Happy Friday! It’s Andrew here, looking forward to the weekend – or as Donald Trump understands it, the days he prefers to make news and war and ramp up his authoritarian blitz. Perhaps he’ll go easy on us, because yesterday was truly enough: If you thought Trump’s lying address in primetime was bad, wait until you see what fresh hell Stephen Miller has in mind for all of us.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we unpack Miller’s speech about “left-wing violence,” take in Trump’s mess of election fraud lies, consider the brewing disaster over Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, and take a look at what happened when acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was finally forced to meet a group of Epstein victims. Let’s read on.

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Fascist’s Fantasy

Stephen Miller is the most powerful unelected figure in Washington. His title is deputy White House deputy chief of staff, but the true nature of his role lands somewhere between Trump’s policy architect, and the actual U.S. attorney general, and the real Homeland Security chief – or perhaps the shadow president.

As I’ve reported with my colleague Swin, “Everything you loathe or love about Donald Trump’s America, you hate or cherish about Stephen Miller’s republic of fear.”

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Miller has been given enormous latitude to carry out the president’s agenda, and his own, despite helping tank Trump’s poll numbers on his signature issue, immigration, by leading a racist mass-deportation campaign too cruel, too violent, and too in-your-face for Americans with a conscience to stomach. But that is why Trump keeps Miller around and empowered: Trump and Miller are both fascists, and Miller is Trump’s fascism strategist. He is the guy who gets it done.

A Rush Limbaugh fan as a teen, Miller has always dreamed of crushing the left. Now, he’s getting to use the full force of the federal government to lead an all-out war on liberals, progressives, and leftists – and he’s throwing it in all our faces with his characteristically apocalyptic and authoritarian rhetoric.

“We have taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and the survival of our republican form of government,” Miller said Thursday.

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Welcome to Thursday. It’s Swin, again. We are enduring yet another week of watching Donald Trump fail at surrendering to Iran in a war he started and promptly lost. Stateside, the president is losing a very different kind of war, even as he ups the body count on our streets.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we’ll get into just how badly Trump is eating shit in his war on his own people. Plus, in an astonishing development, a rush of Democrats including Nancy Pelosi (!) voted to cut military aid to Israel, while three Trump nominees were made to sweat through hearings on Capitol Hill.

And there’s more: After Trump’s primetime address tonight, set for 9pm ET, be sure to tune into zeteo.com and youtube.com/@zeteo to hear Mehdi and me break down the litany of lies the president will undoubtedly tell.

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‘They Lost the Country’

On Tuesday evening, Zeteo politics editor Andrew Perez messaged me seven words: “His blood is still on the ground.”

Andrew lives in Maine, so he went to Biddeford, where ICE killed a young Colombian man. (We will have more for you on this story soon; watch your inbox.)

His name was Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Before him, there was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, in Houston, Texas. And now we have a third fatality in just over a week: a 28-year-old man in St. Augustine, Florida, who was apparently killed by a tractor-trailer as he ran from ICE agents.

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This is only counting one week of bodies – the ones we know about. And it’s the result of President Trump, his White House policy architect Stephen Miller, and the rest of the administration dedicating the past several weeks to dialing their mass-deportation machine back up to their preferred volume of sadism. After the fierce backlash to the Trump-Vance administration’s siege of Minnesota, the Republican Party hatched a plan to curb at least some anti-immigrant brutality until “after the midterms.” But they couldn’t even muster that. They just couldn’t help themselves.

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Good morning, and happy Wednesday. Martin here, delighted to bring you your morning news, on what promises to be another day of absurd Capitol Hill tragicomedy.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we consider The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s acting attorney general and nominee for the permanent role who faces a Senate confirmation hearing. There are Republican doubters, but that someone with Blanche’s record of outright abuse of power in service of his master can even get this far, let alone be confirmed, suggests something is wrong in the state of Denmark.

We also take a look at the state of Maine, where something is very definitely wrong after the shooting of an unarmed, legal immigrant on Monday, and where assurances of a “pause” in ICE vehicle stops ring mirthlessly hollow. Then there’s Trump’s Iran war, which lurches on in strike, counter-strike and Oval Office idiocy, even through a rare rebuke from Senate Democrats. What a world.

First, some good news. Today’s edition of ‘First Draft’ has NO paywall, thanks to our sponsor, Ground News. 🗞️ 😎 🙏 So there’s no paywall today BUT you should still consider becoming a paid subscriber to Zeteo and supporting independent journalism!

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‘I Love Working For President Trump’

At 9am ET, on Capitol Hill, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will sit before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing. Democrats will attack, and Republicans defend, with key GOP faces monitored for signs of doubt, the death of Lindsey Graham, a Trump loyalist, leaving his side one short.

On Tuesday, The New York Times published a taster of exchanges to come, using emails obtained by a watchdog to show “Blanche’s role in Trump’s Retribution Campaign.”

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And yet, if Senate Republicans hold together – perhaps persuading themselves, as the Times put it, that Blanche “has been a low-key, but important check on Trumpian excesses” – Blanche will proceed to a full Senate vote, all but sure to succeed.

It seems incredible it could even be possible. Before Donald Trump returned to power, he faced four criminal cases. Blanche was his lawyer. Only one case, over hush money payments to a porn star who claimed an affair, progressed as far as trial. Blanche lost it. But he didn’t lose Trump’s favor, and since then, Blanche has led the way in an astonishing run of corruption, self-dealing, and abuse of power.

Nakedly political investigations are too numerous to list. Letitia James, James Comey, Jerome Powell and the Southern Poverty Law Center are among high-profile targets. There have been political prosecutions of anti-ICE protesters. In Chicago, the case fell apart. In Texas, draconian sentences were won. There have been firings, of officials believed disloyal or, in the case of Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer, canned for refusing to give Mel Gibson back his guns.

It was Blanche, as deputy to former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who led the cover-up of the Jeffrey Epstein files and therefore Trump’s friendship with the late financier and sex offender, the files still not revealed in full despite congressional action. It was Blanche who conducted a jailhouse interview with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s partner, a convicted sex-trafficker, and arranged her transfer to a cushier lock-up. It is Blanche’s DOJ that now blocks investigations of Epstein’s New Mexico ranch.

As acting attorney general, it was Blanche who oversaw Trump’s preposterous $10 billion lawsuit against his own Internal Revenue Service, and it was Blanche who oversaw the so-called settlement setting up a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to pay off Trump supporters, many jailed over January 6, with attendant tax immunity for Trump and his boys. That proved too much even for Trump’s GOP. This week, a judge in Florida rebuked Blanche in the matter, sending her ruling to the New York and Washington bars, where ethics complaints have been filed.

And yet, here he comes, for confirmation as attorney general.

When it comes to Blanche’s work overseeing investigations of supposedly biased DOJ actions under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the Times’s characterization of his struggle to control “Eagle Ed” Martin, a far-right zealot installed at Main Justice by the White House, might have been funny, had it not also been indicative of that possible line of defense for Republicans today: that Blanche is somehow the good guy, fending off even wilder excesses.

Without Graham, Republicans have 11 Senate Judiciary seats, Democrats 10. If one Republican flips, Blanche fails to advance. On Monday, one possible rebel, John Cornyn of Texas, told reporters he was “concerned” by Blanche’s judicial rebuke over the IRS lawsuit.

“We’ll be prepared to ask him some questions about not just the weaponization fund but the tax audit issue [and] also whether or not the lawsuit that was brought was a real lawsuit or whether it was, in the words of the federal judge, collusive,” Cornyn said.

