Good morning and happy September, dear friends. May the cosmic energy from August’s solar and lunar eclipses fuel our curiosity and empathy, help us heal and let go of our old wounds, and welcome us to a new day. Prem here, with all the news you need.

To start ‘First Draft,’ here’s someone, and his ferocity, we may soon be rid of if his voters finally decide enough is enough. Benjamin Netanyahu was just on Israeli television, openly bragging about how he tricked those stubborn and misinformed Americans into finally attacking Iran. Below, I’ll take you back to something else Netanyahu did, two years ago, inside Capitol Hill, on my first day at Zeteo.

Plus, Chief Justice John Roberts said Donald Trump’s ludicrous White House ballroom project was “likely unlawful” but really just argued about standing to sue – and crocodiles – with five other conservatives who had him outnumbered, thereby freeing Trump to erect his emiratic carbuncle where the East Wing once stood.

Come along, then, as we digest another insane day under Trump, but also another day on which ‘First Draft’ is published without a paywall, so new readers can see what Zeteo brings to the table each weekday morning: reporting and opinion on all the news you need, on the political subjects that matter. Let’s get to it.

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Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For… Israel

Benjamin Netanyahu has spent decades pushing U.S. presidents to attack Iran. He asked four presidents point-blank to do so. Three refused, over and over. With Donald Trump, Netanyahu’s luck finally changed. Now, as the Israeli prime minister scrambles to hold onto his job in election season, he is going around Israel bragging about how exactly he convinced the world’s most powerful military to bend to his will.

On Sunday, Netanyahu sat for an interview with the genocide-inciting Israeli TV network, Channel 14. There, he appealed to Israeli voters about why they ought to continue supporting him.

“I’ve been against Iran for almost 40 years,” Netanyahu said, adding that “it took a long time to bring the United States to its senses.”

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He was able to do it, Netanyahu said, because he had “close to 1,000 hours on American television with the ability to influence the United States – with the intimate knowledge of all its leaders, both those who support us and those who don’t support us – the ability to navigate this field, through it.”

The gall. In English, Netanyahu lavishes praise on U.S. leaders. In Hebrew, he boasts of how he manipulated them.

That’s not all of it, though.

Some of you may not remember, but the following is forever seared in my memory. On my first day at Zeteo, two years ago, Netanyahu came to Washington. While he delivered a speech that had members of both parties applauding with a level of zeal they don’t show even for a U.S. president, the Israeli prime minister also attacked Americans protesting his visit outside.

I want to underline this: A foreign leader, whose entire project benefits from billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars each year, came to U.S. soil, and slandered U.S. citizens – and U.S. representatives clapped like seals in response.

There is a straight line between that moment – and the U.S. continuing to unconditionally fund Israel ever since, despite it killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and several Americans – and today, when Netanyahu feels so comfortable bragging about how he asserted his will over the U.S.

Think what an indictment this is.

Netanyahu explicitly cites how the U.S. media has served as a compliant springboard, a vessel for his influence operation on, if not the populace, at least the consultants and members of Congress who engage with cable news more than their actual constituents.

And as for the American leadership class: You have unconditionally given this man more than $20 billion, at a conservative estimate, in the past three years. Even as he and his soldiers and his terrorist settlers have killed and brutalized and bullied a double-digit number of Americans, you have given him more and more. And anytime someone has gained enough momentum to criticize that dynamic with enough gusto to resonate with the people you’re supposed to represent, you either willingly or reluctantly scramble to defame them.

And as for the rest of us, the collective “we”: Do we have an ounce of self-respect? As the polls have shown, definitively, American public sentiment towards Israel has plummeted. Despite mainstream media’s insistence, it’s not even a question of divides over Israel in the Democratic Party – it’s nearly unanimous opposition. And independents are not far behind. Even in the Republican Party – home to the Christian Zionists and the Trump-First MAGA movement – opinion on Israel has become split, with no sure sign of it firming up again.

Still, one may hope that the level of condescension, power concentration, and weaponization expressed by the U.S. political class in order to shield its undying support for Israel will prompt something beyond earth-shaking public opinion.

Yes, pro-Israel politicians are beginning to pay the price, particularly in the Democratic primaries. And yes, tens of thousands of Americans, particularly young people, have put themselves on the line and protested against the parasitic U.S.-Israeli relationship and in support of human rights for Palestinians – and subsequently, of course, been viciously targeted by the ruling party, and smeared by some members of the “opposition” party and their mainstream media allies.

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There comes a point when every dam breaks. It should’ve happened decades ago. Years ago. Months ago. Every single day delivers another reminder of how heartlessly violent the Israeli state is, and how that behavior is carried out on the U.S. dime. Most Palestinian children killed by Israel are not like Hind Rajab, whose name is now known around the world. In the global mind, most remain nameless. Americans have been killed, defending our Palestinian siblings or while simply trying to live their own lives in Palestine.

If it has not already completely lost its meaning, without action, the promise of American patriotism will ultimately come to be void. With each crime committed against an innocent Palestinian; with each American humiliated or killed with no justice; with each boast Israeli leaders like Netanyahu let loose about how they successfully manipulated the foolish Americans, despite it all; with each such step, any semblance of “pride” in being American is more and more unearned.

As far back as 2001, Netanyahu was caught on camera as he spoke with Israeli settlers during the second intifada. “I know what America is,” he said. “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.

“They won’t get in the way.”

Looks like he was right.

🇮🇷 Iran War Updates

• Loose talk: Donald Trump said “We’re going to hit them hard” and “There will be a response” to Iranian strikes on U.S. bases in Jordan on Sunday – strikes launched after the U.S. hit Iranian launchers near the Strait of Hormuz, after a month with no attacks. Trump also said the U.S. might “smack them to see what happens.”

• Strait talk: Iran said a tanker in the Strait hit mines and caught fire. The U.S. denied it. A British monitor said it “received a report of an incident involving a tanker and military forces in the Indian Ocean.” Trump claimed the Strait was in “extremely good shape.”

• Sloppy second: Vice President JD Vance said Trump was “sending a message” by posting AI videos of blasts on Kharg Island, an oil hub. Iran called the videos “laughable.”

• ‘Lashing out’: At the G20 meeting in North Carolina, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Iran was “lashing out kinetically because they are losing economically.”

• Penta-gone: Dan Driscoll resigned as U.S. Army Secretary after clashing with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. With the military under strain from prolonged war, Fox said Driscoll opposed the firing of generals responsible for transformation and readiness.

• Lebanon latest: Lebanon asked Greece to help secure peace with Israel, on the same day Athens signed a multibillion-dollar weapons deal with the Israelis. Lebanon’s national news agency said Israeli forces continuing strikes in the south despite a supposed ceasefire dropped illegal white phosphorus munitions.

