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

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🖊 New White House counsel

Longtime Trump aide Will Scharf, now the White House staff secretary, will take over as the next White House counsel on Sept. 1, the White House announced last night.

• Scharf replaces Dave Warrington, who'll leave the administration for the private sector.

Scharf represented Trump in his Supreme Court presidential-immunity case.

• Scharf chairs the National Capital Planning Commission, which has tried to clear the way for Trump's White House ballroom construction. An appellate court halted the project Friday.

Mullin's MAGA backlash

Just 4½ months after replacing Kristi Noem as Homeland Security secretary, Markwayne Mullin is feeling the heat from President Trump's MAGA enforcers, Axios' Brittany Gibson reports.

• Steve Bannon, a top MAGA podcaster, is among those who've joined the chorus of MAGA figures objecting to Lance Schroyer's nomination to lead ICE. "You can't pick a cop from Oklahoma and think he's going to walk in and be able to do that, right? You're asking too much of somebody," Bannon told Axios.

Keep reading.

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Trump’s immigration crackdown looms over Minnesota’s bruising Senate primary Minnesota’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate on Tuesday features establishment-backed U.S. Rep. Angie Craig and the more progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan. The immigration debate is an added schism in a race that otherwise echoes many of the other left-versus-center divides that have played out across the United States this year. Read more.

Why this matters: Craig voted for tighter enforcement soon after President Donald Trump returned to office last year, only to later express regret for her decision after the Republican president sent a surge of agents into Minneapolis. Those votes may turn out to be some of the most fraught of Craig’s eight-year career in Congress, decisions that Flanagan has highlighted while trying to portray her rival as unwilling to fight an unpopular administration in Washington.   Craig flipped a Republican-held seat in 2018, and every two years she overcame millions of dollars of attack ads to win tough reelection campaigns. Until Craig’s Senate run, the heat came from the right. Newly under fire from the other side, the decisions she made as a swing-seat congresswoman have become a liability as a statewide Senate candidate.

RELATED COVERAGE ➤ Wisconsin primary also features progressive clash with Democratic establishment Congressional Democrats launch probe into efforts to deport US military members and their families Trump announces staff secretary Will Scharf will be his new White House counsel Justice Samuel Alito confirms he’s staying on the Supreme Court for another term Joe Biden’s cancer has spread, his son Hunter says

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Trump Hit by Humiliating Reality Check After AI-ing Golf Photo

The 80-year-old president underwent a remarkable transformation.

Donald Trump has been caught cheating at one of his own golf clubs—although this time not on the course itself.

The 80-year-old president was called out online after posting a photo of himself driving golfing great Gary Player around the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Sunday.

The original picture, taken by freelance photographer Andrew Mordzynski and published by Getty Images, shows Trump as he actually is: a pasty, overweight, slightly disheveled octogenarian.

But in the digitally altered version posted by Trump on his Truth Social account the president appears to have had some kind of magical glow-up: younger, slimmer, and more manly. It’s the version of Trump he’d rather have us see.

In the original picture, Trump, wearing a white and gold cap from his own merchandise line, has puffy eyes and a blotchy, reddish face. His mouth is open.

In the starkly different version of the same photo Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday afternoon, his eyes are wider, his mouth is closed, his skin is tanned, and the back of his hair is neatly trimmed.

His chest area has also been smoothed, and the “TRUMP” logo has been changed from the original, in a square patch, to more visible standalone letters on the shirt.

What appeared to be sweat near his forehead has been removed, with the philtrum between his nose and lip more pronounced.

Other visual indicators of an AI or photoshopping tool being used include the heavily airbrushed skin textures on both men, forsaking realistic pore and hair details.

The background also has a blurred look resembling a painting, with a warm, artificial-looking glow.

Apart from receiving a more tanned look, Player, 90, looks virtually identical in both photos.

X account Patriot Takes shared Trump’s photo with a different picture of the president with his golf buddy on Sunday, adding the caption “Trump’s AI Image vs. Reality…"

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.

Also not visible in the photo from Sunday are the bruises of varying sizes spotted on Trump’s forearms, alongside what looked to be a couple of scrapes.

Trump also sported Band-Aids on a couple of fingers of his right hand, which he rested on his knee while squinting forward at the route ahead.

