Good evening, this is Really American. It is Thursday, July 30, 2026. Trump woke up to the worst poll numbers of his presidency, and by tonight he’s threatening to take his own Attorney General nominee and go home.

The wheels are coming off for Trump in every direction. Here is what we are tracking this evening. His own party is defying him out in the open, the midterm map is sliding toward Democrats in the races he cares about most, and his family is busy trying to auction off a piece of the World Cup. On top of all that, his State Department can’t even put the right names on a map of Africa. We’ve got a lot for you tonight, so let’s get into it.

One quick thing first, because we need to explain why this platform matters. When a billionaire buys a newspaper, the coverage doesn’t change with an announcement. It just quietly does, and the stories that threaten his friends or his tax bill get softer until they’re gone. Bezos owns the Washington Post and killed its endorsement the second it suited him. Murdoch built a whole network around telling one audience what to believe. We don’t work that way, because no billionaire owns us. You do. We’re this close to our July subscriber goal, and we'll only reach it if you upgrade. If you’ve been reading for free, tonight’s the night. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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TRUMP THREATENS TO PULL HIS OWN AG NOMINEE

The fight over Todd Blanche, which started this week, has turned into Trump threatening to take his ball and go home.

Cornered by two Republican senators who won’t budge, Trump went on Truth Social Thursday and floated pulling Blanche’s nomination entirely, saying he’d put it back only after John Cornyn and Thom Tillis are out of office at the end of the year. That’s called being a sore loser. The Washington Post reported he blamed their resistance on his refusal to endorse either of them, writing that both senators had their careers “ended by my action.” Read that again. He’s insulting the exact people whose votes he still needs.

What they actually want is simple, and that explains why Trump is so desperate to keep it off the record. Cornyn and Tillis want written confirmation that a nearly $1.8 billion payout fund for so-called victims of “weaponization” is dead, and they want the tax protections shielding Trump and his family from IRS audits narrowed so they can’t cover his future filings. Tillis says Trump would rather torch his own nominee than put the fund’s death in writing, and that tells him everything. “There’s at least one or two people in the White House that wanted to have this latent capability for future use,” Tillis said.

Cornyn made clear this goes past two retiring senators, warning that Trump is “mistaken if he believes concerns about the provisions in his tax lawsuit settlement are limited to me and Senator Tillis.” When his own party is asking out loud whether his nominee can ever get confirmed, the problem isn’t Cornyn. The problem is a deal that looks like Trump buying himself permanent protection from the IRS, and his own side can see it.

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THE MIDTERM MAP IS TURNING ON REPUBLICANS

While Trump fights his own senators, the ground under his party is shifting toward Democrats, and the people who forecast these races for a living are the ones sounding the alarm.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the respected forecaster run by analyst Larry Sabato, moved Jon Ossoff’s Georgia Senate race from “leans Democrat” to “likely Democrat” on Thursday. That’s a gut punch for Trump, who has spent years gunning for the man who helped flip Georgia in 2020. The Daily Beast reported that the same forecast pushed five Republican-held House seats toward Democrats, including the New York district of Trump ally Mike Lawler, bringing the number of real toss-up seats to 20.

The analysts said plainly why it’s happening, pointing straight at voter anger over affordability, the war in Iran, and Trump’s own sinking approval. “The Democratic lead is certainly more robust now than it would have been for Republicans in 2022,” managing editor Kyle Kondik told the Daily Beast, comparing it to the last midterms when everyone braced for a red wave that never showed up.

Ossoff has become the blueprint. He turned hearings into viral moments by using Pete Hegseth’s own Iran words against him and forcing Trump’s intelligence nominee to squirm over who won in 2020. Republicans bet that leaning into Trump would fire up their base, and that bet is aging badly. When the man Trump most wanted to destroy is now favored to win, you know which way the wind is blowing three months out.

TRUMP’S INNER CIRCLE TRIES TO SELL THE WORLD CUP, AND IT BACKFIRED

Here’s one the sports pages caught before the political press did, and it lands right in the middle of Trump’s family.

The Union of European Football Associations announced Thursday it will boycott future World Cups over FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s plan to sell ownership stakes in the tournament to private investors, and CONCACAF’s forty-one member associations jumped in right behind them to reject it. Yahoo Sports reported UEFA didn’t mince words, saying the model “has no place in the world of football” and vowing to stay out as long as the proposal is alive.

Follow the money, and you land exactly where you’d expect. Infantino reportedly held investor talks with members of the Trump administration, and the group set to lead the buy-in would run through Thrive Eternal, a venture firm controlled by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared. All of this comes after Trump openly bullied FIFA into lifting a red card against a U.S. player. The pattern of a president leaning on a global institution to line his own circle’s pockets is already set.

The World Cup is run by a nonprofit. Carving it up so a Kushner-linked fund can profit is the kind of self-dealing that used to be a full-blown scandal on its own. When European and North American soccer would rather walk away from the sport’s biggest event than hand Trump’s family a cut, you’re watching the rest of the world react to this administration the way American voters already are.

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TRUMP’S STATE DEPARTMENT CAN’T READ A MAP

Want a small picture of how this government runs day-to-day? Look at what happened in Rio this week.

At the AIDS 2026 conference in Brazil, the State Department displayed a map of Africa during a presentation on its new health agreements, but it mislabeled every single country on the continent. The Independent reported that Nigeria, where the U.S. maintains a military presence, was dropped into the Sahara, making it landlocked. Mozambique got moved clear across to the Horn of Africa. The whole image carried an AI watermark indicating it was generated with OpenAI tools rather than checked by a real person.

An AI and geopolitics expert at the Atlantic Council put it flatly, saying whoever built and approved the slide “did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work.” The State Department took “full responsibility” and blamed a staffer who rushed the deck before the event. That’s not much of a defense.

Remember, this is the same administration that paused PEPFAR funding last year and is now phasing the program out entirely in South Africa. The partners watching that slide go up have already seen American commitment wobble. A garbled map is embarrassing on its own. It’s also a tell. A government that can’t be bothered to put Nigeria on the right coast isn’t paying attention to the things that keep people alive.

BEFORE YOU GO YOU NEED TO HEAR THIS

If tonight’s edition handed you something the billionaire outlets are burying, the best thing you can do is become a paying subscriber. And ask yourself why you had to come here to read half of it. When a handful of oligarchs own the megaphone, the story stops being what happened and quietly becomes whatever they’ll let you hear about it. A night where Trump threatened his own nominee, watched the midterm map slide away, and let his family chase a cut of the World Cup is exactly the kind of night that gets softer on outlets owned by people who still need something from him. We ran it all because nobody owns us but our readers, and with July closing out, we’re right on the edge of our goal. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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— The Really American Team

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Thursday, July 30, 2026. Trump woke up to the worst approval number of his presidency, and the day only gets uglier from there.

The floor is falling out from under him. His approval just hit a new low, and his own party is heading for the exits. The economy is slowing because of a war nobody wanted, and his own senators won’t confirm his Attorney General. Also, the diary of the man he humiliated yesterday just caught his top adviser red-handed. We have a good one for you today; let’s get into it.

One quick thing first. We’re in the last days of July and right on the edge of our subscriber goal. Here’s why we keep asking. When a billionaire buys a newspaper, nobody announces the coverage is about to change. It just quietly does. Stories that embarrass his friends get softened. Stories that threaten his tax bill or his contracts vanish before you ever see them. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and killed its endorsement when it suited him. Murdoch built a whole network around telling one audience what to believe. That’s the game. Not censorship with a stamp on it, just a slow narrowing of what you’re allowed to hear, until the news is whatever the richest people in the country are fine with you knowing. We don’t work that way, because no billionaire owns us. You do. Reader-funded, independent, not for sale. If you’ve been reading for free, today’s the day. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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TRUMP’S APPROVAL HITS ROCK BOTTOM

32 percent. That’s how many Americans approve of Donald Trump right now. It is likely to only get worse.

A new Quinnipiac poll dropped Wednesday, and it’s the lowest of his entire presidency. A staggering 58 percent disapprove. A separate CNN poll had him at 34 but it’s the same story either way. The country is done.

And the part that should scare the White House, his own base is cracking. Republican approval fell from 85 percent to 76 percent in a single month. Those aren’t Democrats leaving. Those are his own people.

The reason isn’t complicated. The Iran war has killed 18 American service members, and voters can see it isn’t working with 54 percent saying we’re not winning. Two-thirds say it wasn’t worth it, per The Hill.

A number like that in an election year is a flashing red light. Trump is dragging his whole party toward the midterms, and they can all see the cliff.

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TRUMP’S WAR IS WRECKING THE ECONOMY, WE HAVE DATA TO PROVE IT

Want to know why people are turning on him? Look no further than their wallets.

New economic data that came out this morning shows the economy slowed to 1.5 percent growth last quarter. Economists expected around 2.1. The drop came straight out of Trump’s war in Iran, which torched energy markets and broke supply chains.

You feel it every single day. Gas is still high. Groceries jumped. Airfares surged. The Strait of Hormuz is still choked off, so fuel prices stay up and shortages stay on the table.

And it’s about to get worse. A Yale analysis found Trump’s tariffs will cost the average household about $1,100 more a year. That’s money out of your pocket, on purpose.

63 percent of Americans told CNN that Republicans don’t care enough about the cost of living. They’re not wrong. Trump picked a war, and you got the bill.

TRUMP CAN’T EVEN CONFIRM HIS OWN AG

Trump’s own party won’t hand him his Attorney General and the reason tells you everything.

Republicans John Cornyn and Thom Tillis blocked the committee vote on Todd Blanche this week. They want it in writing that a Trump-friendly “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” also known as the January 6th slush fund, is actually dead before they’ll move. Blanche won’t do this because he still wants it to happen.

Now, here’s what that fund really is. It came out of a plan for the Justice Department to settle Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. The deal would pay out Trump supporters and January 6 rioters, and it would block the IRS from ever auditing Trump’s or his family’s old tax returns. Cornyn wants that immunity narrowed so it can’t cover his future filings too.

Cornyn isn’t hiding his frustration. He accused the DOJ of “stonewalling” and said “the ball is in Blanche’s court.”

Don’t forget how we got here. Trump torched Cornyn’s career by backing his primary opponent. Now Cornyn is a vote Trump needs, and one Republican no can kill the whole nomination. Burn your own people, and this is the bill that comes due.

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THE MILLERS BEGGED FAUCI FOR HELP. NOW THEY WANT HIM JAILED.

This is the hypocrisy of the year and we have our popcorn ready for this one. Stephen and Katie Miller, yes that Stephen Miller, quietly leaned on Anthony Fauci to protect their own family. Then they demanded he rot in prison.

Fauci’s diary gave it away, the same diary Rand Paul released to smear him. In 2020, Katie Miller tested positive for COVID while 10 weeks pregnant. Fauci, the man we all came to love, called her several times a day to keep her calm. He got on the phone with the doctors treating their newborn. He advised Stephen too.

“I am calling katie frequently to check on her couple time per day,” Fauci wrote. “She is very anxious about getting very ill since she is 10 weeks pregnant.”

And notice this. The passages about the Millers got quietly scrubbed out of Paul’s release. Funny how that happens.

Now look at them today. Katie Miller says Fauci’s pardon should be “trashed” and that “he should be in jail.” Stephen went on Fox and sneered at “so-called healthcare government experts.” This is the man they trusted with their pregnant wife and their sick baby.

That’s who’s running your government. Beg the expert in private, throw him to the mob in public. Yesterday they cheered Paul’s hearing. This is exactly what that hearing was built to bury.

BEFORE YOU GO

If today’s edition told you something the billionaire outlets are burying, the best thing you can do is become a paying subscriber. Ask yourself why you had to come here to read half of this. When a few oligarchs own the megaphone, the story stops being what happened. It becomes whatever they’ll let you hear about what happened. Trump’s at 32 percent, the economy’s sliding, and his inner circle just got caught, and every bit of that gets quieter on outlets owned by people who still need something from him. We ran it because nobody owns us but our readers. We’re in the final stretch of July, and every upgrade gets us to goal. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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— The Really American Team

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Wednesday, July 29, 2026.

Our paid subscribers got early access to our breaking news this morning about Trump’s Attorney General nominee. We told you this morning was a bad one for Donald Trump, and then the afternoon showed up and made it worse: the senator he betrayed in Texas is now sitting on his Attorney General nominee, every single member of the Senate just lined up against the pardon he might want most, Rand Paul is threatening to throw an 84-year-old doctor in prison to save face after his hearing collapsed, and Alex Jones, of all people, spent the day demanding Trump’s impeachment. His bad day turned into a bad night. Let’s get into it.

One quick thing first. We are halfway through the week and almost at our July subscriber goal. There’s one reason why we keep asking. When a billionaire buys a newspaper, nobody announces the coverage is going to change – it just quietly does. Stories that embarrass his friends get softened. Stories that threaten his tax bill or his contracts disappear before you ever see them. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and killed its endorsement when it suited him. Murdoch built a whole network around telling one audience what to believe. That’s how it works. Not censorship with a stamp on it, just a slow narrowing of what you’re allowed to hear, until the news is whatever the richest people in the country are comfortable with you knowing. Really American doesn’t work that way, because no billionaire owns us. You do. We’re reader-funded, independent, and not for sale. If you’ve been reading for free, tonight’s the night. Subscribe or upgrade right now. Join as a paid member now.

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CORNYN MAKES TRUMP PAY AND TANKS HIS AG NOMINEE

Trump stabbed John Cornyn in the back a few months ago. Tonight Cornyn is stabbing back, and he picked the perfect knife.

