Good morning. Martin here, writing on another day (and night) of momentous primary elections, with the direction of the Democratic Party once again in play. It may be the middle of August, but politics won’t slow down.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we look first to an alarming moment, in which a far-right TV host urged Donald Trump to declare a national emergency in order to grab control of midterm elections Republicans seem bound to lose, and the president played alarmingly coy. Are we dangerously numb to such moments?

We also consider what turned out to be a mixed night for progressives with primary hopes, as Francesca Hong, the democratic socialist many thought would be Democrats’ nominee for governor in Wisconsin, lost a tight battle with moderate David Crowley. There was still a big win for the left in Minnesota, where Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan won the Senate primary.

We also have exclusive polling that shows a near-tie for Senate in Kansas, which hasn’t sent a Democrat to the upper chamber in 96 years. All around the U.S., the electoral stakes are high. Let’s read on.

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‘Stranger Things’

Donald Trump openly flirted with a new coup against U.S. democracy, telling an interviewer, “Stranger things have happened.”

The president was speaking to Real America’s Voice, the far-right network that is home to shows including ‘The War Room,’ hosted by former Trump campaign chair, White House strategist, and election attacker Steve Bannon, and ‘The Charlie Kirk Show.’ Host Wayne Allyn Root – a conspiracy theorist who once said Trump was like “the King of Israel” and like “the son of God” – told Trump that declaring an emergency over the midterms would be a viable alternative to the SAVE Act, the voter suppression bill that the president has obsessively championed but which remains stalled in the GOP-run Senate.

Root said:

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Um Mahmoud* considers herself “one of the lucky few.” From Gaza, she was diagnosed with cancer in 2020 after years of experiencing often debilitating back pain. But she happened to be in Ramallah, receiving treatment, when Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza broke out in October 2023.

Nearly three years later, however, Um Mahmoud is facing a different kind of death sentence: While she’s escaped the immediate threat of bombs, gunfire, and healthcare collapse, she’s trapped in the occupied West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority can no longer pay for her treatment owing to Israel’s withholding of tax revenues. So she must wait, without treatment – while the cancer ravages her body.

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Um Mahmoud’s story is both about one woman who desperately needs cancer treatment – and one about how Israel’s genocide extends far beyond the borders of Gaza.

A Difficult Journey Even Before Oct. 7

Before I get into Um Mahmoud’s story, it is important to describe the situation of cancer treatment in the West Bank and Gaza before 2023.

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“There’s one issue they [AIPAC] won’t talk about,” says Eli Clifton, co-author and cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, “they don’t talk about Israel, and I think that that’s the admission from AIPAC…that their actual issue is toxic.” Clifton notes that pro-Israel super PACs could end up raising and spending a quarter of a billion dollars this election cycle alone.

But it’s not all about money, as Ian Lustick, co-author and former State Department expert on Israel-Palestine affairs, tells Mehdi. “I spoke with Blinken and Sullivan and Biden, trying to tell them what the actual situation in Israel was like. But they’re socialized psychologically not to even be able to include in their agenda of possibilities what the realities are there.”

Watch this important conversation to understand how the U.S. paved the way for Israel to become the “extreme right-wing rogue state” it is today, as Lustick puts it, how people can push back against the lobby’s influence in the U.S., and a lot more.

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Paid subscribers can watch the full video above. Free subscribers can watch a 4-minute preview. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to unlock content like this and a lot more from Zeteo.

Click here to buy a copy of Clifton and Lustick’s book, ‘Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power.’ And if you’ve already read it, feel free to share your review of the book in the comments below!

Looking for more book recommendations? Visit the Zeteo book club here for inspiration!

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Happy Tuesday! It’s Swin again. The Trump White House is acting like it’s a foregone conclusion that Democrats take back the U.S. House next year… to the point that President Donald Trump is preemptively, and rather hilariously, spinning that the voters are “very angry” at Republican candidates but they are “not angry at me.” (They are extremely mad at him, and he is the reason his party’s chances are looking increasingly dreadful in the 2026 midterm elections, but who’s keeping score, really?)

