Donald Trump has sweeping plans for a second administration. Here’s what he’s proposed

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ICE should keep making traffic stops despite recent shootings, Trump says

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump wants Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to keep pulling over vehicles, signaling his opposition Wednesday to plans announced just a day earlier to suspend most traffic stops following another string of fatal shootings.

https://apnews.com/article/ice-immigration-enforcement-deaths-traffic-stops-3d614361d8354474bc4eb8e37ec26b28?

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A Crisis of Civic Credibility (Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto / Getty)

View in browser You know that conspiracy theories have gotten out of hand when even Donald Trump thinks so. Yesterday in the Oval Office, reporters asked the president about FBI Director Kash Patel’s statement that his agents were assisting in an investigation into Senator Lindsey Graham’s death. Trump said the matter was simple: Graham had fallen victim to a heart problem. “What happened is actually something that’s very hard to detect,” he said. “I don’t see a lot of evil there. I know there’s all sorts of conspiracy theories going along. And I don’t think the FBI—I think the FBI’s wasting their time if they’re doing that.” Despite Trump’s effort to tamp down rumors, speculation about Graham’s death continues to spread, especially among Republicans. The MAGA influencer and self-proclaimed McCarthyite Laura Loomer suspects that Graham was murdered, but Marc Thiessen, a Washington Post columnist and former George W. Bush speechwriter, has questions as well. Patel is a MAGA insider and veteran conspiracist, but John Cornyn—an establishment senator who lost Trump’s support and then a primary in May—also wants to see a toxicology report “to rule out any foul play.” At the same time, Mitch McConnell’s prolonged absence from the Senate is inspiring conspiracy theories as well. The senator’s office released a photograph Sunday night that was intended to quell rumors, and it even included a copy of that day’s Washington Post, like a proof-of-life picture of a hostage. The image was immediately dissected by would-be sleuths who wondered whether it was an AI-generated deepfake or some other kind of fabrication. (The Post acquired the original photo from McConnell’s office and says that metadata appear to show it was taken Sunday.) Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who has seldom met a wild hare he won’t chase, went on the right-wing channel Real America’s Voice and said, “I’ve just heard from some other sources that was an older photo. So I really don’t know.” One can hardly be surprised that so many MAGA-aligned voices are leaping to unproven theories. (I have seen members of the public and media on the left also casting doubt on McConnell’s status, but no comparable remarks by Democratic lawmakers.) A conspiratorial bent has long suffused the right, but Trump made it core to his appeal. His 2016 campaign centered on the ideas that foreign countries were sending criminals to the United States and that Hillary Clinton was engaged in an elaborate uranium scheme with Russia. More recently, his rallying cry is the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The president can scarcely complain about the FBI wasting its time when Patel espoused conspiracy theories before his appointment, and when agents have been reinvestigating (yet again) the 2020 election results in Georgia. Fringe ideas find fertile territory in Congress, where roughly two-thirds of House members have joined the chamber since Trump won in 2016. This MAGA tendency has exacerbated a broader trend toward low trust in American society, which both preceded and contributed to Trump’s rise. “When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses,” my colleague David Brooks warned in a 2020 essay. “In periods of distrust, you get surges of populism; populism is the ideology of those who feel betrayed. Contempt for ‘insiders’ rises, as does suspicion toward anybody who holds authority. People are drawn to leaders who use the language of menace and threat, who tell group-versus-group power narratives. You also get a lot more political extremism.” In such an environment, many people are slow to believe official explanations, whether they take the form of medical examiner’s reports or photographs issued by senatorial offices. Distrust has been further exacerbated recently by the rise of artificial intelligence. Disinformation and misinformation experts who spent years telling the public to be on guard against deepfakes are now trying to convince the public that the McConnell image is real. They weren’t wrong to be concerned before, but it’s easy to see how years of warning, combined with a social-trust deficit, contribute to the proliferation of doubt. I see this even in people around me whom I’ve never known to be suspicious or susceptible to baseless rumors. I see it in myself at times. The situation reminds me of a famous old bit called “Of Course—But Maybe” by the comedian Louis C.K. “I have, like, the thing I believe—the good thing, that’s the thing I believe—and then there’s this thing and I don’t believe it but it is there.” That has become the modern American condition. Skepticism of authority is prudent; excessive skepticism is corrosive. But it’s hard to tell when you’ve crossed that barrier, especially when everyone around you is wrestling with the same question. Trump’s attempts to soothe suspicions about Graham’s death are unlikely to make much difference. One reason is that the atmosphere of distrust has broken containment. Trump may have risen by exploiting that feeling, but now he’s just another authority figure to be doubted. Meanwhile, he continues to feed the problem elsewhere. The president is scheduled to give a speech tomorrow night in which he’s expected to speak about supposed threats to election integrity. Trump’s claims about noncitizen voting and other fraud have all been nonsense. For those who believe what he says, these comments encourage distrust in election officials and democracy broadly; for those who reject what he says, they create reasons not to trust the government he leads. Believe it or not, we are condemned to distrust. Related: America is having a moral convulsion. A Department of Justice for an age of conspiracy theories

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• 🪙 Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiled new images of a proposed $1 gold-colored coin featuring President Trump to commemorate America's 250th anniversary. Go deeper.

ps:Just absolutely pathetic!!!!!

• 🚔 President Trump said ICE should keep doing traffic stops, despite reports that his administration has mostly suspended them after two deadly shootings. Trump wrote on Truth Social: "I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job." Go deeper.

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📺 Trump vote-fraud speech traps networks

President Trump's primetime address from the East Room tonight (9 p.m. ET) is forcing TV networks to choose: Air potential 2020 election falsehoods, or risk backlash from a White House that's shown little hesitation in confronting the media, Axios' Alex Isenstadt writes.

• White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tells Axios it'll be "a major address to the nation on protecting the integrity of our elections."
• The networks haven't announced their coverage plans, which is unusual for the morning of the event.