The president’s bruising is usually most notable on his hands, not his arms, which were exposed due to his polo shirt.

He has previously blamed the bruising on his large daily dose of aspirin and excessive handshaking as part of the job.

Trump is no stranger to using AI, regularly filling his social media feed with computer-generated slop.

Last week Trump posted an AI-generated image on Truth Social depicting him alongside generals George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur, two of the most celebrated U.S. military commanders of World War II.

A previous AI posting spree saw him digitally insert himself next to President John F. Kennedy, as well as cast himself as the star of imaginary science fiction films.

Last October, Trump famously posted an AI video of himself as a king, flying a jet, and dropping a brown substance on No Kings protesters.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-hit-by-humiliating-reality-check-after-ai-ing-golf-photo/?

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Trump’s Secret Nuclear Admission to Aides Is Leaked

The president is telling advisers he may have to abandon the key rationale for his war on Iran.

Donald Trump has privately admitted that he may be forced to end his war on Iran without achieving his main objective, according to a bombshell report.

The conflict began on Feb. 28 when Trump joined Israel in launching massive air strikes that decapitated the leadership of the Islamic regime. The president cycled through several rationales for the war before hitting on keeping Tehran from building a nuclear bomb—and has stuck to that line in the five months since.

That reported retreat would make it harder for the White House to paint any end to the conflict as a victory. Iran’s closure of the waterway, through which a fifth of global oil supply passes, has sent gas prices in the U.S. soaring ahead of midterm elections likely to be dominated by cost-of-living concerns. Democrats hold an almost 8-point lead in the polls, which means the GOP could lose control of both the House and the Senate.

Trump has tried to smooth over any panic among his aides, the Journal reports. He’s told them Iran is unlikely to restart its nuclear program while he’s in office, pointing to American strikes that wrecked three of the country’s main nuclear sites last year, according to the Journal. He also brushed off uranium still buried in the country during July’s NATO summit. “We’ve already got the nuclear material, because it’s so far underground,” he said then.

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

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-secret-admission-to-aides-that-he-may-be-willing-to-walk-away-without-iran-nuclear-deal-is-leaked/?

ps:Something we never should've been involved with in the first place!

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Republican Senators Fear Trump Is About to Make a New Midterm Nightmare

The president’s long-running obsession with election integrity has his party on edge.

Senate Republicans are panicking that Donald Trump will spend the rest of the summer publicly hammering them over a voting bill they have little to no chance of passing.

The SAVE America Act, which the 80-year-old president has ranked above everything else on his agenda, would force Americans to produce citizenship paperwork when they register and show photo ID at the polls.

Trump has repeatedly claimed the act is essential because millions of noncitizens keep participating in elections to stop him from winning them. Studies, even by the MAGA-aligned D.C. think tank the Heritage Foundation, have shown time and again that cases of noncitizen voting are vanishingly rare.

The House approved the bill in February almost entirely along party lines. Republicans hold 53 Senate seats. They need 60 to pass what Trump has cast as the party’s insurance policy for November, telling GOP representatives in March that the measures would all but “guarantee the midterms.”

Sen. Mike Rounds, 71, told Politico on Monday that an August offensive from the president would shock nobody. “That would be consistent with his approach,” he said. “We also know the votes aren’t there.”

Senators cleared out of Washington for the summer recess on Saturday with no version of the legislation advanced. They will not sit again until Sept. 14. That leaves them just three weeks of floor time, before they scatter for October and the midterms, for a vote they’ve already failed to pass six times. Majority Leader John Thune, 65, whom Trump has threatened to have ousted from leadership over the debacle, called up a narrower photo ID measure early Saturday morning, written by Ohio Sen. Jon Husted. Every Republican who voted backed it. The move still fell eight votes short, at 52-46.

One GOP senator, speaking anonymously, told Politico that Thune’s calculation was simple. “He thinks it will give us cover with the president,” they said. “I think he’s wrong,” they went on, adding their colleagues were “not factoring in the president’s reaction.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, 65, was blunter about the math. “At the end of the day, all Republicans need to start getting satisfied with everybody pretty quickly, so that we can get the voters to be satisfied with us, and we maintain our majority at least in the Senate,” he told the publication.