The day before the Judiciary Committee was set to confirm Todd Blanche as Attorney General, Cornyn canceled his final meeting with him. No meeting, no markup. The Independent reported that Cornyn wants written guarantees that a Trump-friendly IRS settlement and a so-called “weaponization fund” are dead for good.

But this is personal. Trump endorsed Ken Paxton over Cornyn in the Texas primary. Cornyn lost. Now he’s the swing vote on Trump’s hand-picked AG, and he is in no hurry.

“If that’s the way friends treat you, you wonder about his enemies,” Cornyn told the New York Times.

The committee is split down the middle. Trump can’t afford a single defection. And the man he humiliated is the one holding the gavel over his nominee. Betray your allies, and this is what you get back.

THE WHOLE SENATE TELLS TRUMP NO ON MAXWELL PARDON

Every senator. Democrat and Republican. Agreed on one thing today. Ghislaine Maxwell should never get a pardon.

The Senate passed a resolution by unanimous consent opposing any clemency for Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker serving 20 years for helping Jeffrey Epstein. Not one senator objected.

Senator Jacky Rosen brought it, and she said the quiet part out loud. The point was to stop AG nominee Todd Blanche from cutting Maxwell a deal to clear Trump’s name. “It’s frankly horrifying that Trump would entertain the idea of clemency for even a second for a convicted sex trafficker,” Rosen said, per The Hill.

Remember, Blanche personally interviewed Maxwell for two days last summer. Right after, she got moved to a cushier prison.

When 100 senators (well, not Mitch McConnell) from both parties line up to preemptively block something, they’re worried it might actually happen. That should tell you everything about where this administration’s head is on Epstein.

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PAUL’S REVENGE TOUR HITS A WALL AS FAUCI STANDS STRONG

Republican Rand Paul didn’t get his moment this morning, so tonight he’s threatening prison.

Paul says the Homeland Security Committee will vote next week to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for pleading the Fifth. He promised “repercussions.” His colleague Josh Hawley spent the hearing calling Fauci a “narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar.”

Here’s the big problem for Paul. The Independent laid out why the threat may be empty. Biden’s preemptive pardon shields Fauci from federal prosecution for his pandemic-era work. A contempt referral would need 60 votes in the full Senate, which means it’s dead. The last time a witness took the Fifth like this, in 2013, the DOJ refused to prosecute.

So Paul gets a headline and probably nothing else. He turned a hearing into a circus this morning, and he’s spending tonight trying to salvage it. This is what a personal vendetta looks like when it runs out of road.

ALEX JONES TURNS ON TRUMP AND CALLS FOR IMPEACHMENT

Read that one twice. Alex Jones wants Donald Trump gone. To be clear, Alex Jones is not a good man, but this is a stunning 180.

The InfoWars founder who spent years selling Trump to his audience went on a livestream and called for Congress to remove the president, also known as impeachment. The 25th Amendment. Whatever it takes.

“The big issue is how to stop Trump,” Jones said, according to the Daily Beast.

His breaking point is Iran. Jones says Trump is marching the country into a forever war, warned that “they’re getting the draft ready,” and called the massive defense bill Trump is backing “impeachable alone.”

This is not some Never-Trumper. This is the guy who sold “Hillary for Prison” shirts. When a voice like that inside the MAGA base starts screaming about the 25th Amendment, it tells you the coalition Trump built is cracking from the inside.

SUPPORT INDEPENDENT MEDIA TONIGHT

If tonight’s edition gave you something the corporate outlets buried, the best thing you can do is become a paying subscriber. Think about why you had to come here to read some of this. When a few oligarchs own the megaphone, the story isn’t what happened. The story is whatever they’ll let you hear about what happened. In one day, Trump lost his own senators, lost the entire chamber on a single vote, and lost Alex Jones, and a lot of that gets a lot quieter on outlets owned by people who need something from him. We covered it all because nobody owns us but our readers. We’re close to our July goal, and every upgrade tonight gets us there. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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— The Really American Team

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Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, is suddenly in real jeopardy of becoming Trump’s Attorney General after Republican Senator John Cornyn canceled his morning meeting with the nominee on Wednesday. Cornyn is now refusing to vote yes. We’ll break down the reason why below.

Thank you for being a paid subscriber. As a member, you are getting this briefing and Really American’s analysis hours before everyone else. If you are reading on a free subscription, this is what you miss every time news breaks. Upgrade today and never get the story late again.

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Good morning, this is Really American. It is Wednesday, July 29, 2026. Donald Trump is having a genuinely terrible morning, and it’s not even lunch.

Let’s talk about it.

The birthright citizenship fight? He lost it. Quietly. For good.

Rand Paul’s big Fauci hearing? A disaster. Security dragged a lawyer out of the room.

His SAVE Act? His own party is telling reporters it’s dead.

And we just found out Trump personally blocked snow relief for millions of Americans because of how their states voted.

Four fronts, all falling apart at once. Here’s what happened.

But first, one quick thing. We’re halfway through the week, and we are close to hitting our July subscriber goal. Really close. Here’s why that matters. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Rupert Murdoch runs Fox. Every month another billionaire buys up another outlet that’s supposed to hold power accountable. None of them are going to run the newsletter you’re reading right now. We don’t answer to any of them. Really American is reader-funded, independent, and not for sale. If you’ve been reading for free, today is the day. Upgrade now and push us over that July goal. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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TRUMP’S BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP FIGHT DIES QUIETLY

It’s over. Trump lost.

Tuesday was his deadline. He had 25 days to ask the Supreme Court to rehear the ruling that killed his executive order on birthright citizenship. He let the clock run out. He filed nothing.

Remember, this is the guy who went on Truth Social a week after the loss and swore he’d appeal “IMMEDIATELY.” In all caps. Then he did nothing. The deadline came and went in total silence.

And here’s the part that has to sting. His own justices sank him. Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. Both Trump picks. Both crossed him to strike the order down 6-3.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that citizenship is “the right to have rights.” The court, he said, would keep that promise.

The AP says a rehearing now is almost impossible. The Supreme Court hasn’t reheard an argued case in more than 50 years.

So let that sink in. Trump spent months threatening a right that’s written into the Constitution. This morning that threat is dead and the Fourteenth Amendment is still standing.

PAUL’S FAUCI SHOW TRIAL BLOWS UP

Anthony Fauci sat down in front of Rand Paul this morning and said nothing. On purpose.

Fauci took the Fifth. He refused to answer a single question at Paul’s hearing on Covid’s origins. And he told the room exactly why. He said Paul’s whole goal was to bait him into a perjury charge. He called it an “unhinged obsession” with putting him behind bars.

Watch what Paul did next.

Fauci’s lawyer tried to speak. Paul ordered security to physically remove the attorney from the room. Then he turned to Fauci and warned him there would be “repercussions.”

This is a United States Senate hearing.

NBC News reports Democrats went after the whole circus. Richard Blumenthal called it a “show trial.” Gary Peters said it does real damage and scares scientists away from ever serving the public again.

Rand Paul wanted a villain this morning. He got a witness who wouldn’t talk and a hearing that made him look small. That is the party asking to run your country.

REPUBLICANS QUIETLY TANK TRUMP’S SAVE ACT

Here’s one Trump won’t post about. His own party is killing his voting bill behind his back.

USA TODAY got the memo. Literally. An internal Senate GOP strategy document tells Republican offices to go tell reporters the SAVE America Act doesn’t have the votes. They wrote out the talking point for them. “We don’t have the votes to pass the SAVE America Act or eliminate the filibuster.”

Trump wants the exact opposite. On Monday, he demanded the Senate cancel its August recess and blow up the filibuster. He said Majority Leader John Thune shouldn’t let anyone “leave town” until the bill passes.

His senators aren’t listening.

John Cornyn didn’t even pretend. “We could stay here until the cows come home. It’s not going to change a thing.” Thune says the White House sounded out about 20 Republican senators. 15 said no.

The SAVE Act is voter suppression wearing an election security costume. Every week Trump’s own party lets it die is another week your right to vote is safe.

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TRUMP BLOCKS SNOW RELIEF FOR BLUE STATES

This one’s bad. Trump overruled his own government to deny disaster aid to four states. The reason? They didn’t vote for him.

Politico got the emails and the documents. Trump personally stepped in to block relief for New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island after record snow hit the East Coast in February. Every one of those states cleared the FEMA and NOAA bar to qualify. Rhode Island got nearly 40 inches in a single day.

They asked for about $227 million to dig out. Trump said no. A former FEMA official told Politico they can’t remember the government ever denying a qualifying request like this. Ever.

Now here’s the other half. Trump has approved almost 90 percent of disaster requests from Republican states. Politico called it the most partisan use of FEMA aid since the agency was created in 1979.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill said it plain. Her towns are now stuck eating the cost of a storm that didn’t care who they voted for.

So think about what that means. If you live in one of these states, that bill is yours now. Trump looked at your disaster and decided it didn’t count. Because of your neighbors.

SUPPORT INDEPENDENT MEDIA

Look, this is the stuff the billionaire outlets won’t touch. In one morning, Trump lost his citizenship fight, watched his own party bury his agenda, and punished millions of Americans for their votes. We covered all of it because nobody signs our checks. We’re halfway through the week and close to our July goal, and every single upgrade gets us there. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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— The Really American Team

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Tuesday, July 28, 2026. The president slept through a funeral today and woke up wanting to take shots away from your kids.

Tough day to be 80 and running the country. Trump nodded off in the front row at Lindsey Graham’s funeral, then spent whatever energy he had left leaning on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to go after your kids’ vaccines. Down in Kentucky, Andy Beshear finally said out loud what everyone has been thinking about Mitch McConnell. And the aide who follows Trump around like a shadow got the seat at the funeral his own wife didn’t want. Here is where things stand tonight.

Here is the thing nobody in corporate media will tell you straight. The billionaires already won the newsrooms. The Ellison family just got the green light to hand Bari Weiss the keys to CBS News and CNN at the same time. Bezos owns the Washington Post and told its opinion page what it is allowed to say. Murdoch runs Fox. Every one of those outlets answers to a man worth more than most countries, and not one of them answers to you. Really American got built for exactly this moment, to be the newsroom the oligarchs don’t own. We run on readers, not on some tech baron’s spare change. If you have been reading for free, stop waiting. Upgrade tonight.

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TRUMP LEANS ON RFK JR. TO CHASE A DEBUNKED CONSPIRACY

Trump keeps pushing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to prove something that isn’t true. He wants his health secretary to tie childhood vaccines to autism, a link scientists put to bed years ago.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump cornered Kennedy over lunch at his Virginia golf course back in May and asked why he wasn’t doing more on it. Trump told him he had the yips. These days the president drags almost every conversation with Kennedy back to the same subject.

What he actually wants is fewer shots for kids. Kennedy already took a swing at it. In January he tried to cut the childhood schedule from 17 diseases down to 11, and a federal judge shut it down in March.

None of this has any science behind it. Researchers tracked more than 600,000 kids in one 2019 study and found nothing linking the MMR vaccine to autism. A 2021 review of 138 more studies landed in the exact same place. Even Trump’s own pollster warned him that voters hate the anti-vaccine act, and only about a third of adults trust a word Kennedy says on health.

Strip those shots out of the schedule and kids stop getting protected. We are already sitting on the worst measles numbers in thirty years. Trump looked at that and decided the real problem is too many vaccines.

TRUMP DOZES OFF AT GRAHAM’S FUNERAL

They sat Trump in the front row at Lindsey Graham’s funeral, and he could not stay awake for it.

The 80-year-old sat a few feet from the casket at Washington National Cathedral on Tuesday, head dipping, eyes sliding shut. The Independent caught it, and so did every camera in the room. Graham, the South Carolina Republican, died earlier this month when his aorta ruptured.

Remember that this is the same guy who spent years calling Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe” and telling anyone who would listen that Biden was too old and worn out for the job. Back in May a CNN medical analyst said Trump has “severe daytime somnolence” and nods off constantly, including in the Oval Office while people are talking to him.

The White House answered by calling everyone who noticed a “depraved moron.” Good luck selling that one. A Quinnipiac poll in June already found most Americans think the White House is lying about Trump’s health.

He can’t make it through a funeral without dozing off, and he is the one person alive walking around with the nuclear codes. Every insult he ever aimed at Biden just came home.

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BESHEAR TELLS MCCONNELL: PROVE IT OR RESIGN

Andy Beshear is done being polite about it. Kentucky’s governor told Mitch McConnell this week to prove he can still do the job or hand back his Senate seat.

McConnell is 84. He fell at home, went to the hospital on June 14, and nobody has seen him in public since. That is seven weeks now.

Beshear laid it out in a letter Monday. Forty-three days, no votes, no appearances, barely a word to the people who elected him. The Washington Post got a copy. All McConnell’s office has coughed up is two photos and a line about “intense physical therapy.” No audio. No video. Nothing of the senator actually speaking.

Beshear is looking hard at a 2028 run for president, and he told Thune that if McConnell won’t answer for himself, the Senate needs to investigate and start clearing the seat.

This is what it looks like when a Democrat stops asking for permission. McConnell ran Washington for thirty years, and now the people who worked for him would rather stash him in a rehab facility than tell you what is going on.

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HARP RIDES TO THE FUNERAL, MELANIA STAYS HOME

Melania Trump skipped Lindsey Graham’s funeral. The person riding next to the president to the cathedral was Natalie Harp, the aide who goes wherever he goes, leaving many asking the questions you’re probably thinking right now.