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we get into some new reporting on just how much the White House is planning for a congressional Democratic majority to take over within months – and those plans involve a lottttttttttttttttttttttttttt of defiance of Congress, on a scale that could make even first-term Trump administration officials blush. Plus, Trump signs an insane executive order on vaccines and doctor-turned-Senator Bill Cassidy, the man who made Robert F. Kennedy Jr. health secretary, decides to say anti-vaccine conspiracy theories are wrong. Let’s read in.

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Immovable Object Awaits Usually Stoppable Force

If (or, as many Democratic and Republican officials now expect, when) Democrats retake the House after the 2026 midterms, they will have a humongous pile of subpoenas ready to go. Democrats aren’t in the majority today, so their demands for documents are largely for public-relations purposes. But should they win back the House, several lawmakers and senior aides on Capitol Hill tell me they have planned – in the phrasing of one of those aides – a “death by a thousand cuts” strategy of investigations, requests, televised hearings, and possible criminal referrals.

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One goal would be to slam Donald Trump, his administration, and some of the broader MAGA elite with so many investigations and oversight demands that at the very least the onslaught slows down the president’s vast and increasingly authoritarian machinery of destruction and abuses, which has so far enjoyed the protection of Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

The historic levels of corruption of President Trump, his family business empire, and other associates and enablers; the rank lawlessness of so much of the administration, at home and abroad; ICE killings; the Epstein files; Elon Musk’s empire and DOGE legacy; the ongoing catastrophic Iran war; and so much else – you name it, Dems are ready to slam Trumpland with investigations about it, the congressional sources say.

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So, I didn’t hold back in this 7-minute rebuttal video, above, in which I lay out why Shapiro’s movie is actually very Islamophobic and why the Daily Wire co-founder is totally wrong about the number of Muslim bad guys in Hollywood. I also break down the real reason why Shapiro and the Daily Wire are making films about ISIS right now: to distract from Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

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Watch the full video above to see me bring plenty of receipts on how this new movie is just the latest example of Hollywood’s overwhelmingly negative depictions of Muslims and Arabs.

We are making this video free to watch, without a paywall, but a free press isn’t. If you’d like to see more videos like these, please consider upgrading your subscription or donating to support Zeteo’s work and never hit a paywall again.

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Seven years ago, on Aug. 10, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was found dead inside his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. New York City’s medical examiner ruled his death a suicide by hanging, later supported by federal investigations.

But the staggering failures, from guards who neglected to conduct required checks to falsified records to malfunctioning security cameras, have maintained the air of suspicion and conspiracy that still surrounds his death.

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In the years just before and since Epstein’s death, several figures in his orbit have died, including former business partners, employees, alleged associates, and survivors. They’ve died under circumstances varying from cancer to suicide, overdose, and, in one recent case, a cause that has yet to be determined. Like Epstein himself, they took with them firsthand knowledge of his world, answers to questions we may never get.

Here are nine notable people connected to Epstein who have died in the last decade – and what the available evidence actually tells us about their deaths:

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As the host of the massively popular and long-running YouTube series ‘The Majority Report’, Sam paved the way for progressive pundits with his sharp and funny analysis of U.S. politics. That’s why Sam was the perfect guest for this week’s ‘We’re Not Kidding’ for Mehdi to discuss the wave of progressive and socialist wins across the country.

“What do you say to this common line now — that this is the Democrats’ ‘Tea Party’?” Mehdi asks.

“It’s only analogous in the sense that there is an insurgency,” Sam says. “The establishment of the Democratic Party is completely out of touch with the voters.”

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Oh and don’t think Mehdi forgot that Sam was the person who told Mehdi to participate in that insanely racist ‘Jubilee’ debate. Sam himself did a ‘Jubilee’ debate earlier in 2025, which also went viral. Togthether, for the first time, they unpack their insane experiences (though Mehdi’s was objectively more insane) and what it revealed about young MAGA conservatives. “What’s animating their movement is what you exposed on that Jubilee,” Sam says. “I think it’s really important for people to understand the stakes and really how we got here.”

The two also weigh in on what we’re now calling ‘The Great Tucker Carlson Debate.’ Will the right-wing podcaster run for president? Can he be trusted on issues like Israel and foreign wars? Is there utility to going on his platform, or vice versa? And which part of the debate does Sam think is “bullshit?”

You’re gonna have to watch to find out - and to discover which right-wing cable host’s “Jewish beard” did Sam describe himself as!