“I look at political data almost every day of the week,” he went on. “I don’t see [the SAVE America Act] as one of the major factors that are going to get [voters] out to the polls.”

The Daily Beast contacted the White House for comment on this story. “The American people overwhelmingly support election integrity and the SAVE America Act,” spokesperson Lauren Bis said.

“Republicans must use reconciliation to pay our troops, support our farmers, secure our elections and thwart Democrats’ obstructionist tactics.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/republican-senators-fear-trump-is-about-to-make-a-new-midterm-nightmare-with-election-threat-obsession/?

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Trump’s Staggering Vanity Project Cash Grab Exposed

Leaked records show $423 million routed to the president’s D.C. projects this year.

President Donald Trump is pouring an astonishing $423 million into his crusade to remake the nation’s capital in his own image.

The president, 80, has spent much of his second term rebuilding in D.C., ordering a ballroom at the White House, a South Lawn helipad, a 250-foot “Triumphal Arch,” and an overhaul of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The list goes on—and the National Park Service spreadsheets behind it just revealed the massive dent it’s making in public coffers.

This year’s allotment for the White House grounds tops $323 million, according to internal Interior Department documents obtained by former CBS News justice correspondent Scott MacFarlane, who now publishes on Substack. Work on the National Mall ahead of America’s 250th birthday drew close to a further $100 million.The combined $423 million is more than twenty times the $20 million the two sites drew under the Joe Biden administration in 2024. “The National Park Service is being used as a piggy bank for Trump’s vanity projects,” said Tim Whitehouse, who leads the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, 70, has cut millions of dollars in funding for Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon. Jobs still waiting in the queue include tree work at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, an emergency fix to a wastewater plant at Death Valley National Park, California, and new roofs at Mission San Jose in San Antonio, Texas.The workforce has thinned, too. Roughly 2,000 employees left the park service in the year to May after DOGE cuts and other reductions, according to the records obtained by MacFarlane. One employee said anonymously that colleagues were being “forced to prioritize Trump’s vanity projects over our own needs.”Trump’s building spree gathers pace as his standing with voters collapses. The president sank to 32 percent approval in a Quinnipac poll released last month—the worst showing of his political career, and below even his ratings in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol Building.

Sixty-eight percent of voters told that pollster that Trump is not focused enough on the problems facing everyday Americans. His own advisers say he’s in denial, and that he’s fixating on “the hobbies that distract from his terrible polling numbers.”

The New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman estimates his construction projects consume about 70 percent of his attention, even as the president insists that voters are disillusioned with the GOP, and that “they’re not angry with me.”

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

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-staggering-vanity-project-cash-grab-exposed-as-white-house-takes-423m-in-federal-funding/?

ps:It's not just staggering it's absolutely pathetic!!!!!

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Trump signs order calling for spacing out childhood vaccines, against medical groups’ guidance

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order calling for revamped childhood vaccine recommendations that promote his long-held but discredited theory that childhood shots should be spaced out into separate medical visits.

https://apnews.com/article/vaccine-research-autism-trump-kennedy-rfk-d10f81f221c4ae9f5b2f83dd0ee98b29?

 

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Betting Big

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When Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he was nursing grudges and claiming a mandate. The institutions he saw as his enemies—in politics, business, and education—faced a dilemma about how to respond.

A few concluded that they should resist the president’s demands of fealty and collaboration. Another group tried appeasement, seeking accommodation that would allow them to otherwise operate as usual. And some looked at the landscape and concluded that something fundamental had shifted in American politics. They saw the MAGA movement as a lasting change, and decided that their best move was to make their own radical shift to adjust.

As I wrote last week, predictions of a Trump-driven realignment of the electorate now look extremely shaky. The groups that he was able to attract to the Republican ticket two years ago—young voters, especially men; Hispanic voters; and Black men—have turned solidly against him and against GOP candidates in polls ahead of the midterms. Voters who were unimpressed with Joe Biden or Kamala Harris and who heard Trump’s promise of stopping inflation are now angry about the president’s shrugging at higher prices and inflationary war in Iran. With some distance, the 2024 election looks less like a decisive turning point and more like a fluke. But that realization has come too late for those who reshaped themselves for a reality that has proved ephemeral.

