Good evening, this is Really American. It is Thursday, September 3, 2026. Do us a quick favor before we start. Hit that ❤️ and restack this edition. Corporate media keeps these stories from getting out, and restacking forces the platform to carry them to people who would otherwise never know they happened.

We have a lot to get into this evening. Trump went to the Supreme Court today and asked for the power to decide which Americans get a mail ballot, with the first ballots already in the mail and North Carolina sending its own out tomorrow. A billionaire who wired Jeffrey Epstein more than $180 million is suing Congress rather than sit for questions about where that money went. Excavation begins within two weeks on a 250-foot gilded arch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington, while the lawsuit against it is still being argued. And in a Massachusetts courtroom, the jury in the Lindsay Clancy trial is split 11 to 1 with a mistrial one deadlock away. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. Corporate media is owned by MAGA billionaires now. Bezos has the Post, the Ellisons have CBS and CNN, and Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump while Meta strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us. They are not going to keep asking why a billionaire is suing Congress rather than answer for the money he sent Jeffrey Epstein. We will. We won’t stop asking why Leon Black is suing Congress and hiding from the truth. We do not have an owner. We have you, and our goals for September are ambitious. If you want reporting that does not flinch when powerful people push back, subscribe.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. The billionaires who own the networks are never going to run this reporting, and every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

TRUMP ASKED THE SUPREME COURT FOR THE POWER TO DECIDE WHO GETS A MAIL BALLOT

Trump’s administration went to the Supreme Court on Thursday and asked for emergency permission to let his Postal Service refuse to deliver mail ballots, with the first ballots already entering the mail this week.

Here is how the rule works. States would have to upload lists of their eligible mail voters to a federal portal. If your name does not appear on that list, the Postal Service simply does not deliver your ballot. Every election envelope would also need a unique bar code for each voter. Twenty-three Democratic-led states and voting rights groups are fighting it, arguing that the Constitution hands elections to the states and that Congress never gave the post office any authority to police them.

The administration told the justices these are only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements, and that the rule plainly does not seize control of state elections. In court, the Justice Department compared its authority here to postal rules on shipping cremated remains and dummy grenades.

That is the argument for a system a whistleblower says will reject entire batches of ballots when a single envelope fails to match, potentially delaying tens of thousands at a time. Election officials say it is already too late to rebuild their systems. North Carolina starts mailing ballots Friday. The appeal skipped the lower courts entirely, and a 6-3 conservative Court now has to decide, in a matter of days, whether a president who still lies about losing in 2020 gets to stand between voters and their ballots.

Subscribe now

A BILLIONAIRE WHO PAID EPSTEIN $180 MILLION IS SUING CONGRESS TO AVOID TESTIFYING

Leon Black was scheduled to appear before the House Oversight Committee on Thursday morning. Instead he sued the committee to block its subpoenas, and there was an empty chair where he should have been.

Black, who co-founded Apollo Global Management, sent Jeffrey Epstein more than $180 million over six years. His name appears more than 300 times in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department. Lawmakers want to understand the money that funded Epstein’s trafficking operation, and they specifically want to know about nondisclosure agreements Black signed with women. His attorney calls the investigation a fishing expedition that oversteps the committee’s authority and says this is no longer about finding the truth about Epstein but about destroying her client. Black denies any wrongdoing, any awareness of Epstein’s crimes, and every allegation against him.

He has now defied two congressional subpoenas, according to Robert Garcia, the committee’s ranking Democrat, who is calling for Black to be held in contempt. Chairman James Comer said it is a shame Black is hiding behind litigation rather than giving the American people answers.

An innocent man with nothing to hide answers the questions and goes home. Black has spent years and enormous sums making this go away. Congress passed a transparency law a year ago and more than three million files are still being withheld. Every time somebody gets close, the lawyers arrive.

EXCAVATION STARTS IN TWO WEEKS ON TRUMP’S 250-FOOT GILDED ARCH

The administration announced Thursday that digging begins within two weeks on a 250-foot arch to be built between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

The renderings Doug Burgum posted show a white arch trimmed in gold, stamped with ONE NATION UNDER GOD, topped by a winged golden figure holding a torch and flanked by gold eagles with their wings spread. Burgum called it one of the great pieces of American architecture, befitting the most powerful capital in the world, and noted that more than 70 cities have beautiful arches but America will now have the most spectacular of them all.

A National Park Service report backed the project while acknowledging it would adversely affect the sightlines between iconic landmarks and disrupt the historical significance of dozens of nearby sites. Those sightlines are not decoration. Washington was laid out over generations so its monuments speak to each other.

Three veterans and an architectural historian are suing, arguing Congress never authorized this and that authorization is required. Their attorney says construction should not proceed and that they are prepared to tell the court it needs to step in now. The Justice Department filed Thursday asking that the suit be thrown out. So the ballroom rises where the East Wing stood, a fence is proposed around Lafayette Park, and now the shovels come out for a golden arch, all of it while the lawsuit is still live.