Why it matters: What would usually be a no-brainer decision to carry a presidential address has become a high-stakes editorial judgment for broadcast networks.

Trump has said his speech will focus on "free and fair elections." He has promised a "very big announcement" and "really big news" regarding the security of the U.S. voting system.

• He hasn't specifically said whether he'll bring up the 2020 election — an obsession of Trump's since he lost it and cried fraud.

The big picture: The networks face pressure from both sides.

• They've spent years trying to avoid amplifying Trump's false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Yet they also must contend with an FCC that, under chairman and Trump ally Brendan Carr, has opened investigations into broadcast networks.

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👀 Inside Trump's ICE reversal

Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photos via Getty Images

A livid President Trump complained to advisers late Tuesday about the Department of Homeland Security's decision to pause vehicle stops by ICE agents, after two fatal shootings of drivers in the past two weeks. The department's idea seemed to be that agents would get more training. But by yesterday morning, Trump had sent a Truth Social post reversing the pause, leaving DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and border czar Tom Homan to explain, Axios' Brittany Gibson and Alex Isenstadt write. Why it matters: The latest ICE shootings have revived a tense debate within the administration over how to balance increasing public pressure to stop the violence with Trump's demands for tough enforcement and more deportations. 🔭 Zoom out: The recent shootings show how Mullin's handling of such incidents contrasts with that of his predecessor as DHS secretary, the often-embattled Kristi Noem. The initial pause on vehicle stops came soon after a plea from Maine Sen. Susan Collins (R), in light of the shooting of a Colombian national in Maine on Monday. Keep reading.

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Hegseth announces new policy to test troops for low testosterone Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Wednesday that he is rolling out a new screening program for “testosterone deficiency” among troops, calling it necessary to allow them to operate at their “absolute best.” Read more.

Why this matters: The move comes as other Trump administration officials have begun to advocate for men to have easier access to testosterone replacement therapies, but the messaging from Hegseth and others blends known science on the hormone with broader, and less substantiated, claims. The Pentagon did not respond to questions about what research or academic studies underpinned the move.   Over the past several years, special operations troops — and specifically Navy SEALs — have come under scrutiny for their use of testosterone and similar substances to enhance performance. The death of a SEAL recruit during training in 2022 led to the discovery of substances including testosterone in his possession, and revealed far more rampant drug use among the elite program than was previously acknowledged.   Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a Pennsylvania Democrat and Air Force veteran, said it “proves that Secretary Hegseth takes direction from the far corners of the manosphere.”

RELATED COVERAGE ➤ Vance says Trump administration ‘screwed up’ communications around Epstein files   ICE should keep making traffic stops despite recent shootings, Trump says   Report: Detainees at ICE facility in Texas report frequent beatings and other human rights abuses   After six years, Trump brings his election obsession to primetime at the White House   CDC nominee says she won’t betray science — while declining to challenge Kennedy’s actions   Trump immediately fires the new court-appointed top prosecutor in Seattle   Donald Trump endorses ‘Pillow Man’ Mike Lindell for Minnesota governor   New York Times files motion to quash subpoenas served on journalists over Air Force One coverage   George Santos’ next gig? Reality TV show contestant   US Mint produces a $1 coin bearing Trump’s face   Drained Reflecting Pool reveals Trump’s ‘American flag blue’ liner is now closer to gray

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Trump Throws Keystone Kash Under the Bus Over Lindsey Graham Case

The president said there is nothing “evil” surrounding the death of the South Carolina senator.

Donald Trump has said the FBI is “wasting their time” investigating Lindsey Graham’s death after Kash Patel helped fuel wild conspiracy theories.

While speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, the 80-year-old president was asked whether he knew why the FBI was getting involved in the late South Carolina senator’s death, even though it was due to natural causes linked to a cardiovascular condition.

Days after Graham’s death, Patel posted that the FBI is “assisting local authorities and has made every necessary resource available,” without explaining how or why. Conspiracy theories have also raged online that Russia may have poisoned the 71-year-old, who had met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv the day before he died.

On Monday, FBI agents were spotted at Graham’s home in Washington, D.C., taking photos. No items were removed from Graham’s home.

Trump downplayed any suggestion that there was anything suspicious surrounding Graham’s death and reiterated that a medical examiner ruled it was caused by a tear in one of his main arteries—known as an aortic dissection—which is extremely difficult to detect.

“If it happens, there’s not much you can do about it. Sounds unfortunate, but there’s not much you can do about it,” Trump said. “His father died of the same thing at about the same age.

“So I don’t see a lot of evil there. I know there’s all sorts of conspiracy theories going along, [but] I think the FBI is wasting their time if they’re doing that.”

Patel, a former MAGA podcaster with no prior experience in law enforcement, has frequently been accused of being more obsessed with social media clout than doing actual FBI work.Patel announced that the FBI was getting involved in Graham’s death in an X post in which he praised the Republican as “a devoted public servant, a fierce defender of our nation, and a true patriot who dedicated his life to the people of South Carolina and the United States.”

A number of MAGA figures spread unsubstantiated claims that Graham, who had been calling for sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow, could have been poisoned by the Kremlin.

Others pushed similar claims that Iran could have been involved in Graham’s death, given that he was one of the biggest supporters of Trump’s war against the Middle Eastern country.

A full autopsy report on Graham has not been released, pending the results of a toxicology report and other tests.

The Daily Beast has contacted the FBI for comment.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-throws-keystone-kash-under-the-bus-over-lindsey-graham-case/?

ps:Of course he did, but having said that, there really isn't any reason for Patel to investigate Graham's death!!

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Musk Faces Legal Nightmare Over $1M Checks Election Stunt

The world’s richest man had poured a record $21 million into a normally low-profile and non-partisan race.

