BREAKING: Trump's Diarrhea Corruption Exposed, Kash Cozies Up To Putin, Jet Grounded
Good evening, this is Really American. It is Monday, July 20, 2026. In Trump’s Washington, a $1 million donation buys you an FDA apology.
Taylor Farms, the produce giant at the center of a national parasite outbreak, turns out to be a million-dollar Trump donor that got a White House meeting days before the FDA started apologizing to it. That is where tonight’s edition starts, and the swamp only gets deeper from there. FBI Director Kash Patel is planning an October trip to Russia as a guest of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, days after Trump’s own declassified documents confirmed Putin worked to help him win. A federal judge just froze the $111 billion merger that would hand Trump-aligned billionaires control of CBS, CNN and HBO under a single roof. And Trump’s free Qatari jet is being pulled out of service because it lacks the missile defenses everyone warned him about, while his DOJ subpoenas the journalists who reported it. Corruption, capitulation and consolidation, and one court standing in the way.
Before we get to the news, notice the thread running through tonight’s stories: access, money and power deciding what you are allowed to know. A donor gets a White House audience while an outbreak investigation wobbles. A president’s Justice Department subpoenas reporters for accurate stories. Trump-friendly billionaires race to consolidate the networks you watch. These are the stories corporate media soft-pedals, because their owners are in the room where it happens. This is why Substack matters and why Really American matters more than ever: reader-funded journalism is the one model left with no owner to please and no license to protect. We are fully reader-supported and unbuyable. If you want this work to keep landing in your inbox every morning and night, become a paying member. Subscribe or upgrade right now.
THE MILLION-DOLLAR DONOR AND THE FDA’S APOLOGY
This morning we told you the FDA’s outbreak response was collapsing into confusion. Tonight we can tell you what was happening behind the scenes, and it smells worse than the lettuce.
The Daily Beast reported that executives from Taylor Farms met with White House and FDA officials on Thursday, July 16, one day before the company recalled its central Mexico iceberg lettuce over a positive cyclospora test. By Sunday, the FDA was telling the company its test was a false positive, and Taylor Farms was publicly announcing that the agency had apologized. Taylor Fresh Foods gave $1 million to Trump’s MAGA Inc super PAC in 2025, on top of donations to Trump, Ron DeSantis and other Republicans, and the company recently hired former White House official Trent Morse to run its influence operation in Washington.
Follow the full timeline. Federal investigators spent weeks tracing an outbreak that has sickened nearly 7,000 people to lettuce served at Taco Bell, supplied by Taylor Farms. The company got its White House meeting, where by its own account it challenged investigators’ conclusions and complained about the FDA’s process. The FDA also delayed its food traceability rule, which would have regulated companies exactly like this one, less than a week before the meeting. Then came the false positive announcement and the apology. There is no direct evidence the meeting changed the government’s response, and the FDA insists the epidemiological case behind the recall still stands. But the FDA is now publicly contradicting itself mid-outbreak, and the public can see the donation receipts. As one viral post put it: “Forgive me for not trusting anything y’all say.”
This is the deeper cost of pay-to-play government. Even if every test result is legitimate, a health agency that meets privately with million-dollar donors under investigation has spent its credibility, and credibility is the entire currency of public health. Thousands of Americans are sick, the source is officially unidentified, and the loudest voice in the room got there with a checkbook.
When the referee starts apologizing to the team that paid him, nobody trusts the score. That is where the FDA is tonight, and it is exactly how outbreaks get worse.
TRUMP’S FBI DIRECTOR IS PLANNING A TRIP TO RUSSIA
Four days after Trump’s own declassified documents confirmed that Putin directed efforts to help him win in 2020, his FBI director is planning a friendly visit to Moscow.
Politico reported that Kash Patel is scheduled to visit Russia on October 14 and 15, with stops in Moscow and St. Petersburg. His likely host is the FSB, the Russian security service that succeeded the KGB. No FBI director has visited Russia since Robert Mueller in 2013, and even at the height of counterterrorism cooperation, such trips were rare and carefully justified. This one comes with no stated agenda, while Russia wages war on Ukraine, while bipartisan majorities in Congress push for tougher sanctions, and while U.S. intelligence continues to attribute election interference and major cyberattacks to the Kremlin.
Patel is uniquely unsuited to make this trip look innocent. He built his career trying to discredit the Russia investigation, spent the interregnum writing children’s books mocking it, and faced questions over a $25,000 payment from a Kremlin-linked film company. As director, he has treated the FBI’s jet like a personal shuttle, from Olympic hockey finals to snorkeling trips to visits to his girlfriend’s concerts, conduct that already has House and Senate Democrats running a joint probe into his misuse of taxpayer resources. Now he wants to spend two days as the FSB’s guest.