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‘I Want To Look at a Crocodile’

Chief Justice John Roberts signed the dissent to the unsigned ruling by which Donald Trump’s pet Supreme Court said he could continue building his White House ballroom because drones, or something. Roberts joined the three liberals, but it was hard to escape the feeling that the man who has done more than most to give Trump what he wants might be crying crocodile tears. Not least because he decided to write about crocodiles.

The majority confined itself to the matter of standing. (Maybe on crocodiles, Roger Moore’s Bond-style. Maybe not.) It said the plaintiff didn’t have it. Roberts said she did. In his words, Alice Hoagland of the National Trust for Historic Preservation “regularly visits the White House to take in the historic building’s beauty and to appreciate its symbolism. By overshadowing the traditional White House, Hoagland explains, the new ballroom will detract from the building’s message of republican simplicity and thereby worsen her viewing experience.

“Hoagland’s injury suffices for standing. A historic preservationist… can be aesthetically injured in a concrete, particularized way by the transformation of a historic building that she frequently enjoys, just as an environmentalist can sustain a concrete, particularized aesthetic injury from the extinction of a particular animal or the transformation of a particular forest or river that he regularly enjoys.”

Precedent included Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, from 2000. Roberts continued: “With the Court’s rejection of Hoagland’s standing today, however, it now is the case that ‘I want to look at a crocodile’ can adequately answer the ever critical ‘what’s it to you?’ question of Article III standing, while ‘I want to look at the White House’ cannot – no matter how distinctive the particular viewer’s interest in looking at it may be.”

Funny the alleys up which legal arguments take one, when one is not a lawyer. It also seemed, to this non-lawyer, that so much ink need not have been spilled.

“Construction of the ballroom has proceeded apace for the better part of a year,” Roberts wrote. “That construction is likely unlawful. Pursuant to its plenary constitutional authority over the District of Columbia and federal property, Congress has explicitly prohibited the construction of any “building or structure… on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.”

Surely the whole thing should’ve been that simple. Trump’s ballroom is unlawful. But then, this is constitutional law, which is never simple, and always political, and the presidential crocodile Roberts helped create has long escaped control. On Monday, five of Trump’s six right-wingers were happy to let him carry on running amok.

🗞️ What You Need to Know

• Don’t blame Canada: A YouGov survey found that 43% of Americans approve of Canada’s 50% tariffs on U.S. goods in Trump’s trade war, and only 40% disapprove. It also found 61% opposed to renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America, to 19% in favor.

• Elections news: A federal judge refused to lift a block on the U.S. Postal Service attacking mail-in votes. The administration appealed again. DHS said it plans to “surge” voter fraud investigations. Military chief Gen. Dan Caine said there are no plans to deploy troops to polling places. The New York Times reported “around $1 billion in anonymous money” has been spent on elections this year.

• Data glitch: Trump went all-in for AI data centers, which are very unpopular, saying that communities should only reject data centers “if they want to end up being backwards and poor.” JD Vance, for his part, said: “I don’t think data centers are that controversial.”

• ICE watch: In Biddeford, Maine, where an ICE agent killed an immigrant father in July, GOP Senator Susan Collins defended her support for $70 billion extra for the agency through Trump’s second term. A federal court enjoined a Virginia law preventing localities from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement efforts.

• ‘Highly unusual’: New CDC head Erica Schwartz has not added two measles deaths in Pennsylvania, reported by Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro, to the national tally for the current outbreak, the Washington Post reported, noting staff unease given Health Secretary (and anti-vax crank) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. disputes the causes of death.

• Congress watch: Speaker Mike Johnson backed GOP Ohio Rep. Max Miller, who denies abuse claims. Ex-New York GOP Rep. George Santos was banned from prediction market Kalshi for improper trading. Four Democrats introduced a resolution to “condemn and denounce socialism in all its forms, including the Democratic Socialists of America.” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries defended meeting Jared Kushner.

• Epstein news: Bloomberg obtained the Bureau of Prisons’ application to move Ghislaine Maxwell, the sex trafficker associate of late sex offender and Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein, to a minimum security facility. The justification was redacted.

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🧠 Pop Quiz!

What nationality was John Candy, the legendary comic who played a belligerent American sheriff initiating an invasion of Canada in his final film release, the 1995 Michael Moore satire ‘Canadian Bacon’?

Keep your eyes out for the answer below!

🌏 Anywhere But America

• 🇵🇸 Don’t forget Gaza: Israeli airstrikes killed at least five Palestinians, officials said. Two were killed and several were wounded near a park in Gaza City packed with displaced families. More than 1,325 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the so-called “ceasefire” of October last year.

• 🇵🇸 West Bank update: In remarks reported by the New York Times, retired Israeli generals and officials condemned settler violence and compared Israeli violence in the occupied territories to Nazi violence against the Jews. “I’ve earned the right to speak,” said Asaf Agmon, a former Air Force general whose soldier grandson was killed in Lebanon last year. “I am ashamed of what our people are doing here.” The U.S. condemned a settler attack on an NBC News crew.

• 🇨🇳🇳🇵New warning: Rescuers were racing to find workers believed trapped in tunnels at hydropower sites after catastrophic flooding in Nepal and China last week. The death toll passed 1,000 with 3,900 still missing.

• 🇷🇺🇺🇸 G20 protest: As jet-powered drones battered Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, European finance ministers slammed Russian involvement at the G20 meeting in North Carolina, including sideline talks with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Spain and South Africa, U.S. allies attacked by Trump, were not present.

• 🇬🇧 Elite entry: British Museum staffers expressed concern, The Guardian reported, after pro-Trump, Epstein-linked Palantir billionaire Peter Thiel attended a VIP viewing of the Bayeux tapestry.

• 🇨🇩 Ebola update: Authorities in DR Congo said the caseload in the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record had passed 6,000, with 2,911 deaths.

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🙄 WTF?!

In the Oval Office, Dr. Oz referred to “the ravages of obesity” while gesturing toward (a supposedly) 238-pound President Donald Trump. Might’ve been unwise, had Trump been awake.

🧠 Trivia answer: Canadian.

ICYMI From Zeteo

Zeteo’s Martin Pengelly contributed to this newsletter.

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Good morning, and Happy Monday as ever. Martin here, delighted to kick off your week. Please note that this week’s Madchester musical link is to the video for “Stinkin Thinkin,” a quality which might be said to apply to many of our subjects today.

First in ‘First Draft,’ we’ll take a look at the wholly absurd situation in which far-right provocateur and close Trump adviser Laura Loomer can abuse five prominent Black Democratic women in viciously racist terms, to absolute crickets from the media and Democratic establishment, leaving the strongest condemnation to no less than Marjorie Taylor Greene. Of course, our press and pols are busy, what with so many attacks to be mounted on Hasan Piker instead. Then we’ll turn to Donald Trump himself, and his hissy fit about Kristen Welker of NBC correctly saying he has had “some mixed results” with endorsements of late. There are also worrying developments to consider in Trump’s forever war with Iran, with missiles flying over the Strait of Hormuz once again.