Harp climbed into the car with Trump outside the White House, black dress, hair up, and sat with him through the whole service. Nobody has said why the first lady stayed home from a funeral she would normally turn up to.

There is a new book out from New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, and it paints Harp as one of the most powerful people anywhere near Trump. They report she left him notes in his private spaces, one of them reading “You are all that matters to me,” and that Trump has told people Harp “will never leave me.”

Her own brother has called the whole thing “very unhealthy.” Karoline Leavitt and the rest of the White House keep insisting she is nothing more than a hardworking aide.

The person with the most access to the most powerful man in the country is a former cable host not a single voter ever signed off on. You don’t have to be a Democrat to find that strange.

INVEST IN INDEPENDENT MEDIA

Everything you just read came from a newsroom no billionaire owns. That is the entire point of Really American. The oligarchs already bought Fox, they bought the Post, and they are carving up CBS and CNN as we speak, and they are betting that you get tired and stop paying attention. We were built to make sure that bet doesn’t pay off. The only thing standing between this work and the people trying to buy up every last microphone in the country is readers who decide to chip in. If you have been reading for free, tonight is the night you change that. Upgrade your subscription right now to a paid subscription.

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— The Really American Team

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Tuesday, July 28, 2026. Trump’s own witness just blew up his Reflecting Pool case, and it was all downhill from there.

Quick ask before the news. They have billionaires and a propaganda machine, we have you. Hit the ❤️ and restack this so these stories reach people MAGA money is trying to keep in the dark.

Here’s what you need to know this morning:

Trump’s Reflecting Pool prosecution is falling apart, and it was his own witness who lit the fuse. Kaitlan Collins won an award, Trump tried to trash it, and she handed it right back to him on Jon Stewart. Trump couldn’t get Obama’s name out of his mouth in Michigan, sparking new concerns about his cognitive health. And he snapped at yet another female reporter on Air Force One, because apparently that’s the whole playbook now.

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TRUMP’S OWN WITNESS SINKS THE REFLECTING POOL CASE

The government’s only witness on damages just testified that the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was already wrecked, long before the man Trump’s Justice Department indicted ever touched the water.

David “Davey” Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist, was indicted this month and accused of damaging the pool’s liner, and he has pleaded not guilty. According to a court filing Monday reported by NBC News, the lone grand jury witness who testified about damages said the area was already damaged and would have needed repairs no matter what Hearn did.

That witness put the repair cost at $6,000 to $15,000 based entirely on pre-existing damage, and could not point to a single dollar of new damage caused by Hearn. That matters, because the felony charge requires prosecutors to show he caused more than $1,000 in damage.

The prosecution comes out of the DC US Attorney’s office, run by former Fox host Jeanine Pirro. When NBC pressed Pirro on how she would prove the damage, she said, “With an expert. Come to the trial.” Hearn’s lawyers are now questioning whether the grand jury was even properly instructed before it handed up the indictment. We don’t expect the grand jury to return an indictment.

KAITLAN COLLINS CLAPS BACK AT TRUMP ON STEWART

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins won an award for her White House reporting, Trump spent part of his Correspondents’ Dinner speech trying to trash it, and Collins used a sit-down with Jon Stewart to put the focus right back on the work.

At Friday’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Collins was honored for her coverage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s 2025 Oval Office visit. Trump called the award fake, said she should not have gotten it, and joked that it was not her on a Bud Light can, it was transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

On The Daily Show Monday, Collins brushed the insult aside, telling Stewart she was not surprised, because that kind of thing happens regularly inside the Oval Office. “It’s not really about me and I don’t want it to be about my reaction,” she said, adding that it is more effective to keep the reminder on the reporting and the non-answers she gets.

According to The Daily Beast, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle responded to the exchange by saying, “The liberal media can dish it but they can’t take it.”

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TRUMP MANGLES OBAMA’S NAME IN MICHIGAN IN LATEST COGNITIVE SCARE

Trump stumbled through Barack Obama’s name during a Michigan speech on Monday, one of several verbal slips that reopened questions about his health.

Speaking at General Motors’ Milford Proving Grounds, Trump tried to say, “Remember Barack Hussein Obama,” but mispronounced both Hussein and Obama, according to reporting on the July 27 event. Later in the same speech he stumbled over the word Mexico while trying to praise its president, Claudia Sheinbaum.

Trump was in Michigan to support former Rep. Mike Rogers in this year’s Senate race, against either Rep. Haley Stevens or Abdul El-Sayed. Even so, he took 46 minutes to mention Rogers by name. At one point he told the crowd he had done more for them than their own parents.

The White House has repeatedly denied that Trump is any less sharp than he used to be.

TRUMP HAS MELTDOWN AND SNAPS AT ANOTHER FEMALE REPORTER

Trump snapped “What a stupid question!” at a CBS News reporter aboard Air Force One on Monday, the latest in a run of hostile exchanges with the women who cover him.

CBS’s Jennifer Jacobs, identified by The Daily Beast, asked why Trump wanted the Senate to cancel its August recess and stay in Washington rather than go campaign. Trump shouted the insult twice, then pivoted to calling her “a smart person” he had known since his early Iowa campaigns. He wants senators to stay and pass the SAVE Act, his bill requiring people to prove citizenship when they register to vote in federal elections.

The outburst came just days after Trump used his Correspondents’ Dinner speech to attack Kaitlan Collins, and it fit a familiar pattern. He has repeatedly singled out female reporters, going after their looks, their tone, and their intelligence whenever they ask questions he does not like.

The Senate recess is scheduled to run from August 6 to September 14.

WE NEED 35 TODAY, WILL YOU BE ONE?

What you just read is the kind of courage that doesn’t spread on its own. Somebody has to go find it, tell the truth about it, and get it in front of enough people that it can’t be buried.

Almost nobody does that work anymore. A collapsing prosecution in a DC courtroom doesn’t sell ads. A reporter refusing to flinch won’t move anyone’s ratings. The stories that decide who runs this country are worth nothing to the billionaires who own the news, so they go missing, and every one that disappears is a free win for Trump.

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Then hit the ❤️ like button and restack this edition. Trump’s own witness just sank his case, and somebody in your feed still thinks that kind of thing never happens anymore. You can be the one who shows them it does.

— The Really American Team

Tell me in the comments: which of these stories surprised you the most?

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Good evening, this is Really American. It is Monday, July 27, 2026. Trump flew to Michigan to sell his economy and got called a pedophile protector to his face instead. It was an incredible sight.

Do us one favor before you read on: hit the ❤️ and restack this. The whole Trump act runs on people assuming he wins every fight. When you restack, everybody who follows you sees the days he doesn’t.

It was that kind of night. A heckler said the quiet part out loud while Trump talked tariffs. Then Trump told a crowd that people in blue cities are “not clean.” His lawyers asked the Supreme Court to gut mail-in voting 99 days before the midterms. And Mitch McConnell’s office put out yet another photo to prove he is still alive. Four stories, one clear picture of a party running on chaos.

If you are reading this on a free subscription, here is what your support pays for. Every single day we cut straight through Trump’s lies and report what actually happened. We also run some of the biggest anti-Trump movements anywhere on social media, which means the truth reaches millions of people who would never find it on their own. Bezos owns the Washington Post. Murdoch runs Fox. Really American answers to none of them, because you fund us. We need 30 of our readers to upgrade to a paid subscription tonight to stay on track for our goal. If you have been reading for free, be one of them. Subscribe and upgrade right now.

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TRUMP HECKLED AS “PEDOPHILE PROTECTOR” IN MICHIGAN

A protester stood up at Trump’s Michigan rally and called him a pedophile protector, over and over, while Trump tried to talk about the economy.

The event at the General Motors Proving Ground in Milford was supposed to boost his economic message before November. Instead, a man on the far side of the venue boomed “Pedophile protector! Pedophile protector!” at the 80-year-old former friend of Jeffrey Epstein. Trump ignored it at first. Then he pointed at the man and called him a communist while his crowd chanted “USA.”

A second group unfurled a “Stop Data Centers” banner before security hauled them out. According to the Daily Beast, Trump then rambled off script, mispronouncing Mexico and Obama’s name and floating another no-bid grass contract for a rich friend. Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel called the speech a “rambling mess.”

Trump campaigned on releasing the Epstein files. Once in office he called it a “hoax” and told people to move on. He cannot outrun this, and the people yelling it at his own rallies know it.

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TRUMP SAYS BLUE-CITY PEOPLE ARE “NOT CLEAN”

At the same rally, Trump told the crowd that people who live in Democratic-run cities are dirty. His exact words: the people are “not clean.”

He claimed the sidewalks and curbs in blue cities reek and blamed the left for all of it. Then he inflated his own record, telling the crowd crime in Washington is “down 88 percent.” According to Mediaite, the nonpartisan Niskanen Center found crime in D.C. fell about 24 percent overall, driven almost entirely by nonviolent offenses, with violent crime barely moving. The 88 percent figure is fiction.

Here is what Trump will not say. The states that vote reddest sit at the very bottom on the numbers that measure whether people actually live well. Mississippi’s life expectancy is about 71 years, roughly nine years shorter than blue states like Massachusetts and Hawaii near 80. Louisiana ranked dead last of all 50 states in U.S. News’ 2025 rankings on health care, education, and economy. Red states lead the country in poverty, maternal death, and school systems starved of funding.

The people Trump calls dirty live longer, healthier, better-educated lives than the people in the states that keep voting for him. He insults the cities that work and runs the states that don’t.

TRUMP ASKS SUPREME COURT TO LIMIT MAIL BALLOTS

Trump’s Justice Department asked the Supreme Court on Monday to let his executive order restricting mail-in voting take effect for November’s midterms.

A Massachusetts appeals court blocked the order last week, warning it would “sow confusion” and “threaten disenfranchisement of many eligible voters.” Judges appointed by both parties voted to block it. Only Trump’s own appointee sided with him. His order forces states to build voter lists from federal data, bars the Postal Service from mailing ballots to anyone left off those lists, and lets Washington cut funding to states that refuse.

According to the Washington Post, nearly two dozen states and D.C. are suing, calling the order unlawful voter suppression that would strip eligible voters off the rolls. Trump still claims mail voting is riddled with fraud. There is no evidence, and there never was.

The justices could rule within days, with 99 days left before the election. Control of the House and Senate runs through those ballots, and Trump is trying to throw them out in the places he expects to lose.

MCCONNELL RELEASES ANOTHER “PROOF OF LIFE” PHOTO

Mitch McConnell’s office put out a new hospital photo on Monday to prove the 84-year-old senator is still alive.

McConnell has been hospitalized since June, when he fell at home and lost consciousness. His office stayed nearly silent for weeks, which let conspiracy theories run wild, including a Trump-world ally claiming without proof that he was “brain dead.” The Senate’s attending physician now says McConnell is improving but still not cleared to leave the rehab facility, with his childhood polio affecting his mobility.

According to the Independent, all of this is happening while Trump leans on Majority Leader John Thune to ram through a voter ID bill. Republicans hold the Senate by just 53 to 47, so every single vote counts. McConnell is a reliable Trump vote most of the time, and he is not seeking re-election when his term ends this year.

This is who holds the majority rubber-stamping Trump’s agenda. A party so thin it needs an 84-year-old in a rehab bed to keep its numbers.

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If tonight told you anything worth knowing, the most powerful thing you can do is become a paying subscriber. We showed you Trump getting heckled to his face, lying about crime, trying to kill mail voting, and propped up by a Senate running on fumes. Really American reports it with no billionaire deciding what you get to see.

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— The Really American Team

Tell me, if you could heckle Trump, what would you say to him and why?

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Good morning, this is Really American. It is Monday, July 27, 2026. Republicans spent months defending Pete Hegseth and just figured out he was exactly the disaster everyone warned them about. But it’s too little, too late.

It took Republicans about a year to admit Pete Hegseth is exactly the wrecking ball everyone warned them about, and the same senators who confirmed him are now saying they want him gone. Over at the Justice Department, Epstein’s survivors are watching Trump hand the entire operation to his personal defense lawyer, and they are warning the files are about to vanish for good. And off the coast of South America, the Pentagon just quietly conceded that a bombing campaign that killed 221 people barely dented the flow of cocaine. Trump says he stopped the drugs by 98 percent. His own DEA says he stopped almost nothing. Three stories today, and not one of them is going the way Trump wants.

We won’t stop covering everything from Trump’s failures to the Epstein Files, not until every survivor gets the justice they deserve. We count on ready support to keep us going. Read this next paragraph to understand why Really American exists and why you need to support it:

Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Rupert Murdoch runs Fox. The Ellison family just got the green light to put Bari Weiss in charge of both CBS News and CNN. The same handful of billionaires keeps buying up the outlets you rely on, and the independent voices get squeezed out a little more every month. Really American is the opposite of all that. We are fully reader-supported, we answer to no billionaire, and we do not run ads. Here is the honest part: we are in the final days of July and still short of our subscriber goal for the month. If you have been reading on a free subscription, today is the day to change that. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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REPUBLICANS ARE DONE DEFENDING PETE HEGSETH

Republican senators are now saying out loud what Democrats warned about a year ago. They have lost confidence in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis did not hold back. “I don’t have any confidence in him anymore,” Tillis said, accusing Hegseth of forcing out some of the most distinguished commanders in the entire Department of Defense. He described “Game of Thrones stuff” inside the Pentagon and said Hegseth wants to run the whole place himself.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins called the firing of Gen. Christopher Donahue, the top Army commander for Europe and Africa, “deeply troubling.” This is all happening while the Iran war Hegseth is running has already cost $37.5 billion, roughly what the federal government spends on the entire Coast Guard for two years.