Subscribe now

THE LINDSAY CLANCY JURY IS SPLIT 11 TO 1 AND A MISTRIAL IS CLOSE

Not everything happening in this country runs through Washington. In a Plymouth County courtroom, a jury has now spent about 36 and a half hours over six days trying to decide whether Lindsay Clancy is criminally responsible for the deaths of her three children.

Clancy does not deny that she killed Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan at their Duxbury home in January 2023. The question the jury has to answer is whether she was legally responsible when she did it. Her defense argues she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and had been failed by the medical providers she went to for help. Prosecutors say she acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly, and that she was depressed rather than psychotic.

Thursday brought the trial to the edge. A note from the foreperson said the panel is split 11 to 1 and that one juror, in the defense’s telling, refuses to listen to the judge’s instructions on reasonable doubt. Kevin Reddington asked that the juror be removed. Judge William Sullivan declined to take sides, questioned each juror individually, reread the instructions on reasonable doubt, and sent them back. He will question the lone juror Friday morning.

Legal experts are near unanimous that the juror stays. Being a holdout is not a violation of anything. Jurors are specifically told not to abandon a strongly held belief to go along with the room. That is the system working, even when it is agonizing to watch. If they deadlock again, this ends in a mistrial and three children are relitigated in front of another jury.

If you are struggling with your mental health during or after a pregnancy, help exists and it works. The Postpartum Support International helpline is at 1-800-944-4773, and the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available around the clock.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

Ask yourself which of tonight’s four stories your evening news led with. The men who own those newsrooms have business in front of this administration, and some of them run in the same circles as the men in the Epstein files. We are going to keep asking about those files and about Leon Black no matter how many lawyers show up. We chase these stories without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page. Our goals for September are ambitious and we need paid subscribers right now. Share this with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

Subscribe now

One more quick favor before you go. Hit the ❤️ and restack this. It is what gets these stories past the algorithm. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

BONUS: GLORIA STEINEM GOT THE LAST WORD ON TRUMP

One last thing tonight. Gloria Steinem died Thursday at 92, and it turns out she left behind a verdict on this president that never made it to air. In a podcast interview, her remarks about Trump were cut from the released version. The full recording has now surfaced. Trump, she said, is an isolated as----e who ended up in the White House for a series of quite accidental reasons, and we do not know exactly what he believes except that he should dominate everybody. She did not stop at him either. There is a fault in us, she added, for not having been politically active enough to support better candidates, and for not making it possible for enough different kinds of people to run for high office. That was Steinem for sixty years, unsparing about the powerful and unsparing about the rest of us. She called him the harasser in chief in 2017. Earlier this year, in a New York Times essay marking his entry into his eighties, her advice to him ran to a single word: resign. Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton and Jill Biden all posted tributes Thursday. Trump, who eulogizes almost everyone, has said nothing. Her family’s statement said her words and actions gave people permission to be their truest selves. She used hers to the last. Have a good night.

Subscribe now

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Thursday, September 3, 2026. We have some big stories for you today. Trump is doing damage and we are exposing every bit of it.

Even when these stories get covered by corporate media, you rarely get the whole picture, and never an honest one. So hit that ❤️ like button and restack this edition. Restacking is what forces the platform to carry it to people who would otherwise never know any of it happened.

We have a lot to get into this morning. Trump’s narrative is falling apart as his former Army Secretary blew the curtain wide open. The Army secretary who just quit told Trump to his face that Pete Hegseth is doing generational damage to the military. Republicans have concluded Trump is going to sit on $400 million rather than spend it saving their majorities. The administration wants to wrap a permanent fence around Lafayette Park. And Gloria Steinem has died at 92. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. There is a reason you did not see most of this morning’s edition on your television. Corporate media is owned by MAGA billionaires now. Bezos has the Post, the Ellisons have CBS and CNN, and Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump while Meta strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us. These are not people who are going to run hard at a president they need things from. That is the whole business model, and it is why stories like these get softened into nothing or skipped entirely. We do not have an owner to answer to. We have you. Our goals for September are ambitious and we need paid subscribers to join us right now. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that does not flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Join us today to keep the fight going, and help us keep our coffee cups full.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. The billionaires who own the networks are never going to run this reporting, and every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

THE ARMY SECRETARY TOLD TRUMP THAT HEGSETH IS DOING GENERATIONAL DAMAGE TO THE MILITARY

Dan Driscoll’s public statement said serving under Trump and Hegseth was the honor of a lifetime. What he said in the room when he handed over his resignation was very different.

Driscoll told the president that Hegseth is doing generational damage to the United States military, according to a source familiar with the conversation. He had tried, in his own words, so many different ways and so many times. It was clear, the source said, that Hegseth would not listen to the facts or the truth or reason or any of it, because of his personal animosity.