We’re also happy to say that this week, ‘First Draft’ will be published without a paywall, so new readers can see what Zeteo brings to your table each weekday morning: reporting and opinion on all the news you need, on the political subjects that matter. Let’s get to it.

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‘Who You Calling a Bitch?’

On Friday, the far-right activist and close Trump ally and adviser Laura Loomer treated the world to some foul racist invective, calling prominent Democrats Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, former Rep. Cori Bush, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon “ghetto Black bitches.”

Loomer said she didn’t care about being called racist, but she did seem to care when one target answered back.

“Girl,” Nixon posted, before reaching, effectively, for the campaign vernacular of our times. (See Abdul El-Sayed’s baiting of “beta” opponent Mike Rogers.)

“You ate dog food on camera,” Nixon wrote, about something Loomer definitely did. “In the words of Queen Latifah, ‘Who you calling a bitch?’

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Loomer responded with more gutter racism: ‘I called you a ghetto bitch, because you are, Angie, and your record proves it. But, you speak Ebonics though, so maybe I need to bark at you and tug your leash and then you’ll finally understand.”

On Sunday, Nixon hit back, writing: “When referring to me, it’s [State] Representative Angie Nixon. However after November 3rd, YOU CAN CALL ME SENATOR!”

Loomer wrote: “Ok[ay] Shaniqua.”

Enter an unlikely defender. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon-spouting former MAGA congresswoman from Georgia with plenty of racism in her own record, took Loomer to task.

“I’m not a Democrat and I’m not supporting Angie Nixon, but the Republican Party and President Trump owns Laura Loomer and her nonstop vitriol,” Greene wrote. “This hateful, racists [sic], and demeaning rhetoric should not be tolerated. Ever. But they allow it and keep her in the inner circle.”

The Piss Artist Commonly Known as MTG went on to say Loomer’s racism would hurt Senator Ashley Moody, the Republican who will face Nixon in November, just as Loomer’s influence over Donald Trump has damaged the party already. Sticking to her current, politically convenient line of Trump apostasy, Greene said Republicans could win on “actual accomplishments for your voters and policy plans that will help Americans.” Good luck with that. But then she went back to safer ground, pointing to Loomer’s own failed congressional runs: “Voters proved twice that they reject her completely. When will the President and the Republican Party reject her and her hateful racists [sic] behavior? They refuse to[,] which tells you everything you need to know.”

Loomer went into overdrive, repeating her slur and using others, whining: “Why is anti-white racism ok[ay] but I’m not allowed to call a spade a spade.”

You had to say, MTG had a point. And so, turning to the press, did Mehdi:

“Serious question to every mainstream news network and newspaper in this country: how can you justify crazy obsessive coverage of Hasan Piker and just totally ignore much worse stuff like this from an actual presidential adviser?”

Loomer may not have an official title, and may have denied working for Trump in her exchange with Greene, but she very definitely is a close Trump adviser, having last year played a central role in his firing of six members of the National Security Council. Responding to the New York Times about that story, Trump denied it but also called Loomer a “great patriot.” This June, Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan provided a five-page account of the meeting that led to the firings. Their bestselling book, Regime Change, also includes another description of Loomer’s White House access, lunching and plotting with then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in the West Wing.

Loomer has more on her CV. She recently went after a transgender CIA officer in the White House intelligence directorate, who was soon removed. She has taken credit for the swift deportation last week of Milo Yiannopoulos, the British far-right provocateur with whom she fell out and for whose removal she long called.

Compared to all that, what is Hasan Piker? A leftist streamer who has made controversial statements, for example about 9/11, which he walked back, and who has seen those and other statements, for example about American Jews and Israel, and not much different than remarks by Hannah Arendt, willfully and widely misrepresented. Piker has appeared with Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, who is now being forced by his own party to distance himself from Piker and his views.

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If it’s near-impossible to find a senior national journalist or indeed a senior national Democrat saying anything about Loomer’s abject racism about a candidate for Senate, two congresswomen, a former congresswoman and the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s also near impossible to find a senior national journalist or a senior national Democrat not rushing to attack Piker, on social media or on TV:

But here we are. The president has a close ally and adviser who has called herself “a proud Islamophobe,” and who has described Islam as a “cancer on society” and Muslims as “savages.” We get why no one wants to talk about that, and would rather attack a prominent Muslim commentator and a prominent Muslim candidate, both of them stringent critics of Israel.

But, to repeat, Loomer has now called five prominent Black women “ghetto Black bitches,” and repeated and varied the slur. Isn’t that enough to stir up some sort of comment or action? Anything?

Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?… Loomer?

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🇮🇷 Iran War Updates

• Strait strikes: On Saturday, a tanker was struck in the Strait of Hormuz. On Sunday, U.S. forces hit Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island in the first military action in a month, with AP citing an official who said Iranians were preparing to launch “rockets with sea mines.” Iran said fighters and civilians were killed and wounded, and promised to respond. U.S. forces in Jordan were attacked.

• Slop press: Late Sunday, Trump posted to Truth Social AI videos and the message “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!! President DJT.” Echoing George W. Bush, who attacked Iraq, he also posted video of his golf drive.

• Bombshell report: The Washington Post reported “several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere.” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell called the report a “crime.”

• Ayatollah speaks: Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said Muslim nations should “know your real enemy, understand its plans and confront it.”

• Family affair: Yair Netanyahu, the son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was “evacuated” from his home in Miami due to a “significant threat” to his life, Israel’s Shin Bet security agency said. Benjamin Netanyahu, whose forces have killed Iranian leaders’ family members, including Khamenei’s father, previously said Iran had tried to kill one of his sons.

• Lebanon latest: The U.S. State Department said Iran-backed Hezbollah had to disarm before a peace process could be put into effect. Israel continued to ignore the ceasefire, with artillery and airstrikes in the south of the country.

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‘Rebuke or Punishment’

In Wisconsin in June, NBC ‘Meet the Press’ host Kristen Welker struggled through a disastrous interview with Donald Trump, then pleaded with him not to stand up and walk out. Later, she said he’d agreed to sit down again.

So much for groveling. Sunday brought an outburst Welker’s way that brought to mind that tweet that gets trotted out once a week: “’I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”

On Truth Social, Trump said Welker would be “reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment,” for the heinous sin of… saying Trump has of late achieved “some mixed results” in endorsing Republicans for Congress.

Welker was clearly correct. For the U.S. House, Trump picks Rep. Andy Ogles (Tennessee), Rep. Cory Mills and Catalina Lauf (Florida), and Amir Hassan (Michigan) were beaten. So were gubernatorial picks Mike Lindell (Minnesota), Burt Jones (Georgia), Rep. Randy Feenstra (Iowa), Pamela Evette (South Carolina), and Megan Degenfelder (Wisconsin).

Yes, Trump’s general record is strong. But even the high-profile wins he touted were not particularly comfortable. Last week, Trump dragged Lindsey Graham’s know-nothing sister, Darline, over the line in the South Carolina Senate primary and saw Mike Mazzei squeak the nomination for governor in Oklahoma.