Just a heads up — ‘We’re Not Kidding’ will be taking a break for the rest of August and will return in early September.

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Free subscribers get a 5-minute preview of the video above while Zeteo’s paid subscribers can watch it in full. You can find previous episodes of ‘We’re Not Kidding’ wherever you get your podcasts.

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Good morning, and as tradition now demands, Happy Monday. Martin here, happy as ever to be delivering the news you need. We may be in the dog days of August, with the Senate finally having followed the House out of DC for an absurdly long summer break, but political battles continue.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we look at a fascinating first few days in Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign for U.S. Senate in Michigan, as the Democratic candidate mixes persuasive answers to predictably hostile news anchors with off-the-cuff hooks, jabs, and roundhouses befitting politics in the Trump age but all too rare from the Dems. Has Donald Trump finally met his match when it comes to the art of the counter-punch? We may be about to see. Also, we take in Senator Bill Cassidy’s truly excruciating explanation of his vote to make top Trump lackey Todd Blanche attorney general, and consider another dispiriting day in Trump’s zombie war with Iran. Time to dive in.

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Meet the Dem Who Fights Back

In late 2019, after Donald Trump stoked huge controversy by suggesting a revered Democratic congressman had gone to hell, the White House defended the president as “a counter-puncher,” who only delivered such right hooks when he was “under attack.”

The subjects of that Trump insult were the late Rep. John Dingell (the longest-serving member of Congress, ever) and his widow and successor, Rep. Debbie Dingell, who still represents Michigan on Capitol Hill. Since then, nationally, there have been countless other instances of Trump “counter-punching” opponents and critics with barely a blow in return. But now it looks like the Wolverine state has delivered a counter-puncher Democrats can call their own: Abdul El-Sayed, the newly minted candidate for U.S. Senate, after a bruising primary. And that should have Trump worried.

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From the president down, Republicans are going in hard. On Saturday, Trump posted pictures of himself with his third wife, Melania Trump, and El-Sayed with his only wife, Sarah Jukaku, who was wearing a hijab. The Islamophobic and racist message was as inevitable as the wrongly placed apostrophe in the caption: “Two VERY DIFFERENT America’s.” El-Sayed’s response was swift – and brutal.

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Seven years ago, Jeffrey Epstein – the shadowy financier and pedophile intimately linked to powerful people around the world, including Donald Trump – died in jail. He was found dead in his jail cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, where he was awaiting trial for federal sex trafficking charges.

Questions surrounding Epstein and his legacy have dogged Trump, particularly throughout his second presidency. Last year, due to significant public pressure, Congress passed a law mandating the Justice Department release its files related to Epstein. The Trump administration has been accused of slow-walking and covering up the release of the files, while members of its administration have refused to productively meet with Epstein’s victims.

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Epstein’s death, which was ruled a suicide, would have possibly been the first suicide in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in more than 20 years. That and many other puzzling questions and facts have left millions wondering: Did Jeffrey Epstein really commit suicide?

The confluence of procedural failures and dubious events surrounding his death has done nothing to quell suspicion. Here are eight unanswered questions about Epstein’s death:

1. Why weren’t required inmate checks performed?

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In this Substack Live, Zeteo’s John Harwood is joined by Wisconsin’s former Democratic Party chair, Ben Wikler – who has spent years helping the state’s Democrats fight back against the GOP. In the conversation, Wikler lays out his plan for helping Democrats take back democracy, as outlined in his new book, This Is the Plan.

Wikler also discusses Wisconsin’s upcoming gubernatorial race, where Republican Tom Tiffany could be set to face off with democratic socialist Francesca Hong.

“Republicans are trying to distract you from the fact that they’re trying to rip you off, that life is so hard to afford right now. And Tom Tiffany is part of the problem,” Wikler tells Harwood.

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This conversation was live on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, and both took questions from subscribers in the live audience. Share your thoughts on the discussion in the comments below, and be sure to keep an eye out for the next Substack Live!

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Thankfully, Trump’s former White House lawyer Ty Cobb – who represented the Trump White House during the Mueller investigation back in 2017 – is not afraid to strike a different, more blunt tone.

“We’re screwed,” Cobb tells Mehdi, when asked about whether Trump’s new Attorney General Todd Blanche will attempt to discredit midterm election results.