Billionaire Elon Musk could face prosecution after a bipartisan elections commission found that he likely broke the law by offering $1 million checks to Wisconsin voters in last year’s state Supreme Court election.

The Tesla chief and MAGA megadonor poured a record $21 million into a normally low-profile and non-partisan judicial race held in April 2025, only for liberal appellate Judge Susan Crawford to beat his preferred candidate, Brad Schimel, by 10 points.

In an effort to shore up support for Schimel, who was also endorsed by President Donald Trump, Musk made a social media post offering $1 million to people who voted in the election, eventually handing out three checks to voters.

His America PAC political action committee also offered $100 to voters who signed or referred other signatories to a petition opposing “activist judges.”

Now, the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission has found probable cause that Musk violated the state’s election laws by making the social media post “in order to induce them to vote in that election,” the Associated Press reported.

The commission, which is made up of three Democrats and three Republicans, voted 5-1 to refer two voter complaints from Milwaukee and Green Bay to the Brown County district attorney’s office, the commission’s spokesperson told the AP.

Spokespeople for Musk and Brown County District Attorney David Lasee, who is a Republican, did not immediately respond to the AP’s request for comment. The Daily Beast has also reached out.

The government watchdog group Wisconsin Democracy Campaign had previously filed a lawsuit, which is pending in Brown County, seeking to block Musk from offering future cash payments in the state.

At the time, the state’s Democratic attorney general sued to try to stop Musk from handing out the $1 million payments, but the state courts allowed the payments to continue.

Musk had hyped the Wisconsin election as a race that could “determine the fate of Western civilization” and said it mattered “for the future of the world” because of the state Supreme Court’s role in congressional redistricting.

Crawford’s win allowed the liberals to keep their majority on the court, with their advantage growing to 5-2 this year after Democratic-backed candidate Chris Taylor also won an election in April by double digits.

After Schimel lost in 2025, Musk said he would spend far less on political campaigns. He also said he had “done enough” political spending right around the time of his explosive break-up with Trump last year. But the world’s richest man has since made nice with the president and resumed pouring tens of millions of dollars into Republican super PACs, The Hill reported in February.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-faces-legal-nightmare-over-1m-checks-election-stunt-in-wisconsin-supreme-court-race/?

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Trump’s Primetime Speech Has Republicans ‘Scared S***less’

Insiders are terrified that the president will do something crazy on live TV.

The prospect of an unpredictable Donald Trump making a live, primetime address to the nation on Thursday night has many Republicans rattled.

The 80-year-old president has hyped the speech as the announcement of “really big news,” although it is expected to be little more than Trump rehashing years-old false claims about the 2020 election.

One former Trump administration official told Politico that Republicans are not only concerned about the president moaning about Joe Biden’s election victory six years ago while the country is at war and millions of Americans are struggling with a cost-of-living crisis, but also about him deciding to improvise.

“The people I talk to are scared s---less,” the official said. “It’s not scared s---less about the text of what he’s going to say, it’s, what does he add to the text?”

Trump’s inner circle has been desperate for the president to focus on what they see as his achievements in improving the economy, such as declining inflation.

Trump has endured dire approval ratings on the economy during his second term, with policies such as sweeping tariffs and the Iran conflict exacerbating the financial hardships already facing many Americans.

While the White House hasn’t previewed Trump’s speech, it will reportedly focus on voting machine security and alleged election interference by foreign countries.

Steve Cortes, a former Trump adviser, said that while the president’s base still believes there was a “grave injustice” in the 2020 election, Trump would be wiser to discuss other issues ahead of the crucial midterm elections.

“I believe for the persuadable voters, the non-MAGA people, talking about an election from six years ago sounds like sour grapes,” Cortes told Politico.

There is also the issue of how many people will even pay attention to Trump’s rant. Major broadcast networks, including CNN, Fox News, and ABC News, have not cleared their schedules to air it, and it is unclear whether the White House even asked the networks to preempt their programming to broadcast it live.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to suggest that the lack of official information surrounding Trump’s address is precisely why people should watch it.

“As usual, anonymous sources are speculating about what President Trump will say during his speech on Thursday evening. The truth is, nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say, which is why everyone should tune in,” Leavitt said.

Trump teased the speech while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday, confirming it would touch on subjects such as “election machines and integrity.”

“What we’re going to be talking about Thursday, it doesn’t get bigger because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country,” Trump said.

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-primetime-speech-has-republicans-scared-sless/?

ps:How pathetic! Back to the same bull manure lies!! That was brought to court 60+ times and lost everytime!!! And that even the SCOTUS wanted nothing to do with!!!!!!!!!!

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Trump administration revives rule that could deny green cards to immigrants who use public benefits

MIAMI (AP) — The Trump administration is reviving a rule that could deny green cards to immigrants who use public benefits that could include food stamps, Medicaid, housing vouchers and others.

https://apnews.com/article/immigrants-residency-trump-2d631ee59e141da4cf471817ef414829?

• 💰 Trump Media & Technology Group is letting financial services companies access real-time Truth Social data for a fee, interim CEO Kevin McGurn tells Axios' Sara Fischer exclusively. Go deeper.

ps:How pathetic!!

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• 🎰 Federal regulators are investigating whether a White House teleprompter operator capitalized on his knowledge of President Trump's prepared speech text by making trades on the prediction market Kalshi. Go deeper.

Trump's Labor nominee touts experience and fraud prevention as he seeks confirmation

President Donald Trump's nominee to run the Department of Labor emphasized a steady grounding in labor law built on years of experience in private practice, academia and the federal government as he looked to win over senators in a confirmation hearing Thursday. Read More.

Trump administration races the clock to rebuild US tariff wall knocked down by Supreme Court

The U.S. Treasury last year swelled with revenue from President Donald Trump’s double-digit taxes on imports from almost every country on earth. Read More.