David Ellison, who, along with his father, Larry, is a friend of Trump’s, decided to use the new Trump administration as an opportunity to build a huge media conglomerate. First, his company Skydance merged with Paramount. Taking control of CBS News, he installed Bari Weiss as editor in chief, seeking a leader who would appeal more to both the White House and to conservative viewers. But Weiss’s makeover has so far looked like a flop: 60 Minutes has hemorrhaged staffers, and the Evening News has hemorrhaged viewers. Her proposition was that a slightly more conservative version of the mainstream media would bring the audience back to a struggling network, but that doesn’t appear to actually be appealing to either MAGA viewers or legacy CBS watchers.

Ellison has already moved on to an attempted merger with Warner Bros., reportedly promising administration officials deep political changes at CNN if the deal was approved by federal regulators. Ellison got approval, but now that deal is in trouble anyway. Facing an antitrust lawsuit led by the attorney general of California, Paramount agreed to pause the merger until a trial next year. Experts are divided on how likely Paramount is to prevail, but if the merger doesn’t close by September 30, the company will owe Warner Bros. shareholders $7 million every day until it does. In a New York Times column last week, Ellison complained that people are drawing incorrect inferences about his politics, but his private views are beside the point: What is public is Ellison’s willingness to play to the Trump administration’s politics to build an empire.

CBS News is not the only media interest to discover that courting MAGA news consumers is not a guarantee of success or growth. The Times also reported recently on how a range of right-wing influencers has seen audiences shrink drastically. Their travails appear to reflect Trump’s own difficulty in keeping his 2024 coalition together: The most pro-Trump figures have seen some of the biggest drops, amid ideological battles inside the MAGA coalition over Israel and the war in Iran, while more Trump-critical figures on the right have sometimes gained.

Other corporate leaders also bet on Trump. Elon Musk attempted to become something like an unelected deputy president at the start of Trump’s second term. That experiment ended acrimoniously, and the men’s relationship has been on and off ever since, but Musk’s reputation is now inextricably connected with Trump’s. X has shed users. Tesla sales have struggled, in part because anti-Trump consumers have turned against Musk and also because Musk has been distracted by other ventures, such as SpaceX.

These decisions to throw in with Trump were notable because many institutions treated his 2016 win as an accident of chance, and were happy to publicly resist him. In doing so, though, they seem to have opened the door to more direct corporate involvement in politics—and with it, greater vulnerability to political pressure. The idea that corporations had gone “woke” by embracing DEI and other progressive causes in 2020 and 2021 was to some extent a marketing ploy by the companies, but it infuriated Republicans and made them targets for Trump’s second administration. Trying to protect themselves, corporate leaders now may have overcorrected, mistakenly assuming a lasting MAGA regime.

Within right-wing politics, many individuals and organizations also leapt into Trumpism. The venerable Heritage Foundation reworked itself and lost or pushed out many long-standing scholars and staffers. Now it finds itself in an identity crisis—and also shut out of the White House because Trump is still sore about the attention and credit that Project 2025 won for driving his agenda. Many mainstream Republicans remade themselves as MAGA Republicans, but the results have not always been good. Just ask Senator John Cornyn, who lost his primary to an even-more-MAGA challenger this May.

Earlier this month, Politico’s Kathy Gilsinan reported on the broken pipeline for bringing new foot soldiers into conservative government and nonprofit organizations. “Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” a senior GOP congressional staffer told her. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”

This is the risk of betting big on a long-term realignment: If you wager wrong, politics overall will snap back quickly, but you will be stuck with the consequences of your decision for much longer.

Related:

• Americans are turning on Trump.
• What if 2016 was a fluke? (From 2020)

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Trump officials propose new requirements for food additives and ingredients

U.S. health officials on Monday proposed a rule change that would require food manufacturers to notify regulators before introducing new ingredients or additives into processed or packaged foods. Read More.

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Trump scoffs at Iran’s demand for war reparations Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei stressed that Iran will not reopen the Strait of Hormuz until the U.S. meets its conditions. This includes compensation for war damage, a demand President Donald Trump said Tehran’s negotiators hadn’t raised until now. Read more.

What to know: Trump responded that he is now demanding “compensation from Iran, for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts.” The U.S. government has blamed Iran-backed militants for the deaths and injuries of hundreds of Americans over several decades, including more than 600 U.S. troops killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2011.