Cobb’s honest yet brutal assessment doesn’t stop there in this ‘Mehdi Unfiltered’ interview. “Come 2028, does American democracy survive Donald J. Trump?” Mehdi asks him.

“I’m not sure they survive it in 2026,” he says.

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Mehdi also presses Cobb on his time representing the White House during the Mueller investigation, asking him hard-hitting questions that Zeteo is known for:

• “The Mueller report… lays out 10 episodes of potential obstruction of justice by Donald Trump. You don’t deny any of that, do you?”

• “When you were working for Donald Trump, did he ever ask you to obstruct justice?”

• “Do you have no regrets going to work for Trump in term one?”

Want to hear Cobb’s responses? Paid subscribers can watch the full video above, where he also explains why Trump is even more corrupt than Russian President Vladimir Putin. Free subscribers can watch a 3-minute preview. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to unlock content like this from Zeteo and never hit a paywall again.

Editor’s Note: This interview was recorded before the Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as the U.S.’s new attorney general.

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300 Palestinian children killed in 300 days. That’s one child killed on average every day by Israel since the so-called “ceasefire” took effect last October, according to UNICEF. As we’ve asked over and over again: What ceasefire?

What ceasefire, when Israel kills over 30 Palestinians in the days after U.S. President Donald Trump claims a breakthrough in talks to implement the truce.

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What ceasefire, when Israel destroys medicines… medicines without the world batting an eye?

This is Palestine, where Israel’s genocide continues unabated, where Israeli settlers continue to rampage through West Bank villages with impunity. Here’s just a small glimpse of what happened during another troubling week in Palestine:

Saturday, Aug. 1 – Israeli Forces Destroy Gaza Medical Supply Warehouses

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On Friday afternoon, Mehdi hosted a live town hall with Zeteo’s Asawin “Swin” Suebsaeng and guest Skye Perryman, the president of legal nonprofit Democracy Forward. Perryman’s organization has been locked in legal battle after legal battle with the Trump administration ever since he retook power last year.

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In the town hall, which included a live online audience of paid Zeteo subscribers, Mehdi, Swin, and Perryman discussed how ordinary Americans can – and may need to – fight back against Trump and his party’s many election-rigging schemes. They also took subscribers’ questions on the GOP’s worst threats to a free and fair 2026 election, whether Team Trump is too stupid to pull off a successful coup, whether voters should be worried about troops or ICE at the polls, and more.

“The suggestion of massive boycotts, massive work stoppages – we may be at the place where that is going to be needed in this country,” Perryman said, adding, “We have already seen this administration have to back down in the face of that type of collective action.”

If you missed Zeteo’s ‘Start The Steal’ series, you can read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 now.

Paid subscribers can watch the full video above. Free subscribers can watch a 2-minute preview. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to unlock content like this from Zeteo – and also to join future Zeteo live town halls with big-name guests and newsmakers.

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It’s always a good week when what’s left of the levers of democracy actually work the way they’re supposed to. And Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Senate primary against $60 million in outside spending, including over $30 million from AIPAC, showed that the people – the voters – are what truly make democracy great.

Of course, Republicans and others have already kicked into overdrive, ramping up their racism and Islamophobia against El-Sayed, as Mehdi laid out in ‘First Draft.’ And Zeteo’s politics team painted a horrifying picture this week about Donald Trump’s plans to steal the midterm election.

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Meanwhile, ICE is not investigating the Maine killing, but it is collecting DNA of migrants who have never been convicted of a crime. Trump’s former personal lawyer is one step closer to running the Justice Department. And Trump still thinks he can limit birthright citizenship. Here’s just a taste of what Trump and his cronies did this week that harmed democracy, undermined the Constitution, and hurt societies worldwide:

Saturday, Aug. 1 – Trump Sells Early Access to Truth Social Posts for $100K

Trump’s media company launched a premium version of Truth Social that includes a “Truth API,” giving users early access to the president’s posts – which often include announcements that affect the stock market and could prove lucrative to traders – for a monthly fee of up to $100,000.

One anonymous Wall Street executive told NPR the move would be “considered criminal” in a different administration.

Sunday, Aug. 2 – Questions Swirl About Rescinded ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche released two documents the Justice Department says rescind Trump’s $1.8 billion so-called “anti-weaponization fund” and narrow a provision to only retroactively protect Trump, two of his sons, and his company from tax audits.