Trump media firm plans to sell high speed access to Truth Social posts, possibly Trump's own

President Donald Trump's media company is planning to charge for special high-speed access to Truth Social posts, including possibly his own affecting national security and financial markets. Read More.

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📺 Trump takeaways: Dark warning on U.S. elections

President Trump cast American elections as under siege last night, describing a system riddled with vulnerabilities that hostile foreign actors and unauthorized immigrants are exploiting.

The dark, foreboding 25-minute address from the East Room, which repeated fraud theories that have been debunked, served two main purposes, Axios' Alex Isenstadt and Marc Caputo report:

1. Build support for his SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship for voter registration and is stalled in the Senate.
2. Return to a topic that fixates him perhaps more than any other: The 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.

Citing newly released "raw" intelligence, Trump claimed that China carried out "the largest compromise of election data in history" during the 2020 election — obtaining 220 million U.S. voter files and creating "ballots for Biden."

• One big catch: Voter rolls listing names and addresses are readily available in nearly every state. Some even post them online to promote transparency.

He also accused the intelligence community — the "Deep State" — of withholding documents describing China's activities from him when he was in his first term as president.

• By blaming the intel community of 2020, he excused his own administration — presumably including current CIA director John Ratcliffe, who was DNI director at the time — from catching what he now calls a huge threat.

Friction point: Some in Trump's political operation believe that talking about voter fraud will motivate his voters to turn out in November. But outside of the White House, party leaders and pollsters strongly believe that swing voters don't want to hear about it.

• "It's a stupid, stupid move," said one Republican pollster who works on several campaigns and has tested the effectiveness of the "stolen election" narrative.
• "Even swing voters who think something wasn't good about the election, when they listen to Trump, just have an eyeroll," the pollster said.

More takeaways ... Read the documents ... Behind the broadcast drama.

ps:Oh so pathetic

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👀 Inside Bibi's mystery Trump meeting

Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photos: Alessandra Benedetti/Corbis and Win McNamee/Getty Images.

White House officials were surprised in recent days to read in the Israeli press that President Trump would host Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. In fact, no meeting has been scheduled, Axios' Barak Ravid reports. Why it matters: Netanyahu has visited the Oval Office six times in the 18 months since Trump returned to office — more than any other world leader. Each of those meetings was scheduled within hours or days. This time, Netanyahu has been trying to get an appointment for more than two weeks. The fact that Trump isn't rushing to sit down with Netanyahu in front of the cameras signals not only the divergence of interests between the two, but also how disillusioned the White House is with the Israeli leader five months after they launched a war together. Behind the scenes: Two White House officials told Axios that while Netanyahu wanted to meet Trump, a meeting was never confirmed or added to the president's schedule. "Our impression was that Bibi was trying to will a meeting into existence," one of the officials said. White House officials didn't rule out the possibility of Trump meeting Netanyahu when he comes to Sen. Lindsey Graham's wake at the National Cathedral later this month. Read on.

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🎤 Feds probe Trump's longtime teleprompter guy

Federal regulators are investigating whether a White House teleprompter operator capitalized on his knowledge of President Trump's prepared speech text by making trades on the prediction market Kalshi, two sources familiar with the matter tell Axios' Nathan Bomey.

• The speeches the person allegedly traded on included the State of the Union in February.

Gabriel Perez, the teleprompter operator, is under investigation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over allegations that he bet on Kalshi "mention markets" using information on Trump's planned remarks, according to the sources.

• Perez, who has been Trump's prompter guy since 2016, won more than $100,000 on such trades, the sources said.

What to watch: The CFTC has discussed terms of a settlement with Perez, which could include him giving back profits from the trades, sources told ABC News, which was first to report the investigation.

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Trump uses primetime address to raise doubts about US elections ahead of midterms President Donald Trump used a primetime address to the nation Thursday to elevate his yearslong push to raise doubts about the legitimacy of U.S. elections and dispute his 2020 loss in an appeal for more restrictive voting laws ahead of the midterms. Read more.

Why this matters: Trump’s speech presented allegations of interference and influence in ways that lacked key context, while failing to produce evidence that votes had been manipulated or the election outcome had been altered. Trump used the remarks to justify his push to pass a strict voter ID bill in Congress that has not advanced because it lacks enough support from Republicans.   Election security experts say the decentralized U.S. voting system, with the power over elections residing with the states instead of the federal government, is a strength. Americans vote in more than 10,000 different jurisdictions with different rules, making the nations’ elections extraordinarily complicated but safe from widespread fraud. No credible intelligence has emerged showing the vote count in 2020 was manipulated by foreign actors. Repeated audits and reviews, many run by Republicans including Trump’s then-attorney general, have found no significant fraud occurred in 2020.

RELATED COVERAGE ➤ To air or not to air? Nation’s TV networks struggle to find the right balance for Trump speech   Why American elections are so complicated — and secure   China rejects Trump’s election interference claim as ‘groundless accusations’   Recent polling data on Trump   China and Xi are seen more favorably than the US and Trump in many nations, new survey says   Trump’s teleprompter operator on unpaid leave for alleged prediction market bets on speeches   Acting AG meets with Epstein accusers after demand from key GOP senator   Hegseth again backs a low-altitude military flyover as maneuvers draw scrutiny   WATCH: Fighter jet flyover at a crowded beach   Trump officials want to make testosterone drugs easier to prescribe. Is that a good idea?

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White House Melts Down as Trump’s Speech Backfires

Trump had promised to reveal “really big news” during the address, but that didn’t materialize.

The White House has freaked out at the response to President Donald Trump’s crackpot primetime address.

In an address from the East Room of the White House on Thursday, the 80-year-old tried to convince the nation of “shocking vulnerabilities” in U.S. election security. China, he said, rigged the 2020 election, which he happened to lose to Joe Biden.

Trump had promised to reveal “really big news” during the address, but, in truth, he pored over familiar grievances and proved Republicans, said to be “scared s---less” about what he was going to say, right.