On the other hand, the ranking Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, said after meeting the nominee that Blanche told him his work on the IRS suit and the slush fund had been “a mistake. He believes he was a victim of a hit job by this judge in Florida,” Durbin said, adding that Blanche is “a good lawyer, and he’s been at this a long time as a prosecutor and defense lawyer, and he has a way about him that is… not an ‘Aw shucks,’ but it’s pretty close to it.”

It’s hard to see Democrats falling for that – John Fetterman isn’t on the committee – but Durbin’s words pointed to how Blanche might hope to win over Republicans not simply cowed by fear of Trump. Cornyn and Tillis, set to leave Congress, may have nothing to lose. Then again, both have little love for Democrats.

Blanche stands to lead Trump’s onslaught against his enemies for another two years. To stop him, Democrats will seek to exploit perhaps the most shameful part of his record. On Thursday, outside witnesses will testify. Democrats will call Danielle Bensky, in Senator Durbin’s words “a brave survivor of Jeffrey Epstein’s horrific crimes”, her name “included in multiple batches of released Epstein Files, due to Todd Blanche’s failures. She’s attempted multiple times to redact her information without success.”

On Monday, a group of Epstein survivors released a short video, describing Blanche’s betrayals and demanding he be rejected. The group behind the video, World Without Exploitation, said: “Under Blanche’s leadership… Epstein survivors’ personal information… was exposed, while the names of many alleged abusers and other powerful individuals connected to Epstein remained redacted.”

The name “Donald Trump” is among those known to have been blacked out. The true extent of his friendship with Epstein remains to be seen. Blanche slow-rolled the file releases, mismanaged them, orchestrated the cover-up. Bondi already said so.

Speaking to the Times, Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, which obtained the emails cited by the paper, said senators should judge Blanche “not by his assurances at a confirmation hearing, but by the record he has already built.”

World Without Exploitation was more stark: “Stand with survivors,” it said. “Tell the Senate to vote NO on Todd Blanche for AG.”

Maybe the last word should go to Blanche himself. In April, on being named acting attorney general, he said: “I love working for President Trump, it’s the greatest honor of a lifetime. If he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, ‘Thank you very much. I love you, sir.’ I don’t have any goals or aspirations beyond that.”

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🇮🇷 Iran War Updates

• U-turn time: Predictably, Donald Trump dropped his plan to charge a 20% fee on ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, citing strenuous opposition from regional allies (if not his own administration’s previous insistence that it would be illegal) and instead ordering the reimposition of a naval blockade on Iran.

• Ways to pay: Trump claimed regional allies would “love” to pay for U.S. action against Iran “a different way.” “They said… we’d love to invest in the United States with billions and billions of dollars,” Trump burbled, adding, a day after proposing it, “I don’t think anybody should be able to charge a fee for the Strait.”

• Hot war: Early this morning, U.S. Central Command said U.S. forces began launching another “wave of strikes against Iran.” Earlier, Iran said it fired on three ships in the Strait and targeted Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan. Trump told Fox he planned to hit bridges and power plants next week – which would be war crimes – and did not rule out the use of troops on the ground.

• Casualties of war: An Iranian government spokesperson said at least 30 civilians have been killed in U.S. attacks on southern Iran in recent days. Hundreds of others have been wounded, another official said. The International Maritime Organization said Iranian missiles killed two and wounded 14 on UAE-flagged tankers. The UAE threatened retaliation.

• No way, NDAA: In Washington, Senate Democrats blocked the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act, in protest of the war with Iran and U.S. military aid to and intelligence cooperation with Israel.

• Markets watch: Oil prices dipped after Trump dropped his threat to charge fees over the Strait: a common pattern throughout the war.

• Lebanon latest: Axios Trump scooper Barak Ravid said Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu to move troops out of Syria and Lebanon, saying: “They don’t want you there. You should redeploy.” The Israeli prime minister insisted on the need for “security zones.” In Lebanon, Israeli forces carried on shelling and destroying infrastructure.

Susan Collins Is ‘Encouraged’? Over ICE??

News that ICE will pause most vehicle stops after deadly shootings in Texas and Maine was welcome, if hardly sufficient to atone for the horror. Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins, meanwhile, appeared to claim credit for the move.

“I spoke with DHS Secretary [Markwayne] Mullin last night and urged him to cease all non-urgent vehicle stops in the wake of yesterday’s deadly Biddeford shooting,” Collins posted. “I am encouraged that the department has agreed to do so.”

As Collins said, the agents who killed 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero were not wearing body cameras, for the expanded use of which Collins helped allocate $20 million this spring. But Collins also blamed Democrats for a shutdown she said delayed such reforms: a petty partisan point in the aftermath of a horrific shooting, never mind the obscenity of helping ICE receive extra billions after the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.

Guerrero was legally in the U.S., was not the agents’ intended target, and, according to a witness, told his attackers “I tried to stop,” even as his life ebbed away. Agents handcuffed his lifeless body and left it to lie on the street. His wife and young daughter looked on. The Trump administration sought to blacken its victim’s name, saying he tried to use his car as a weapon, a claim it soon had to drop.

Collins said, “[I]t is clear ICE needs to improve its performance,” then praised work beyond street-level enforcement. That was tone deaf. Democrats in Congress and contenders for the nomination to face Collins in November condemned the Biddeford killing and demanded root and branch reform, if not abolition.

Border czar Tom Homan wasn’t backing down, claiming “vehicle attacks are up 3,400%” and telling Fox vehicle stops would be subject only to a “short pause, just to make sure we’re doing the right thing. Operations continue. Arrests are at record numbers. Deportations are at record numbers.” Later on Tuesday came news of the death in Florida of an immigrant who ran from ICE, to be hit by a truck.

It all bore out Swin’s reporting for Zeteo just last week, that the Trump administration is merely gathering its strength. Worse is sure to come.

🗞️ What You Need to Know

• Big Lie: Trump said he would have “big news” in his primetime address Thursday. News outlets reported he will make claims about China, Venezuela, and supposed voter fraud in the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden. Law firms that cut deals with Trump last year, meanwhile, were reported finally to be fighting back.

• Payday: Writer E. Jean Carroll finally received $5.6 million from Trump. Her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, saluted the unanimous jury that in 2023 found Trump “liable for sexually assaulting and defaming” Carroll and awarded the sum.

• Court orders: Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett told Congress the Supreme Court needs extra security funding, detailing threats including a swatting at Barrett’s home and deliveries in the name of the murdered son of a New Jersey judge.

• Hatch-Act man: Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faces a formal complaint over attempts to intervene in congressional races, having reportedly sought to persuade third-party candidates to clear the way for Iowa Republicans.

• Wholly crap: A spotlight remained on Kennedy’s stewardship of U.S. public health, as the CDC said it expected an outbreak of cyclospora, a parasite that causes explosive diarrhea, to continue through August.

• Naughty Elon: Wisconsin elections officials referred two complaints to prosecutors after finding probable cause that Elon Musk violated bribery law by handing checks to voters in his attempt to sway the 2025 state Supreme Court election.

• Suits you: Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia grad student detained for 104 days over his pro-Palestine activism, sued “the Heritage Foundation, Stephen Miller, a Columbia affiliate, and others” under the Ku Klux Klan Act, a post-Civil War law that restricts official co-operation with vigilante groups.

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🧠 Pop Quiz!

In 1964, the Indiana University student who would find fame as writer E. Jean Carroll won which national sporting title?

Keep your eyes out for the answer below!

🌏 Anywhere But America

• 🇵🇸 Don’t forget Gaza: An Israeli strike today killed at least four members of the same family, including a 6-year-old girl, Al Jazeera reported. Israeli strikes and gunfire yesterday killed at least 10 Palestinians, including a 10-year-old boy and a senior police officer, officials said.

