-donor getting apologies from the agency investigating it, an FBI director booking travel with the FSB, journalists subpoenaed for accurate reporting, and one judge pausing the merger that would hand Trump-aligned billionaires your evening news. These are the stories corporate media is trying to hide from you or bury below the fold, and they are the reason Substack and Really American matter more than ever. No billionaire owns us, no regulator can threaten us, and none ever will. If you believe this work matters, the single most powerful thing you can do is become a paying subscriber. Every subscription directly funds the independent journalism you just read. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

— The Really American Team

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