The only thing that was “big,” in fact, was the level to which the media quickly dismissed the president’s 27-minute rant. The reaction from the White House, in turn, was even bigger.

Lackeys running the “Rapid Response 47” account were tasked with going on X to individually call out the hosts, correspondents, contributors, and networks that didn’t willingly lap up Trump’s rambling.

First in their scope was Pierre Thomas, senior justice correspondent at ABC News. He had said on the network that “there is no evidence that they [China] were able to change the outcome of votes.”

“From the same people who brought you the Russia Collusion Hoax. Laughable,” the official account responded. The “hoax” in question is a counter-narrative set up by top MAGA figures that attacks the legitimacy and conclusions of multiple investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which Donald Trump won.

ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl was also in the White House’s sights. He said on Special Report that the president had exaggerated the findings in the newly declassified intelligence documents released to support his ramblings.

“Fake News @jonkarl immediately went on TV to accuse President Trump of lying — even though he admitted he still has ‘a lot more to look through,’” the account handler moaned. “Notice how he doesn’t seem to care about critical intelligence being willfully kept from the President during the 2020 campaign.”

The White House claims that China had access to U.S. voter data during that cycle. In a separate post, the Rapid Response account said that this “was purposely kept from President Trump and the American people in an unprecedented coverup to undermine his first administration and his 2020 campaign.”

The Democratic U.S. Senator from Virginia, Mark Warner, said on Special Report that he was “embarrassed” that networks covered Trump’s “falsehoods” without scrutiny.

“As a matter of fact, before I start, as an American, not as an elected official, I was embarrassed that the president of the United States went before our whole country, and networks like yours carried this as news, as opposed to a rehash of falsehoods,” Warner said.

Tagging him on X, the Rapid Response account said that he “melts down over the fact that TV networks carried @POTUS’ address to the nation. Mark is furious that President Trump is bringing transparency to this long-avoided issue.”

Warner and host Tony Dokoupil sparred during the broadcast, but even the MAGA-coded frontman accused Trump of lying. Rapid Response, of course, failed to mention this. “And honestly, much of what the president has said on this topic has been false,” Dokoupil told viewers. “Most notably, of course, the claim that he won the 2020 election when, of course, he did not.”

Major Elliot Garrett, Chief Washington Correspondent at CBS News, wasn’t as lucky as Dokoupil. The former senior White House correspondent for Fox News was called out during the Rapid Response rampage. He was accused of “moving the goalposts.”

“I hear that there is an assessment that in an abstract experiment, it was found that one type of machine might be vulnerable—one type of machine,” he had said on Special Report.

The White House-linked account said this is “one type of machine too many.”

MS NOW was also given the treatment for cutting away as Trump began rehashing old MAGA talking points about elections. “MSDNC — which a few call ‘MS NOW’ but many others call ‘group therapy for the mentally deranged’ — cut out immediately as @POTUS started to describe shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure. ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE,” the account ranted, to finish off a high-strung night of posting.

The account’s ranting reflects Trump’s anxiety over the response to his claims. The president himself said that ABC and NBC should lose their licenses for not airing his crackpot theories.

“In a rare move, NBC and ABC Fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about because of the fact that they don’t like the topic because they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it,” Trump said.

He angrily claimed that the networks and other media were “part of a plot.”

“They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left. They can’t have a great country, and that’s true.

“You can’t have a great country without free and fair elections. Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.

“They use our public multi-billion-dollar-in-value airwaves for absolutely no money. They pay nothing. All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting. They pay nothing for multi-billion-dollar assets. Great damage has been done to our country. Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue,” he added.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-house-melts-down-as-trumps-speech-backfires/?

ps:Each speech gets more and more pathetically desperate than the one before it!!!!!

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Trump Humiliated by Instant Fact Checks After Crackpot Speech

Experts were quick to clear up misconceptions in the president’s address.

President Donald Trump’s underwhelming Thursday-night address was immediately undercut by experts who fact-checked his claims.

In his speech, the president repeated claims that the 2020 election had been stolen, that electronic voting machines were insecure and had been compromised by foreign actors, and that China acquired 220 million U.S. voter files, among other accusations.

Ben Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins immediately following the speech that, despite the president’s claims and references to declassified documents uploaded online, there was still no evidence of any effect on an election result.

“What stood out to me is that there’s still no evidence of a result of any election being incorrect,” Ginsberg told Collins.

“There still was not the documents, there still was not the evidence, although we’ll see what’s produced,” Ginsberg said, before responding to a number of specific claims Trump made.

The 74-year-old, who has worked for the RNC, George Bush’s presidential campaign and the Republican Governors Association, also discussed the president’s claims about Chinese interference in the 2020 election.

“The administration has cut back on the cybersecurity agency, CISA, and the Department of Justice outfit that helps states so that, in fact, if there is a problem with the 2026 election, it will be in large part because the defenses that are provided by the federal government to the states to stop that activity have been drastically cut back,” he said.

Others fact-checked the president’s claims online, including former national security expert Miles Taylor, who served as the Chief of Staff of the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term before making waves for questioning his fitness for office and campaigning against his re-election.

“Trump suggested the ‘Deep State’ hid from him that China was trying to interfere in our elections… maybe he forgot that we personally briefed him on the threat throughout 2018,” Taylor wrote on X.

“Big mistake to make claims living humans can refute.”

Taylor also broadcast a livestream offering a real-time fact-check of the president’s claims, telling his viewers, “If he wants to thank anyone for protecting the elections during his administration, he can thank folks like me… we’re not going to let him get away with these lies about the 2020 election.”

In addition, CNN’s Zachary Cohen noted that the documents published by the White House discussed issues that were already widely known.

“The documents Trump is referring to right now, and CNN has reviewed all of them, largely discuss vulnerabilities that have been known for years and/or are reflected in the 2021 US intel community assessment,” Cohen wrote.