The numbers behind that are staggering. An analysis found Hegseth has fired or blocked the promotions of more than 80 generals and admirals, roughly 10 percent of the military’s top officers. Asked about six promotions he recently blocked, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman answered that promotion recommendations have always been recommendations and never mandates. Senator Mike Rounds, who sits on Armed Services, said he was disappointed and that he has heard the same thing more than once, that Driscoll was frustrated over his top generals being pushed out.

This is a Pentagon where the civilian leader of the Army resigns in the seventh month of a war, praises the boss on paper, and privately tells the commander in chief that the man running the department is breaking it for a generation. Trump has not responded.

This comes as prediction markets are increasing their odds that Hegseth will be out as SecDef before the year is over.

Subscribe now

REPUBLICANS HAVE FIGURED OUT TRUMP IS KEEPING THE $400 MILLION FOR HIMSELF

Early voting is about to start and Trump is sitting on more than $400 million in super PAC money that his own party is now convinced he has no intention of spending on them.

MAGA Inc. had that much on hand as of July 31. Here is what it has actually spent this cycle: under $900,000 backing one senator in a primary, and under $20,000 on text messages for a House member. Trump personally has to approve every dollar. His advisers keep telling anxious Republicans the cavalry arrives after Labor Day. Republicans have stopped believing it, and some donors have started holding back their own money rather than add to a pile that never moves.

The theories about where it goes instead are not flattering. Preserving his influence over the next presidential race by handing it to a chosen successor. Legal fees. Travel and events. His Miami library, projected to cost at least a billion dollars, which would make it the most expensive presidential library ever built. People around him believe the donations dry up once he is a lame duck, so he is holding on.

The first ads finally ran Wednesday, just under a million dollars, and they are clips of Trump talking about his own record. A Republican ad maker’s response on seeing them: they think he’s popular or something, and he’s not. His approval is stuck in the mid-30s. John Thune says he is a realist and it is a competitive environment. Trump told House Republicans he will give speeches in the final 30 days.

Subscribe now

THE ADMINISTRATION WANTS TO FENCE OFF LAFAYETTE PARK

A federal panel takes up plans Thursday to wrap a permanent fence around all eight acres of Lafayette Park, the public square directly across from the White House.

The park has not had permanent fencing since the late 19th century. The administration’s 79-page design proposes enclosing the entire perimeter, with enlarged gates at the north and south ends, and draft options that would either fence in or cut out the monuments at the four corners. Officials point to real security concerns, including assassination attempts and a Secret Service shooting near a checkpoint in May, and argue permanent barriers beat the converted bicycle racks they have been using for years.

Consider who decides. The National Capital Planning Commission has 12 seats, three of them presidential appointments, plus Pete Hegseth, Doug Burgum, the GSA administrator, Rand Paul and James Comer. Its new chairman takes over from Will Scharf, who just moved into the White House counsel’s office. This is the same commission that blessed the ballroom after Trump had already demolished the East Wing without permission.

Lafayette Square is where Americans have gathered to be seen and heard by whoever is in that building, for as long as there has been a building. A president can have a fence or he can have a country that walks up to his door. This one has picked.

GLORIA STEINEM HAS DIED AT 92

Gloria Steinem died peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by people who loved her. She was 92, and she was working for equality until the very end.

She got her start when the industry had no room for her. Young men in politics were treated like rising stars, she wrote, and young women were treated like young women. She was angry about the talent lost because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity rewarded because it was born into a male one. In 1963 she went undercover at the Playboy Club and exposed what the job actually was. She helped found New York magazine, then Ms. In 1971 she helped launch the National Women’s Political Caucus alongside Shirley Chisholm, still the only national organization devoted entirely to getting women into political life.

In 1957, at 22, she ended a pregnancy when it was illegal. The doctor who helped her asked for two promises: that she never say his name, and that she do what she wanted with her life. She dedicated a book to him decades later and told him she had done the best she could.

At the Women’s March in 2017 she said they were there for a deep democracy that says we will not be quiet and we will not be controlled. She kept that promise for sixty years. The work is not finished, and she knew it, and she left it in better hands than she found it.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this morning’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. An Army secretary warning the president that the Pentagon is being broken, a party realizing its own leader is keeping the money, a plan to fence off the square across from the White House, and the loss of a woman who changed this country. Ask yourself which of those your morning show led with. The men who own those newsrooms have business in front of this administration, and it shows in what makes air. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. Our goals for September are ambitious and we need paid subscribers to join us right now. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that does not flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Upgrade to become a paid subscriber to make your support go even further.