• 🇺🇦🇷🇺 Going ballistic: Ukraine said it downed five Russian ballistic missiles, though other missiles and drones hit Kyiv. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was in Paris, seeking aid to boost such air defenses while joining other European leaders for the Bastille Day parade.

• 🇨🇺 Power play: Cuba suffered its third blackout in three days under an oil embargo imposed by the Trump administration, which openly calls for regime change in Havana and has hinted at military action.

• 🇨🇩 Ebola update: Eighty percent of new Ebola cases in DR Congo are from unknown chains of transmission, the World Health Organization said, adding, “Perhaps the most alarming finding is that many of the newly reported deaths are people who died in their communities without ever reaching a health facility and without receiving care.” At least 719 people have died.

• 🇬🇧🇫🇷 World Cup runneth over: With Andy Burnham confirmed as Britain’s next leader, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is reportedly set to resign next Monday… after a trip to New Jersey for the World Cup final Sunday, if England beat Argentina today. France, beaten by Spain yesterday, were revealed to be traveling on jets also used for ICE deportations.

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😳 WTF?!

House Speaker Mike Johnson can’t even be bothered to pretend to care about the ICE killing of Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. Unsurprising, but utterly sick all the same.

🧠 Trivia answer: Miss Cheerleader USA.

ICYMI From Zeteo

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Good morning, and welcome to Tuesday. Prem here, with today’s look at the news that matters as you start your day. Unfortunately, it’s hard to give too cheerful a greeting, given what happened yesterday in Biddeford, Maine.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we consider another day of pure horror in Donald Trump’s America. Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old man from Colombia, legally permitted to work in the U.S., was shot dead by an ICE agent looking for someone else. The administration blamed its victim. Of course it did. Witness accounts of the killing and its aftermath, of how the man’s wife and child saw themselves instantly bereaved, were heartbreaking. But these abominations demand we do not look away. This is the face of Trump’s regime.

In Florida, meanwhile, a judge excoriated Trump’s attempt to use $1.776 billion in taxpayer dollars to pay off his criminal cronies. In Iran, Trump’s illegal war cooked back up to flaming hell. Below, we cover it all.

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‘I Watched a Wife Fall to Her Knees’

On Monday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed yet another person in broad daylight.

In Biddeford, Maine, ICE agents killed a 26-year-old man from Colombia.

The young man, identified by neighbors who spoke to the Portland Press Herald and an immigrant advocacy group as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, had work authorization in the U.S. and had been issued a Social Security number, the group said. Maine Senator Angus King revealed that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin admitted that Guerrero was not the target of a warrant.

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King said Mullin claimed the ICE officer opened fire after the man tried to “weaponize” his vehicle against agents – a claim the Trump administration has repeatedly recited despite being debunked or undermined in other incidents. Later, DHS changed its story, saying the driver “attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.”

Daniel Boucher, who lives near the site of the shooting, witnessed parts of what happened.

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Good morning from Washington. Martin here, and as is becoming sort of traditional, Happy Monday. After another impossibly busy weekend of political and geopolitical news, it’s my pleasure to distill it all into a top read to start your week.

It was a weekend when Donald Trump’s illegal war with Iran flared back into sustained exchanges of fire over the Strait of Hormuz. Back home came sad news that dominated the Sunday headlines: Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died on Saturday evening, aged 71, when his heart gave out.

This consideration of Graham’s antic career, from shortly before the 2020 election, is one of the best columns (or pure political broadsides) I’ve ever had the pleasure to edit, though what came after 2020 seems sure to color how Graham is remembered too. Today’s ‘First Draft,’ meanwhile, considers how Trump, the man Graham warned about, avidly served, seemed to abandon, then avidly served again, reacted to his death. Let’s read on.

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‘I Was Nasty Too’

Donald Trump’s response to the death of Senator Lindsey Graham was nothing if not predictable. It was all about him.

“He ran against me,” Trump told CNN, of the Republican primary of 2016, adding: “He was one of the 17 people that ran against me and he was a smart guy. And it was a nasty campaign. He was tough and nasty but I was nasty too. And it was that fine. And I got to know him by little drips and drabs, and then we became friendly. And there was no better advocate.”

As shorthand for how Graham attacked Trump – calling him a “loser,” a “nutjob,” a “demagogue,” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” who would “destroy” the GOP – but then came swiftly to heel, it was accurate enough, though there were 17 candidates including Trump, Graham one of five who dropped out before votes were cast. Tellingly, Trump also praised Graham for his 2018 defense of Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump said was treated worse than anyone and “that includes me, maybe not.” Takes one to know one, let’s say. Like Trump, Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault. Like Trump, Kavanaugh vehemently denied it. Unlike Trump, Kavanaugh wasn’t found liable.

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But Kavanaugh was just a sidetrack, a bit of free association. Trump didn’t want to talk about the justice any more than he wanted to talk about Graham. He really wanted to talk about his precious SAVE Act, the voter-suppression measure wrapped in lies about voter fraud the president thinks will save the Republicans in November, and which is set to dominate discussion again when Congress returns on Monday.

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You made it to Friday! It’s Swin, again. Here at Zeteo, some of us have a saying whenever fatigue or demoralization start to creep in, given how successful Donald Trump and his party have been in unleashing their barbarism on us all. Whenever I start to feel tired, I remind myself that they aren’t tired. Stephen Miller isn’t tired. Todd Blanche isn’t tired. Marco Rubio isn’t tired. Tom Homan isn’t tired. They’re having the times of their lives, as they sadistically wreck countless others. If they aren’t tired, I – sitting in my tiny, air-conditioned corner of the media – haven’t earned the right to be tired yet.

There’s a lot more time left in the second Trump era. One thing he and the Republican Party are counting on is that they wear you out. Their political comfort – or survival, even – relies on just enough American voters getting bored, cooling on their outrage, or simply forgetting and moving on from the last news cycle that tore at President Trump’s poll numbers.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we’ll get into how much this government wants you to forget that his brutal clampdowns – on immigrants and Democratic-majority cities – are still happening, and escalating all over the country. Plus, the Graham Platner campaign confirms his plan to formally withdraw from the Maine Senate race on Monday and the Iran war keeps heating back up. Here goes.

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‘We Need Better PR’

In January, even the Trump White House was forced to acknowledge that its hyper-violent, televised and livestreamed crackdowns on blue cities, immigrants, and U.S. citizens had grown sharply unpopular. After the carnage in Minnesota, Team Trump flipped out that their policies were killing them in the polls in an election year, sidelined wannabe stormtroopers like Greg Bovino, and forced themselves into a brief period of strategic retrenchment. The White House began begging Republican politicians to downplay terms like “mass deportation” – you know, the things Trump ran on in 2024. And orders were handed down from the highest levels that, as one White House official describes it to me, “We need better PR.”

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For a moment, Trump’s demand for a kinder, gentler, less visible fascism held. At least some of ICE and DHS’s highly public militarized violence got shoved in the penalty box, even if everyone knew it was all just for show and that Team Trump planned to rev things up “after the midterms” anyway. But for many of Trump’s nativist allies, that wasn’t good enough. They launched a pressure campaign, demanding the administration ratchet things back up before Election Day in November.

To some extent, the campaign worked. If they wanted blood, they got it. Still, sources in the Trump administration tell me that they want to have their crackdowns and their mass deportations but without the viral videos that sprang out of places like Minnesota early this year. Because of this, the sources say, officials at the White House, DHS, and elsewhere have spent a significant amount of time planning where to launch operations out of the public eye.