“None of the declassified information supports the claim that any previous election results — including the 2020 presidential contest that Trump lost — were manipulated by foreign interference or fraud in a way that would’ve changed the outcome.”

CNN’s Laura Coates Live featured a segment calling out Trump’s claims with senior CNN reporter Marshall Cohen, who noted that voter files like the ones supposedly accessed by China can be bought online, that the CIA found Venezuela did not have the capability to interfere with foreign elections, and that the source of the president’s claim about 250,000 non-citizens being found on voting rolls was unreliable.

“When you look at the better source, the government sources that assess who’s a citizen, who’s not, it was a much smaller number, only about 28,000,” Cohen explained.

The Bulwark’s Sam Stein also fact-checked the president’s claims, highlighting evidence in the documents published by the White House that contradicts Trump’s assertions that election interference was primarily conducted to disadvantage his campaign.

“one of the documents that Trump has disclosed tonight has a section noting that China targeted the BIDEN campaign and does ‘not currently intend to covertly interfere to try and sway the outcome of the election,’” Stein wrote, attaching a screenshot from one of the declassified documents uploaded to the White House website.

Even Fox News trod lightly in its coverage of the president’s speech, devoting just over five minutes to the address before pivoting back to the subject of Iran.

Discussing the speech with Sean Hannity, White House correspondent Aishah Hasnie said of alleged evidence that electronic voting machines are easily compromised, “Fox News has not seen the evidence yet and is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president’s statement and claims.”

Fox News was sued for defamation in 2021 by Dominion Voting Systems after several programs across the network amplified claims that the company’s machines had been rigged to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump. The case was settled in 2023, and Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million and acknowledged the court’s ruling that it had broadcast false statements.

The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-humiliated-by-instant-fact-checks-after-crackpot-speech/?

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Trump Accidentally Proves That Putin Did Help Him Run for President

The president declassified intelligence that was supposed to back up his conspiracy theory but showed something very different.

When President Donald Trump addressed the nation on Thursday, he wanted the world to believe that China stole the 2020 election from him. Instead, he dropped fresh evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin had worked to hand it to him. Among the newly declassified intelligence documents Trump released Thursday are assessments that the Russian president and senior Russian officials directed proxy efforts to spread allegations about Joe Biden and Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where Hunter Biden was a board director, orchestrate a corruption scandal against the Democratic nominee, and “ensure the President’s victory,” a reference to Trump, who was the incumbent at the time. Rather than reinforcing Trump’s claim that Beijing worked to stop his re-election, the pages spotlight an intelligence assessment that Moscow sought to help it.

In a primetime address from the White House on Thursday, Trump accused China of compromising the 2020 election by stealing or hacking data and trying to make sure he didn’t win. To back up the claims, he announced the release of newly declassified documents from the CIA and other agencies.

The declassification effort is being run in part by the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, led by former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. He is working alongside White House official Kurt Olsen on a broader push to re-investigate the 2020 results, according to sources familiar with the process.

One of the documents describes Putin and senior officials overseeing proxy efforts to spread claims that Biden, as vice president, engaged in criminal activity in his dealings with Ukraine and Burisma. The document says operatives affiliated with the Russian government advanced these narratives with U.S. officials and other prominent figures, through personal interactions as well as audio and documentary releases via U.S. and Ukrainian outlets.

It goes on to say these figures were conspiring to intensify their efforts as the election approached, aiming to “orchestrate a high-profile corruption scandal” implicating Biden and the Democratic Party in order to help Trump win.

The document describes an intelligence assessment that Russian government-linked proxies were working to damage Biden’s candidacy ahead of the vote, relying in part on U.S. officials and other prominent people to amplify the narratives, though many of the people involved remain redacted in the public version.

Sam Stein, who was politics editor for the Daily Beast from 2017 to 2020 and is now managing editor for The Bulwark, called the release “really incredible,” noting the documents confirm Russia tried to spread the Burisma allegations “with US officials.” Bulwark senior reporter Will Sommer separately flagged a document confirming that China, contrary to Trump’s claims, did not interfere with voting systems, writing on X that the release includes a classified graphic making clear that Russia was the country that was actually trying to meddle.

The broader document set also includes older material on election vulnerabilities. A National Intelligence Council report from January 2020 concluded that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have the capability to access and potentially manipulate U.S. election data, such as voter registration databases, though it cautioned that because American elections are decentralized, any breach would likely be too localized to alter an outcome.

A CNN review of the broader release similarly found the material largely restates vulnerabilities that have been known for years, and that none of it supports the claim that any past election, including the one Trump lost in 2020, was manipulated by foreign interference in a way that changed the result.

Trump’s address was quickly picked apart by experts. Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins immediately afterward that, despite the president’s claims, there was still no evidence any election result had been affected, adding that the promised documentation still hadn’t materialized.

CNN’s Zachary Cohen separately reported that the material Trump cited largely covers issues that were already widely known and reflected in a 2021 U.S. intelligence community assessment.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-accidentally-fingers-putin-in-election-dump/?

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Young Trump Voters Deliver Damning Verdict on His Second Term

The president is bleeding support among a key demographic that helped hand him his 2024 win.

Young voters who backed Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election have delivered a blistering verdict on his second administration.

“We’re a humiliation across the world in terms of foreign policy. The United States is not what it once was, and we can’t seem to drive costs down for the average American,” Zachary, a 25-year-old scientist from Missouri who voted MAGA two years ago, told a New York Times focus group.

The results, published Friday with participants’ surnames withheld, come as polls show Trump, 80, has hit -45 in approval ratings among Gen-Z voters, according to last month’s figures from The Economist.

That same demographic was partly responsible for putting Trump back in the White House, with roughly half of young voters backing him, up from just 37 percent in 2020 and 36 percent in 2016.

Zachary added that Trump’s second stint in the White House has left him completely disillusioned with the American Dream, telling the Times that the oft-cited mantra of “work hard, get ahead” no longer holds true.