Subscribe now

Hit the ❤️ and restack this one before you head out. Restacking is what pushes this past the algorithm and into feeds that would never see it otherwise. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

ONE MORE THING: NEW YORK JUST TOLD THE AI COMPANIES NO

Some hope to end on. New York City, running the largest school system in the country, announced this week that its elementary and middle schoolers will not be using artificial intelligence at all. That is about 600,000 kids, two thirds of the system, barred from AI until high school, where it will be allowed only in narrow cases. No individual screens before third grade. Middle school screen time capped around 45 minutes a day. Teachers cannot hand grading to a machine, or use it to decide whether a student graduates. And companion chatbots, the ones that offer emotional support to children, are banned in every grade. Nearly 40 apps are being pulled or changed. Mayor Zohran Mamdani put it plainly: the tech industry wants everyone to believe AI-powered early education is inevitable and necessary, and the city does not see it that way. Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels said kids learn by wrestling with hard problems, getting them wrong, and trying again, and that no app or chatbot or algorithm can replicate that struggle for a child. Parents organized for months to force this. They won. Have a good day.

Subscribe now

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Wednesday, September 2, 2026.

Even when these stories get covered by corporate media, you rarely get the whole picture, and never an honest one. So hit that ❤️ like button and restack this edition. Restacking is what forces the platform to carry it to people who would otherwise never know any of it happened.

We have a lot to get into this evening. A Republican senator who voted to confirm Pete Hegseth is now demanding Trump fire him. Trump admitted he threatened Canada with tariffs because a friend could not buy the private jet he wanted. A crane pulled apart a beloved sculpture at the Kennedy Center. And the president appeared to fall asleep in the Oval Office again. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. There is a reason you did not see most of tonight’s edition on your television. Corporate media is owned by MAGA billionaires now. Bezos has the Post, the Ellisons have CBS and CNN, and Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump while Meta strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us. These are not people who are going to run hard at a president they need things from. That is the whole business model, and it is why stories like these get softened into nothing or skipped entirely. We do not have an owner to answer to. We have you. Our goals for September are ambitious and we need paid subscribers to join us right now. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that does not flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. The billionaires who own the networks are never going to run this reporting, and every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

A REPUBLICAN SENATOR WHO CONFIRMED PETE HEGSETH IS NOW DEMANDING TRUMP FIRE HIM

Thom Tillis cast the deciding vote that made Pete Hegseth the Secretary of Defense. On Wednesday he told Trump to get rid of him.

“I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” the North Carolina Republican wrote. Hegseth, he said, is intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of national defense and the health and wellbeing of the fighting force. He urged Trump to find someone who will retain and empower military talent rather than diminish it. Tillis sat on the Armed Services Committee. His vote was the one that broke a 51 to 50 tie in Hegseth’s favor.

Look at who has left. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The first woman ever to serve on the Joint Chiefs. The director of the National Security Agency. The Air Force chief of staff. The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Navy secretary. The top Army commander in Europe. The Army chief of staff. And now Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who according to sources raised concerns that Hegseth was blocking Army readiness efforts by firing the generals responsible for them.

The Army now has fewer generals than at any point in recent history. Trump himself was reportedly surprised and concerned by how deep the cuts went and how senior the people leaving are. When the man who put you in the job goes public asking the president to fire you, the argument is over.

Subscribe now

TRUMP ADMITTED HE THREATENED CANADA WITH TARIFFS OVER A FRIEND’S PRIVATE JET

Nobody asked. Trump volunteered it in the Oval Office on Wednesday, when a reporter asked whether trade talks with Canada would resume.

He explained that a friend of his was trying to buy a Gulfstream and could not, because Canada had not certified the aircraft. The friend put him in touch with Gulfstream’s chief executive directly. They talked. And so, Trump said, he immediately threatened a major tariff on Bombardier and other Canadian goods until the certification went through. He claimed Carney called him within the hour and it was all resolved in two hours flat, work that had taken the company nine years and millions in legal fees.

That is not what happened. The certifications came 26 days after his post, not two hours, and the tariff was never imposed. In the same conversation he claimed the US loses 60 to 100 billion dollars a year to Canada, when the actual combined trade gap is around 21 billion. He said Canada basically bars American banks, when 16 US banks operate there and Citibank has been in the country since 1919. He called Doug Ford a slob.

Fifty percent tariffs are in force on 20 billion dollars of Canadian goods. Canada’s retaliation lands September 8. Prices go up on both sides of the border, and the president just told the country, without being asked, that this whole approach started as a favor for a rich friend who wanted a nicer plane.

A CRANE TOOK APART A BELOVED SCULPTURE AT THE KENNEDY CENTER ON WEDNESDAY

They wrapped the arms and legs first, then pulled Joel Shapiro’s “Blue” off the Kennedy Center campus in pieces.

The sculpture, a tall blue figure caught mid-kick, has stood there since 2019 on a part of the campus called The REACH. Shapiro described it in a video years ago as being about action and risk and performance and energy, a celebration of possibility. He died in 2025. It may be reinstalled somewhere else through his foundation, but it will not be there. It was the mascot for National Dance Day, which is coming up on September 19, with events held around it.