Meaningful FCC “rebuke or punishment” for Welker is unlikely, however much Trump squeals about his pet FCC Chair, Brendan Carr, taking “this threat to our country very seriously.”

But Trump’s outburst did point to his very real threat to the press. As he bleated about “fake polls used by a crooked media,” reporters from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg were being barred from the G20 meeting in North Carolina, while the Pentagon claimed a Washington Post report of military warnings about extending the Iran war was a criminal matter.

On Sunday, NBC said: “Kristen is one of the best in the business, and we stand by her.” It would have done better to call Trump out as the threat to free speech that he is.

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🗞️ What You Need to Know

• Bizarre interview: Speaking to GOP congressman turned Fox host Trey Gowdy, Trump talked Iran, the economy, and dream (golf) foursomes. He also confirmed he wants Republican voters to pretend he is on the ballot in November. Polling suggests that may be unwise.

• ICE horror: Ten people described to the New York Times brutal deportations to Liberia, where they have no ties. Five said they were beaten for protesting. “They didn’t treat us like people, like human beings,” said Carlos Téllez-Sanchez, from Venezuela. “They can say or do anything to you and there’s nothing you can do.” CBS further reported the increase in such “third country” deportations.

• Deport in a storm: Trump Border Czar Tom Homan all but admitted far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was swiftly deported and publicly shamed because even-further-right activist Laura Loomer told authorities the Briton overstayed his visa. Homan denied Yiannopoulos was deliberately spared detention in tough conditions.

• Dem defers: Veteran Rep. James Clyburn told NBC Democrats should not prioritize impeaching Trump if they take back the House. “Our priority ought to be making housing, education, energy, healthcare affordable and accessible for all of our citizens,” he said. “Impeaching the president will not do that.”

• Lying eyes: Mike Rogers, the GOP Senate candidate in Michigan, claimed in a fundraising email to have seen “the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes.” But in 2011, at the time of the raid that killed the al-Qaeda leader, Rogers, then chair of the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters he was informed of events the next day.

• Epstein news: A Brazilian doctor whose wife publicly linked Donald and Melania Trump to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein fled Florida days before he was due to go on trial for allegedly conducting cosmetic procedures without a license. Joao Araujo said he was “a fugitive now. With honor.”

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🚨 Watch Now!

🌏 Anywhere But America

• 🇵🇸 Don’t forget Gaza: An Israeli strike killed two Palestinians, including a 3-year-old boy, and wounded several yesterday, while an attack today killed at least two others. José Andres, head of World Central Kitchen, addressed the Israeli officer who said he wasn’t sorry for directing the strike that killed seven of the aid group’s workers in April 2024. “There will never be any excuse for killing them,” Andres said.

• 🇵🇸 West Bank latest: Israeli settlers forcibly detained a British activist trying to protect a Palestinian village. Finn Joughlin’s lawyer said he would be deported.

• 🇺🇦🇷🇺 Deadly cost: The toll from the worst Russian attack this year rose to 38 with four missing, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said. The Friday strike hit a warehouse near Kyiv that stored ammunition, sparking explosions and fires.

• 🇨🇦 Off the charts: Google Maps kowtowed to Trump’s ridiculous trade war bullshit and childish executive order and changed Lake Ontario to Lake America.

• 🇻🇪 Oil grab: The Wall Street Journal described how U.S. companies refusing to play ball over Venezuelan oil after the removal of President Nicolás Maduro led Donald Trump to have the U.S. government take a direct stake instead.

• 🇨🇳🇳🇵New warning: Nepalese authorities warned of possible new flooding, days after flash floods caused by a fracturing glacier killed at least 900 people and left thousands more missing in Nepal and China.

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🧠 Pop Quiz!

Donald Trump says he’s renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America. How much of Lake Ontario is in Canada?

Keep your eyes out for the answer below!

🙄 WTF?!

Far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is campaigning with AI slop celebrating the starvation of Palestinians. Disgusting irony of the portly Ben-Gvir being shown looking trim and healthy? Noted.

🧠 Trivia answer: 54% is in Canada, and 46% in the U.S.

📺 Sunday Show Roundup

• Confronted with Democratic Senator Chris Murphy’s claim that ICE is “arresting parents at school bus stops” in Connecticut, leaving children “alone [and] scared to death,” Trump Border Czar Tom Homan failed to issue any sort of denial. “Now, did they arrest somebody at a bus stop? I’m not aware of that,” he told CNN’s ‘State of the Union.’ “But ICE is out there to enforce law against those that have been ordered removed by a federal judge… there’s no safe harbor.” Homan also defended deportations of previously legal Haitian immigrants that a UN monitor called “insane.”

• Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, 86 and in Congress 33 years, told NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ he regretted advocating for Clarence Thomas during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation process. “I have made mistakes in my life, and that’s one that I made, and I will own up to that mistake,” Clyburn said, considering Thomas’s far-right opinions and alleged rampant corruption. “I had no idea that Clarence Thomas would rebel the way he has against his own background and experiences,” Clyburn said, adding that he supports expanding the court.

• Wearing a blazing red Canada soccer jersey, Ontario Premier Doug Ford told ABC’s ‘This Week’ that Donald Trump’s trade war will be “devastating on both countries but… definitely devastating on the U.S… A tariff on Canada is nothing more than a tax on American people, and it’s probably the worst move he could ever do.” For good measure, Ford added that Trump’s executive order to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America was “like something out of ‘Saturday Night Live.’”

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🗓️ Mark Your Calendars

• Monday, Aug. 31: House lawmakers return after a five-week vacation, with a government funding deadline just four weeks away, another week off due after Labor Day, and the Senate not back for two weeks. In Asheville, North Carolina, G20 finance ministers and central bank governors will meet. Vice President JD Vance is due to speak at a GOP campaign event in Sterling Heights, Michigan.

• Tuesday, Sept. 1: Massachusetts holds congressional primaries, with all eyes on the Democratic Senate contest between Senator Ed Markey, 80, and Rep. Seth Moulton, 47. Markey has heavyweight progressive endorsements and leads in most polls.

• Wednesday, Sept. 2: Ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro faces a deadline to file a bid to dismiss his U.S. criminal case in New York.

• Thursday, Sept. 3: A hearing is scheduled in federal court in Boston over Donald Trump’s ongoing attempts to restrict mail-in voting. In court in Washington, DC, a woman charged with vandalizing the World War II Memorial is scheduled to be arraigned.

ICYMI From Zeteo

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Happy Friday! It’s Swin again. Despite the best efforts of Abdul El-Sayed, it appears the Donald Trump-Natalie Harp news cycle is calming down. There’s a ton of war and ethnic cleansing to report, so I am more than OK with that. I just got back from Springfield, Ohio, where Trump’s campaign of terror against the city and its Haitian residents is reaching its most barbaric stage yet. I’ll have more reporting on that for you here at Zeteo very soon.