RELATED COVERAGE ➤ Trump used elaborate ruse to fly out of Turkey following summit because of Iran threat, report says What to watch Tuesday: Primaries in Wisconsin and Minnesota showcase Democratic divide Washington grapples with a National Guard deployment extended until 2029 Trump media company announces a massive loss and new turnaround effort Deadline passes for Rep. Max Miller to be replaced on Ohio ballot as he faces domestic abuse claims Ocasio-Cortez says she’s freezing her eggs as she decides her next political moves

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Fuming TV Addict Trump, 80, Erupts as His $1.7B Failure Is Exposed

The president vowed to take legal action in a deranged name-calling rant.

Donald Trump went on a furious rant after a liberal think tank said the president’s costly National Guard deployments in cities did not reduce violent crime.

Analysis from the Center for American Progress found that the Trump administration’s crime crackdown in cities such as Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., cost American taxpayers more than $1.7 billion but had little effect.

A report from CAP published in July suggested that Trump tried to portray his troop-deployment efforts as a success by “exploiting” the fact that violent crime and murder were already declining in the cities his administration targeted with its “extreme interventions.”

On Monday, Chandler Hall, the associate director for public safety at CAP, discussed the analysis of whether there “actually was a change in the pre-existing trends” before Trump deployed troops to the cities during an interview on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal.

“We looked at what were the effects of the National Guard deployments, not just in D.C., but in all cities in which the National Guard were deployed,” Hall said. “What we find is that across multiple cities, multiple data sets, and multiple time windows, we find no effect that violent crime actually did change post the National Guard deployments in any of the cities.”

In a rambling Truth Social post of 190 words, Trump lashed out at Hall while also threatening to sue CAP for exposing his unnecessary $1.7 billion crackdown.’

“Chandler Hall, representing, on Television, the foolish Center for American Lack of Progress, stated that adding the National Guard to Cities, including our now Great Again, Washington, D.C., had ‘NO impact on Crime.’ How crazy is that,” Trump posted.“Hall was met with furious dissent. The report is just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics, including George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, WellsFargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, and NBC Universal. Foreign support includes the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (Taiwan), and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates,” he continued. “The Dumocrats love it, and are against anything ‘TRUMP.’ These people, and others like them, are so bad for our Country. Their stated course is anything to hate or demean ‘TRUMP.’

The 80-year-old president also threatened that CAP would be “met with a lawsuit,” which is apparently being drawn up now.

“I am also strongly considering adding some of the contributors to this Fake Organization. Crime is way down since I took Office, and they know it. Liars, at this level, must be held accountable! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Trump, who spends an extraordinary amount of time watching cable news television as president, had his meltdown after managing to catch Hall on the relatively obscure Washington Journal program hosted on the C-SPAN television network.

Hall’s appearance on the show began at 9:25 a.m. ET on Monday morning, a period in which Trump’s public White House schedule listed him as taking part in “Executive Time.”

Analysis from the Daily Beast found that the 80-year-old president was only seen in public three times in Washington, D.C., before 11 a.m. during the entire month of June. On most of these days, Trump’s mornings were taken up with so-called “Executive Time.”

Trump’s post was shared alongside a clip of border czar Tom Homan praising the crackdown in D.C. during a Monday appearance on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show.

“I’ve lived in D.C. at least 15 years, and I wouldn’t walk the streets of D.C. without a concealed weapon,” Homan said. “President Trump has made Washington D.C. an example for the whole world. Over 16,000 arrests, almost 2,000 firearms taken off the street. Three dozen murder suspects taken off the street.”

In his Washington Journal appearance, Hall did state “in the interest of fairness” that the deployment of troops in areas like D.C. did result in a fall in “opportunistic property crime,” such as theft or vandalism.

Hall also noted that the nonpartisan D.C.-based think tank Niskanen Center issued a report in June revealing that Trump’s deployment of troops to the capital had no measurable effect on reducing violent crime.

Instead, the crackdown was merely a “blunt and expensive” stunt, as the troops’ presence in tourist areas only resulted in a 24-percent reduction in crimes such as theft and vandalism rather than violent crimes.

The Daily Beast has contacted the Center for American Progress for comment.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fuming-trump-80-erupts-as-his-17b-failure-is-exposed/?