Michael Sebastiani stood nearby watching it come down. He is part of a group called Hands off the Arts, formed to push back on what this administration is doing to the Kennedy Center. He did not say disassembled. He said dismembered. Art is what makes you think, he said, and that is its role in life. He called it a welcoming fixture for people coming into the city and said he was sad to see her gone.

Keep the sequence in mind. The board is in court fighting for the right to bolt Trump’s name onto the building. The East Wing of the White House is rubble for a ballroom. There is a triumphal arch proposed near Arlington. This is a president who cannot stop putting his name on things, presiding over the quiet removal of somebody else’s work.

THE PRESIDENT APPEARED TO FALL ASLEEP IN THE OVAL OFFICE AGAIN

Trump hosted travel and tourism executives at the White House on Wednesday to celebrate a strong summer season, and the video shows him closing his eyes while one of them spoke.

The room included representatives from American Airlines, Marriott, MGM Resorts and Carnival, with Sean Duffy alongside. As an executive addressed the president and the assembled guests, Trump’s eyes closed and his face went slack. Clips went around within the hour. Supporters say he was looking down. One defender offered that he is a known contemplator.

This was Monday all over again. He nodded off then too, during an Oval Office healthcare event where his own cabinet secretaries took turns praising him, while Mehmet Oz gestured directly at him.

Twice in three days, at events he scheduled, in front of executives and cameras he invited. He is 80 years old, he holds the nuclear codes, and his staff keeps building rooms full of people to flatter him that he cannot stay awake through. At the same event he said the strikes on Iran will not go on too long, and told reporters the regime is getting weaker by the day. Those are the words of a commander in chief that people are supposed to take at face value, delivered in a room where he could not keep his eyes open.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this evening’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A Republican senator turning on the defense secretary he confirmed, a trade war that started as a favor over a private jet, a sculpture pulled down in pieces, and a president who cannot stay awake at his own events. Ask yourself which of those four your evening news led with. The men who own those newsrooms have business in front of this administration, and it shows in what makes air. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. Our goals for September are ambitious and we need paid subscribers to join us right now. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that does not flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Upgrade to become a paid subscriber to make your support go even further.

Subscribe now

Hit the ❤️ and restack this one before you head out. Restacking is what pushes this past the algorithm and into feeds that would never see it otherwise. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

ONE MORE THING: THE NEW TRUMP COIN ACCIDENTALLY DATES THE DEATH OF LIBERTY

End the night on this. The US Mint is now selling $1 coins with Trump’s scowling face on them, only the second time a sitting president has appeared on American currency. Above his head is the word LIBERTY. Beneath it are two dates joined by a dash: 1776 and 2026. Anyone who has ever seen a headstone knows what that formatting means, and the internet noticed immediately, with one economics writer observing that the design appears to give liberty a birth date of 1776 and a death in 2026. The Treasury is selling them at better than a 50 percent markup over face value, which is its own kind of statement. Federal law permits only the portrait of a deceased individual on currency, a rule written specifically to reject the British habit of stamping living monarchs on coins, and a bipartisan review committee warned about all of this before the design went ahead. They did it anyway. A man who has put his face on banners at the Justice Department, his name on passports and gold cards and a future aircraft carrier, has finally minted something honest. Have a good night.

Subscribe now

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Wednesday, September 2, 2026. Before we get to the news, hit that ❤️ and restack this one. Every restack puts this reporting in front of readers the MAGA propaganda machine would rather never see it.

We have a lot to get into this morning. The USS Abraham Lincoln pulled into port looking like a ghost ship after more than eight months at sea. Apple caved and renamed the lake after Trump called them personally. All four living former presidents will stand at Ground Zero on the 25th anniversary, and Trump will not be with them. And the White House is holding its first press briefing in 40 days without telling anyone who is giving it. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. Our goals for September are ambitious and we need paid subscribers to join us right now. Here is why it matters. Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution. Meta’s changes strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us, and that was a choice, not an accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump, and independent progressive media is what got sacrificed. The one thing no billionaire can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. Our goals are ambitious this month, and every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

THE LINCOLN CAME INTO PORT LOOKING LIKE A GHOST SHIP

The USS Abraham Lincoln pulled into Thailand on Wednesday with rust running the length of its hull, its first port call in more than eight months, and the pictures tell you everything about the state of this Navy.

The carrier left San Diego last November. When it finally gets back to Southern California later this year it will have completed one of the longest deployments in American naval history, and it set a modern record for consecutive days at sea during the war with Iran. Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote to Pete Hegseth last month citing widespread reports from that ship: shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing problems, deteriorating mental health, deck safety concerns, and a mail system so broken that care packages sent to sailors were lost in transit for months. Five thousand people live on that ship.