“I feel like working hard and having a grinding mind-set is more of the way to meet the bare minimum,” Zachary said. “I’m always working. I’m doing stuff on my off time. And I can save exactly $120 every paycheck.”

Caleb, a 24-year-old management consultant who lives in Maine, was of much the same view when he spoke to the Times. “When I see people working 60-plus hours a week in a trade and not able to make a dent in cost of living, it does feel like it’s gotten tougher, at least, to play by the rules,” he said.

Both men gave Trump just one out of five on a rating scale of how they currently view the president’s second term. “I’d say 1 mostly because I feel there’s a high level of corruption and a lack of transparency within this administration that I definitely either didn’t see or didn’t notice in the first Trump term,” Zachary said.

“I feel like he wants to make it mostly a country for people that are already well off,” he went on. “Most of the policy that comes down isn’t benefiting 80 percent to 90 percent of Americans.”

Caleb added that “it’s hard for me to look at the status quo and not see it as objectively worse when it comes to policy,” adding that most of the changes he’s seen have been “reactive to other issues that were caused during the administration.”

He urged Trump to “focus on sustainable change,” while Zachary thinks the president “needs to be working more for the working-class, average American, rather than being concerned with his own image.”

Trump hasn’t fared much better even among members of the group who rated him higher on that scale. Kim, a 25-year-old medical scribe from Virginia who gave Trump two out of five, told the Times that “nothing seems affordable or feasible right now” and that “the way that he’s acting has just been disappointing.”

Christian, a 25-year-old curriculum adviser from Tennessee who gave the president three out of five, told the Times the president “forgets about certain people in different tax brackets” and that he “makes decisions for maybe wealthier people in the front of his mind.”

Even Alvin, a 24-year-old engineer and New Yorker who rated him four out of five, told the Times that Trump should “keep doing what you’re doing, but at least help us with the economy.”

The Daily Beast contacted the White House for comment on this story.

“President Trump is committed to maintaining Republicans’ majority in Congress,” White House assistant press secretary Liz Huston said. “Young Americans are directly benefitting from President Trump’s policies, which include the largest middle-class tax cuts in history, improved housing affordability, the most secure border in history, and the lowest murder rate since 1900.”

“President Trump will continue to advance his proven economic agenda to accelerate growth, create jobs, and lower costs for Americans,” she added.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/young-maga-trump-voters-deliver-damning-verdict-on-his-second-term/?

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Details of Trump AG Pick’s Jaw-Dropping Meeting With Epstein Victims Exposed

Todd Blanche was issued an ultimatum during his Senate confirmation hearings.

A survivor of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein blasted Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche for refusing to provide victims with any concrete answers during a “demoralizing” meeting that seemed solely aimed at earning Blanche a promotion.

During Blanche’s Senate confirmation hearings this week, Republican Thom Tillis told President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and top choice to permanently lead the Department of Justice that the only way to earn his vote would be to meet with Epstein’s victims.

Survivor Dani Bensky told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday that Blanche had been ignoring her and the other victims for the past eight months, but he quickly agreed to meet with them once his Senate confirmation was on the line.

That meeting, however, failed to live up to the women’s already low expectations, survivor Liz Stein told the hosts of MS NOW’s The Weeknight.

“It had absolutely nothing to do with us, and it had everything to do with Blanche checking a box so that he can get a promotion,” she said. “I don’t think that we had high expectations going into this meeting. I certainly did not. But I didn’t expect to walk out of the meeting feeling the way that we feel right now. It was demoralizing, to say the very least.”

The survivors would have been happy with pretty much anything Blanche had to offer them, but he refused to give them anything concrete, she added.

“He completely talked around questions,” Stein said. “He didn’t give transparent answers. He didn’t give us any promises as far as following up on investigative leads. He had no real answers for the Ghislaine Maxwell transfer and no real explanation for the improper redactions.”

Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping lure, manipulate, and groom young girls for Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

After meeting with Blanche last summer, she was moved from the low-security Federal Correctional Institution Tallahassee in Florida to the minimum-security Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas, a dorm-style facility with a study, game room, and arts and crafts classes that is typically not available to sex offenders.

During this week’s meeting with survivors, Blanche did say he would meet with the women again if they first went to the FBI—something they’ve already been doing for the past 30 years, Stein said.

“It just felt like more political posturing and using survivors the way that we’ve been used as political pawns,” she added. “We’re victims of the crime of sex trafficking. And the fact that our Department of Justice will not take that seriously is beyond concerning not just to us, but should be concerning to Americans all across this country.”

In a statement, the DOJ told the Daily Beast that Thursday’s meeting had been a “productive, initial discussion” involving Blanche, senior DOJ officials, FBI special agents, and victim services representatives.

“Acting AG Blanche answered questions and walked through what is needed for investigations to proceed,” the statement said. “While some victims said that they had not reached out to the FBI under this administration, he encouraged victims to meet with FBI investigators as the next step, and attendees spoke with agents after the meeting about scheduling interviews.”

The department also said it was “determined to bring justice for all victims of human trafficking and sex crimes.”

Stein, however, also ripped into Blanche for meeting with other top Trump administration officials in the Situation Room last year to try to contain the MAGA civil war that erupted when the FBI and DOJ announced that the government’s investigative files would not be released.

Congress eventually voted to force the DOJ to publish the files, but in the meantime, Blanche suggested he meet with Maxwell and hatched a plan to offer an empty gesture of transparency designed to calm Trump’s base, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan revealed in their book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

The incident was yet another case of the administration treating Epstein’s crimes as a “reputational problem” instead of prosecuting more of his associates, Stein said.

“Usually, the situation room is reserved for acts of war, natural disasters,” she said. “Yet they were in there discussing the Epstein files. And it just makes you pause and wonder why.”