The orders helped Blanche secure key votes from holdout Republican senators, but legal experts question whether the documents are legally binding, and they expressed concerns about loopholes that could result in the original orders being reinstated.

Blanche’s nomination was later approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. He’s now on track to be confirmed as the permanent attorney general, albeit by an extremely slim majority.

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Monday, Aug. 3 – ICE Collected DNA From Nearly 1 Million People in 2025

Wired reported that ICE has collected the DNA of roughly 920,000 immigrants in 2025 who were in ICE custody, according to new data from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology.

The DNA samples, which include those of young children, have become the largest single source of new genetic profiles in the FBI’s criminal database, even though the vast majority of people in ICE custody have never been convicted of a crime.

Tuesday, Aug. 4 – Oath Keepers Off the Hook for Jan. 6, No FBI Probe into ICE Killing

A federal judge begrudgingly granted Trump’s Justice Department’s request to dismiss seditious conspiracy charges against members of the far-right Oath Keepers over the group’s involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection, but noted he wished for “a different ending” in the matter, saying the move “diminishes the gravity of that day.”

Meanwhile, CBS News reported that the FBI isn’t conducting a civil rights probe into the death of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was killed by an ICE officer in Maine in July – despite the fact that such fatal shootings are typically investigated by the agency.

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Wednesday, Aug. 5 – Another ‘Inadvertent’ Deportation

The lawyer of a Maine man who was “inadvertently” deported to Guatemala after ICE claimed they had mistaken him for someone else said he will be returned to the U.S. next week. The man was removed from the country even though he didn’t have a deportation order – and a federal judge had ordered ICE not to remove him one day before his deportation.

Meanwhile, AP reported that more than 50 parents and spouses of active-duty military members have been detained by immigration agents since Trump returned to office. At least six of the loved ones were deported, while another eight remain in federal custody.

Thursday, Aug. 6 – Trump Targets Birthright Citizenship…Again

Trump signed a pair of executive orders designed to further restrict eligibility for birthright citizenship, while also seeking to stop people from coming to the U.S. to give birth.

The new executive orders, which are likely to face legal challenges, come just over a month after the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship as constitutionally protected.

Friday, Aug. 7 – White House Once Again ‘Considering’ Axing Lisa Cook

ABC News reported that the Trump administration is renewing its effort to remove Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook after White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino sent her a letter Wednesday giving her three weeks to respond to previous allegations of mortgage fraud she has steadfastly denied.

The latest push to fire Cook follows a Supreme Court ruling in June allowing her to continue in her position. The ruling, however, didn’t prevent Trump from attempting to remove Cook from her post again.

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Did you miss previous weeks of ‘This Week in Democracy’? Catch up here. And check out more of Zeteo’s reporting from this week below:

“No one’s had access to him for about seven months now,” Zulfi Bukhari, one of Khan’s closest advisers and a spokesman for his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, tells Mehdi. “We’ve gone to courts to try to get a bail on medical grounds…But right now we’ve had zero joy.”

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Bukhari also expresses frustration with the Trump administration, which Khan’s supporters had hoped would speak out on his behalf. “We were told that President Trump really cares about his friend, Imran Khan,” he says, adding “I think all Pakistanis are massively disappointed in the way the U.S. has treated Pakistan.”

And despite a recent Observer report that “a deal to free the World Cup-winning captain has been discussed behind the scenes,” Bukhari denies that negotiations are underway.

Paid subscribers can watch the full 18-minute interview above to hear about the latest efforts to release Khan and why his sons have still not been granted visas to visit him. Free subscribers can access a 3-minute preview. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to unlock the rest of Zeteo’s award-winning content.

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This week, Zeteo published our ‘Start the Steal’ special series, detailing the many, many ways that Donald Trump and his allies are working to rig or steal this year’s midterm elections – and how Democratic officials and nonprofit organizations are standing up to Trump’s scorched-earth attack on American democracy.

To cap this series, Mehdi will moderate a LIVE Town Hall TODAY at 2pm ET / 11am PT / 7pm BST with Swin, who co-authored all four articles, and Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, a legal nonprofit that routinely fights the Trump administration in court.