Hegseth’s response was that conditions had been completely misrepresented. He did not say how. Trump, asked about the deployment, said it was not nearly long enough.

Here is the part nobody in this administration wants to explain. To relieve the Lincoln, the Pentagon pulled the USS George Washington out of Japan, stripping the Pacific of its dedicated carrier while China and North Korea watch. Even the Chief of Naval Operations admitted last week he would prefer seven-month deployments and pushes back hard on extensions. A rusted hull limping into Thailand is what a Navy looks like when it is run by a man who calls the reporting misrepresented instead of fixing the ship.

If you or someone you love is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available around the clock, and veterans and service members can press 1 to reach the Veterans Crisis Line.

Subscribe now

APPLE CAVED TOO

Apple relabeled Lake Ontario as Lake America on Tuesday, joining Google, after Trump got on the phone with the company himself.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the quiet part on Fox Business Monday, telling a host that the president reached out to Apple directly and he expected the change soon. It came the next day. Both companies did the same thing with the Gulf of Mexico last year, so the pattern is set: Trump signs an order, makes a call, and the biggest technology companies in the world edit the map.

MapQuest did not. Its answer was four words, we’re not changing it, and the internet rewarded it. The app hit number one in navigation and number eight overall on the App Store, its highest chart position since the brand launched in 1996. Usage ran at roughly 50 times normal. General manager Doug Berger said hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the app that weekend to tell them they got it right, and that the goal was simply to give people an app that keeps the names they are familiar with.

Here is what makes the caving so pathetic. Only 14 percent of Americans support the renaming. Apple and Google folded to a president with historically low approval on a policy almost nobody wants, and the one company that said no is currently beating both of them in their own app store.

Subscribe now

FOUR FORMER PRESIDENTS WILL STAND AT GROUND ZERO. TRUMP WON’T.

Every living former president will be at the World Trade Center site next week for the 25th anniversary of September 11. Donald Trump will not.

Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who was president that morning, have all confirmed. Biden is going while being treated for an aggressive prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, which tells you what he thinks the day is worth. Hillary Clinton, a New York senator at the time of the attacks, will be there too. Trump was set to attend until he learned the memorial does not let politicians give speeches, a rule in place since 2012 so the day stays focused on the 2,996 people killed. Speakers may read a poem or the Gettysburg Address. That is it.

He is going to the Pentagon instead, where he is the featured speaker. JD Vance will attend in New York and will not speak.

Trump has furiously denied that the microphone was the reason, attacking the reporter who broke it in personal terms and calling the story made up. Then he told reporters he is not going to the World Trade Center because he is going to the Pentagon, where he is a featured speaker.

Four men who held the office will stand together at the place where it happened, say nothing, and let families read the names. The current president could not accept those terms. He leaves for his golf course in Ireland the following morning.

NOBODY WILL SAY WHO IS RUNNING THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS BRIEFING

The White House will hold its first press briefing in 40 days on Thursday, and it will not say who is standing at the podium.

Forty days. During a war in its seventh month, with strikes and counterstrikes this week, two months from a midterm election. The last briefing was July 23. Karoline Leavitt left the job last week and went back to MAGA Inc., the super PAC supporting the president, where she stays on as a top outside adviser. No replacement has been named. Scott Jennings has been floated, and Susie Wiles met him at a Washington steakhouse at the White House’s request. Communications Director Steven Cheung and deputy press secretary Anna Kelly are also mentioned.

Trump says he has never had so many job applications in his life and that they all want the job. He has had a month to fill it.

Leavitt’s parting advice to whoever takes it was that Trump is his own best spokesperson. That is the actual policy. Why staff a podium where reporters ask questions you cannot control when the president can talk to a camera on an airport tarmac and walk away whenever he likes. Forty days without a briefing is not an oversight. It is the model.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this morning’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A carrier limping into port covered in rust, two trillion-dollar companies rewriting a map on a phone call, four former presidents showing up where the current one would not, and a White House that has not answered questions in 40 days. Our goals for September are ambitious and we need paid subscribers to join us right now. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Upgrade to become a paid subscriber to make your support go even further. We need your support more than ever.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ like button and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach more people. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

ONE MORE THING: MAINE SHOWED UP TO SEND SUSAN COLLINS HOME

Some hope to end on. Almost 400 people packed the Franco Center in Lewiston on Tuesday night for Troy Jackson’s first town hall as the Democratic nominee against Susan Collins, and the room was electric. Jackson, a former Maine Senate president who grew up in a logging family in Allagash, talked about groceries and housing and health care people cannot afford, and told the crowd there are more people out there looking for a better government than there are people holding us back. Attendees wrote their questions on tickets before the doors opened, and he pulled them out of a hardhat one by one so people could stand up and talk to him directly. Next to him on the stage sat an empty chair. He had invited Collins, who has not held a town hall in more than two decades. Five terms, a seat on the most powerful committee in the Senate, and she has not stood in a room and taken questions from Mainers since before some of the people in that hall were born. Four hundred of them showed up on a Tuesday to say they are ready to send her home. That is what the end of a career looks like when it starts.