The Hill first reported the collapse in Republican support. It matters because Hegseth needs Tillis and Collins to pass his emergency war budget, and with Mitch McConnell out sick, that math is falling apart fast.

The war is being paid for out of your taxes, and the man running it just lost his own party. When the people who confirmed him stop trusting him, that should tell you something.

EPSTEIN SURVIVORS BEG SENATORS TO BLOCK BLANCHE

Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors are pleading with Republican senators to reject Todd Blanche as attorney general. Blanche is Trump’s former defense lawyer, and he is close to confirmation.

In a letter to Sens. Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, the survivors laid out how Blanche handled the Epstein files as acting attorney general. He released the victims’ names, photos, and identifying details, then left out the names of the men accused of abusing and enabling Epstein. More than 1,000 girls and women were abused. Not one person other than Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell has ever been charged.

The survivors also said Blanche met with them recently and gave them an hour of deflection and gaslighting. Last summer he met Maxwell in prison. Soon after, she was moved to a lower-security facility.

The Guardian reported that legal experts expect a Blanche-run Justice Department to bury the case for good. Remember, Trump campaigned on releasing every Epstein file. Then he fired Attorney General Pam Bondi because she would not make the story disappear.

Trump promised transparency and delivered a cover-up. The men who enabled Epstein stay free, and the victims get their names dragged into public while the powerful walk.

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TRUMP’S BOAT STRIKES: 221 DEAD, COCAINE UNCHANGED

Trump keeps bragging that his military boat strikes ended drug smuggling by sea. His own government just proved that is a lie.

His own DEA found the strikes did nothing to the supply or the price of cocaine. Since last September, U.S. forces have blown up at least 67 boats and killed at least 221 people. Legal analysts call those strikes executions without trials. And the drugs never stopped. Traffickers simply switched to bigger boats, aircraft, and routes that hug the coastline.

Trump has claimed at least 15 times that the strikes cut ocean drug trafficking by 97 or 98 percent. “98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” he posted on Truth Social in April. In Florida, cocaine now sells for $13,000 to $15,000 a kilo, a drop of about 50 percent in five years. Falling prices mean more supply, not less.

The Washington Post obtained the DEA assessment along with a closed-door briefing where Pentagon officials admitted the seized cocaine is still coming in at high purity. A Florida sheriff who backs the strikes said the drugs keep washing up on beaches behind people’s houses every week.

221 people are dead, the cocaine is cheaper than ever, and Trump is on Truth Social claiming a 98 percent victory. That gap between the body count and the bragging is the whole story.

WE’RE SHORT ON OUR JULY GOAL

If today’s edition was worth your time, the best thing you can do is become a paying member. Republicans turning on Hegseth, survivors fighting to unseal the Epstein files, and a deadly campaign built on a lie are exactly the stories billionaire-owned media soft-pedals, and we cover them without asking anyone’s permission. We are in the final days of July and still short of our goal, so if you have been reading for free, today is the day. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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— The Really American Team

Happy Sunday. Grab your coffee, or whatever you’re drinking this morning, and let’s spend a little time together. Most of the week we’re all moving too fast to stop and think, so this is the one morning I let myself slow down and just talk to you about what we watched happen this week and what’s coming.

First, a big thank you. If you’re a paid subscriber, you are the reason Really American exists. Not a foundation, not an advertiser, not some billionaire with an agenda. Just you, our readers. Every subscription keeps us independent and keeps this thing growing, and I don’t take a single one of you for granted.

If you’ve been reading for free, I’d love for you to take the step and upgrade to a paid subscription. There isn’t a trick or gimmick.

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Let’s get into it.

I have to start with the Iran war.

I’ve spent more of this week on this war than on anything else, because I don’t think the coverage you’re being handed comes close to the reality. Oil prices are climbing. Shipping throughout the region is still badly disrupted. This week the House actually forced a vote to end the war, but it died in the Senate anyway. And while all of that was happening, flag-draped caskets came home to Dover.

I watched that footage, and I had to stop for a minute.

Somebody made the decisions that put those Americans in harm’s way. Somebody is responsible. And almost no one in power wants to sit in front of a camera and talk about it honestly. Corporate media has already started to move on, but I refuse to. We’re going to keep covering it, because these were real people, and they deserve more than one news cycle.

Also look at this photo of Trump sleeping at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner this week. Or sorry, a long blink.

The second story we absolutely cannot let disappear is the self-dealing. You know who I’m talking about.

In my opinion, what’s happening around this administration is one of the most brazen corruption stories in modern American history, and it’s being treated like a footnote. This week it was Donald Trump Jr. and his stake in a defense startup, Vulcan Elements, that’s now lined up for an enormous Pentagon loan. Yup, read that again. The president’s son buys into a company, and then the government his father runs steers money straight to it.

We already have a name for this. It’s called Teapot Dome, and a century ago it was such a scandal it defined an entire era.

The corporate media wants you to shrug and look away. They want to tell you this is just how Trump operates, so why get worked up about it? No – let’s stop pretending any of this is normal.

Now, it wasn’t all bad news this week, and I want to give you something good, because you’ve earned it.

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The DOJ blinked, and it was embarrassing for them. After trying to drag New York Times reporters in front of a grand jury over their reporting, the government backed down and pulled the subpoenas. That is a real win. When the most powerful government on earth tries to turn journalism into a crime and then retreats, that is the system working exactly the way it’s supposed to. I don’t get to tell you good news very often, but this week I can.

And all of it comes back to one thing.

While this week played out, a small group of billionaires kept tightening their grip on what you’re even allowed to see. The Ellisons and Bari Weiss are reshaping CBS and CNN, Bezos at the Washington Post, and Murdoch at Fox. Paramount and Warner Bros. are another giant media merger tangled up in court. This is the whole game: whoever owns the megaphone decides which of the stories I just told you actually reaches you, and which ones quietly disappear.

That is exactly why Really American exists, and it’s why we can only keep existing if readers fund us. We don’t answer to any of those people. We never will. I’m not interested in propaganda. I’m interested in the truth, and I want you to have the fastest, most honest read on the day available anywhere.

I put everything into these. If they mean something to you, the single best way to keep them coming is to become a paid subscriber right now.

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Thank you for spending your Sunday morning with me. Enjoy your coffee, take care of the people around you, and I’ll see you throughout the week.

— Justin and the entire Really American team

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Good evening, this is Really American. It is Saturday, July 25, 2026. Katy Perry slammed the White House for turning her song into a bomb-strike video.

Tonight, pop star Katy Perry is furious that the White House set her biggest hit to footage of exploding bombs, and she wants everyone to know she never signed off on it. A federal appeals court handed Trump another loss on his push to sabotage mail voting, and twenty-three states can breathe a little easier. Mitch McConnell has now been gone from the Senate for nearly six weeks, and even his own allies are starting to ask where he is. And one of the people behind Project 2025 got stopped at a Senate checkpoint with a loaded magazine and a baggie that came back positive for cocaine and fentanyl. Let’s get into it.

Quick thing before the news. Really American doesn’t have an owner, a hedge fund, or a billionaire sitting upstairs deciding what we’re allowed to print, and that is on purpose. The whole operation runs on readers, ordinary people chipping in what they can so this keeps existing. We are behind on our subscriber goals for July and need your help to catch up.

Really American will continue to push for answers. Thank you for standing with us as we continue to ask the powerful questions. When you subscribe, you support independent journalism that is not afraid to offend and is grounded in truth. We deal in facts, not rumors. If you haven’t yet, upgrade your subscription to a paid one. Not next week, tonight. Upgrade to a paid subscription right here.

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KATY PERRY TORCHES THE WHITE HOUSE OVER ‘FIREWORK’

The White House took one of Katy Perry’s biggest songs, cut it over a video of bombs going off, and Perry is livid.

The official White House TikTok account posted the clip on Thursday, pairing “Firework” and its “boom, boom, boom” line with footage of explosions, captioned “Iran has been warned.” Perry answered on Saturday in a statement on X (formerly Twitter), writing that she was deeply appalled and angry, that she never approved it, and that nobody even asked her.

She pointed out that she wrote the song as an anthem of hope for people going through their darkest moments, which makes the strike video especially galling. To see that message “weaponized to soundtrack destruction and violence,” she said, is a complete violation of everything the song stands for.

According to The Daily Beast, Perry is only the latest artist to tell this administration to knock it off, joining Ariana Grande, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Celine Dion, and Kenny Loggins.

Here is the pattern, and it is worth clocking. This White House keeps grabbing things that don’t belong to it, from songs to voter rolls, and daring anyone to make them stop.

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COURTS BLOCK TRUMP’S MAIL VOTING SABOTAGE AGAIN

A federal appeals court just refused to let Trump move ahead with his plan to choke off mail voting.

The First Circuit denied the administration’s request to pause a lower-court order that stops the Postal Service from carrying out Trump’s March executive order, and the panel ruled against him 2 to 1, with only his own appointee, Judge Joshua Dunlap, dissenting in part. That keeps the block in place across twenty-three states and the District of Columbia.

The underlying ruling from Judge Indira Talwani stays alive too, which means the Postal Service cannot refuse to deliver mail ballots just because a state won’t hand its unredacted voter list over to the Justice Department. Democracy Docket reported that Trump’s DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin, has openly threatened to bring criminal charges against state election officials who refuse to turn over those records.

If you vote by mail, this is the ballgame. A court just told Trump he can’t hold the mail hostage to get your name and your neighbors’ names, and in twenty-three states your ballot is safe for now.

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MCCONNELL VANISHES, AND NOBODY WILL SAY WHY

Mitch McConnell has not set foot in the Senate in nearly six weeks, and his office still won’t say when he’s coming back.

McConnell, 84, has been out since June 14, when his staff said he was hospitalized after a fall. His team put out a photo of him on July 12 holding a copy of The Washington Post, said he’d moved from the hospital to a rehab center, and then went quiet on the one question everyone actually has, which is when he returns. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear says he’s heard nothing back, and even loyal allies like Scott Jennings are now telling McConnell to just get in front of a camera and reassure people.

Per the Washington Post, one of his own colleagues, Ron Johnson, publicly questioned whether the photo was even real before backpedaling, and his absence has quietly shrunk the Republican majority to an effective 52 to 47.

Kentucky is paying for a full-time United States senator who hasn’t cast a vote in a month and a half, and so far the only answer his constituents have gotten is a single photo.

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PROJECT 2025 STAFFER CAUGHT WITH DRUGS AND AMMO

A top Heritage Foundation official tried to walk into a Senate office building carrying a loaded gun magazine and a bag of drugs, and Capitol Police stopped him at the door.

Matthew Christopher Wingate, who serves as Heritage’s government relations director for defense and foreign policy, got flagged at the Russell building on July 14 when an X-ray caught a pistol magazine in his briefcase, and a search turned up ten rounds of 9mm ammunition. Then officers kept looking, and according to court records obtained by NOTUS, they found a sandwich bag holding four capsules and three blue pressed pills that tested positive for cocaine and fentanyl. Wingate, who previously worked for Senators Joni Ernst and Ted Cruz, told officers he forgot the magazine was there and claimed the drugs were prescribed.

Remember who Heritage is. This is the think tank that wrote Project 2025, the blueprint for how they intend to run your government and your life, and one of their senior people couldn’t clear a metal detector without turning up fentanyl.

BEFORE YOU GO, READ THIS

If tonight’s edition was worth your time, the single best thing you can do is become a paid subscriber. You just read about a court stopping Trump from hijacking the mail, a senator who’s been missing for six weeks, and a Project 2025 insider caught at a checkpoint with fentanyl, and nobody cut us a check to cover any of it. If you’re still on the free list, tonight is the night to upgrade and keep this going. Your support keeps us going and allows us to report facts, not rumors.

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— The Really American Team

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Saturday, July 25, 2026. Trump absolutely humiliated himself last night. We watched the speech so you didn’t have to.

Trump ended his years-long boycott of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and used the night to bomb on live TV, insulting reporters by name through a rambling hour he himself called a “freaking stupid speech.” A few feet away, Trump shrugged and clapped while WSJ reporters picked up an award for exposing his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Then, at 80, he closed his eyes and dozed off in his chair while the program kept going without him. Before any of that, Trump sat and watched a video mocking him as a wannabe king. He fought to reassemble this room. By the end of the night, it had mostly quit listening to him.

Before we get to the news, look at who Trump thanked from that stage. He gave warm shoutouts to Larry and David Ellison, the billionaires who grabbed Paramount and are now trying to swallow Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN. He praised Bari Weiss, their handpicked new boss at CBS News. So here’s a president who sues newspapers, standing on a stage thanking the billionaires buying up what’s left of the free press. Really American doesn’t take a dime from any of them. We’re reader-funded, independent, and not for sale. If you’ve been reading on a free subscription, this is the morning to change that. We need you with us. Upgrade to a paying membership right now.

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TRUMP BOMBS AT THE DINNER HE SPENT YEARS BOYCOTTING

Trump talked for an hour Friday night at the Waldorf Astoria and lost the room almost right away. He named journalists to insult them, dug up old nicknames, worked through a stretch of fat jokes that went nowhere. Karoline Leavitt had promised something “vicious.” It was mostly just boring.

Then he did the thing no speechwriting shop survives. He trashed his own writers to their faces. A term-limits bit died in complete silence, and Trump told the room it was “the only thing I thought was good in this whole freaking stupid speech that they wrote.” CNN reported that one Republican in the room texted reporter Kristen Holmes a four-word verdict: whoever wrote this should be fired.