But before we leave behind this month’s round of Harp coverage, it’s important to remember (beyond the jokes, beyond the innuendo, beyond the astonishing weirdness of her devotion to The Donald) why what she does truly matters.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we’ll get right into how some of the most prominent MAGA zealots in the country use Harp to get Trump to sound more like them. Plus, we are now precisely six months removed from the start of a war Trump told us would last four weeks – and he seems completely disengaged. Cheery stuff. Let’s get to it.

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Playing Him Like a Harp

If you’re a senior administration official, Cabinet-level appointee, or a political activist close to the White House who wants Donald Trump to blast something out on social media, you can just ask the president directly. You can shoot him a text, even. Or, as is now common practice, you can ask the one and only Natalie.

When Georgia’s Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff, highlighted the extremely odd Natalie Harp-Trump rapport – how the U.S. president seems to take his 35-year-old “human printer” wherever he goes – it inspired a screeching, hysterical reaction from the White House and Trumpworld, and a deluge of reports on the aide. Since at least 2024, one of the things that’s cropped up in my own reporting is that Harp, as strange and off-putting as the idea may be, is one of the most influential people on the planet today. That is largely because of her direct access to President Trump and how she feeds him a constant diet of online agitprop and kookery. It is also due to the fact that she helps control his MAGA social-media megaphone.

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For years, Dan Scavino, one of Trump’s other top White House aides and loyalists, reigned supreme as the man running the president’s social-media operations. Yes, when it came to Trump’s Twitter account (now Truth Social), Trump did tap out some posts. Others, he dictated. Some were ghostwritten, or found and reposted, by advisers like Scavino. But when it comes to his signature Truth Social account, even if President Trump doesn’t find, repost, or write posts himself, they are still effectively his own. He signs off on drafts or recommendations and approves or edits before his “Truth” is posted.

However, sources with direct knowledge of the matter tell me Harp is the new Scavino.

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We made it to Thursday! It’s Swin again. If you work in political media and you, for a second, bought former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen’s schtick of turning on the president and earnestly seeing the error of his mean and Trumpy ways, you might want to consider early retirement. Find someone less gullible – a 5-year-old, maybe? – to take your place. Somebody whose bullshit-detector isn’t irreparably broken. Your readers or listeners could use the upgrade.

In today’s ’First Draft,’ we’ll dig into Team Trump’s growing interest in weaponizing the man they once dubbed MAGA-land’s premier sniveling snitch. Plus, anti-vax Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says the deaths of two unvaccinated people in Pennsylvania during a growing measles outbreak are totally not his fault, and Donald Trump has an interview love-in with [checks notes from the Age of Obama] Glenn Beck. At least there are just two days till the weekend. Let’s read on.

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‘How Are You, Michael?’

When I was working at the Daily Beast’s Washington bureau in 2015, future President Donald Trump, via his attorney Michael Cohen, threatened to destroy my best friend and colleague, Tim Mak. I vividly recall the moment Tim stepped out of our mini conference room, clicking his little recorder and telling us as he chuckled: You gotta hear this…

Tim had just reached out to the 2016 Trump campaign for comment for a story that would soon be headlined: “Ex-Wife: Donald Trump Made Me Feel ‘Violated’ During Sex.” Trump did not appreciate it, so he sicced Cohen on my future best man. The Trump attorney shouted and swore, vowing to sue Tim and the Beast into oblivion. (You can listen to some of the hilarious audio here, of a reporter standing his ground and of a small man trying to make himself sound big.)

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The Beast published the story, Cohen made an ass out of himself by spouting borderline-illiterate bullshit about spousal rape, and his promised world-altering lawsuit didn’t happen. In the years that followed, Cohen got raided by the feds, very publicly fell out with President Trump, cuddled up to the anti-MAGA “resistance,” and became a key witness in New York Attorney General Letitia James’s civil fraud case against Trump, as well as in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal hush-money case against Trump. Bragg’s case, of course, is the reason Trump became America’s first felon president, a label Trump bitterly resents.

In all those years of Cohen claiming he’d seen the light and had made an anti-Trump turnaround, I never once bought it. You can scroll through my public output and social media posts. It was always clear to me (not just as a close friend of someone he profanely threatened with financial ruin, but as a political reporter employing a shred of common sense and instinct) that Cohen was still the same guy: a gross habitual liar. It was just that his circumstances and benefactors changed.

Now Cohen – who is seeking a federal pardon, which Trump has the power to grant – has switched sides again. And the Trump-Vance administration has taken notice.

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Good morning! Andrew here. Do you ever wonder why it is Donald Trump is wildly unpopular and yet Americans don’t seem very enthused about voting for Democrats? There are plenty of reasons, sure, but we have one more potential explanation for this phenomenon this week.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we look at the opposition party’s opposition to Hasan Piker, against whom senior Democrats are expending serious energy just two months out from midterm election day. We also consider Darline Graham’s win in the Republican South Carolina Senate runoff and another insane day in Trump’s stupid trade war with Canada. Time to read on.

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Eyes Off the Ball

Donald Trump is leading a deeply corrupt, fascist administration that seeks to punish and imprison his enemies – big and small, real and perceived. The unpopular president and his team are laying the groundwork to try to steal the 2026 midterms, and they’re not even trying to hide it.

Democrats in Washington, meanwhile, are hyper-focused on… condemning a left-wing podcaster, Hasan Piker, and distorting his comments criticizing Zionists as a way to marginalize and block the rise of anti-Israel voices on the left.

With less than 10 weeks to go before the election, the opposition party is using this crucial time to demonstrate their continued fealty to Israel – despite its deep and growing political unpopularity in the U.S., its horrifying genocide in Gaza, and the ruinous Iran war that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dragged America’s idiot president into.

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Some Democratic lawmakers have even used the controversy over Piker to try to undermine Abdul El-Sayed, the party’s Senate nominee in Michigan – making clear how little they care about gaining power to incapacitate Trump.

The latest Piker row stemmed from his remarks about how it’s “dangerous” for some Jews to teach “people the idea that Jews are monolithic” in their support for Israel.

“People don’t fuck with Israel any longer,” Piker said. “And if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action. Not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”

Piker was responding to a Michigan Democratic congressional candidate’s refusal to back El-Sayed until he makes “some serious outreach to Oakland County’s Jewish community” – with El-Sayed’s apparent offenses being his opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and his having won the primary despite $32 million spent against him by the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.

“This media narrative presents Jews as single-minded and singularly invested in the continuation of the Israeli apartheid,” Piker continued, adding: “I don’t know how people don’t recognize how dangerous this predicament is… You’re running around basically tying your entire identity to a country that inevitably will be seen as Jewish ISIS, and you’re saying, ‘As Jews, this is all we care about.’ You’re making antisemitism worse.”

Pro-Israel Democrats have treated these comments as if Piker was calling for violence, when he very obviously wasn’t. Indeed, his argument is a common one: The idea that Jews universally support Israel, its genocide in Gaza, and apartheid encourages antisemitism. Of course it’s dangerous.