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Happy Thursday – it’s Swin. I’ve written before about how President Donald Trump’s war on Iran is not only the worst-run war in U.S. history, it’s clearly also the most Orwellian. And this week is sadly no exception. To the Trump-Vance administration, war is peace, bloodletting and bombings are ceasefires and deal-making, and a ceasefire can be declared “over” even if it never really began.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we delve into how the Trump White House is revving the boneheaded-imperialism machine back up – and getting embarrassed every step of the way. Plus, Graham Platner suspends his Senate campaign but takes a swing at Democratic elites on the way out. Let’s dive in.

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‘Nobody’s Afraid of Him’

This was supposed to be over. But Donald Trump has a problem. Basically, nobody takes him seriously anymore. Not in his own government, not in Iran or elsewhere – at least when it comes to his most malevolent threats against the Islamic Republic.

“Nobody’s afraid of him right now,” one senior U.S. official tells Zeteo, as the U.S. and Iran exchange fire and accuse each other of collapsing a ceasefire that was never actually a ceasefire.

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Sure, President Trump can reboot his bombing campaign, as he already did late last month and is huffily doing this week, all while claiming that maybe he doesn’t even want to cut a peace deal with the Iranians anymore. (He does… but more on that in a moment.) Trump can name-call the Iranian leadership, and he can re-threaten the grand-scale war crimes and ground invasions he and his administration actively planned for but haven’t carried out. And he can keep lying to the world that time is on his side and that he’s in no rush to end the bloodbath that he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started back in February.

But ever since last month, the Iranian government has continued its campaign of humiliation against the Trump administration by refusing to bend to the U.S. president’s renewed threats of mass murder and his resumed bombing sprees. All of Trump’s violence and bluster clearly are not imposing an effective deterrence to aggressive Iranian activity, including in the key global economic leverage point of the Strait of Hormuz. There’s a good reason for that.

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Good morning, friends. Prem here. Last night, I watched the Michigan Democratic Senate primary debate between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens so you didn’t have to. (I promise I have other evening hobbies…) Here, I’ll take you through some highlights, and focus on an element of the race that is starting to crystallize… one I recommend you all pay attention to in the weeks ahead.

Today’s ‘First Draft’ also looks at the lowlights of Donald Trump’s arrival in Turkey for the NATO summit, which coincided with an all-too predictable return to strike and counter-strike in the war with Iran. Let’s get into it.

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El-Sayed vs. Stevens, on the Debate Stage

With Mallory McMorrow’s departure from the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, the race has become a showdown between Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens. On Tuesday, the two debated. It was an instructive conversation, in the final month of the campaign. In particular, the debate showcased one very puzzling, even revealing strategy the Chuck Schumer- and AIPAC-backed Stevens is pursuing.

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Onstage in Grand Rapids, the two candidates duked it out in a similar format: El-Sayed frequently argued any given issue could not be solved without being freed from corporate or outside interests. He then attacked Stevens for being the recipient of donations from such interests, such as Big Tech companies contributing to the AI data center boom. Stevens would retort with podium-pounding refrains, saying she had “the receipts,” or defaulting to a repeated suggestion that El-Sayed was only trying to “go viral” or “shouting into a bullhorn about problems.”

Early on, questions about the U.S. relationship with Israel dominated the conversation.

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Good morning! Andrew here. I’m traveling, which means I’m not reporting from the great state of Maine today. Maybe that’s OK. It’s quite a scene right now, and could be for some time. Zeteo broke the news of Graham Platner’s campaign launch last summer, and I’ve spent much of the past year covering his grassroots bid on the ground. That seems likely to change.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we look at whether Platner’s time as Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee is coming to an end, and take in a truly mad White House performance from Donald Trump which was, of course, just the chaser for another ludicrous Washington day.

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‘A Red Line’

Mainers have shown Graham Platner an awful lot of grace. It’s why the Marine combat veteran and populist oysterman survived a series of controversies that would have typically nuked anyone’s political aspirations.

Platner didn’t just survive. He beat the Democratic establishment’s pick for Senate, Maine Governor Janet Mills, so badly she was forced to leave the race early. Even as the scandals piled up, Platner won 72% of the primary vote, securing the chance to take on five-term Republican Senator Susan Collins.

The allegations raised Monday landed differently. Jenny Racicot, a woman who dated Platner, told Politico he came over to her house uninvited in 2021, deeply intoxicated, and sexually assaulted her. Her claims, which Platner denied, were disturbing. Politico said it reviewed correspondence between Racicot and her therapist, and spoke with a man she told about the incident. Racicot also spoke to CNN, saying Platner “absolutely” raped her.

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The reaction was swift. Rep. Ro Khanna and Senator Ruben Gallego rescinded endorsements. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand called on Platner to “immediately withdraw,” adding that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee “will not invest in the Maine Senate race if Platner remains on the ballot.” The DSCC’s super PAC arm, Senate Majority PAC, said it “is redirecting resources away” from Maine. The Maine Democratic Party demanded he withdraw. So did Hannah Pingree, Maine’s Dem nominee for governor. Progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren, who backed Platner’s bid, called for him to step aside. Supporters in lefty media, including Emma Vigeland and ‘Pod Save America’ hosts Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor, urged Platner to drop out.

The Maine Democratic Party can replace Platner on the ballot, as long as he exits by Monday, July 13. The party would need to select a new candidate by July 27. If not, the party can’t swap him out. Platner said he would “reflect on the best path forward” – a remark that could only be read as him knowing he’ll have to drop out.

At least, it sounded that way. Right?

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Good morning from DC. Martin here, making a claim to be the Folarin Balogun of Zeteo FC – if only in that I’m American and British at the same time, as I both wasn’t born here and somehow doubt Donald Trump would personally intervene to have me reprieved from a red card and freed to play for the U.S. in a (rugby) World Cup.

Anyway. In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we take in a major development in Michigan, where Mallory McMorrow dropped out of the Democratic U.S. Senate primary on Sunday, leaving a straight fight between pro-Palestine progressive Abdul El-Sayed and pro-Israel centrist Haley Stevens. All the issues that have dominated recent House primaries won by left-wingers are present – Medicare for All, corporate cash, AIPAC – and the polls look good for El-Sayed. Elsewhere, Trump spent Sunday pretending he’d had a huge crowd for his Saturday night 250th birthday speech, when he wasn’t posting about his repellent remodeling of DC, while talks to end his illegal Iran War remained in limbo. There’s all that and more to think about, so let’s get started.

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‘The Most Important Primary Candidate in America’

On Sunday, after state Senator Mallory McMorrow ended her campaign for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Michigan, sources from either end of the party considered the most telling part of her move: she chose not to endorse.

Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), said: “Kudos to Mallory McMorrow for not endorsing Haley Stevens.”

Though “the DC establishment is sending a desperate signal to Michigan voters that Haley Stevens is the status quo insider they want to rally around,” Green said, “Abdul El-Sayed is the most important primary candidate in America.”

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Tellingly, Green found an echo from the heart of that establishment. Former Obama strategist and White House adviser David Axelrod said: “Conventional thinking in DC has been that a Mallory McMorrow exit would help Haley Stevens. But candidate quality matters, and Abdul El-Sayed is a strong candidate. Stevens has big establishment support but he remains the frontrunner.”

El-Sayed does enjoy healthy polling leads. The progressive choice opposed to Stevens, the party insider, like other left-wingers who won recent primaries in New York and Colorado, El-Sayed campaigns passionately for policies such as Medicare for All, and passionately against influences such as AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby group that maintains a grip on much of Congress. Stevens, a former Obama adviser in the House since 2019, enjoys massive AIPAC support.

After McMorrow announced her withdrawal on social media, El-Sayed responded.