You could see it happening. People were on their phones. They ate macarons off the dessert trays and drifted out to the lobby while he talked, and one guest, per CNN, poured himself a comically large glass of wine. Trump kept insisting he’s the only reason any of them have jobs. “When I’m gone, you’re all going to be broke,” he said.

He actually believes that. Not that the press keeps him honest, but that he keeps the press alive and they owe him for it. Nobody in that room owes him a thing, and the silence that kept swallowing his punchlines was the sound of a press corps that’s finally done pretending.

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WSJ WINS AN EPSTEIN REPORTING AWARD WHILE TRUMP SITS AND WATCHES

The worst moment of Trump’s night wasn’t a joke that flopped. WSJ reporters walked up on stage and collected a prize for “courage and accountability,” handed out for their reporting on the lewd birthday letter Trump allegedly sent Jeffrey Epstein. He sat a few feet away, shrugged, and clapped along. It was amazing to watch.

Then Wolf Blitzer said the quiet part into the microphone. Introducing the award, Blitzer noted that Trump’s own lawsuit against the Journal had exposed reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address, and that her family had to be relocated because of it. The paper got booted off Air Force One. They kept filing anyway. And during his speech, Trump called WSJ reporter Josh Dawsey “unhireable,” which is a strange thing to say about a guy who just won a national award for covering you.

He’s still suing the paper’s parent company, and the lawyers who do this for a living expect him to lose. Back in April, a federal judge already gutted his central argument, ruling Trump hadn’t shown the story was published with actual malice.

What a sequence of events. Trump used a lawsuit to put a reporter’s home address out into the world and pushed her family out of their house. And the answer from her entire profession was to give her team an award for courage, on live television, while he had no choice but to sit there and watch it happen.

Quick note before the next story. Everything you just read got to you because Really American answers to readers and nobody else. If that’s worth something to you, become a paying subscriber today.

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AN 80-YEAR-OLD TRUMP DOZES OFF AT THE DINNER HE DEMANDED

Trump is the reason this dinner happened at all. He pushed for the redo after a gunman blew up the original dinner in April, and he insisted the show go on, got his way. But, then he fell asleep in it.

The 80-year-old Trump kept closing his eyes for long stretches while the speeches went on around him in the Waldorf ballroom. For a man who never stops talking about strength and stamina, he really couldn’t stay awake at his own black-tie event.

For Trump, maybe this is the new play against the press. Put them to sleep, tank the ratings, make the whole night not worth airing. Honestly, good play. Whatever it was, Trump, who can’t stand being called boring, gave the most boring performance in the building and then nodded off through everyone else’s.

Easy to laugh at, and plenty of people did. But this is also the man making live decisions on Iran, on the economy, on your health care, every single day. He can’t get through a scripted dinner without dozing off, and the people around him keep insisting that’s nothing to worry about.

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TRUMP GETS FORCED TO SIT THROUGH A “NO KINGS” VIDEO ROASTING HIM

Before Trump got a word in, the room made him watch a video that roasted him over press freedom and reminded everyone that America doesn’t do kings.

Then Weijia Jiang, the CBS correspondent wrapping up her term running the White House Correspondents’ Association, stood up beside him and said it to his face. Per the Daily Beast, Jiang drew a hard line between criticizing the press, which is healthy, and setting out to break it, which is Trump’s whole project. She told the man of the deal that the First Amendment is a done deal. She’d written those words knowing he would be sitting inches away when she read them.

After Trump went at its people by name, CNN CEO Mark Thompson said plainly that honest reporting is going to irritate politicians sometimes, and the right to do it without the government leaning in isn’t up for debate. Late in the night Trump pulled on a “Trump 2028” hat, a wink at a third term the Constitution flatly bans, then claimed he was only kidding. The corporate media is trying, but they aren’t trying hard enough.

This is the part that outlasts the bad jokes. All night Trump tried to make the journalists in front of him smaller, and the room just wouldn’t cooperate. They put the truth on a screen and made him watch; they said it out loud with him sitting right there. In a lot of countries the reporters who did that to their leader on live TV would’ve been arrested by morning. Here, they’re writing tomorrow’s story. Worth protecting, that. We are trying.

HELP US FIGHT THE BILLIONAIRE TAKEOVER OF AMERICAN MEDIA

In one night we watched Trump bomb on live TV, sit through an award for the reporters who exposed his Epstein ties, fall asleep in his chair, and get made to watch a video calling him a king. How much of that runs at full strength in a newsroom the billionaires already own?

We’ll tell you. Not a lot. Some gets quietly softened at a network the Ellisons control with Bari Weiss now installed at CBS News. Some never gets assigned in the first place at a paper Bezos owns, or a channel Murdoch runs. That’s not a conspiracy theory; it’s just what oligarchy ownership does. The men Trump thanked from that stage are the same men deciding what the rest of us get to hear on TV.

Really American is the direct alternative, created to counter this. And it only holds together one way. Readers pay for it, so readers are who it answers to. No owner, no advertiser, nobody with a merger waiting on federal approval. Every paid subscription goes straight into the reporting and the writing you just read. It’s the difference between this newsletter being here next year and gone.

If you’ve been reading us for free, make today the day. Upgrade to a paying membership right now.

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— The Really American Team

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Friday, July 24, 2026. Trump just can’t catch a break; we keep exposing him.

New reporting suggests an Iranian threat chased Trump off his new Qatari jet in the middle of a foreign trip, and his own Justice Department went digging through reporters’ phone records to punish whoever told you. In a major move, a dozen Democratic attorneys general just slammed the brakes on David Ellison’s $111 billion plan to swallow Warner Bros. Back in Washington right now, Trump is walking into the Correspondents’ Dinner to roast a press corps he drags into court. And RFK Jr. quietly rewrote the CDC’s own vaccine science to win a single Senate vote. We have four stories tonight, and the same few powerful men look worse in every one.

David Ellison is in court this week fighting to put CBS, CNN, HBO Max, and Paramount+ under one roof, with his father Larry writing the checks. We need to keep the pressure up to stop them. Every few months another oligarch-friend of Trump buys another slice of what you are allowed to see, and the reporting that embarrasses them gets softer or never gets assigned at all. Really American answers to none of them, because readers pay for it and nobody else does. Look at the second story below and you will see what that fight looks like when someone actually shows up to have it. Really American takes no billionaire money, answers to no advertiser, has no oligarch owner, and is funded entirely by the people who read it, which makes it unbuyable. If you have been reading on a free subscription, today is the day to upgrade. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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TRUMP’S QATARI JET EXPOSED AS MASSIVE SECURITY FLAW

Trump abandoned his new grift plane halfway through a foreign trip this month after officials caught a credible threat that Iranian proxy forces were trying to kill him. He had flown into Turkey on the luxury Qatari-donated Boeing 747, the one built without the antimissile defenses that protect the old Air Force One. The Secret Service told him to switch aircraft, and begrudgingly he did.

Then the New York Times reported that Trump first tried to sell the swap as a favor, claiming he wanted American troops in Britain to tour the new jet. Nobody bought it, shocker. He later admitted the plane still has to be, in his own words, “maxed out” before it can match what the old one already does.

Instead of owning the security gap, Trump went after the people who reported it. Federal prosecutors subpoenaed the phone records of Times reporters and their relatives to hunt the leak, then quietly withdrew those subpoenas on Thursday. A foreign government handed Trump a flying palace that cannot keep him alive, and his answer was to sic the Justice Department on the journalists who said so.

The Secret Service now puts the threat level against the people it guards at the highest in the agency’s history. Trump is keeping the plane anyway, and says he wants it for his presidential library someday. What that leaves the rest of us is a government that treats a reporter’s family like a list of suspects.

DEMOCRATIC AGS FREEZE ELLISON’S $111 BILLION DEAL

Twelve Democratic attorneys general just forced Paramount to halt its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery until next June, while a federal court decides whether to kill it for good. California ran the coalition. New York, Connecticut, Oregon, and Arizona signed on.

Court filings made public Friday spelled out the freeze. New York’s Letitia James called it “a crucial victory,” and California’s Rob Bonta said the delay was “great news for audiences.” Their suit argues that bolting Warner Bros onto Paramount would give David Ellison too much say over which movies reach theaters and which cable channels reach your living room.

The delay hurts him. Paramount now owes Warner Bros shareholders $650 million for every quarter the deal stays open, starting in October. The combined company would already sit on roughly $80 billion in debt, backstopped in part by Ellison’s father, Larry.

Underneath the corporate paperwork, this is a fight over who owns your news, and Democrats are the ones waging it. CBS, CNN, HBO Max, and Paramount+ would all report to a single billionaire family. A dozen state prosecutors just bought everyone months to stop it.

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TRUMP TO MAKE A “VICIOUS” SPEECH TONIGHT

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is underway in Washington tonight, three months after a gunman fired a shotgun at a checkpoint outside the April event and forced the whole room to evacuate. Trump arrived at the Waldorf Astoria for the do-over.

According to the Guardian, press secretary Karoline Leavitt promised his remarks would land as “unifying yet vicious, and serious yet hilarious, all at the same time.” It is the first time Trump has ever spoken at this dinner. He boycotted it through all four years of his first term.

Three of the biggest names from the April event are missing tonight. Melania Trump, JD Vance, and Marco Rubio all skipped the do-over, leaving Trump to deliver his “vicious” speech without his wife, his vice president, or his secretary of state in the room. Secret Service director Sean Curran told reporters the agency was braced for the worst, saying flatly that they expect bad people to show up.

The night also honors Victor Gonzales, the Secret Service officer shot and wounded stopping the April gunman, and the hotel staff who shielded guests during the attack. Cole Allen, the man charged, has pleaded not guilty to trying to assassinate the president.

Do not lose sight of who has the microphone. This is the man who sued CBS, threw the Associated Press out of the press pool, and choked off reporters’ access to the Pentagon. He gets to work the room tonight while the journalists he punishes sit there and take it.

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RFK JR REWRITES VACCINE SCIENCE TO SUGGEST AUTISM LINK

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had the CDC quietly rewrite its official guidance to claim science has not ruled out a link between vaccines and autism. The old page said plainly that vaccines do not cause autism. Kennedy’s people cut that line.

The Independent traced the timing, and it stinks. The edits went live to win over Senator Bill Cassidy, whose vote Trump needs to confirm Erica Schwartz as head of the CDC. Senator Cassidy is a physician. A real doctor. He said he wanted assurances the agency would respect scientific integrity, and Kennedy handed him a government website that now questions the shots given to babies in their first year.

Three decades of review by the leading Institute of Medicine and federal researchers found no causal link between those vaccines and autism. RFK Jr’s CDC now labels its own earlier statements “not evidence-based” and dangles a fresh federal study to reopen a question that was already answered.

None of this lands in a vacuum. Measles just hit a 35-year high in this country as vaccination rates slip below the level that keeps an outbreak from spreading. Kennedy is telling frightened parents the science is unsettled so one senator will vote yes, and it is children who pay for the trade.

HELP US FIGHT THE OLLIGARCH TAKEOVER OF AMERICAN PRESS

Let’s talk about what we just covered. A president flying a foreign palace that cannot protect him and then hunting the reporters who said so, a dozen hero Democratic prosecutors jamming a billionaire’s plan to own your news, that same president getting ready to mock a press corps he keeps dragging into court, and a health secretary trading vaccine science for a Senate vote while measles comes roaring back.

Now ask which of those stories runs at full volume in a newsroom owned by Bezos, or Murdoch, or the Ellisons with Bari Weiss installed over CBS News and CNN. Maybe a few get softened. Most never get assigned at all. This is not a worry about some far-off future; it is the exact thing being fought over in a California courtroom right now, and it is moving faster than at any point in the history of American media.

Really American is the alternative, and it is built the only way that stays honest. Without an owner. We don’t have an advertiser with a favor to call in. Readers fund it, readers own it. So readers are the only people it answers to, and every paid subscription goes straight into the reporting you just read. Plus, our coffee fund.

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— The Really American Team

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Friday, July 24, 2026. Trump’s own wife, who barely speaks to him, is skipping his speech tonight. We don’t blame her.

Trump’s newest tariffs took effect at 12:01 a.m., targeting goods from 60 countries, most of which are allies, including China, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the entire European Union, and a bigger round is still expected to come. Tonight he finally gets to deliver the revenge speech he was denied in April, except Melania Trump, JD Vance, and Marco Rubio all found something else to do. Over at CBS News, the correspondent Bari Weiss’s team pushed out went public for the first time and said she was asked to report on an incident that never happened. And in New Hampshire, the polling that made JD Vance the obvious heir apparent has fallen apart in five months while Marco Rubio quietly ate 19 points of his lead. Four stories, four bad mornings for the same people.

We need to tell you why we created Really American. The Ellison family installed Bari Weiss to control CBS News and CNN. She’s already killed stories that make Trump look bad. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post; we know his stance. Rupert Murdoch runs Fox, Trump’s favorite network, and just bought Roku to control what goes on your TV. When a handful of families, let’s call them oligarchs, own the pipes, the story gets shaped before it ever reaches you, and the reporters who refuse to go along get shown the door. Read the third story below, and you will see exactly how that works from inside the building. Really American takes no billionaire money, answers to no advertiser, has no oligarch owner, and is funded entirely by the people who read it, which makes it unbuyable. If you have been reading on a free subscription, today is the day to upgrade. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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TRUMP’S NEW TARIFFS HIT 60 ECONOMIES AT MIDNIGHT

Trump’s newest round of tariffs took effect at 12:01 a.m. Friday, and they cover imports from 60 economies including China, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the European Union.