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We believe Trump’s election-subversion campaign is the biggest story in America right now – and that only independent media can tell this story the way it needs to be told. You can read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of the series now – and Mehdi, Swin, and Skye will answer your questions at 2pm ET on Friday.

It’s a conversation you won’t want to miss.

Paid subscribers can register through the link below. Free subscribers – it’s not too late to upgrade to a paid subscription and join the conversation.

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Good morning, Mehdi here, and happy Friday! It’s the weekend! Phew. Though, to be honest, in Donald Trump’s America, sadly, the week never ends. Still, what a week it has been so far. Abdul El-Sayed, whom I first interviewed when he was running for governor in 2018, is now officially the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan. And folks on the right are freaking out.

I’ll discuss that in The Lede, below. Plus, there’s more troubling news of Israeli troops brutalizing Palestinian-American citizens, and Trump is really, really pissed about the Washington Post’s report that he has fallen out with Pete Hegseth over the Iran war fiasco. Let’s read on.

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Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, the Muslim Boogeyman

The Republican Party’s reaction to Abdel El-Sayed’s Democratic Senate primary victory in Michigan immediately reminded me of something my friend Dalia Mogahed once told me.

Mogahed is a Muslim-American scholar, author, and former Gallup pollster who has forgotten more about American attitudes toward Islam than most of us will ever know. Not long after I moved to the United States in 2015, she explained something that upended a common assumption.

Contrary to popular belief, she said, spikes in Islamophobia weren’t primarily driven by terrorist attacks – or even by the perception of a terrorist threat.

Do you know what they did correspond to?

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This week, we’ve been publishing our ‘Start The Steal’ series, documenting the president’s scorched-earth campaign to rig the coming elections. This remains the biggest story in America right now, and to keep reporting this story the way it needs to be told, we need your support. In this new age of American authoritarianism, independent media is more important than ever. Subscribe to Zeteo and never hit another paywall. Read on for Part Four of our special series, below. – Mehdi

As Donald Trump’s aides sat down to write his “address to the nation” that he would deliver on July 16, they realized that they had a problem: They couldn’t actually write what their boss wanted them to write.

For months, the president of the United States had been itching to unveil a big, primetime speech that would detail newly declassified documents and U.S. intelligence proving his demonstrably false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him in part by a massive conspiracy of foreign adversaries; that evidence of this conspiracy had been suppressed by the anti-Trump American “Deep State”; and that this secret trove of papers meant that everyone in the country has to submit to his party’s widespread crackdown on elections.

Obviously, none of that was ever true. And the White House knew it.

Since January 2025, the second Trump administration and his party’s elite ranks have worked to pervert and repurpose swaths of the U.S. intelligence apparatus – the institutions that are supposed to monitor foreign adversaries and protect Americans – to directly aid the president’s authoritarian desires to cement his 2020 lies into policy and remake domestic elections under the banner of the right’s heads-I-win-tails-you-lose philosophy.

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The speech – and the intelligence cherry-picking that went into it – was just one part of a giant narrative-cooking operation meant to justify Trump’s attempted federal takeover of elections.

According to two U.S. officials and two people with knowledge of the matter, Trump and senior White House staff had been briefed multiple times this year, by intelligence personnel and others, that there was no classified or top-secret evidence hidden within the federal government to suggest that China, or any other, government had breached election infrastructure to flip votes in the 2020 presidential contest to Democratic nominee Joe Biden. When Trump would seem annoyed by this, two of the sources said, some aides would assure him that officials had not finished reviewing literally every document yet, pushing the Trump-appeasing excuses into the realm of you-can’t-prove-a-negative.

“There just wasn’t anything to it,” a senior U.S. official told Zeteo.

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New York Times’ conservative columnist Bret Stephens is of course no exception.

In this latest ‘DEBUNKED’ video, Mehdi breaks down why Stephens’s viral argument – in which he claims that calling Gaza a genocide is “farcical” – is total BS.

Watch the full video above to see Mehdi bring the receipts and show Stephens how real journalism is done.

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A year ago, I was removed from my position as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for daring to suggest that we needed to challenge geriatric, corrupt, and asleep-at-the-wheel Democrats in safe blue seats. That we needed a culture of competition, not complacency. That the status quo was failing. That with democracy on the line, we shouldn’t be letting Democratic members of Congress die in office.