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Good morning! Your whole ‘First Draft’ team is reporting for duty today together: Martin, Andrew, Prem and Swin. We’re here to toast Donald Trump’s horrible, no good, very bad birthday party for America on its 250th. We hope you have a restful and rewarding July 4 weekend, and a better holiday than the sad souls who are heading to the nation’s capitol to celebrate a president who despises them.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we take the temperature at the Trump White House and brave the temperature on the National Mall, to depict – visually, thanks to the usual great work from Prem – the sheer crappiness of the ‘Great American State Fair,’ centerpiece of all that is wrong with the administration’s semiquincentennial plans. We also look to Michigan and Maine, where Abdul El-Sayed and Graham Platner are warning about AIPAC and campaign spending, and attempt to keep pace with another day of amazing stories of staggering Trumpian corruption. On we go.

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‘I Can Do Anything’ – Except Put On a Proper State Fair

There’s little to celebrate on America’s 250th birthday, living under the country’s first wannabe king. But Donald Trump will roundly punish those Americans depraved enough to want to mark the semiquincentennial with him in Washington.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of attending a Trump rally, you know they are miserable. You get to wait many hours outside, no matter the weather, with no one to feed you or give you water. Andrew recalls, at a 2024 rally in New Hampshire, watching a MAGA man sitting outside near the front of the line, wearing shorts in a blizzard for hours on end, wondering as the man’s inflamed knee turned increasingly purple how many more days he’d have that leg. Such is the price of being a Trump superfan: They might love his racism and commitment to harming the vulnerable, but he has a shit sandwich for them, too.

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Those who venture to the National Mall on July 4 are in for a similar experience. “It’s going to be approximately 107 degrees out, and I’m gonna go and I’m gonna make a really long speech just to show that I can do anything,” Trump bragged on Wednesday.

That speech means the fireworks families travel to DC to watch are set to start far later than usual. Attendees are banned from bringing backpacks, coolers, folding chairs, or bug spray. The forecast: 97 degrees with scattered thunderstorms.

Trump’s fans and their kids are in for a world of hurt. As well as enduring the noise of a seemingly endless flypast, Trump’s new and enormously corrupt Air Force One included, they can expect to inhale an excess of fine particulate matter, as Team Trump is planning to unleash a record amount of fireworks.

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Good morning! Martin and Swin here. At Zeteo, we’ve spent time this week at Donald Trump’s so-called Great American State Fair, on the National Mall in DC. We’ll have more to report soon (it’s going as well as you’ve heard, and yes, it does add another layer to the thesis, Trump Literally Can’t Do Anything Right), but until then, we need to talk about the president’s unbridled corruption. Since last year, multiple sources close to Trump have quipped that thanks solely to his second presidency, and his willingness to use it to line his and his family’s pockets, Trump will finally be able to say he’s an actual billionaire as opposed to a “fake” one. 😂 😭 The line might be funny… if it weren’t so immensely sad for a nominally democratic society.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we follow Trump’s chemtrails of corruption west to North Dakota, via his first flight on his new Air Force One, the totally normal, not staggeringly wrong gift from his friends in Qatar. We also take a trip back inside a presidential brain still absolutely furious about bestselling book Regime Change and consider other events from another insane day in DC and further abroad. Let’s dig in.

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‘He’s Pretty Busy as President’

Famously, The Onion’s front page for April 16, 1912, about the sinking of the Titanic, reads: “World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg.” On Wednesday, Donald Trump was taking off rather than sinking, but the gag came to mind nonetheless. The world’s largest metaphor for the most corrupt U.S. president’s second administration – the new Air Force One, a $400 million gift from Qatar, a suitably emiratic symbol of this kakistocratic regime – made its maiden flight from Maryland to Medora, North Dakota, where Trump teed off celebrations of America’s 250th birthday at the Theodore Roosevelt library.

A reporter asked about financial disclosures that showed Trump’s staggering profit from the presidency: at least $2.2 billion in 2025, including about $1.4 billion from family crypto ventures, more than anyone else in the sector. “What message,” the reporter asked, “does this send to average Americans, especially those who may be struggling financially?”

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Trump’s response is worth quoting in full, if only to show how he avoided the question by lying and blathering at length.

“I don’t get involved in my personal… we have funds that run my money. Well I’ve made a lot of money before I became president, and they invest my money, and I don’t talk to them. I never… I don’t even speak to them. So, I have many people. I don’t know what they call it, ‘closed accounts’ or something. You put your money in, and that’s it. I don’t talk to them, they’re big institutions, and they run it. But yeah, I’ve had a great career in business. I’ve had a great career. I don’t know if I’ve had a better career in politics or business, but I had a great career in business. And you know, you saw the cash and you report the different things, and what they do is, we gave it, I think it’s called a blind account, but they basically, they take it, and I purposely, I never speak to any of the people that run the money, but they’re big institutions, and they invest in whatever they invest.”

It was nonsense: horseshit d’oeuvres, if you will, for the speech Trump gave in the Dakotas, surrounded by cosplay Rough Riders. Trump has clearly, undoubtedly, obscenely profited from the presidency second time around. Consider just some of the many, many stories of insider dealing and ruthless profiteering.

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Good morning, friends. Prem here, with two stories for you that together serve to illustrate how the monstrosity of the old world may at last be proving too much to bear. We all have our limits. A new world is no longer struggling to be born. Here it comes. To that end, prepare for elected Republicans to grow even more insane and ‘Reasonable Democrats’ to spiral even more, as socialism spreads from sea to shining sea in the United States!

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we consider another momentous win for the left, this time in Colorado; a determined Democratic effort to hold President Donald Trump to account over his preposterous Board of Peace and its plans for Gaza; and the Supreme Court turns Trump down on birthright citizenship, though not without four justices showing they don’t believe in… the Constitution. Let’s get to it.

Socialism’s Mile High Moment

A democratic socialist born in 1997 has unseated a veteran Democrat who was first elected to Congress in… 1997.

Last night, 29-year-old Melat Kiros beat 30-year incumbent Diana DeGette, 68, in the Democratic primary for Colorado’s first congressional district in Denver.

Kiros’s victory in the Mile High City comes just one week after a Zohran Mamdani-backed trio of democratic socialists – Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander – strung together three primary wins in New York City. In total, three Democratic incumbents have been usurped by challengers from the left in just the past week.

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The Colorado election is another notch in the belt for the democratic socialist movement – showing promise beyond the well-oiled machine that is the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

New York was not a one-off, says Bhavik Lathia, a Democratic strategist and spokesman for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “Kiros’s win validates that the same political energy is moving across the country — from Maine to New York to Pennsylvania to Colorado. The common thread is voters looking for outsider candidates who will fight Trump and corporate power with equal clarity,” he tells Zeteo. “The socialist sweep in New York showed that voters are hungry for a Democratic Party willing to change. Kiros’ win shows that hunger is national.”

AIPAC will be feeling super disappointed this morning. Again.

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Good morning! Andrew here, writing about one of my least favorite topics: the Supreme Court. Sometimes, people seem to forget the high court’s 6-3 supermajority is composed of far-right political operatives who were installed on the court via a pile of billionaire money, and who, underneath the black robes, remain full-on ideological extremists, bestowed with a lifetime of hard power. Unfortunately, the justices remind us of this reality often enough.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ the Supreme Court gives Donald Trump another king-like power, Colorado primary voters could replace a 15-term Democratic congresswoman with another young democratic socialist, and Michigan progressive Abdul El-Sayed picks up a key endorsement, ahead of his interview later today with Mehdi.

Our Malevolent Rulers

As we have written before here in ‘First Draft,’ Donald Trump is radically unfit to lead the U.S., and should be democratically and constitutionally removed from office, without delay. The right-wing justices in the Supreme Court supermajority see it differently: They want this monstrous man to be king.