Have a good day.

Subscribe now

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Tuesday, September 1, 2026. Before we get to the news, hit that ❤️ and restack this one. Every restack puts this reporting in front of readers the MAGA propaganda machine would rather never see it.

We have a lot to get into this evening. A whistleblower says the new federal system for screening mail ballots is so rushed that a single bad scan could throw out an entire batch. Trump is threatening Iran with the biggest attack of them all as strikes resume. The White House is quietly lawyering up for a wave of Democratic subpoenas it expects next year. And two House Democrats crossed the aisle to rescue Mike Johnson’s agenda. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. It is the first week of a new month and our goals for September are ambitious, so we need paid subscribers to join us right now. Here is why it matters. Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution. Meta’s changes strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us, and that was a choice, not an accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump, and independent progressive media is what got sacrificed. The one thing no billionaire can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. A new month just started, our goals are ambitious, and every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

A WHISTLEBLOWER SAYS ONE BAD SCAN COULD KILL THOUSANDS OF BALLOTS

The new federal system for screening mail ballots was thrown together so fast, and tested so little, that a single scanning glitch could reject an entire batch of ballots, a whistleblower has told Congress.

The system comes out of Trump’s March executive order tightening federal control over mail voting, which directs the Postal Service to check ballots against a federally approved voter list before delivering them. That is a break from what USPS has always done, which is deliver what states hand it. Clerks scan a sample from each batch, between 15 and 400 ballots depending on size. Here is the part that matters: the whistleblower says it runs on a zero percent failure rate. One mismatched scan rejects the whole batch, even if that batch holds tens of thousands of ballots.

Engineers had roughly three months for work that normally takes close to a year. The full system was not assembled for testing until around August 24, leaving a handful of working days to find problems. By the final week, staff were reportedly calling it a shit show. A worker who raised concerns about the lack of testing was told: we cannot fail.

Senator Richard Blumenthal calls the project perilously rushed and potentially unlawful, and says USPS kept building it while under active court orders to stop. About a third of American voters cast ballots by mail. Sixty-two days out, the agency will not say what rejection rate it expects.

Subscribe now

TRUMP THREATENS “THE BIGGEST ATTACK OF THEM ALL”

Trump threatened Tehran with the biggest attack of them all Tuesday as American strikes resumed along the Strait of Hormuz and Iran fired back with drones and missiles.

The escalation started Sunday, when US forces hit Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island in the first exchange in over a month. Iran answered with ballistic missiles at American bases in Jordan. On Tuesday the US struck again across Hormozgan province, and Central Command said it was targeting Revolutionary Guard positions. Iranian state television reported strikes near an airport, a fishmeal factory, a fishing pier, and a home in the coastal city of Bandar Kuhestak that was hosting a wedding. Four people were killed there and 35 injured, according to Iranian officials.

Trump’s response was to promise more. If Iran retaliates, he said, it will be hit at a much harder and higher level, and if there is a third round they will be totally wiped out as a country. There will be very little left of the Islamic Republic, he added, and an agreement with them is not worth the paper it is written on.

The State Department then warned Americans across the entire world to be vigilant, saying Iran or its allies may target US interests anywhere. That is the actual state of things in month seven. The Treasury Secretary is out predicting Hormuz will be a worthless piece of water in two years. A war sold as a matter of weeks is now a president threatening to erase a country while telling Americans abroad to watch their backs.

Subscribe now

THE WHITE HOUSE IS LAWYERING UP BEFORE THE SUBPOENAS ARRIVE

Trump says publicly that Republicans will hold Congress. Inside the White House, they have been preparing since spring for Democrats to take it.

The counsel’s office has held private briefings for political appointees. Staff were told to be careful about what they put in writing, and to make sure financial disclosures and ethics filings are complete, accurate and on time. One former official described the message plainly: do not give them a reason to find anything. Current and former aides are trading recommendations for personal lawyers in case they get subpoenaed in 2027. Some have approached the attorney who represented Cassidy Hutchinson during the January 6 investigation.

Then there is the legal groundwork. An August 10 Justice Department memo concluded that executive privilege can cover the president’s communications with private advisers, meaning people who do not work for the government at all. Trump leans on a constellation of outside allies, family and business figures, and this would give the White House a basis to keep those conversations from Congress. On Tuesday, Will Scharf took over as White House counsel. A former official said that unlike his predecessor, they expect Scharf to play more to what the president wants.

Democrats already have a list: Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski. An administration confident it did nothing wrong does not spend six months teaching its staff how to survive an investigation.