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Good morning, and happy Tuesday to all. Martin here, having undertaken the altogether unenviable task of watching Abdul El-Sayed go on Fox to be shouted at by Jesse Watters, the better to distill the result for your reading pleasure.

The short version, to put it in the language of an English soccer manager, is the boy done good, all in all. There was a deal of nonsensical stuff about progressive positions El-Sayed has taken in past years and which Republicans think mean society is about to crash down around their ears, but then there was always going to be and if El-Sayed sometimes dodged the question, that often had to be inferred because his host wouldn’t shut up. When El-Sayed did drag the interview his way, and offered more substantive points, he seized a share of the spoils.

Elsewhere, it was another wholly ludicrous day in Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced new sanctions for Iran but shrank from actually confronting countries like China and Russia that continue to trade with Tehran. There was a lot more to think about too. Let’s read on.

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‘You Got to Give Credit to Abdul’

Abdul El-Sayed sat for an interview with Fox carnival barker Jesse Watters in primetime and did quite well. So much of the 26-minute exchange was taken up with Watters talking over his guest that the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan might’ve wondered why he bothered. But the hits El-Sayed landed, when he managed to shut Watters up, outweighed some awkward moments.

El-Sayed made Watters laugh, repeatedly, by calling Republican opponent Mike Rogers a “beta,” for avoiding campaign confrontation and not appearing on Watters’s show. Whether any Democrat should be joshing with the sort of host who opened with a seven-minute rant about communists and pointedly, repeatedly called his guest “Abdul in Michigan” might be debated. So might the chances of El-Sayed’s tax policy ever being given a fair hearing on Fox. But consider four minutes that closed out the interview.

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Watters said: “Black people in Michigan voted for this white lady you ran against” – Rep. Haley Stevens – “by like eight points over you. What happened there?”

El-Sayed said: “Well, Jesse, I mean you said it yourself, right? You got to give credit to Abdul. He ran against the machine. I got outspent 11-1.”

He didn’t mention AIPAC, the pro-Israel group that backed Stevens heavily. Curiously, Watters didn’t bring up Israel either. El-Sayed mentioned Hasan Piker, the livestreamer Republicans want to tie to him to, presently at the heart of yet another confected “scandal” about so-called antisemitism. That might yet count as an unforced error, but Watters didn’t pounce. An exchange on “sharia law” might’ve had Fox-watching bigots salivating, but it went best for El-Sayed, who pointed out that it’s just the same as “canon law,” a concept familiar to Christians like Watters and his viewers, only for Muslims, free to practice their faith like all others.

Ultimately, El-Sayed succeeded in bringing Watters back to his core campaign message: Forget the culture war hoo-hah, let’s talk about healthcare, inequality, and the cost of living.

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We made it to Monday! It’s Swin again. If you’re living in the U.S., you woke up this morning to our nation very much at war. No, I’m not talking about that war. Or that one. Or that other one. Or this war… Nope, not that one, either. I’m referring to the other insanely stupid war that President Donald Trump is forcing his fellow Americans to go along with – the one he’s waging on our neighbors to the north.

In today’s ’First Draft,’ we’ll get right to the point about Trump’s latest endless war; just because the bombs aren’t falling in this one (yet?) does not make the damage any less substantial or consequential. Plus, Hakeem Jeffries takes more fire over a secret meeting with Jared Kushner and the Trump administration prepares for its “Economic D-Day” with Iran. Let’s read in.

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DON’T Blame Canada

What happened this weekend wasn’t just folly and ‘Idiocracy.’ It was a scandal – an imperialistic disgrace that’s been going on far too long.

Donald Trump and his administration are waging a full-blown economic war on Canada. We are living in 2026 and in the real world, not in 1995 and in a poorly reviewed Michael Moore movie, or in 1999 in the ‘South Park’ movie. So why, then, is the U.S. at “war” with Canada?

The simple but correct answer is that for the past year and a half, America has been ruled by an astonishingly violent airhead who likes starting wars that pretty much no one asked for – even if those wars mangle the U.S. economy.

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Almost right after he stepped back into the White House last year, the tariffs-obsessed Trump unleashed economic warfare on our longtime Canadian allies, for self-destructive and made-up reasons. Trump’s attempted strong-arming led to Canada’s leader declaring an end to the U.S.-led global order as we knew it. That warfare reached its latest, deranged state this past weekend, when trade talks imploded in spectacular fashion.

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Happy Friday! It’s Swin, again. I have seen a lot of you making the same complaint, and it goes something like this: Donald Trump is such a horrendous U.S. president on so many different personal and policy fronts; I know his poll numbers are garbage right now, but how is it even possible that he’s consistently clinging to more than 30% favorability in the polling? What does a doddering fascist have to do to crack the 20s?

Well… in today’s ‘First Draft,’ I may have a surprise for you: You’re not the only ones wondering that. Some very well-connected consultants and Trump whisperers are thinking about the scary 20s, too – and they’re not pleased about it. Plus, Trump’s DOJ opens yet another absurd but frightening front in his war on his enemies, and the Iran stalemate keeps on stalemating hard. Let’s read in.

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How Low Can He Go?

Did you see the news this week? (No, not that.)

“Trump approval falls to 33%, lowest of his presidency, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds,” Reuters reported on Monday. “Trump’s approval rating plummets to new low ahead of critical midterms,” announced Fox News, the president’s source of comfort and advice.

American Research Group (which doesn’t have the reputation other pollsters do) clocked him at an even 30.

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“Nearly a quarter of Americans who voted for President Trump in 2024 believe they are worse off financially since he returned to office last year, according to a new survey,” said the Financial Times.

“Republican support for Trump has fallen as Democrats hold a big lead among enthusiastic midterms voters,” said the Economist and YouGov, noting that “about one-third (35%) of Americans strongly or somewhat approve of Donald Trump’s job performance as president.”

Private polls commissioned by different organizations and arms of the Republican elite “aren’t much better,” I’m told by an operative close to the White House who has knowledge of data causing a sustained bedwetting from much of the party that President Trump is going to drag them down hard in the critically important midterms.

Of course, one leading cause of these through-the-floor numbers is Trump’s catastrophic war on Iran. The data, and common sense, tell you that.

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Welcome to Thursday. It’s Swin, again. You may have heard by now that “the MyPillow Guy” Mike Lindell – one of the top financial backers of efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win – has refused to concede after he lost the GOP gubernatorial primary in Minnesota, despite having Donald Trump’s endorsement. In case you’re wondering how it’s going, on Wednesday afternoon Lindell texted me a link to his ‘Lindell Plan’ for privately funding a recount, telling me: “We need to get rid of the electronic voting machines and secure our elections!”

It would be easier to shrug this stuff off if it weren’t also, essentially, the animating policy position of the White House and the entire GOP today. But enough about the war on democracy at home…

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we’ll check back in on the war abroad and how it’s going for the president of the United States (piss-poorly, for starters). Plus, we consider another truly weird day in DC, filled with bizarro Trump rants, amid worrying signs for the U.S. economy. Deep breath, and let’s read on.