That’s not because these far-right justices are all MAGA devotees, though surely some of them are. Some of the justices almost certainly can’t stand the man, with his constant demands of them and his propensity for launching loud personal attacks if they fail to side with him on every single issue, no matter how idiotic.

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Fundamentally, Trump and the justices are partners in fascism. With teamwork, a handful of elite, unelected far-right operatives and a narcissistic game-show host can take apart American liberal democracy piece by piece, and replace it with authoritarian rule.

This is not something you’ll hear every day in the mainstream media, but it’s precisely why the right-wing justices, three of whom Trump appointed, have repeatedly granted this president king-like powers – even though they surely know he is out of his mind.

On Monday, the high court gifted Trump, as liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted, a new king-like power, one exceeding the powers of King George III.

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Good morning, and Happy Monday. Martin here, writing from a capital awash with either popular enthusiasm for Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair, down on the National Mall, or quite a lot of summer rain. Last time I looked out the office window it was… decidedly the latter.

Today’s edition of ‘First Draft’ is brought to you without a paywall, courtesy of our sponsor Ground News.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we consider the latest report of multi-billion-dollar Trump corruption, this time around a deal for Kazakh tungsten, and note encouraging signs of clear Democratic communication to voters of how utterly unacceptable this must be. We also consider the president’s choice of Sunday entertainment: a rather damp tour of the capital he wants to remake in his image, even as his Iran war threatened to roar back to life. Let’s dig in.

‘An Inbred Family Tree’

JD Vance may or may not be right that in Trump’s America, staggering presidential corruption makes for a “12-hour news story” at best, but it is undeniably true that the kind of alleged corruption the New York Times reported Sunday should occupy the nation much longer than that – even if it’s just the latest instance in an absolutely staggering succession of reports of Donald Trump, his family, and their allies enriching themselves at voters’ expense.

The Times headline was stark: “Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit.” The lede described how last year Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick secured a deal with the president of Kazakhstan to give “a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips, and other critical goods.”

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“Within weeks,” the Times’s Eric Lipton and Paul Sonne wrote, a firm part-owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump joined with partners to take a 20% stake in “a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project.” Lipton and Sonne also noted how Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment company controlled by the Lutnick family and overseen by the commerce secretary’s sons, Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, worked to raise $210 million in capital for an entity related to the deal, work that would “typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.”

In November, six days after the Trump boys bought in, the U.S.-Kazakh deal was signed. It was just the tip of the iceberg. One or both of the Trumps and Lutnicks “have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project,” the Times said, citing federal filings.

“All 14 of these companies have either benefited directly from offers of financial assistance from the Trump administration, or have pending permit applications before the Commerce Department, which Mr. Lutnick oversees, the Times found. The total amount of federal funding that the Trump administration has provided or is considering providing to the companies exceeds $8.9 billion, according to public statements by the companies and federal government.”

All parties concerned denied wrongdoing, of course.

As for outrage? Well, the Times quoted Rep. Maxine Dexter of Oregon, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. She said: “Congress needs to make sure that taxpayer dollars are being used in the public’s interest and not to benefit family members or those closely tied with the Trump administration.”

Well… yeah. Was that it? Was that all the most relevant Democrat could manage? When, as the Times put it, that Democrat was confronted with a prime example of “emboldened mixing of federal policymaking and personal business [that] began shortly after Mr. Trump returned to office last year, when the Trump and Lutnick sons played a role in billions of dollars of cryptocurrency deals as the fathers helped set policies that supercharged the crypto industry?” And when, “the families’ ethically tangled pursuit of profits is extending to the new arms race for critical minerals?”

It seemed so.

Fortunately, better was on offer elsewhere. California Democratic Congressman Mike Levin did a good job laying out the Times story in digested form and communicating outrage: “The fathers set the policy. The sons cashed in… This is your tax money. It is supposed to secure our supply chains and protect our troops, not pad the portfolios of the president’s children and the commerce secretary’s children.

“This is the most corrupt administration in American history. It is not close… Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.”

Jon Ossoff, the Democratic senator from Georgia who is up for re-election against a predictable MAGA lickspittle, was already on the case. Addressing supporters earlier this month, Ossoff used the Kazakhstan deal in an efficient evocation of how the Trump administration is using billions of taxpayer dollars to enrich the Trump family, “while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for health care.”

Ossoff promised accountability, should Democrats regain control of Congress in November. His message was clear, and crisp, and pointed.

And yet, despite such efforts, the roar from Trump’s flood of corruption threatens to become mere background noise. However hard to parse – Was he admitting how corrupt his boss was? Did he actually think Tricky Dick Nixon wasn’t so bad? – Vance’s remarks last week about the news cycle and numbness to scandal came close to a dangerous truth. In a national conversation debased by such nihilism, Democrats must make sure voters know the sheer scale and threat of Trump’s corruption and don’t just treat it as something built in. Democrats must persuade voters it’s not the case that all politicians are just in it to get rich. At a Knicks watch party in New York the other week, a friend told me: “Red or Blue, politicians are all the same. Cut ’em, they bleed green.” I should’ve shown him Ossoff’s remarks.

On Sunday, outside Congress, Adam Bonica, a Stanford professor of political science, offered another efficient distillation of the story about the Trumps, the Lutnicks, and Kazakh tungsten. Linking to the effectively simple Times graphic pictured above, illustrating how the dollars flow, Bonica made an equally simple but clear point about the source of the poison: “Usually these political corruption maps have complicated plumbing. You know it’s bad when it’s just a closed loop that looks like an inbred family tree.”

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🇮🇷 Iran War Updates

• More strikes: Amid a supposed ceasefire, the U.S. and Iran traded attacks. Blaming Iranian drone strikes on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. said it shot down drones and missiles aimed at bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed to have destroyed eight U.S. military sites.

• Trump threat: Donald Trump said, “There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!”

• Strait talk: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said, “Any attempt to establish new or separate arrangements from those currently being carried out by… Iran will only lead to further complications, delay the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and increase the level of tension.” Later, a U.S. official told the New York Times an agreement to halt attacks in the Strait had been reached. Iran did not immediately confirm it.

• Whither Congress? Rep. Ro Khanna pointed out that U.S. strikes were in “blatant violation of the War Powers Resolution” passed by both houses of Congress. Khanna said Congress should take Trump to court to compel an end to strikes.

• Talks unclear: U.S.-Iran negotiations were set to resume in Qatar on Tuesday, Axios and other outlets reported. But Iran said on Monday those reports couldn’t be confirmed. “The first round of technical talks within the framework of the designated working groups will be held when conditions are met,” Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said.

• Lebanon latest: Israel carried on striking southern Lebanon, two days after signing a deal to end violence in the country. Iran is demanding an end to Israeli strikes in Lebanon, as a condition for ending the wider war.

‘Criminally Made Algae’

Donald Trump’s renovation mania extends to wanting Lafayette Park, by the White House, to contain 47 maple trees to mark his status as the 47th president, the Washington Post reported.

Noting that Trump spent a sodden Sunday morning touring projects including “the East Potomac Park golf course, where reporters saw him reviewing blueprints, and the roundabout where he hopes to erect a triumphal arch,” the paper said the Lafayette Park renovations would not be complete by July 4, as Trump has loudly claimed.

According to the New York Times, Lafayette Park work will cost $17 million, part of a whopping $1.2 billion bill for Trump’s DC projects. Even that is only approximate, subject to ever-spiralling costs of work such as the East Wing ballroom rebuild and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool clusterfuck. (“Noun, vulgar slang, ‘a complex and utterly disordered and mismanaged situation,’” Merriam-Webster.) Furthermore, much of Trump’s White House work is of unknown cost.