The White House is calling them forced labor tariffs. Countries the administration says have no law banning goods made with forced labor pay 12.5 percent. Countries that have the law but do not enforce it, like the EU, pay 10 percent. Oil, gas, and goods covered by the USMCA are exempt. Everything else costs more, and the company writing that check to the Treasury is an American importer who passes the cost straight to you at the register.

Per the Washington Post, the timing is the whole story. A temporary 10 percent import tax expired this week, and that temporary tax only existed because the Supreme Court threw out Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs back in February. Trump lost at the Supreme Court, went looking for a different law, and did it again. This time he used Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which trade lawyers consider much harder to challenge in court than the emergency powers the justices rejected.

This is not the last one either. Administration officials say another round is coming within weeks aimed at countries that subsidize excess manufacturing capacity, and trade specialists expect that round to push rates back near the emergency levels the court struck down. Patrick Childress, a trade partner at the firm Holland & Knight, said flatly that the forced labor tariffs are not the end of the story. Australia called its 12.5 percent rate unjustified. Brazil is openly discussing retaliation. Japan called the whole thing regrettable.

Every one of these tariffs turns into a price on a shelf. Trump has spent two years telling you foreign countries pay them. You pay them, and the round he actually cares about has not landed yet.

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MELANIA, VANCE, AND RUBIO ALL SKIP TRUMP’S BIG NIGHT

Trump is scheduled to deliver his rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner speech tonight at 8:55 p.m., and the three most recognizable people in his administration will not be in the room to hear it.

Melania Trump is out. JD Vance is out. Marco Rubio is out. All three sat in that ballroom in April. A White House spokesperson told the Daily Beast the absences come down to prior commitments and would not say what those commitments are, though the second lady did give birth on Sunday. Karoline Leavitt, Todd Blanche, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Markwayne Mullin are all still expected.

The do-over exists because April’s dinner ended in chaos when an armed suspect stormed the Washington Hilton in what prosecutors call an attempted assassination of the president. He never made it into the room. He has pleaded not guilty and remains in federal custody. Tonight’s replacement dinner is in a smaller ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria and seats roughly 680 people, down from 2,600 in April.

The speech was originally billed as revenge on the press. Weijia Jiang, the CBS correspondent who runs the WHCA, said nobody around Trump knows what he will actually say until he says it, because he reads the room and feeds off it. Hundreds of former journalists and press freedom organizations sent the association a letter this week asking it to confront the administration from the podium over threats to broadcast licenses and the attempt to subpoena New York Times reporters over Trump’s gifted jet.

Trump plans to spend tonight going after reporters for doing their jobs in front of a room a quarter the size of the last one. The people closest to him decided they had somewhere better to be.

Quick break. Really American runs on readers, not advertisers and not billionaires. Upgrade to a paid subscription right now.

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FIRED 60 MINUTES REPORTER SAYS CBS WANTED STORIES THAT NEVER HAPPENED

Cecilia Vega says the new leadership at CBS News pushed her team to put claims into 60 Minutes stories that her reporting could not verify, including one incident she says simply never occurred.

Speaking with John Quiñones on Thursday at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists conference in New Orleans, Vega discussed her firing publicly for the first time. Mediaite reported the remarks from audio obtained by Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter.

The clearest example involves Minneapolis. Vega says producers were asked to include a moment in which Mayor Jacob Frey told local police to physically confront federal immigration agents while the police chief rolled his eyes at him. Her team went and reviewed the footage. “That never happened,” Vega said. She also says she was encouraged to include video of protesters assaulting people believed to be undercover ICE agents after the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, and that her team found no credible examples of it.

There is more. Vega says she was asked to open a report on Trump’s war with Iran by announcing that Iran is totally outgunned by the United States and Israel, language she saw as an administration talking point rather than reporting. On a story about SNAP cuts in West Virginia, she says she was questioned about why she did not interview JD Vance or work in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, a book about growing up in Ohio.

Vega did not say Bari Weiss personally made these requests. She said things started to change when new people began showing up at screenings and giving notes on pieces. Weiss runs CBS News for the Ellison family, which also now controls CNN.

This is what billionaire-owned media looks like from the inside. A reporter checks a claim, finds nothing, refuses to air it, and stops having a job. Everything you watch on that network passes through the same room she just described.

VANCE COLLAPSING IN NEW HAMPSHIRE POLL WHILE RUBIO CLIMBS

JD Vance, former heir apparent, is losing his grip on the 2028 Republican field.

Legendary CNN data analyst Harry Enten walked through a new University of New Hampshire polling on yesterday. This is telling. In February, Vance pulled 53 percent among potential Republican primary voters there and Marco Rubio pulled 7. This month Vance sits at 36 and Rubio sits at 26. A 46-point lead is now a 10-point lead, and it took five months. Enten said Vance is dropping like a rock.

Run the math on the movement itself. Vance shed 17 points and Rubio gained 19 in the same window, which means this is not soft support drifting away from a front-runner. Republican voters in the first primary state are actively moving to somebody else while Vance is still the sitting vice president with the full apparatus of the administration behind him.

Per HuffPost, Enten called it the best 2028 polling Rubio has seen and the worst Vance has seen. That matters because New Hampshire numbers drive donor money and staff hires long before anyone votes, and Rubio spent the last few months collecting both while Vance collected headlines about his travel demands.

Vance’s entire political identity is being Trump’s chosen successor. The voters who were supposed to come with that inheritance are already shopping around, and Trump is 80 years old with a party that has never once stayed loyal to a loser.

JOIN US IN THE FIGHT TO STOP THE BILLIONAIRE TAKEOVER OF AMERICAN MEDIA

You just read about an insane tariff regime that went live while you were asleep, a president whose own family will not sit through his speech (who wants to anyway), a CBS correspondent fired after refusing to report something that never happened, and an heir apparent bleeding out in the first primary state. Sounds like bad news for Trump. Every one of these stories is inconvenient for somebody with the money to make it disappear, and they will try to make them disappear.

That is the entire problem with American media right now, the oligarchs own it. The Ellisons have captured CBS and CNN. Bezos has the Post. Murdoch has Fox and Roku. Those owners do not need to censor anything directly. They just decide who gets hired, who sits in the screening room, who writes scripts, and who quietly stops getting assignments. Cecilia Vega, a hero for speaking out, is what happens to the ones who push back.

Really American is unique. We cannot be bought because there is nobody to buy. No advertisers steering coverage, no parent company, no oligarch in the boardroom. Readers, YOU, pay for this, and readers own it, which is the only arrangement that survives the next few years intact.

If you have been reading Really American for free, today is the day that needs to change. Every single paid subscription goes directly into reporting that nobody upstairs gets to approve. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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— The Really American Team

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Really American Team

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Thursday, July 23, 2026. Trump is threatening to cry. We would love to see that. Here is everything you need to know this morning.

He said it out loud, on a stage in Marietta, Georgia, in front of a live crowd, because Senate Republicans will not blow up the filibuster to pass his voting bill. That same rally handed the internet a second gift, because a man sitting directly behind Trump spent the speech imitating his hand movements while the cameras rolled. It is also the speech where Trump called the Iran war a skirmish, hours after he stood at Dover for the return of four dead American service members. This morning oil crossed $100 a barrel after Houthi fighters attacked Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, which means the skirmish is now showing up at the gas pump. And a new Emerson poll has Democrats leading Republicans by eleven points with the midterms a little over 100 days away.

Before the news, look at who owns the rest of it. Every outlet reporting on this war answers to somebody with business in front of this administration. The Ellison family got DOJ approval to put Bari Weiss over both CBS News and CNN. Bezos owns the Washington Post and spent the last year rewriting what its opinion page is allowed to say. Murdoch runs Fox and just moved on Roku for $22 billion. Four families now decide what most Americans see about a war, a shutdown threat, and an election, and none of them got a single vote. Really American has no owner to please and no advertiser to lose, because readers pay for it directly. That is the entire business model, and it only works if enough of you take part. Upgrade to a paying membership right now.

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TRUMP THREATENS TO CRY IF THUNE WON’T KILL THE FILIBUSTER

Trump told a crowd in Marietta, Georgia on Wednesday night that he may end up sitting at home crying.

The subject was the SAVE Act, the bill requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID at the polling booth. It already passed the House. Democrats are blocking it in the Senate, where it needs 60 votes to break a filibuster and Republicans hold 53 of 100 seats. So Trump did what he always does when a rule gets in his way. He demanded the rule be destroyed, and he told the crowd to call John Thune directly and make him do it.

Then came the part nobody expected. “I’m not a big crier,” Trump said, before telling the crowd he “may be crying” at home if Republicans refuse to terminate the filibuster. According to the Daily Beast, the 80 year old president worked himself there through a warning that Democrats will scrap the filibuster the second they hold power, then admit Puerto Rico and DC as states, which he calculated out loud as four more senators, twelve more House members, and around 40 electoral votes.

Thune has already told him no in public, on the simple grounds that the votes do not exist. Chuck Schumer went further and told The Hill the SAVE Act is not passing the Senate, not passing with Democrats, and not surviving the courts. Schumer’s read on the rest of it was blunt. Trump said the quiet part out loud, and he is willing to shut down the government to get his way.

Strip out the theater and here is the actual situation. A president with a Senate majority, a House majority, and a Supreme Court he shaped cannot pass his own voting bill, and his solution is to ask the Senate Majority Leader to dismantle the Senate as an institution so that no future minority can stop anything either.

The threat sitting underneath the tears is a shutdown in September. Trump is telling his own party to break the chamber or watch him close the government, and the people who eat that cost are federal workers who miss paychecks, contractors who never get back pay, and every family waiting on a benefit that stops moving the day the lights go out.

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THE MAN BEHIND TRUMP STOLE THE ENTIRE GEORGIA RALLY

Trump never noticed. Everyone watching did.

While he spoke at Wheeler High School in Marietta on Wednesday, a young man seated directly behind him inside the camera shot spent the speech mimicking Trump’s hand movements and facial expressions in real time. He pulled his mouth into an O shape. He did the arm waving.

Look at what Trump was saying while it happened. He was calling the war “this skirmish we have with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” and adding that the Iranians are “getting it so hard.” As reported by the Irish Star, that is the exact stretch of the speech the man behind him was performing back at the cameras.

The word skirmish is what should stick, because of where Trump had been earlier that same day. He was at Dover Air Force Base for the dignified transfer of four service members killed in his war. Pvt. Isabella Gonzales of Texas was 19 years old. First Lt. Tyler James Feehan of Hawaii was 25. Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad of New York was 28. All three died in a drone strike in Jordan. Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton of North Carolina was 30, and he was killed in Iraq during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone.

Trump left that tarmac, flew to a campaign rally, and downgraded the thing that killed them to a skirmish. Asked about the families beforehand, he offered that all you can do is throw out your heart.

A viral clip of a guy making faces is a bad news cycle. A commander in chief calling a war a skirmish on the day he met the caskets is a statement of how much he thinks those four lives weighed, and the families standing on that tarmac heard the same speech you did.

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OIL HITS $100 A BARREL AS THE RED SEA SHUTS DOWN

Brent crude hit $100 a barrel on Thursday morning for the first time since May.

The price is up roughly 40 percent this month, and it jumped after Houthi fighters attacked Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea to enforce the blockade they announced on Monday. Per the Washington Post, the Houthis named two vessels, the Encelia and the Layla, both listed as Saudi ships by the maritime monitor Kpler. The Encelia had sailed from Yanbu on Monday and was about 500 miles into its run south when it changed course near the Farasan islands late Wednesday night. An hour later its status flipped to not under command, and it stopped roughly 100 miles off Yemen with a fire at the bow. Saudi authorities said the crew came through safe. Britain’s naval monitoring arm reported the ship was hit by an unknown projectile. The attack on the Layla has not been confirmed by anyone independent yet.

The math is the story. The Strait of Hormuz moved about 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas before the February strikes on Iran, and it has been largely shut ever since. The Bab el-Mandeb moves another 7 percent, and it is now under attack too. That is better than a quarter of global energy supply forced through two narrow channels that are both being shot at. Ships had already started turning around before Wednesday’s attack. The war itself is on day 12 since the June peace framework collapsed.

Trump answered on Truth Social by promising major military punishment for Iran and for the Houthis, adding that he is disappointed in a group he described as having acted professionally until now. Marco Rubio, speaking to reporters in the Philippines, said the Houthis got suckered into this by the Iranians and that he hopes they stop. Rubio also let slip that one of the struck ships was flagged Chinese, which is how a regional blockade becomes a fight with Beijing. Southeast Asian foreign ministers meeting this week said they are deeply concerned about the closure of both routes, because their economies run on Middle East crude.

None of this has an exit plan attached to it. Five months in, every armed faction in the region with a grievance and a drone now holds a vote on the price of energy, and the administration’s answer each time is another threat.

Trump ran on cutting energy costs in half. Pump prices track crude with a lag of a few weeks, so the $100 barrel in this morning’s headlines is the fill-up that hits your wallet in August, and the grocery bill that follows it in September.

DEMOCRATS OPEN AN 11-POINT LEAD WITH 100 DAYS TO GO

Emerson College Polling has Democrats beating Republicans 53 to 42 on the generic congressional ballot.

That is an 11 point lead with the midterms a little over 100 days out. As Mediaite reported, Democrats picked up three points and Republicans picked up two since Emerson’s June survey, which widened a gap that was already large. The pollsters have Democrats consolidating around Trump’s weak approval numbers and voter anger about the cost of living, which is the same pocketbook anger the oil story above is about to make worse.