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Get Carter(ed)

In early May, we here at ‘First Draft’ ran a story headlined: “Is Iran Trying to ‘Jimmy Carter’ Donald Trump?” The answer was: “Yeah, probably.” Nearly four months later, the answer is starting to look a lot like: “Yes, absolutely.”

It’s been half a year since the president launched his disastrous, woefully unpopular illegal war. There is no end in sight, American voters are beyond fed up with it and its rising gas prices, and the Trump-Vance administration is still flirting with global economic apocalypse simply because the ego-addled president can’t just admit he lost a battle that he laughably claims to have “won.”

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In May, we reported that U.S. government officials had “privately discussed classified intelligence assessments suggesting that the government in Tehran isn’t close to breaking, even after… months of war and a sustained economic assault… Administration officials, citing U.S. intel, have also warned that senior Iranian officials are keenly aware that if the war drags on much longer, it could further damage Trump and the Republican Party’s chances at the polls in November. ‘They know they can Carter him,’ a senior administration official familiar with the intelligence and internal deliberations says, referring to how the Iranian hostage crisis helped tank Jimmy Carter’s presidency by the time of the 1980 U.S. election.”

At the time, much of this intel had been briefed to Trump.

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In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we’ll get right into the strange, cultish history explaining why it feels like the entirety of the national Republican Party apparatus and key parts of the U.S. federal government were marshaled to gratuitously defend the honor of one blonde, young female Trump loyalist. Plus, progressives score a stunning upset in Florida, and Trump’s administration keeps targeting the International Criminal Court.

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Fair Game

It was late November 2024. Donald Trump hadn’t even been sworn back into office yet, and yet he was already busy ordering up the kind of sweeping leak hunts that would come to define much of his second presidency.

The president-elect was absolutely livid, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter told me. On Nov. 25 that year, the New York Times ran a story that quoted from a series of leaked “devotional letters” that close Trump aide and confidant, Natalie Harp, had written to her boss. Eyebrow-raising lines included, “You are all that matters to me.”

“I want to bring you joy,” Harp warmly penned, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”

Trump, the sources said, was furious about this for days, and ordered advisers to conduct what one of the sources called an expansive “mole hunt” to figure out who leaked the private correspondence – or, “love letters,” as some Trump advisers mockingly called them. The president-elect privately bellowed about how there were a tiny number of people, including himself, who had access to Harp’s letters, and that he considered it a towering “invasion of privacy” for anyone to leak them.

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One of the three sources says they were “interviewed” by Trump officials for the informal leak probe, and that they were asked to hand over their phone for inspection. It is unclear if Trump ever found the “moles” responsible. But his days of rage underscored a reality that was about to befall Trump’s Washington: Natalie Harp – a 35-year-old former One America News Network personality who now seems to follow Trump everywhere – was a made woman, protected up on high by the MAGA prince of darkness himself.

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Good morning, friends! Prem here, back after being away for a couple of days… Did I miss anything? :)

Luckily for you, you never have to miss a thing with your trusted ‘First Draft.’ This morning, we have exclusive new polling on just how much U.S. voters don’t like the bipartisan press to merge the U.S. and Israeli militaries. Plus, the deadline for an end to the Iran war passes with Donald Trump issuing a dire threat to “bomb the shit out of”… Oman… and Jon Ossoff proves to have really touched a Trumpist nerve with his rally remark about Trump and Natalie Harp. Let’s dive in!

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‘Scrap This Ridiculous Proposal’

New polling shared first with Zeteo shows a majority of U.S. voters are opposed to a provision being pushed by both parties to merge the Israeli and U.S. militaries in unprecedented fashion.

The poll – from Demand Progress and IMEU Policy Project, and conducted by Data for Progress – found a majority of voters siding with those members of Congress who just voted to cut U.S. aid to Israel, in a dramatic if losing House vote last month. Voters also overwhelmingly believe Israel benefits more from the U.S.-Israel relationship.

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The polling surveyed U.S. voters on whether they would support the merging effort that’s already passed the House. The provision, known as Section 219, is in the National Defense Authorization Act, which passed the House in July and is set to be voted on by the Senate in the coming weeks.

The effort to merge the U.S. and Israeli militaries has been backdropped by the likes of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the late Republican Senator Lindsey Graham calling to wind down U.S. aid to Israel. But such calls are in fact a ploy to replace the current U.S. aid regime to Israel with a scheme that would have the U.S. backstop Israel in a much deeper fashion.

So what does the public think about it all?

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Good morning… Martin here, delighted as ever to wish you a Happy Monday. It’s almost late summer now, but summer it still is, so Congress is still on its extremely generous holidays. Fear not: Donald Trump is here to fill the news with yet more absurd corruption.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we look at two aspects of the second Trump administration that go hand in hand: the financial self-dealing allowing the president’s family and associates to rake in untold riches, and the obsequious yes-men who populate his Cabinet, ready to act with complete disregard for convention and the law.

Trump looks set to turn his crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, into a bank, while his new attorney general, Todd Blanche, gets on with targeting the boss’s enemies and rigging the law in his favor, without even pretending to do otherwise. It’s staggering – as is Hakeem Jeffries, very possibly the next speaker of the House, opposing Medicare for All, a policy favored by nine in 10 in his party. We’ll look at that and more, including Trump’s continuing stalemate with Iran. Let’s read in.

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‘The Most Brazen Act of Self-Dealing’

On Aug. 1, Capital One bank said it closed more than 300 Trump Organization accounts for “anti-money laundering reasons.”

“The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by ‌Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance,” it said.

Two weeks later, on Friday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a national regulator whose head, Jonathan Gould, was appointed by Trump last year, granted conditional preliminary approval of an application for a bank charter from World Liberty Trust – the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company.

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World Liberty co-founder Zach Witkoff – son of Trump real estate pal turned all-purpose diplomatic envoy Steve Witkoff – said: “Our ambition is clear: to build the most trusted and widely used digital dollar in the world while strengthening the role of the U.S. dollar across the global economy.”

Among those crying foul, and there were plenty, the top Democrat on the Senate banking committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said: “This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen. I’m introducing a bill to stop this kind of unprecedented corruption.”

Which is precisely what this is: absolutely staggering self-dealing by the president, his family, and their cronies. But this is also the U.S. under the Trumps. The staggering self-dealing story was a Friday story, Saturday too, tops. By Sunday, the torrent of Trumpist slurry was washing other threats into view.

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Happy Friday! Mehdi here, still recovering from my Wednesday interview with Count Binface – yes, Count Binface, that’s his name! Have you not seen it yet?

Last night, Count Binface won 9,455 votes in the UK parliamentary by-election in Clacton, provoked by the resignation of sitting MP and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage in a weird and desperate attempt to distract from a hugely contentious financial scandal. Farage was re-elected with 22,239 votes, so the parliamentary investigation into his donations now picks up where it left off. So… what was the point of all this?

But let’s turn this morning to the man Nigel Farage defers to, Donald Trump, who has been in a spot of bother recently because of the man he defers to: Benjamin Netanyahu.

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‘Israeli-Derived’

Did you know that all those Iranian threats against Trump’s life that we’ve been hearing about recently come from… Israeli intelligence? And did you know that they aren’t considered all that credible by the U.S. intelligence community?

SURPRISE!

Reuters dropped this blockbuster story from reporter Eric Banco yesterday:

The U.S. has received several warnings from Israel over the past year that Iran intended to assassinate President Donald Trump, including before a secret Air Force One ruse in Turkey, that U.S. intelligence officials could not independently verify, according to a current U.S. official and two former officials.

That Reuters piece came off the back of earlier reporting from the Washington Post, which revealed how “U.S. intelligence officials were skeptical of an Iranian assassination threat against President Donald Trump that was relayed by Israel.”

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According to the Post, one U.S. official described the intel on the threats against the president’s life as “Israeli-derived, not U.S.-generated, and viewed as low confidence.”

So Trump secretly left Air Force One, hid in the back of a catering truck – with Natalie Harp – and got onto an alternative plane to fly to London from Ankara, as the Washington Post revealed on Monday, because of an “Israeli-derived” and “low confidence” piece of intel?

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Happy Thursday! Swin here. There’s an episode from the classic era of ‘The Simpsons’ (yeah that’s right; I’m referencing the show again) in which the billionaire Republican tyrant Mr. Burns jumps in an escape pod and mercilessly locks out his ultra-sycophantic assistant, Waylon Smithers, because Burns wants more leg room, all the while expecting his yes-man to keep on serving. Donald Trump did his version with his decoy Air Force One caper – and I’m very sorry, I simply cannot pretend it isn’t tremendously funny.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we get into the wild saga of Trump, his planes, and his apparently expendable aides. Plus, responses to a progressive defeat in Wisconsin and a progressive win in Minnesota suggest Democrats might just have read the memo about the overwhelming need for unity in the attempt to wrest Congress away from the GOP, the better to hold Trump to account. Let’s read in.

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‘They Expect One of Us in the Wreckage, Brother’

One of the reasons I’m glad to no longer be a member of the White House Correspondents’ Association or the White House press pool is that I can easily decline being used as an in-flight decoy and human shield for the dumbest, most blundering U.S. president who ever lived. I can’t fathom a less honorable or more meaningless way to die – and yes, I’m taking into account that Trump’s fellow gold-plated sadist Saddam Hussein used body doubles, who might’ve had to take a bullet for him.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume (as we should probably never do) that we can take the Trump administration’s claims and the Israeli government’s intel at face value: that there was a credible threat that Iranian-government-backed actors, in retaliation for Trump’s illegal war, could try to blow up Air Force One during Trump’s flight out of a NATO summit in Turkey last month. (Allowing for the Washington Post’s reporting on Wednesday, that the CIA had “low confidence” in there being a threat.)

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It would make sense for any American president to have additional security measures in a situation like that. I’m told the White House has been taking the possibility of Iranian-linked attacks on Trump’s wife and other family members incredibly seriously and has acted accordingly during this hellish war that Trump was stupid enough to start. (More on that soon, here at Zeteo…)

But in recent days, multiple news outlets have revealed how Trump and his team conducted themselves like cartoon-villain caricatures in an attempt to make the former host of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ feel safer in the air.

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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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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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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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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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Good morning! Martin here, delighted as ever to bring you the political news you need on this fine Thursday morning. Another summer weekend is in sight, but we’re keeping our eyes on the prize.

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we consider a couple of monumentally embarrassing media hits by Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, a man particularly put out by the rise of the progressive left but himself left on the ropes by Wolf Blitzer of CNN, of all people, when it comes to the matter of Israel and its waning place in Democratic politics. We also look to Maine, where new polling shows progressive Troy Jackson leading GOP Senator Susan Collins, and take in another interminable day in Donald Trump’s off-again, on-again war with Iran. Let’s dive in.

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Fetterman’s Weird, Weird ‘Red Line’

For a measure of the sheer absurdity of Senator John Fetterman’s display on CNN after Abdul El-Sayed’s Michigan win was confirmed, consider this: interviewer Wolf Blitzer, a man once employed by AIPAC, reduced the Pennsylvania Democrat to incoherence by simply asking why he has made support for Israel his “red line,” to the extent of threatening to leave his party if pro-Palestinian voices continue to surge.

“Well,” said Fetterman, “I’ve said this like if the Democratic Party adds that into the platform, if they say we become a party that will never vote for aid for Israel, or if we will define Israel as the aggressor, or that that’s the problem in the region, so then that would force me to reconsider that.”

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Such a defection could determine control of the Senate. So Blitzer pressed: “One issue alone, just Israel. If the Democratic platform upcoming were to say some anti-Israel stuff, you would leave?”

“Well,” said Fetterman, “that’s become the defining, that’s become the you know really the defining litmus in this race, I mean, if you’ve been following the Michigan race, it was AIPAC, AIPAC, AIPAC, AIPAC. I mean, that really made that the center of that race and all the other races across our country.”

“AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby organization,” Blitzer clarified, of the group that spent more than $30 million to back Rep. Haley Stevens, the centrist Democrat El-Sayed defeated, and is now considering spending millions more to boost Mike Rogers, the Republican El-Sayed will face at the polls. “Why is Israel, another country, your red line right now? This is what your critics are saying, rather than a domestic issue that impacts Americans’ everyday lives?”

Fetterman’s answer… didn’t convince.

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Good morning! Prem here, reporting to you from Michigan after a dramatic evening – where a grueling and eventful Democratic primary campaign came to a titillating close. I was at the Abdul El-Sayed election party in Detroit, where the results were not called until after we all had left! On that note…

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ AIPAC failed in its most expensive undertaking yet. Plus, alleged abuser Max Miller’s appearance on CNN went horribly, and Donald Trump’s agriculture secretary took a victory lap over the administration depriving families of food.

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AIPAC Your Bags

DETROIT, Michigan – $30 million. That’s how much the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent trying to help Congresswoman Haley Stevens beat the pro-Palestine Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary.

And the pro-Israel lobby’s election spending – along with several other moneyed interests that altogether spent a total of $60 million to help Stevens – failed. Stupendously.

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Tuesday night was a long one, as was early Wednesday morning. The primary race was ultimately much tighter than recent polling had indicated. In the end, though, El-Sayed pulled it off. NBC News called the race for El-Sayed just before 2am ET. Other major news organizations followed later Wednesday morning. Mallory McMorrow, who dropped out of the Senate primary last month, quickly endorsed El-Sayed.

El-Sayed recently compared himself on a call with supporters to “David” fighting “Goliath,” meaning AIPAC and the establishment.

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