After his DC jaunt, Trump used Truth Social to post a 594-word boast about his plans, replete with batshit (“adjective, vulgar slang, ‘very irrational, excited, or angry,’” Merriam-Webster) claims. The Reflecting Pool, he said, was “now in full use” despite supposed vandalism, though it would be drained again after July 4. “The criminally made algae is gone,” the president burbled, about what he presumably thinks was… wait for it… an antifa plant.

Trump also announced that work on the East Potomac Golf Links would begin Sept. 1, under golf course architect Tom Fazio, who took the Sunday DC tour. According to Trump, the course will be rebuilt to major championship standard. Whether his mound of toxic East Wing debris will remain as a sort of novel sand trap remains to be seen.

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🗞️ What You Need to Know

• Book blast: Trump broke his own embargo (as reported by Zeteo) on commenting about bestselling book Regime Change, managing to misspell his abusive nickname for Maggie Haberman while claiming her work with fellow New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan was “mostly made up.”

• Dictatorship watch: The Times also reported the extreme lengths the Trump White House went to in order to remove protections for federal workers it wanted to fire. Democracy Docket noted how Trump admitted pressuring California officials to ensure GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton made the general election.

• Make your mind up: On Truth Social, Trump took aim at the presumptive new Washington, DC, mayor, Janeese Lewis George, whom he called both a “communist” and a “communist adherent.”

• OK rules: Trump named Lance Schroyer to lead ICE. The former Oklahoma state trooper is an adviser to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, also from Oklahoma.

• Primary win: In Louisiana, Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow, who beat incumbent Bill Cassidy in the first round, secured the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate with a run-off victory over state treasurer John Fleming.

• Dire warning: A group representing central banks said debt-fueled spending on AI data centers risks a financial crunch similar to the 2008-09 global crisis.

• Birthday bigotry: Elon Musk spent his 55th birthday on Sunday boosting a fascistic, anti-migrant film from German director Uwe Boll, which glorifies vigilante violence against migrants and which was denied classification in Germany.

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🧠 Pop Quiz!

The early 19th-century Decatur House, on Lafayette Square by the White House, contains a rare surviving urban example of what sort of building?

Keep your eyes out for the answer below!

🌏 Anywhere But America

• 🇵🇸 Don’t forget Gaza: Israeli strikes killed at least four Palestinians, including a 13-year-old girl, Gaza officials said Sunday. Heavy tank shelling was reported with drones overhead. Israel has killed at least 1,045 Palestinians in Gaza since the so-called “ceasefire” last October, and more than 73,000 since October 2023.

• 🇻🇪 Quake toll: Venezuela’s government reported 1,450 dead from twin earthquakes last Wednesday. Thirty-three rescues were reported. Amid criticism of official efforts, the UN said more than 2,200 international rescuers had arrived.

• 🇺🇦 🇷🇺 Kyiv strikes: Ukraine hit two Russian oil refineries, President Volodymyr Zelensky said. Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted his country was going through a “difficult period” amid the war it started in February 2022.

• 🇵🇰 🇦🇫 Pakistan-Afghanistan escalation: Tensions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border flared Sunday, with Taliban officials claiming Pakistani strikes and ground operations killed more than 35 civilians. Pakistan said it launched a ground operation late Sunday against militant hideouts, killing more than two dozen fighters, AP reported. Afghanistan warned it would retaliate.

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😳 WTF?!

Fox is really shilling for Donald Trump’s “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall, despite overwhelming evidence it’s a flop for the ages. On Sunday, a day of biblical downpours in DC, it might not have been the best choice of words to claim “a great wash” of people were taking in the displays.

🧠 Trivia answer: Slave quarters.

📺 Sunday Show Roundup

• Presented with “centrist” Democrat Josh Gottheimer’s claim that “If you’re a socialist, you’re not a Democrat,” and publication of a centrist manifesto to that effect, Zohran Mamdani laughed, telling ABC’s ‘This Week’ hawking manifestos “sounds pretty socialist to me.” The New York mayor added: “I’m not interested in writing a manifesto, or frankly, in reading one. I’m interested in delivering, and that’s exactly what we’ve been showing.”

• On CNN’s ‘State of the Union,’ North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis lamented Donald Trump’s fixation on supposed voter fraud, asking: “Why are we doing more things to undermine our confidence in elections, rather than getting the strong message out that will win for Republicans this year?” Tillis is not running, having chosen to retire, only then to speak against his party’s Trumpist insanity.

• Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana GOP senator, who also speaks out, but only because he lost his primary to a Trump-backed opponent, said Trump sees Congress as “merely an appendage,” adding: “And frankly, sometimes Congress acts like it’s an appendage.” Cassidy did not tell CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ what sort of appendage he meant.

🗓️ Mark Your Calendars

• Monday, June 29: All eyes will be on the Supreme Court as it releases opinions before the end of its term on July 1. The Trump administration’s challenge to birthright citizenship is among cases not yet decided by the far-right-dominated court. So are questions about how much Trump can control the Fed and government agencies.

• Tuesday, June 30: Colorado holds primary elections. Among Democrats, all eyes will be on the first district, where Rep. Diana DeGette faces Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist endorsed by Bernie Sanders, and the Senate race, where incumbent John Hickenlooper is looking to stave off Julie Gonzales, a progressive state senator.

• Wednesday, July 1: Trump will visit the Theodore Roosevelt presidential library in Medora, North Dakota, set to open to the public on Saturday, July 4. Plans for opening night include a display about Roosevelt’s life mounted by 1,776 drones.

• Friday, July 3: Trump is due to speak at a fireworks display at Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota.

ICYMI From Zeteo

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Happy Friday… finally! It’s Swin again. Since April, I’ve been covering Trumpworld blowback to Regime Change, the new book by New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman. Months before its release, President Donald Trump ordered up a gigantic leak hunt to identify the pair’s sources. The book ramped up Trump’s already searing paranoia, and his leak hunt stalled out largely because too many of the senior officials tasked with finding the leakers are themselves the leakers. Today, we can confirm a new wrinkle in this small saga that a) is indicative of the ultra-catty regime Americans now live under, and b) will likely make you laugh. And if that’s at a certain president’s expense, oh well.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we’ll get into the strange, strange detail in Haberman and Swan’s just-published book that has the nominal leader of the free world squealing about his privacy. Plus, Trump’s pet Supreme Court justices delivered his nasty, racist regime a big win on immigration that will place thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants in danger of their lives.

‘I Don’t Do That!’

There’s plenty about the book Regime Change that’s enraging the president of the United States. Donald Trump has been frustrated that the authors’ premier anonymous sources haven’t been punished. He’s still furious after all these months about the Iran war and White House Situation Room reporting. He got incandescently mad about the Jeffrey Epstein stuff.

Sometimes, it is hard to keep track of all the things that are slowly driving this world-historically petty president into a rage-filled psychotic abyss. In speaking to people very close to President Trump, it’s been difficult to overstate how much this book has genuinely triggered him. But there’s something in the book that hasn’t gotten nearly the level of attention of the aforementioned scoops… and yet it’s something that, according to sources familiar with the matter, has privately and absolutely infuriated the president and helped contribute to his decision to impose an intra-administration blackout on publicly talking about the book.

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“It makes him look so fucking gross,” one senior Trump appointee tells me. “The president sees everything, and he knows about the trash and bathroom sections, and thinks it’s complete bullshit that it got published.”

The perennially image-conscious and self-obsessed president was complaining to aides and other longtime advisers about the book’s descriptions of his bathroom and bedroom habits.