The number that should scare Republicans is not Emerson’s. Fox News put out its own survey on Wednesday showing Democrats up seven, 53 to 46, the largest Democratic advantage in Fox polling since 1996. That is 30 years of Fox surveys, and this is the worst one they have ever printed for their own audience. When the network built to reassure Republicans cannot find good news, the problem is not the pollster.

Here is the honest part, because we are not going to sell you a false sense of safety. The generic ballot is not the map. Decision Desk HQ’s average of all public polling has Democrats up closer to four points, not eleven, and Republicans spent the last two years redrawing House districts mid-decade for the specific purpose of surviving a year exactly like this one. A double digit national lead does not turn into a House majority on its own when the lines were cut in advance to stop it.

So both things are true. The country has turned hard against Trump, and the system has been engineered so that turning is not enough by itself. That gap gets closed by turnout in a few dozen districts, and it gets decided over the next 100 days.

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HELP US FIGHT THE BILLIONAIRE TAKEOVER OF AMERICAN MEDIA

In one morning you read about a president threatening to cry because he cannot break the Senate, a commander in chief calling a war that killed four Americans a skirmish on the day he met their caskets, oil crossing $100 a barrel with no plan to bring it down, and Democrats opening an 11 point lead that gerrymandered maps are built to absorb.

Now ask which of those four stories runs at full strength in a newsroom owned by Bezos, or Murdoch, or the Ellisons with Bari Weiss installed at CBS News and CNN. Some of them get softened. Some never get assigned at all. That is not a conspiracy theory, it is what ownership does, and it is happening faster right now than at any point in American media history.

Really American is the alternative, and it is built the only way that stays honest. No owner. No advertiser with a permit application pending. Readers pay for it, so readers are the only people it answers to. Every paid subscription goes straight into the reporting and the writing you just read, and it is the difference between this newsletter existing next year and not.

If you have been reading us for free, today is the day to change that. Upgrade to a paying membership right now.

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— The Really American Team

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Wednesday, July 22, 2026. Trump went to Dover to meet four flag-draped caskets, and told the country what the dead soldiers thought about his war.

He said all of them agreed with him about Iran’s nuclear program, offered no evidence he had ever spoken to any of them, and did it a day after posting a graphic on Truth Social comparing his 18 dead to Vietnam’s 58,220, captioned “These are the real facts. REPORT THEM!” That was the tone of the day. Meanwhile the Washington Post reported that his administration is weighing strikes in Mali, which would make eight countries bombed in eighteen months by a man who calls himself the president of peace. House Republicans jammed through a $1.15 trillion defense bill and teed up another $73 billion for Iran, blowing up one of the last bipartisan traditions in Congress to do it. And in Florida, we learned that the man who died fleeing federal agents at a gas station last week was a tourist on vacation with a valid visa, two children waiting for him at home.

Before we get into it, we want to sincerely thank every reader who decided to become a paying subscriber to Really American. You keep the lights on. That is not a figure of speech. We do not have a billionaire backer, a hedge fund behind the scenes or an ad department urging us to censor out of fear of what the White House might say. We have you. And that will not change as long as we can help it.

If you have not yet become a paying subscriber, we hope that will change after reading this newsletter. You and I are the very last people standing in the way of the billionaires capturing the free press one outlet at a time. Oligarchs like Jeff Bezos and David Ellison are counting on you to sit on your hands. If you have been reading for free and you have been planning to upgrade, this is when it matters most.

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TRUMP SPEAKS FOR THE DEAD AT DOVER

Four American soldiers came home Wednesday. Trump used them as a talking point before their caskets were off the plane.

Standing in front of Marine One on his way to the dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base, the president told reporters the fallen had agreed with him about the war that killed them. “They said, and all of them said very strongly, we can’t let, we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” he claimed. Asked by the Independent how he knew their views, or whether he had been briefed on them, the White House simply pointed back to what Trump had already said. There is no indication he ever met any of them.

Their names are Tyler James Feehan, 25, Isabella Gonzales, 19, Angel S. Rampersad, 28, and Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30. Three were killed by an Iranian missile in Jordan on Friday. The fourth died Sunday in Iraq. Gonzales was nineteen years old. She was in high school when this president took office for the second time.

The Dover remarks came a day after Trump posted a graphic on Truth Social laying his war’s death toll beside Vietnam’s and Korea’s, listing “18 DEAD” as though it were a favorable statistic, and demanding reporters spread it. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene said he was bragging about eighteen dead soldiers. Gavin Newsom told him to treat them with some respect. When the Independent asked Trump what he would say to the families given how unpopular the war is, he informed the reporter that Americans are not against the war, cited a poll he could not name, and demanded to know whether the reporter wanted Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Poll aggregation currently shows roughly 58 percent of the country opposed and 34 percent in favor. A Politico survey out the same day found only 37 percent of his own base wants the war to continue if it keeps driving up prices.

The Pentagon now counts 18 Americans killed and about 500 wounded. On the other side, Iran’s government reports at least 3,000 dead, including 168 children. Those are the real facts, to borrow a phrase.

A president who cannot say what these four believed, because he never asked and never met them, still needed them to agree with him on camera. That is the tell. He is not honoring the dead. He is recruiting them.

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TRUMP IS ALREADY SHOPPING FOR THE NEXT WAR

While Trump was at Dover, his administration was weighing where to bomb next.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that senior officials are debating strikes in Mali against JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate that has helped turn the Sahel into the deadliest terrorism hotspot on earth. Sebastian Gorka, the National Security Council’s senior counterterrorism director, is reportedly the loudest voice pushing for it. Officials are split. The Pentagon would not comment and sent questions to the White House, which neither confirmed nor denied the plans, offering instead that the mess in Mali is Russia’s fault for being a lousy security partner to the junta it props up.

Approve those strikes and Mali becomes the eighth country Trump has bombed in this term, joining Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria and Venezuela, whose former president his administration seized in January. This is the same man who spent the summer insisting he ended eight wars, a list that included conflicts that were never wars and disputes that are not actually resolved, and who has publicly floated taking Greenland, Canada, Cuba, Gaza and the Panama Canal.

Consider the sequence. His Speaker said Tuesday the Iran war needs to be wrapped up. His own intelligence agencies concluded the strikes will not change Tehran’s position. His Joint Chiefs chairman admitted air power has limits. Nearly six in ten Americans want out. And the response inside the White House is to go looking at a map of West Africa.

There is no authorization for any of this. Congress has not voted on Iran and will not vote on Mali, because nobody in the majority wants a roll call attached to any of it. The eighth war would start the way the previous seven did, with a decision made in a room you will never see, announced after the fact.

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HOUSE REPUBLICANS WRITE THE TRUMP’S BLANK CHECK

Hours after Hegseth failed to explain where a trillion dollars went, House Republicans voted him more.

The chamber passed a $1.15 trillion defense policy bill 216 to 212 on Wednesday, then advanced a budget resolution 216 to 214 that clears the way for roughly $73 billion more for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, most of it to cover the Iran war. Not a single Democrat backed the budget measure. Seven Republicans voted against the defense bill. That vote count matters more than it looks: the annual defense authorization is normally one of the last things Congress passes with a big bipartisan majority, and it just squeaked through by four votes with the coalition in pieces.

Republicans are moving the war money through reconciliation, the maneuver that lets them bypass Democrats entirely. The framework also tucks in $12 billion for farmers and $10 billion for election-related measures, which is worth watching closely given what this administration has been trying to do to voter rolls. Even so, the package is in trouble. It needs nearly every Republican in both chambers, and Republicans in both chambers are balking.

Here is the contradiction Republicans are trying to live inside. Mike Johnson told reporters Tuesday the war has to end. On Wednesday his conference voted to fund it and refused to schedule the war powers vote that would actually constrain it. They will not authorize the war, and they will not stop it, but they will pay for it, which lets every member go home in August and tell voters whatever that district wants to hear.

Congress owns this now. Not the abstract Congress, the specific 216 members who voted yes with gas over four dollars, 500 Americans wounded, and their own Speaker saying out loud that it needs to be over.

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MAN WHO DIED IN ICE ENCOUNTER WAS ON VACATION IN US

Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán came to the United States three weeks ago on a tourist visa. He visited family in Atlanta, then drove to Florida for the beaches. He had been in the state for two days.

On the morning of July 14, federal officials approached him and four other men at a gas station. Everyone ran. Coronilla ran into traffic and was hit by a semi-truck. He was 28 years old. He leaves a seven-year-old son and a seven-month-old daughter. His wife flew to the United States last week to make arrangements and, per the Miami Herald, found out he was dead by watching the news, then had to contact a local immigrant rights group for help.

Everything about the official story is murky. Florida’s highway patrol called it an ICE operation. A Homeland Security source told the Guardian that border patrol agents were involved. DHS has never publicly identified him, and the Associated Press had to confirm his name through a Mexican government official. This is what the accountability vacuum looks like from the outside, and remember that the FBI was reportedly told last week to stop investigating shootings involving immigration agents entirely.

His was one of four ICE-related deaths in a single week. Two people shot dead by ICE officers in Texas and Maine. One died in custody during a transfer to a Georgia detention center. And a tourist killed running from armed men at a gas station.

The administration’s defense of all this has been that people should comply. Coronilla had every legal right to be standing where he was standing. He had a visa. He was on vacation. He ran because five men approached him at a gas station, which is what the mass deportation campaign has taught people to do, and now two children in Guanajuato are growing up without a father. Nobody has been held accountable for any of the four deaths, and under the new rules, nobody outside the agency will even look.

HELP US FIGHT THE BILLIONAIRE TAKEOVER OF AMERICAN MEDIA

Tonight you read about a president putting words in dead soldiers’ mouths, an eighth war being drawn up while the seventh burns, a Congress that will fund a war it will not authorize, and a man killed on vacation by an operation nobody will explain. Billionaire-owned outlets will handle all of it gently, because their owners have business before this government. We do not, and we never will. If this edition was worth your time tonight, back it with a paid subscription and keep it coming twice a day through November. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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— The Really American Team

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Wednesday, July 22, 2026. Trump sued the BBC, and a judge just handed the BBC his books. Ultimate humiliation for Trump.

Note from our editor: We had some technical issues last night preventing us from sending out our evening update. We appreciate your patience and support.

That is how the president’s Tuesday went, and it kept getting worse. A federal magistrate in Miami ruled that because Trump claimed the network wrecked his businesses, the network now gets to look inside them, all four hundred-plus companies sitting in the family trust, and the BBC wants him under oath on top of it. Mike Johnson, of all people, told reporters the Iran war needs to end, undercutting his own president in the middle of an escalation. Pete Hegseth spent three hours in front of Senate appropriators trying to explain how a trillion-dollar Pentagon ran broke, and got roughed up by Republicans doing it. And Trump’s border czar went on a podcast and casually revealed that ICE was sent into American airports because of a phone call the president made at four in the morning on a Sunday.

One quick word before the stories. Nobody owns this newsletter. There is no boardroom to answer to, no advertiser to keep happy, no broadcast license for a vindictive president to threaten, which is exactly why we can run the four stories below without sanding down a single edge. Trump is currently suing one network and demanding the government pull the licenses of two more, and outlets with shareholders have to think hard about that. We never do. Paid subscribers are the only reason that is true, so if you have been reading free and you can spare it, today is the day. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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TRUMP HUMILIATED AS HIS OWN LAWSUIT BACKFIRES

Trump sued the BBC last December over the way a documentary edited his January 6 speech. On Tuesday a federal judge turned that lawsuit into the worst thing that has happened to him all week.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett ruled that Trump has to hand over detailed financial information, because his own complaint claimed the broadcast damaged his brand, his properties and his businesses. Her reasoning was blunt: “Reputational, economic damages, all of that is now at issue in this case.” The ruling gives BBC lawyers a path into the finances of more than four hundred companies held by the Trump family trust, which is roughly the last place on earth this president wants a foreign news organization poking around.

His lawyers saw it coming and tried to shrink the case on the fly, telling the judge the president’s position had “evolved” and that he was now suing only over his reputation, not his business losses. Lett said she did not have the authority to edit his complaint for him. A BBC attorney put the problem plainly, pointing out that a man who ran for office on the art of the deal cannot suddenly claim his name and his companies are separate things.

The humiliation is not finished. The BBC says Trump’s team is stalling on scheduling his deposition, and if this case survives, he will almost certainly have to sit for one, under oath, answering questions about what he meant on January 6. The network is separately in court in Washington trying to unseal more about Trump’s fight to keep his own staff from testifying to a grand jury about 2020. His Justice Department is fighting that one too.

The lesson is one Trump has never absorbed. He files lawsuits as press releases, expecting the target to fold before anything reaches a courtroom. Litigation runs both directions, and discovery does not care who the plaintiff is. He opened the door himself in December, and yesterday a judge told the BBC to walk through it.

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MIKE JOHNSON UNDERCUTS TRUMP ON THE WAR

The Speaker of the House just told the country the president’s war needs to be over.

Asked Tuesday whether he would allow a vote on a war powers resolution or an authorization for the use of military force, Mike Johnson said no to both, then added something Trump will not enjoy reading: “Now we’ve got to wrap it up.” He said the objective had been achieved, called the American deaths a great tragedy, and claimed the administration is working around the clock toward a resolution.