Step back and the pattern is the point. Trump met Putin in Anchorage. Witkoff and Kushner have shuttled to Moscow repeatedly. A Trump appointee attended St. Petersburg’s economic forum and described a Washington “pivot” toward Russia in state media. The documents Trump himself released last week describe Putin’s operation to help him. Against that backdrop, sending the FBI director, the man who runs American counterintelligence, to be hosted by the agency that runs Russian intelligence operations against the United States is not diplomacy. It is a signal about whose side this administration believes it is on.
The FBI exists in large part to catch Russian spies. Its director summering with them tells every adversary and every ally exactly how seriously this administration takes that mission.
A JUDGE FREEZES THE TRUMP-ALIGNED MEDIA MEGA-MERGER
The billionaire takeover of American media we warn you about in every edition just hit a wall in federal court.
A federal judge on Monday issued a temporary restraining order halting Paramount’s $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, the deal that would put CBS, CNN, HBO Max, Paramount+ and two major movie studios under the single roof of David Ellison, the tech scion whose family has been among Trump’s most valuable allies in the media business. This is the same Ellison operation installing Bari Weiss atop CBS News and CNN, the consolidation we have been flagging in these pages for weeks. Twelve states, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, sued to block the deal, and Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín found they had made a “strong showing that the transaction will substantially lessen competition” and that the merger would be nearly impossible to unwind once closed.
The pause is 14 days, with an early August hearing on an injunction that could stall the deal for months. That matters because Paramount is on a shot clock: it owes Warner shareholders $650 million for every quarter the deal fails to close starting in October, which is why the company has hired Supreme Court litigator Paul Clement and will fight through every appeal. The stakes go beyond ticket prices. A Trump-aligned conglomerate controlling two of the last three broadcast news divisions and one of the biggest cable news networks, at the exact moment Trump is threatening the licenses of the networks he does not control, would complete the pincer movement on independent broadcast journalism in this country.
Notice who stepped up, too. Not Trump’s FCC, which is busy harassing ABC. Not his DOJ. Twelve states did it themselves, the same way states are holding the line on voter data. Federalism is carrying the fight the federal government abandoned.
For once, the consolidation machine got told to wait. Fourteen days is not a victory, but it is proof the takeover is not inevitable, and that courts can still say no to the men buying your news.
TRUMP’S FREE JET GETS BENCHED, AND HIS DOJ TARGETS THE REPORTERS
The luxury jet Qatar gave Trump is being taken out of service to be, in his words, maxed out. Translation: the plane carrying the president lacks the missile defenses of a real Air Force One, exactly as Congress warned.
Trump admitted Sunday that the Qatari Boeing will be sent off for about a month of upgrades after reporters asked why he was flying on a plane without antimissile defense systems. This follows his NATO summit trip two weeks ago, when he quietly flew home on the old Air Force One over concerns the gifted jet lacked the secure communications and defenses needed to manage his escalating war with Iran, then claimed on social media he had switched planes for old times’ sake. Lawmakers from both parties warned last September that Trump would pressure the Air Force to rush the plane into service without sufficient security, specifically naming missile defense. Ten months later, that is precisely what happened.
Remember what this plane cost America even at the price of free. Trump accepted a luxury jet from a foreign government he once accused of funding terrorism, plans to route it to his presidential library after office, and has since extended Qatar a NATO-like security guarantee. And when the New York Times accurately reported the jet’s deficiencies, the response was not to fix the process but to hunt the messengers: a furious leak investigation, and DOJ subpoenas of Times journalists over their Air Force One reporting.
Every piece of this story is a warning label. A president’s vanity purchase became a security hole. A foreign gift became foreign leverage. And accurate journalism became a subpoena target. The free plane keeps getting more expensive, and the people paying are the public and the press.
HELP US FIGHT THE BILLIONAIRE TAKEOVER OF AMERICAN MEDIA
Tonight you read about a mega-donor getting apologies from the agency investigating it, an FBI director booking travel with the FSB, journalists subpoenaed for accurate reporting, and one judge pausing the merger that would hand Trump-aligned billionaires your evening news. These are the stories corporate media is trying to hide from you or bury below the fold, and they are the reason Substack and Really American matter more than ever. No billionaire owns us, no regulator can threaten us, and none ever will. If you believe this work matters, the single most powerful thing you can do is become a paying subscriber. Every subscription directly funds the independent journalism you just read. Subscribe or upgrade right now.
— The Really American Team
Kinda figures that a company can poison people if it pays Trump enough money. Trump would sell his grandkids for the right price.
I say if trump wants to fly on an unsecured plane...let him.