Trump and Epstein were close friends for more than a decade, and Trump’s name appears in the files thousands of times. The president has denied knowing anything about Epstein’s crimes or being involved in any wrongdoing.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told the Daily Beast in a statement that Trump has been “totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein.”

“By releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him,” she said.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/details-of-todd-blanches-jaw-dropping-demoralizing-meeting-with-epstein-survivors-exposed/?

ps:Pathetic!!

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Disruption, Interrupted (Aaron Schwartz / Bloomberg / Getty)

View in browser Last night, President Trump delivered a rare prime-time speech, but his address fell well short of the hype. Purportedly, the president was going to make a major statement about election integrity, but in reality, the speech was dense and hoarsely delivered. As my colleagues report, he provided no evidence to back up his long-standing lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The White House also released four tranches of documents meant to support the speech, but Trump’s claims were a farrago of recycled information, misrepresentations of evidence, and tendentious claims based on materials too heavily redacted to parse. Major news networks, apparently concerned that Trump would mislead, declined to air the address live. So why even deliver it? The speech was a sign of desperation. Trump spoke now not only to distract from his sputtering Iran war and its effects on the economy, but also because his attempts to concretely interfere with the 2026 election thus far have almost all failed. As his opportunities to change the rules of the game before November slip away from him, the president is falling back on one of the few tools he has left: attempting to sow chaos and doubt among Americans. Trump has been remarkably successful in his push to gerrymander ahead of the midterms. Several Republican states have redrawn their districts to add GOP-leaning seats, the Supreme Court’s April decision in Louisiana v. Callais allowed other states to move forward with their own maps, and a state court in Virginia shot down retaliatory gerrymandering that would have assisted Democrats. In all, this has given Republicans several more likely seats. But nearly everything else has faltered, including the president’s signature legislative initiative to overhaul elections by, in part, requiring votes to provide proof of citizenship. Last week, Trump refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill “in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.” This is a peculiar and ineffective gesture—the housing bill became law anyway—but he’s right about the prospects for the SAVE America Act. Yesterday, Senator Thom Tillis, a retiring Republican from North Carolina, vowed to block the legislation if it comes up again. As Tillis noted, it would now be too late to implement for the midterms anyway. Most of the subversion methods Trump has tried, however, have been executive actions that don’t require Congress. But the president doesn’t have control over elections—that power is delegated to the states or to Congress. As a result, most of Trump’s big moves have either been blocked by courts or simply ignored by state and local officials. Federal judges blocked parts of an executive order that purported to instruct states not to accept mail-in ballots after Election Day and to require proof of citizenship. Judges also ruled against an order that would have established a federal database of voting-age citizens, and then would have tried to force states to use the list to screen votes by blocking the U.S. Postal Service from delivering ballots to anyone not included on it. The process was an arcane, possibly unworkable attempt to solve a problem—widespread noncitizen voting—that simply doesn’t exist. Although some states have voluntarily handed over voter rolls to the federal government, many others have challenged demands in court and won. The Justice Department’s pressure tactics are now also drawing angry reactions even from Republican allies. In Idaho, the state government, which has forwarded alleged cases of noncitizen voting to the federal government, received a threat of prosecution if noncitizens were allowed to vote; GOP leaders were seething over recent communications from the Justice Department. Earlier this month, Trump fired two members of the Election Assistance Commission, and a third resigned, leaving the body without any leaders. What exactly Trump intends here is a little opaque. The EAC is basically advisory, and hamstringing it will make life harder for local officials, but this also looks like an admission of defeat: Trump had attempted to use the EAC to decertify all existing voting machines and enforce his proof-of-citizenship order. Now he appears to be giving up on it—even though the EAC would be a useful way to help local officials remedy some of the security weaknesses Trump discussed in his speech, such as the computer systems used to run voting processes (though, crucially, no evidence suggests that actual ballots or vote totals are vulnerable). Trump continues to look for evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, but his search remains fruitless, and he didn’t even mount an argument for it last night. The president has been particularly focused on Georgia, but a Trump-appointed federal judge this month blocked the Justice Department from subpoenaing people who worked in Fulton County in that election, and two FBI agents assigned to trawl through old evidence were fired for refusing to do so, MS NOW reported. What options does this leave Trump? One is trying to create chaos by insisting that fraud exists. That was the apparent goal of last night’s speech. Having come up short on any efforts involving legislation or policy, Trump’s main confederates in his latest push are Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, an extreme partisan who has no statutory role in elections and also no experience in election administration or security; and John Solomon, a right-wing pundit with a long history of spreading false claims, who has been brought on by the White House to construct narratives like the ones Trump laid out. The second, as I wrote in an in-depth October article about how Trump was already trying to subvert the midterms, is to deploy troops or federal law enforcement around the time of the election. The danger posed by either of these options should not be dismissed, but there are reasons they were not Trump’s first choices: They are risky and less likely to succeed. Because election officials, experts, and nonprofit organizations have been paying attention to the threat for months, they are now much more prepared for anything the administration might attempt, as Washington Monthly’s Garrett Epps recently reported. The greatest defense against subversion, as I wrote last fall, is for Americans to vote. A close election is easier to steal than a decisive one, and Trump’s political failures have produced polling that points in the direction of a strong vote against the Republican Party this fall. (As Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican gadfly, noted this week, squawking about election fraud is an odd choice when your party controls the White House, House, and Senate.) Prime-time addresses that spew grievances and obvious falsehoods may drive voters even further away from the GOP. In an ironic twist, last night’s speech really might help protect the integrity of the 2026 election. Related: Trump just did more damage to American elections than China. Trump dooms his own party.

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Trump shifts his tone on Jimmy Carter while grappling with Iran, inflation and his own legacy

Jimmy Carter used to be one of President Donald Trump ’s favorite political targets, a catchall foil for feckless Democrats that he could jeer at to make himself look strong and decisive. Read More.