Trump spent the same day moving hard in the opposite direction. He told reporters the Iranians desperately want to meet and that the United States has no interest in meeting until they get serious, then announced plans to strike Pickaxe Mountain, the buried nuclear site. So the president is picking new targets while his own Speaker publicly declares the mission accomplished and the fighting finished. Those are not two versions of the same policy. One of them is a man looking for an exit and hoping his party is not standing next to Trump when he finally takes it.

Notice what prompted Johnson, too. The question that drew him out pointed out that the war has passed five months and that the American death toll has now surpassed the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the same withdrawal Republicans built years of messaging around. He did not challenge the framing. He is heading into a month-long recess, back to districts where gas has crossed four dollars a gallon and where barely a quarter of the country thinks this war has been worth it, and he has no appetite for defending an open-ended conflict all August.

He still will not put an AUMF on the floor, which is the part worth remembering. Congress has the constitutional power to end this and keeps refusing to use it, preferring to express concern while the casualties and the bill climb. Wrapping it up is not something you say to reporters. It is something you vote for.

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HEGSETH CANNOT EXPLAIN WHERE THE MONEY WENT

The Secretary of War sat in front of the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday and asked for another $67 billion. He had a hard time explaining what happened to the last trillion.

Hegseth testified that the Iran war has cost roughly $37.5 billion so far, a figure that conveniently leaves out repairing the American bases Iran keeps hitting. Pressed by Senator Jeanne Shaheen on whether he will be back asking for that money too, he would not say. Then came the number that broke the hearing open: the Pentagon has not yet spent about $75 billion Congress already handed it last year. Hegseth argued it is spoken for. Senator Patty Murray was not buying it, telling him “the problem’s not a lack of money but poor planning.” John Kennedy, a Republican, complained he could not get a straight answer out of anybody at the table.

Meanwhile the military is cutting training to make ends meet. Think about what that sentence actually means. Readiness exercises, the ones that keep crews sharp and prevent accidents, are being trimmed to pay for an ongoing war, in the same week the Pentagon disclosed that nearly a hundred American troops have been wounded in the last fortnight alone. Two more were identified Tuesday: Sergeant Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, killed while a downed Iranian drone was being detonated at Erbil Air Base, and Sergeant Angel S. Rampersad, 28, of Ozone Park, Queens, who had been listed as missing after the strike in Jordan.

Hegseth’s answer to the criticism was to blame the Biden administration, a strange defense from a man who has run the building for eighteen months and helped start this war himself. The strategy questions went nowhere either. General Dan Caine would not say whether the war will escalate further or whether a ground invasion is on the table, and volunteered that air power has limits. Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz has not loosened. The Houthis just announced a blockade on Saudi oil in the Red Sea. Brent crude hit ninety dollars.

That last part is the piece that reaches your kitchen table. The national average for gas went past four dollars this week, up fifteen cents in seven days, because ten percent of the world’s oil shipments are stuck behind a war the Speaker of the House now wants wrapped up. You are paying for this twice, once at the pump and once in the appropriations bill.

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THE FOUR A.M. PRESIDENCY

Here is how policy gets made in this White House, according to the man it happens to.

Border czar Tom Homan went on Katie Miller’s podcast this week and was asked about the earliest and latest calls he gets from the president. His answer: two in the morning, four in the morning, often from Air Force One. He described picking up one Sunday at four a.m. to Trump asking what he was doing. “It’s four o’clock in the morning, sir. I’m sleeping.”

Then Trump got to the point. What did Homan think about putting ICE agents in airports? Homan said it was a brilliant idea. Trump told him he was running it starting the next day.

That is not a story about a quirky boss. That is how armed federal agents ended up inside American airports during a government shutdown, pulled into terminals full of stranded travelers with no screening training, making arrests. One phone call before dawn, no process, no review, decided between two men who were half asleep.

The context has been piling up for a while. Trump posted nineteen times on Truth Social between midnight and 2:30 a.m. one night this month. A review of his April posting found only five days when he appeared to have gotten a full night’s sleep. Haberman and Swan report in their new book that aides who cannot reach him in the morning assume he was up all night on the phone or in front of the television, finally going down around four or five, and that he is sleeping less now than in his first term.

He is eighty years old, running a war, and setting immigration policy at four in the morning on a Sunday. His own staff know it. They laugh about it on podcasts. Nobody in charge seems to think the rest of us needed to be told.

HELP US FIGHT THE BILLIONAIRE TAKEOVER OF AMERICAN MEDIA

You just read about a president whose own lawsuit pried open his finances, a Speaker quietly abandoning the war, a defense secretary who cannot account for a trillion dollars, and policy being set at four in the morning. The outlets owned by billionaires will cover some of this, carefully, with the sharp edges filed down. That is the whole reason this newsletter exists, and the whole reason it depends on you. No owner, no advertiser, no license to lose. If today’s edition was worth your time, make it worth something: become a paying subscriber and keep it landing in your inbox twice a day through November. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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— The Really American Team

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Good morning, this is Really American. It is Tuesday, July 21, 2026. Trump’s own spies just told him his war is going nowhere.

New U.S. intelligence assessments delivered to the administration conclude that Trump’s strikes on Iran will not move Tehran an inch, directly contradicting five months of his victory talk. The bill for that stalemate came due this morning too: the Pentagon is weeks from running out of money for the war, canceling training and raiding maintenance budgets while Congress heads for recess. Trump, for his part, found a fresh revenue stream, with his media company pitching Wall Street firms $100,000 a month for split-second access to the presidential posts that move markets. Inside his own house, Michael Wolff reports a West Wing terrified of what Melania might do next. And after the sign-off, the saga of a $100,000 Charlie Kirk statue that nobody on earth seems willing to buy.

One housekeeping note before the news. A paid subscriber sent us this yesterday, and we want you to see it:

“It costs so little and gives so much.” We could not put it better, and we did not have to, because a reader did. Every story below exists because somebody dug past an official denial: past a president claiming victory, a defense secretary claiming full stockpiles, a company claiming clean hands. The billionaire-owned press has every incentive to let those denials stand, and a president threatening broadcast licenses gives them one more. Reader-funded outlets like this one answer to nobody with a boardroom or a license to lose, and paid subscribers like the one above are the entire engine of that work. These are disgusting times, exactly as our reader says. Join the people funding the fight against them. Support our work by becoming a paid subscriber right now. Join Linda in being part of the movement saying no to billionaire news. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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TRUMP’S OWN INTELLIGENCE SAYS THE STRIKES ARE FAILING

Trump keeps telling America it is winning in Iran. The people whose job is to actually know just told him otherwise.

U.S. intelligence officials have briefed the administration that the strike campaign is unlikely to damage Tehran’s position or soften its negotiating demands, and that both governments are locked in a standoff neither will exit. That assessment landed as the two sides traded fire for a tenth consecutive night, with Iran attacking another tanker in the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday and forcing its crew to abandon ship. Iranian strikes have also hit an Amazon data center in Bahrain and, once again, the desalination and power plants Kuwait depends on.

The human cost keeps climbing while the strategy stands still. The death toll from Saturday’s attack on the base in Jordan rose to three American soldiers, among them 19-year-old Isabella Gonzalez. Trump responded on Truth Social with a directive to his war cabinet, vowing Iran “will pay for that killing many times over.” The Revolutionary Guard answered by promising its missiles and drones will keep coming for years if needed. Meanwhile, actual diplomacy flickers at the margins: Iran has reportedly floated a 10-day ceasefire, mediators from Qatar, Egypt, Oman and Pakistan are shuttling messages, and negotiators are kicking around a compromise shipping corridor. Even Israel is keeping its distance, with its finance minister saying the country has no interest in joining this fight.

Read the assessment for what it is: the intelligence community putting on paper that escalation has no theory of success. A 19-year-old is dead, commerce through the world’s most important oil chokepoint has slowed to single-digit daily crossings, and the professional consensus inside Trump’s own government is that more bombs will change none of it. When a president’s war aims and his intelligence briefings point in opposite directions, believe the briefings. The last two decades taught us what happens when Washington doesn’t.

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THE PENTAGON IS RUNNING OUT OF MONEY FOR TRUMP’S WAR

A war with no strategy now has no budget either.

The Pentagon faces an urgent shortfall driven largely by the Iran conflict, with parts of the Navy and Air Force operating budgets on track to run dry by the end of this month. Per the Washington Post, the military is already limiting and canceling the training exercises that keep units combat-ready, draining equipment and facility maintenance accounts, and begging Congress for permission to shift $4.3 billion from training and weapons purchases toward more urgent needs. Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine testify before Senate appropriators today to plead for an immediate $67 billion infusion, and the House leaves Thursday for a month-long recess with nothing resolved.

The numbers underneath are worse than the headline. The White House claims the war has cost about $30 billion so far, a figure independent analysts consider a lowball that conveniently excludes rebuilding the American bases Iran keeps hitting. The military has burned through thousands of precision munitions and the Pentagon has stonewalled Congress for weeks on how many remain, even as officials privately fret about having enough left to deter Russia and China. Hegseth went on television last month and declared the stockpiles “great, and they’re only getting stronger.” His own building’s private message to lawmakers is closer to panic. And the public has rendered its verdict: just 28 percent of Americans say this war has been worth fighting, against 68 percent who say it was not, numbers that rival the darkest days of Afghanistan.

Here is the analysis nobody in the hearing room will say plainly. A president started an unauthorized war on a six-week promise, it swallowed five months and $30-plus billion, and the tab is now being paid out of the readiness accounts that exist to prevent the next war. Training canceled today is capability missing next year. Congress can fight about who is complicit, and there is plenty of blame, but only one man chose this war, misjudged its length, and kept escalating past every off-ramp.

Watch today’s hearing with that poll number in mind. Sixty-eight percent of the country has already voted on this war. November is when it counts.

TRUMP’S NEW GRIFT: SELLING HIS POSTS TO WALL STREET FOR $100K A MONTH

Trump found a way to charge admission to the presidency itself.

Trump Media has been pitching banks, hedge funds and trading firms a product called Truth API: the fastest possible feed of posts from Truth Social’s ten most influential accounts, for as much as $100,000 a month, or $60,000 monthly on a three-year commitment. The pitch is not subtle. Presidential posts routinely move markets, as when a single 2025 tariff post sent the indexes surging, and in high-frequency trading a few milliseconds of advantage can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per trade. The product launches August 1, customers have already signed, and the Trump Revocable Trust owns 41 percent of the company selling it.

Sit with the mechanics of this. The president makes policy. The president announces policy on his own platform. The president’s company charges Wall Street six figures a month to see those announcements milliseconds before the public. The ethics watchdog CREW called the arrangement wildly unethical while conceding it may not be illegal, because no law ever anticipated a president renting out early access to his own words. Senator Elizabeth Warren labeled it “an egregious scheme to profit off the presidency.” Add it to a family ledger that already booked $1.4 billion in crypto income last year, much of it downstream of policies the administration itself announced.

The deeper problem is what this does to governing. Once market players pay for speed on presidential posts, the posts themselves become a product with paying customers, and every policy pronouncement doubles as inventory. No previous administration of either party would have survived proposing this out loud. The scandal is not hidden. It is a press release with a price sheet.

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THE WHITE HOUSE FEARS MELANIA MORE THAN ANY INVESTIGATION

The person Trump’s aides find most dangerous is not a prosecutor or a reporter. She lives, occasionally, in the residence.

Michael Wolff reports that West Wing staff regard the First Lady as the one uncontrollable force in the building, writing that “everybody in the White House is afraid of Melania Trump and her power.” By his account the marriage sits at its lowest point since the Stormy Daniels trial, the two barely speak, and there is scarcely a pretense that she lives in Washington at all, which tracks with the two-week public absence we chronicled before she resurfaced at the World Cup. Aides reportedly worry less about the children’s ventures than about her next business move, and about the unwritten family rule she keeps testing: making money is fine, making yourself the main event is not.

The money is its own story. Government ethics filings show Bezos’s Amazon paid $75 million for her documentary, which grossed $16.7 million worldwide, a flop by any commercial measure that still delivered the Trumps $10.71 million in licensing proceeds. A streaming giant with endless business before this government overpaid for a film nobody watched, and the First Family pocketed eight figures. That is not a movie deal. It is a tribute payment with a runtime.

Wolff’s sharpest observation is about the stonewall: Trump’s vulnerabilities, the grift, the legal exposure, the health questions, survive because everyone around him depends on his favor and holds the wall together. His wife is the one person inside the perimeter who no longer needs anything from him. Whether she ever uses that leverage is unknowable, which is precisely why the West Wing loses sleep over her and why we will keep watching.

HELP US FIGHT THE BILLIONAIRE TAKEOVER OF AMERICAN MEDIA

This morning you read intelligence findings the president wants ignored, a war budget crisis the Pentagon slow-walked to Congress, a scheme to sell presidential posts to Wall Street, and the palace intrigue his aides pray stays private. Outlets owned by the men buying up American media will tiptoe around every one of these, which is the whole case for reader-funded journalism and for this newsletter in particular. Nobody owns us, nobody licenses us, and nobody can spike what you just read. If that independence is worth something to you, back it with a paid subscription. Every dollar goes straight into this work. Subscribe or upgrade right now.

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— The Really American Team

BONUS: THE $100,000 KIRK STATUE NOBODY WANTS

A New York artist bet six figures that MAGA would buy a lifesize Charlie Kirk statue. What happened next is for paid subscribers only.

Want the rest? Become a paid subscriber and unlock this bonus story, every future one, and the full archive, all while funding fiercely independent journalism no billionaire can touch. It costs less than one fancy coffee a month.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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— The Really American Team