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Happy Thursday, everybody. It’s Swin again. As we’ve been reporting for months at Zeteo, Donald Trump and his Republican Party have been marshaling a gargantuan sum of YOUR money – in the billions! – for initiatives designed to feed his vanity and perpetuate his cult of personality. It’s one of the more disturbing aspects of an infernally authoritarian time, the kind of thing we lied about to ourselves for decades, insisting it can’t happen here. And yet the president and his gang of thieves and reprobates are so clumsy that it’s hard not to laugh at them, even as they try to arrest you for laughing at them.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we dive back into Trump and the GOP’s bungled Pyongyang-ification of our capital, and how it underscores the limits of his reign of terror. Plus, Trump stokes more Capitol Hill chaos, and he stokes a shouting match with a GOP senator, while shivving his own party over a bipartisan housing bill.

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‘He Just Wants to Get Back to the Pool…’

On the night of June 17, I made a joke on Bluesky that Donald Trump “needs this war to end” so he “can stop worrying about war on Iran and get back to his main priority of war on Reflecting Pool.” Because the second Trump era defies all satire, an hour later, the Interior Department began comparing efforts to combat “the dead algae” plaguing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to Trump’s war on Iran.

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The Reflecting Pool saga, now escalated to the White House imposing a mini-police-state around the pool while accused of killing ducks, is nothing if not emblematic of the Maddest-Emperor phase of Trump’s Mad Emperor presidency. He and several departments are siphoning a ton of public money, time, and resources into a vanity project. Now the project is over-budget and devolving into a mortifying self-inflicted spectacle, the president is having armed agents – and literal U.S. troops – patrol the area. Trump is bragging about how many people have been arrested or cited for disrespecting his pool, and much of the U.S. government is spreading Trump’s lie that “vandals” caused the damage that his own “renovation” has in fact wrought. The president is also threatening to sue media outlets that piss him off about the pool. And in keeping with the broader traditions of the Trump-Vance administration, they can’t even manage to pull off this small disaster without seeming suspiciously corrupt.

The Trump presidency is full of perfect metaphors for the depravity and self-defeating failures of the ruling party’s policies. For instance, Trump’s military birthday parade in DC last year was a visual representation of the blundering limitations of his fascist personality cult, and another sign that his administration can’t do anything big or small without doing it “illegally.” Now Trump’s hyper-fixation on the reflecting pool – including his expensive, boneheaded inability to fix it and his demands for a cover-up of yet another humiliation – stands tall among painfully on-the-nose metaphors for the horror he and his party are causing and the wars they’re losing.

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Good morning! Andrew here, to recap another major 2026 midterm primary night. And boy, was it a big night for the left in New York. I work for Zeteo, not corporate media, so I can say this without having to pack up my desk: We love to see it, folks.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ Zohran Mamdani sends three anti-AIPAC Democrats to Congress, John Fetterman cries about it, and a UN panel says Israel “deliberately targeted Palestinian children resulting in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.”

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An Earthquake in New York

The Democrats’ left flank in Congress is about to expand, and move a whole lot further left, thanks to Zohran Mamdani and the voters of New York.

Mamdani, in his first year as mayor, endorsed three candidates for Congress: Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier. All three campaigned against the pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC. All three won.

Like Mamdani’s victory last fall, Tuesday’s elections represent a political earthquake – in the Democratic Party, in America’s biggest city, and in the hub of global capital.

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As Zachary Donnini, head of data science at VoteHub, put it on Twitter, “The Democratic Tea Party is here. Tonight is shaping up to be one of the more consequential nights in recent Democratic politics, with Mamdani- and DSA-endorsed candidates reforming the party.”

Lander, initially a foe in the mayoral race, teamed up with Mamdani to take down Andrew Cuomo before gaining the new mayor’s endorsement in New York’s 10th congressional district. He easily defeated Democratic incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman, long a reliable Israel ally, saying: “I will be one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up for Palestinian human rights.”

The race wasn’t close.

But the other two elections might say even more about where the Democratic Party is headed.

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Good morning, friends. Prem here. Wishing you a wonderful Tuesday wherever you are, a Happy Pride, and a Happy World Cup. I love the extended World Cup. I love that the World Cup is playing almost anywhere you go. I LOVE the World Cup. Who are you cheering for?

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ a man who just became a trillionaire is losing his mind on his own social media platform after being called out for possibly helping leave hundreds of thousands of people, many of them helpless children, to die. Plus, Susan Collins has thoughts about her role in removing abortion rights, about Graham Platner, and about U.S. support for Israel – all of them ridiculous. Let’s get to it.

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Ruh-Ro

Ten-year-old Peter Donde was suffering from H.I.V., contracted from his mother during childbirth. With the help of a U.S.-led aid program called PEPFAR, he was able to stay healthy.

Last February, the South Sudanese child died.

Elon Musk – who just became the world’s first trillionaire – is insisting he had nothing to do with it.

“There is not even a single dead child!” he says. “If there were, it would be worldwide headline news!”

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In fact, several headlines, worldwide, have told us horror stories just like Donde’s. He is one of hundreds of thousands of people, including awful numbers of children, who have died since the Trump-Vance administration callously dismantled the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. government’s international humanitarian and development agency, which administered programs like PEPFAR. The brutal cuts were led by Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which, while tasked with cutting waste and making government more efficient, did not actually accomplish much of that at all.

On top of DOGE’s apparent failure to achieve its mandate was the active harm it caused, seen in the deaths of so many children like Donde, and with so many more destined to meet a similar fate if the Trump brutality continues. That widely reported reality was one Rep. Ro Khanna pointed out on Saturday, during an interview on the ‘I’ve Had It’ podcast.

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Good morning, and happy Monday to all. Martin here, having conquered the urge to go down the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool and get myself a curl of blue paint, peeled from the bottom thanks to algae or hydrogen peroxide or both, to frame over my desk as a memento of Donald Trump’s Washington. Turns out I might’ve been arrested, held for five hours, and charged, as a former Olympic canoeist was on Friday, for simply touching such paint. Really.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we consider another bizarre tale of DC under The Donald: an extraordinary Washington Post report about how Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence until last week, relied heavily on advice and instruction from a cult leader in her native Hawaii. We also look to Switzerland, where JD Vance was left flailing by yet more Trumpian insanity over war or peace with Iran. Here, as they say, we go.

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Gabbard and the Guru

The Washington Post may be reduced under Jeff Bezos, who we now know trashed his staff while sucking up to Donald Trump, but it can still produce remarkable work. Sunday brought an epic: “Tulsi Gabbard, her guru and the mysterious messages that helped shape her political career.”

Reporter Jon Swaine tells us that in a bizarre career that has swerved from social conservatism in Hawaii to progressivism in Congress, from presidential outsider to alleged “Russian asset” to MAGA turncoat and failed director of national intelligence, Gabbard took extensive direction and instruction from a Hindu cult leader.

Read that again: the official who, until last week, oversaw all U.S. intelligence work, who inserted herself in efforts to boost fake allegations of election fraud and perhaps rig the midterms, took instruction and direction from a Hindu cult leader.

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Now imagine that the cult leader did not lead a “breakaway Hare Krishna group.” Imagine the cult leader was Muslim.

Would the story have stayed untold so long? Would what was known have been brushed aside by Trump’s Republicans when Gabbard was confirmed?

It seems sure it would not.

According to Swaine, a former Gabbard aide contacted him to say she worked for Chris Butler, “the eccentric religious leader Gabbard once described as her guru,” head of Science of Identity Foundation, a group based in Hawaii.

Butler, 78, and Gabbard, 45, have denied a mentor-pupil relationship. But the source, Rebecca Saltzburg, provided hundreds of emails.

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