The establishment kicked me out for those “radical” views, and the establishment is losing.

The party insisted that a ‘D’ next to a candidate was good enough. I argued that when you share the same corporate donors as those with the ‘R’ next to their name, when you vote the same as them, and when you answer to special interests, not the people you’re sworn to represent, ‘D’ becomes a meaningless demarcation. To win back the young voters we lost in 2024, I believed we needed to root out corruption in our party and elect a new segment of Democratic leaders they could actually believe in.

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A year later, and Democratic voters have been clear: no more status quo, no more special interests, no more strongly-worded letters.

In Michigan’s Democratic primary on Tuesday, Abdul El-Sayed beat back over $60 million in outside spending ($32 million coming from AIPAC), Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), and an endorsement from the sitting Democratic governor. His historic victory proves, once again, that progressives aren’t just winning in New York City – they can dominate in swing states that Donald Trump won. As Senator Bernie Sanders said, “[El-Sayed] pulled off the biggest upset that I have ever heard of in my life.”

In the year since I left the DNC, the organization I co-founded to elect young progressives to state legislatures and Congress, Leaders We Deserve, has been on a hot streak. In Michigan, our first incumbent challenger of the cycle beat a corrupt millionaire candidate in Detroit backed by MAGA and AIPAC. Donavan McKinney, a Democratic socialist who has led the fight against utility companies in the statehouse, is now the presumptive nominee in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District.

We also took on the Democratic establishment in California’s 22nd Congressional District, where our candidate, Randy Villegas, beat the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (DCCC) handpicked candidate. The establishment’s choice was the only Democrat to vote against California’s challenge of racist Republican gerrymandering, siding with Donald Trump and Greg Abbott. Their candidate shared more than 50 corporate and special interest donors with the Republican incumbent. Our guy? A working-class candidate fighting for affordability who refuses to take money from the same corporations jacking up prices.

In state legislative races this cycle, our record is 18-1, as we’ve fought to build a deep bench of power in key states like Georgia, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Our candidates have challenged the sports betting lobby, AIPAC, AI, and other dark money spenders, and they’ve won.

And of course, we couldn’t be prouder to have been the biggest outside supporter to a Zohran Mamdani-affiliated super PAC during his primary. As we saw in Mamdani’s race, and in races with progressive candidates across the country, young voters are turning out in record numbers, proving that we didn’t lose Gen Z; they just needed candidates to vote for.

Now compare that energy and momentum to the Democratic establishment. The DNC is over $2 million in debt. The RNC has about eight times as much cash on hand as the DNC and is outraising the Democratic National Committee – $21.2 million to $11.4 million. Senator Schumer’s recruits are losing. Favorability of the Democratic brand is at an all-time low.

Why is the establishment getting beat so badly? Especially when Trump and his coalition are collapsing?

Voters see clearly that many of our politicians are serving their largest corporate donors instead of the working class. Younger voters cannot fathom voting for a status quo that has never served them. Moderate voters are sick of lectures about what politicians can’t do, instead of delivering results.

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So let’s put the electability debate to bed. Progressives aren’t just electable; they’re a dominant force. It turns out that a focused affordability message, moral clarity, and a commitment to not being bought motivates voters across the political spectrum. Americans are deeply upset that their government continues to send their tax dollars abroad to kill and maim children. They don’t want data centers in their backyards; they want healthcare. And they want their elected officials to fight like hell, not fold like a wet rag.

The many are beating the money. We’re proving that stronger candidates don’t need tens of millions of dollars in TV ads to get them over the finish line. Progressives like El-Sayed have already defeated the same corporate and special interests that are lining up behind his Republican opponent. He beat them on Tuesday, and he’ll do it again on Nov. 3.

A year ago, cable news pundit panels, elected officials, campaign strategists, and the entire establishment told me I was crazy for daring to challenge our party to do better. Today, I say: I wasn’t wrong; I was just early.

David Hogg is the president and co-founder of Leaders We Deserve, a grassroots organization dedicated to electing young progressives to Congress and state legislatures. Hogg is also a former DNC vice chair, March For Our Lives founder, and gun safety activist. Check out the Leaders We Deserve Substack here.

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.

Check out more from Zeteo, including Mehdi’s interview with Hogg from earlier this year: