However terribly you think the Iran war is going for Donald Trump, the reality is almost certainly worse. The worse it gets, the more the White House tries to cover up and hide the damage from the American people, and the more the president uses the Justice Department to threaten media outlets that expose the sheer tonnage of the damage.

President Trump won’t even be straight with the country about how he’s running out of weapons – when his war has depleted well upwards of 90% of certain crucial munitions, as Zeteo has learned. When reporters have dug in on this topic, he’s huffily accused them of “treason,” and pledged that those responsible for leaking the information “are being hunted down” aggressively.

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The staggering rate of U.S. weapons exhaustion is one of many indications of how colossally disastrous the Iran war has been for the American side since the very moment Trump launched the conflict in February. And the extent to which Trump has routinely ordered the Justice Department to open sprawling leak investigations and browbeat journalists underscores just how much this president is attempting to make it functionally illegal for a free American press to report on how horribly the war is going.

After all, the only thing “treasonous” (to use a term so casually and regularly lobbed by the president of the United States…) about the reporting is that it is personally embarrassing to the man running this war.

‘High Nineties’

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That’s why Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, JD Vance, and Doug Burgum don’t push back on Trump’s reign of terror, argues political scientist Norm Ornstein, as he joins Zeteo’s John Harwood to unpack just how the Republican party got to this level of cult-dom.

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But as prices soar and people can’t afford healthcare, is associating with the failing president a good idea?

This was a Substack live conversation, where Zeteo subscribers could ask questions in real time. Watch the full video above to hear what Ornstein thinks will come after Trump, how the president threatens his colleagues, and why Ornstein believes that Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell (wherever he is!) are as much to blame as Trump.

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Donald Trump makes things up every day – about war, the economy, his deal-making prowess. But nothing captures his compulsion for fabulism better than golf.

Early this month, Trump announced on social media that he shot a two-under-par 70 at his Bedminster NJ course to win another of his “40 Club Championships.” The 80-year-old president boasted: “It’s called TALENT, and I have it.”

Golf aficionados immediately recognized something else, called “cheating.” Conservative journalist Scott McConnell, a Trump club member who has seen him play often, posted on X: “No one like that can win a senior club championship in any universe.”

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“No 80-year-old on earth with a pancake swing and the chip yips has ever shot TEN SHOTS under his age,” added golf writer Rick Reilly, an authority on the president’s game. The title of Reilly’s book on the subject: Commander in Cheat.

Millions of American golfers, trying to make their rounds a bit more respectable, take mulligans every weekend. It’s a harmless indulgence. What distinguishes Trump – a more than respectable golfer – is the extent of his cheating, not just on the course but in every realm of life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Since early last year, Donald Trump and his Republican Party have been working constantly to rig the 2026 midterms and other future elections in any way they can. In response to this flagrantly authoritarian endeavor, a vast, loose network of elected Democrats, legal nonprofits, and aligned groups and activists has dedicated an astounding amount of resources and time to preparing for the many credible ways that the president could attempt to steal elections, if his party loses. It’s happening all over the country.

For this article, Zeteo interviewed numerous knowledgeable sources in a variety of states and cities – people in governors’ offices, sources on Capitol Hill, state attorneys general offices and prosecutors, secretaries of state and other top election officials, prominent liberal attorneys, pro-democracy advocates, and others – to catch a glimpse of just how much these Democratic politicians and their allies are prepping for an all-out onslaught from the Trump-Vance administration ahead of, and after, November.

Overwhelmingly, these sources said that what was most unsettling to them was that for many months, they’ve been wargaming and meticulously planning how to defend their upcoming elections from Trump in ways that mirror how they’d plan to protect elections from a foreign adversary, not the president of the United States.

The Trump administration is engaging in numerous dirty tricks, intimidation tactics, and voter suppression salvos during this election cycle. But perhaps the most depraved among the lot is the administration’s ongoing public threat to sic men with guns – FBI agents, ICE officers, or even U.S. troops – on voting sites or election offices in counties that President Trump has deemed enemy territory, to both intimidate Democrats and potentially even seize ballots and election materials.

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Election officials and lawyers noted how surreal it is, even after a decade of Trumpism, to treat the nation’s duly elected president as the primary threat to the freedom and fairness of American elections. Several of the sources said that they’d never before thought they’d have to spend this much time and energy figuring out exactly what they’d do if the U.S. government – acting like a far-off regime we’d typically hear about from victims who fled it – sends armed agents to harass voters and election workers.

Any deployment of National Guard troops or federal law enforcement like ICE would be illegal, as federal law prohibits armed federal agents from being sent to polling places “unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.”

The Trump-Vance administration, however, has a lengthy track record of breaking laws and norms, and defying the courts, when they want. The president would have to invoke the Insurrection Act to legally justify armed agents at the polls – though there would almost certainly be no genuine justification for doing so.

The second greatest fear expressed by many Democrats, election officials, and others working to prepare for Trump’s threats to the midterms is the prospect of the feds attempting to seize ballots.

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Thursday marks the 61st anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark law that prohibited racial discrimination in voting. The Act safeguarded the right to vote for Black Americans who had long been subjected to racist literacy tests, poll taxes, harassment, and intimidation for simply trying to register and cast their ballots.

The historic legislation was passed five months after the events of “Bloody Sunday,” when civil rights marchers were brutally attacked by police while crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way to Montgomery, Alabama, to demand voting rights for Black Americans.

More than six decades later, the future of the law is in jeopardy, thanks to a far-right Supreme Court that further gutted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

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Now, more than a dozen House districts led by Black Democrats are at risk of being eliminated, and Republican efforts to promote voter suppression, like the SAVE America Act, threaten to further dismantle voting rights for Black and brown voters across the country.

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This week, we are running our ‘Start The Steal’ series, with three months left in the 2026 midterm elections. The president and his allies are conducting a scorched-earth campaign to rig the coming elections, and we believe it’s the biggest story in America right now. To keep reporting this story the way it needs to be told, we need your support. In this new age of American authoritarianism, independent media is more important than ever. Subscribe to Zeteo and never hit another paywall. And read on for Part Two of our special series, below. – Mehdi

In the closing days of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump campaigned on letting Americans die if Democrats didn’t cave to his crank policy demands – and he somehow won. On the campaign trail, he vowed to use presidential power to withhold emergency, life-saving aid and federal disaster relief if blue states didn’t do what he said. He would, in his own words, “force it down” his enemies’ throats.

Throughout Trump’s second term, his policy team, led by Stephen Miller, has weaponized virtually every lever of the federal government to extort Democratic states into submission. Sources with direct knowledge of the matter described to Zeteo how senior Trump advisers decided early on, well before Election Day 2024, that this vindictive, mafia don-style approach to federal aid would be applied to Trump’s crusade to tear out the guts of American election administration and replace it with a system built to rig elections in Republicans’ favor for decades to come. Drafts of policy and legal memos aimed toward this end, the sources added, were written by then-future administration appointees months before Trump had reclaimed power.

Just a few days after he was inaugurated as president again, Trump announced he wanted to condition California wildfire aid on whether the solidly Democratic state submitted to his election crackdown and adopted his restrictive voter-ID rules. During the violent, deadly siege of Minnesota, the Justice Department suggested that the blue state needed to hand over its voter rolls to the feds, if the state wanted the brutal occupation to end.

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Horrifying, unprecedented, and woefully corrupt as these threats are, they’re just one of many, many ways that Trump and the Republican Party are devoting vast resources and time – on Capitol Hill, within the bowels of the Trump administration, in state legislatures, in state and local commissions, and elsewhere – to their plots to rig and pervert elections in the coming midterms and, indeed, all future elections.

And they’re doing almost all of it out in the open.

Of course, when Trump was in power the first time, he and congressional Republicans tried to illegally overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, culminating in a failed but deadly coup at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. One thing that is different in Trump’s second term is that he has appointed and surrounded himself – in every corridor of power in the federal government – almost exclusively with extremist sycophants and cultists who are unconcerned with protecting democracy and wish to help him rig elections in his and his party’s favor.

In advance of this year’s midterm elections, Trump and his vast election denial network are already working to sow widespread distrust in the forthcoming results and lay the groundwork for legal challenges, recounts, and audits that the GOP hopes will help them cling to power in Congress.

For nearly two years now, President Trump and his close allies have been coming at this from practically every conceivable angle: “It’s like tracking a new Jan. 6-style plot every week,” a Democratic lawyer involved with efforts to combat Trump’s election-stealing plots previously told Zeteo.

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President Trump and Republicans’ efforts to interfere in this year’s midterm elections threaten every aspect of elections – registering to vote, voting itself, tabulation, certification of election results. At the top of the list of concerns for Democrats, election officials from both parties, and pro-democracy groups are the attempted federal takeover of elections, seizure of ballots, voting machines, and other election records, and the prospect of Trump deploying troops or federal law enforcement to polling locations. Trump and Republicans are counting on their far-right allies on the Supreme Court to continue giving them more and more advantages as the midterms near.

Below are the many startlingly anti-democratic ways in which Trump and his allies are now trying to rig and attack your free and fair elections.

1. Constant Lying

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This week, we are launching our ‘Start The Steal’ series, at the critical three-month stretch left in the 2026 midterm elections. The president of the United States and his allies are conducting a scorched-earth campaign – on a gigantic, historic scale – to rig the coming elections and suppress the opposition’s vote. We believe this is the biggest story in America right now – but the only way we can keep reporting this story the way it needs to be told is with your support. This is why we all need to support independent media, especially in this new age of American authoritarianism. Subscribe to Zeteo and never hit another paywall. – Mehdi

If Democrats can overcome President Donald Trump’s election-interference efforts and win the midterms in November, they could face one final hurdle to seizing power in Congress and thus providing a check on Trump’s runaway executive power: mass refusal by Republican lawmakers to allow Democrats to take their seats in Congress.

It’s what multiple activists, lawyers, and elected Democrats independently describe as a “doomsday scenario” that experts warn would kick off a constitutional crisis – if Trump and House Republicans ever tried to force it through.

As Election Day 2026 rapidly approaches, Republicans are trying to beat their long November odds of keeping the U.S. House of Representatives, where a GOP majority would continue to protect Trump from a Democratic onslaught of accountability, or even impeachment. The leaders of the GOP know how steep their odds are this year, so Trump and his party are engaging in a massive, diversified, and corrupt campaign to tilt the elections in their favor.

“It’s like tracking a new Jan. 6-style plot every week,” one Democratic lawyer involved with efforts to fight back against the Trump-led blitz told Zeteo. This source, like others, requested anonymity to discuss details of internal deliberations and planning that they were not authorized to speak about publicly.

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One of the numerous nightmare scenarios that different Democratic-aligned groups are tracking is what some of them are calling a potential “Jan. 3 ploy.” Of all the ways Trump and his party are currently attempting to rig and attack American elections, this particular doomsday scenario would be a needle-threading doozy – even for Trump, who has a stranglehold on his party and has already shown a willingness to assault the democratic order to the point that Americans died as a result of a riot he caused. And yet, it is a symptom of how close this president and the Republican Party are to pulling the republic in the direction of complete democratic rupture that a once far-fetched-sounding outcome cannot be simply laughed off.

Democratic lawmakers and their allies are not dismissing the idea. While they emphasize that it is much more likely that President Trump attempts other, different election-subversion schemes, they are nonetheless taking an expect-the-unexpected approach to 2026, and future election years. The Trump-Vance administration and the current iteration of the conservative movement have radically changed what should be reasonably included in the realm of possibility, especially when it comes to the Republican Party’s ruthless efforts to pervert and corrupt the American democratic process in the service of a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose electoral philosophy.

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“Both parties are not grasping what is happening with the largest, fastest growing segment of the electorate, that is also the only true swing vote in America,” says Latino Republican political consultant Mike Madrid.

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Spoiler: it has to do more with gas prices than ICE raids. Madrid tells Zeteo’s John Harwood that neither party recognizes that the economy is overwhelmingly a bigger factor than immigration-related issues for Latino voters. And it’s having an impact in the midterms.

“Latinos, who are the least racially polarized and the most likely to identify as politically independent, rejecting both parties,” Madrid says, “are changing the way politics works because they’re more than happy to vote with their feet and leave either party at either time.”

Watch Madrid and Harwood break down the shifting Latino vote and debunk the “caricature” each party puts on the community. Free subscribers can watch a 1-minute preview, paid subscribers can watch the full 43 minutes. Consider upgrading to a paid subscription and never hit a paywall again!

This was a live conversation on Zeteo.com and the Substack app, where subscribers could ask questions. Be sure to subscribe to catch the next Substack Live.

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Pete Hegseth’s recent announcement of testosterone screening for U.S. troops channeled Colin Jost’s cartoonish depiction of the Defense Secretary on ‘Saturday Night Live.’

But the pathological version of masculinity Jost mocks extends far beyond Hegseth. It permeates the entire MAGA movement, from Donald Trump on down.

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And as events this summer have shown, it’s ugly, not funny.

As Hegseth unveiled his testosterone program, the New York Times reported that he blocked promotions for five senior Navy officers who are women or people of color, including the first American woman to command a nuclear aircraft carrier.

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In primary elections across the United States this year, progressive outsiders have defeated moderates and centrists and dethroned multiple incumbents.

The Democratic Socialists of America, Justice Democrats, and a burgeoning ecosystem of progressive and labor organizations have played large roles in spurring the political upheaval in the 2026 midterm elections. And U.S. support for Israel amid its genocide in Gaza has been a key issue undergirding every race.

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This year’s primary season isn’t over yet, but there’s a number of new progressive and leftists who are all but guaranteed to join Congress this fall, after winning in safe blue districts.

Here’s a look at the new coalition headed to Washington:

1. Adam Hamawy, New Jersey

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“Trump has no fucking way out,” one senior administration official tells me. I scribbled those six words down in my notes in recent days, as Donald Trump considered wildly escalating his failed war in Iran, and I’ve been repeating them to myself ever since.

It was true months ago that President Trump had very few ways out of his illegal war on Iran – a war he managed to lose within its first few days of existence. Many within the Trump-Vance government have feared for a long while that their leader started yet another “forever war” in the Middle East, dooming the United States to a new armed conflict for the duration of this and future administrations. But if there was no good way out then, it’s even more true now.

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At this very moment, it seems that Trump will not immediately sign off on executing the “massive attack” plan that he had his Pentagon draw up. But sources stress to me they absolutely do not believe that Trump’s gigantic expansion of the war is off the table – far, far from it.

Indeed, this war almost certainly won’t end without the Trump White House fully embracing an objectively mortifying capitulation to Tehran, an enemy this president claimed he could easily knock over within just days. That is not a visual that Trump’s titanic ego is willing to accept, hence the ease with which he is able to so forcefully pull himself back into a quagmire, when he’d otherwise prefer to change the channel. To make matters more gross, virtually all the top officials in the federal government are refusing to tell President Trump what they all actually think – which is that the war is FUBAR.

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Taylor Farms – the produce giant whose lettuce has been recalled in connection with the “explosive diarrhea” outbreak sweeping the United States – and its lobbying groups have for years worked to end or delay programs meant to help the government better test for foodborne diseases and prevent their spread, according to records reviewed by Zeteo.

Over a decade ago, Taylor Farms and big agricultural industry groups successfully lobbied to defund a significant foodborne illness testing program that was responsible for some 80% of U.S. public produce pathogen testing.

More recently, under Donald Trump’s second administration, a lobbying group that Taylor Farms belongs to successfully pushed to delay a rule that would have helped the government more quickly trace contaminations back to specific locations – which could have helped prevent the illness at hand, cyclosporiasis, from proliferating into thousands of cases nationwide.

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The Trump administration moved to delay the tracing rule last year. Several days later, Taylor Farms donated $1 million to a pro-Trump super PAC. That summer, Taylor Farms contributed another $1 million to House Republicans’ super PAC, and a few months later, Republicans in Congress enshrined the rule delay as part of a funding bill.

Separately, legal complaints and employee accounts suggest that Taylor Farms’s facilities have been host to unsanitary workplace conditions, with staff working long hours and receiving sparse breaks – conditions that experts say could foster the spread of foodborne illnesses.

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Ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, former National Assembly President Cilia Flores, are expected back in U.S. court Wednesday as they face criminal prosecution over their alleged participation in a decades-long drug trafficking operation.

This hearing comes just six months after Donald Trump’s administration kidnapped Maduro and Flores in Venezuela as part of an unprecedented regime change operation, setting the stage for a lengthy and complicated legal battle ahead.

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But what, exactly, are they accused of? Were their arrests even legal? And why are they being tried by the U.S.?

Here’s what you need to know:

What Is Maduro Accused Of?

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At the beginning of this month, we pissed off the Trump White House.

Again.

We ran a story on how President Donald Trump is already planning to steal classified U.S. documents after he leaves office a second time – just like he did the first time. The West Wing got huffy about it.

“Zeteo is a pathetic fake news blog and their so-called sources have no idea what they’re talking about. Zeteo’s three readers already know this ‘publication’ is total fake news,” the White House told us in an email. No one signed their name. (If you read their statement closely, you’ll notice they did not deny any of our reporting… 🤣🤣🤣)

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The federal government is waging a nonstop war on the First Amendment in ways that we haven’t seen in the United States in a long, long time. On top of that, senior White House officials constantly hurl childish taunts and bullshit smears at news organizations that shine a light on what this corrupt, out-of-his-mind president actually does.

Their enemies list includes Zeteo.

The Trump White House has publicly denounced us as “terrorist sympathizers,” because we’ve reported on the scandals and lies they’ve told about their disastrous war on Iran. Vice President JD Vance went out of his way to call our founder and editor-in-chief, Mehdi Hasan, a “dummy.” A White House spokesperson called Mehdi a “nutjob” and “such a terrible ‘journalist’” after Zeteo broke news about Trump’s push to spy more, not on foreign adversaries, but on U.S. allies.

Top MAGA ally and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has been paying attention to what Mehdi and Zeteo have been doing too and… he doesn’t approve! Trump’s “rapid response” team dubbed Mehdi a terrorist-loving “moron,” simply because he called out the White House press secretary’s bald-faced lies. The White House previously branded Zeteo “a fake news blogsite run by left-wing hacks that no one should take seriously.” (They threw that particular hissy fit because we dared to report on Trump and the GOP’s ongoing plots to steal elections.) And I will forever cherish the fact that the Trump White House issued a statement labeling yours truly a “deranged hack who couldn’t even hold a job at Rolling Stone and is now writing for a Greta Thunberg blog.” Despite all of their attacks, the Trump White House, perhaps nursing some hurt feelings, has pretended not to know who we are, emailing us, “What the hell is a Zeteo?” That was after we reached out for comment regarding one of President Trump’s massive, failing leak hunts.

They know what we are. And they’re going to keep knowing.

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I’ve been a political reporter at multiple mainstream media outlets, including the Daily Beast and Rolling Stone, and I can honestly say that I’ve never been prouder of the work I’ve done than when it’s here with the hard-charging team at Zeteo. You can tell a lot about someone from their enemies. Clearly, Zeteo is getting under Team Trump’s skin; we wouldn’t be doing our jobs right if we weren’t.

But, as always, the only way we can fight back is together.

So if you’re able to, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Zeteo today to support us and help grow independent media. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! You can still help us by making a donation to Zeteo.

Every paid subscription, every donation, every financial contribution, big or small, sends a message to Donald Trump’s authoritarian, warmongering administration and his party – that we won’t allow ourselves to be bullied, we won’t be silenced, and we won’t stop telling the truth about fascism, genocide, illegal wars, the Republican Party’s widespread efforts to attack free and fair elections, and other moral and literal atrocities of our time.

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Please help us fight on. Thank you for standing with Zeteo.

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“Russiagate” was real, according to none other than Donald Trump and his administration.

Trump spent years dismissing allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to aid his presidential campaign, labeling it a “hoax.” And yet, now his administration has, seemingly unwittingly, admitted that Russia sought to meddle in the 2020 election to boost his failed reelection bid.

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“President [Vladimir] Putin and senior Russian officials are overseeing efforts by proxies… to spread claims about former Vice President [Joe] Biden as well as Ukrainian politicians and alleged Ukrainian influence in the 2016 election,” reads a declassified National Intelligence Council document published by Trump’s administration on Thursday.

The White House released documents focused on “Election Integrity,” as Trump delivered a primetime national address alleging foreign election interference. And in the trove were documents that countered the president’s own years-long claims questioning intelligence reports indicating that Russia attempted to interfere in U.S. politics specifically on his behalf.

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They cannot competently govern, but give Donald Trump’s flunkies this much: They know what their president wants to hear.

“You have changed America and created the Golden Age,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has gushed. “A new Golden Age of economic prosperity,” boasted Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. “A golden age of national defense,” chirped the Pentagon’s Pete Hegseth.

And “the Golden Age,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Americans on the country’s 250th birthday, “is just beginning.”

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OK, laugh at their fantasies. Trump’s bungling has driven inflation higher, his Iran debacle drags on, his ICE agents keep killing peaceable, productive immigrants, and his vanity projects produce one embarrassment after another. Leaders presiding over halcyon days do not suffer sub-40% public approval.

But a narcissistic president who craves superlatives deserves recognition for those he has earned. He has indeed created a Golden Age – of the most appalling kinds.

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BIDDEFORD, Maine – Thirty-six hours after Donald Trump’s masked secret police killed Joan Sebastián Guerrero, his blood is still on the ground, stained into the road.

“This is blood,” someone has written in chalk. There’s a memorial on the sidewalk with bouquets of flowers, candles, notes, cardboard signs, and a drawing of Guerrero. There’s a stuffed bear and a toy lobster. A dozen people stand across the street, outside a pawn shop, protesting solemnly, as cars drive by.

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“It felt important to come out and stand for community and connection against destruction and disorder; that’s why I’m still standing here,” Gracelyn Kilpatrick, a 36-year-old Biddeford resident, tells Zeteo, as she holds an American flag. “I’ve been here for about three hours now, and I don’t want to leave this space unattended… I know that there are vigils and protests going on in other places. I think it’s really important to be here.”

Since the start of his second presidency, Trump has brought an intensifying level of disorder and destruction throughout the United States, as he’s turned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into an unaccountable paramilitary force that wages war on American cities, kidnaps immigrants, and kills people with impunity, sometimes on video. Republicans – including Maine Senator Susan Collins, who’s up for re-election – have responded to mounting public outrage by defending ICE and showering it with cash.

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Georgia may be one of the most important states in the United States for deciding the balance of power in Washington next year. And in the lead-up to November’s midterms, the state’s election board is working overtime to sow as much distrust as possible in the election results.

In support of these efforts, the Republican-led Georgia State Election Board has hired two election deniers to work as taxpayer-funded investigators. Those men, backed by state subpoena power, get to carry out probes based on their belief in President Donald Trump’s election lies.

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These efforts and more are the byproduct of Trump’s incessant lies about the 2020 election, which a vast majority of Georgia Republicans falsely believe was stolen or rigged against Trump – despite a complete lack of evidence.

With control of Congress up for grabs and Democrats pledging to act as a check on Trump’s power, the Republican majority on the State Election Board – whom Trump called his “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory” at a 2024 rally in Atlanta – is leading the Georgia election-denial movement’s efforts to convince people that the November elections can’t be trusted, and that Democrats can only win if there is widespread fraud. At the center of those efforts are debunked fraud claims from 2020 in plurality-Black Fulton County, where the state’s largest Democratic voting bloc could decide the balance of power in Congress.

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