TWO DEMOCRATS BAILED OUT MIKE JOHNSON

Mike Johnson’s week was about to collapse. Two Democrats saved it.

Five Republicans voted against the rule teeing up this week’s GOP bills, which is what happens in a majority this thin. The rule should have failed. Instead it passed 210 to 208, because Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington crossed over and voted with Republicans. Rule votes are not close calls. The majority votes yes, the minority votes no, and a member of the minority crossing over is close to unheard of.

What they rescued was a package that includes the Republicans’ bill denouncing socialism, which is not legislation so much as a midterm attack ad with a vote number attached. Johnson could not deliver his own conference. Two Democrats delivered it for him.

Democratic leadership found out when everyone else did. Whip Katherine Clark said it came as a surprise, that she had not heard from either of them, and that one of the rules of being on a team is you vote against the rule. She said there would be further discussions.

There should be. Republicans are two months from an election, they cannot run their own floor, and their own hardliners are in open revolt. That dysfunction is a gift, and the only job was to let it happen. Golden and Perez handed the speaker a functioning week and handed Republicans a messaging vote to run on. Nobody asked them to.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this afternoon’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A mail ballot system that could reject batches wholesale, a president threatening to erase a country, a White House preparing its staff for subpoenas, and two Democrats rescuing the speaker’s agenda. Our goals for September are ambitious and we need paid subscribers to join us right now. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Upgrade to become a paid subscriber to make your support go even further.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ like button and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach more people. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Tuesday, September 1, 2026. Before we get to the news, hit that ❤️ and restack this one. The algorithm decides who sees this. You decide who sees it after that. This is especially important with our call to action.

We have a lot to get into this morning. Thomas Massie stood on the House floor and read the names of Epstein coconspirators he says should be prosecuted. We have an important call to action for you below to help get the Files released. The Army secretary quit over Pete Hegseth, leaving the Army with nobody confirmed in charge of it. CBS boss Bari Weiss personally ordered the headline on that El-Sayed story, and her own newsroom is calling it racist. And the Small Business Administration is staging a reality show judged by Nicki Minaj. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. It is the first of the month and we have ambitious goals for September, and we need paid subscribers to join us right now to hit them. Here is why it matters. Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution. Meta’s changes strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us, and that was a choice, not an accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump, and independent progressive media is what got sacrificed. The one thing no billionaire can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. A new month starts now, our goals are ambitious, and every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

MASSIE READ THE EPSTEIN CO-CONSPIRATOR NAMES ON THE HOUSE FLOOR

Thomas Massie stood on the House floor Monday night and read out more than a dozen names of people he called Epstein coconspirators who should be investigated and prosecuted.

It has been a year since Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the bill Massie pushed through alongside Ro Khanna. The government is still withholding more than three million files. So Massie went to the floor, named names including Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, and billionaire retail mogul Les Wexner, and started collecting the 218 signatures needed to force a vote on a second bill.

Mountbatten-Windsor was accused of sexual abuse by Virginia Giuffre, who said Epstein trafficked her to him, and he has denied ever meeting her. Wexner, who employed Epstein as his money manager for years, told House investigators in February he had no firsthand knowledge of the crimes.

Transparency Act II would give state attorneys general access to the files so they can prosecute under state law, and make it easier for survivors to sue to obtain their own records. That last part matters most. Survivors currently cannot get the documents about what was done to them.

Here is something you can do in two minutes. The petition needs 218 signatures, which means it needs Republicans. Find your representative’s contact information at house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative, then call the office and say this:

“Hi, my name is [name] and I’m a constituent in [city or zip]. I’m calling to ask the congressman/congresswoman to sign the discharge petition for the Epstein Files Transparency Act II. The government is still withholding more than three million files a year after the first bill passed. Survivors still can’t get their own records. Please sign the petition and let the House vote. Thank you.”

That is the whole call. Staffers count them. If your member has already signed, call anyway and thank them, then ask them to press their colleagues.

Here is where things stand with the money: traders put the odds of the Justice Department releasing the remaining data set before 2027 at just 12 percent. A Republican congressman is trying to pry it loose from a Republican administration, and the market thinks the administration wins.

Subscribe now

THE ARMY SECRETARY QUIT AND NOW NOBODY IS IN CHARGE

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has resigned after months of friction with Pete Hegseth, and his exit leaves the United States Army without a single Senate-confirmed leader, civilian or military.

The fight was over Hegseth’s purge of senior officers. Hegseth fired Army chief of staff Gen. Randy George in April, and Driscoll was close to him. Since then the department has been running on an acting chief. Driscoll’s deputy undersecretary is expected to follow him out the door this week. Last week Driscoll attended the retirement ceremony for Gen. Chris Donahue, who led Delta Force against the Islamic State and whose career effectively ended when Hegseth downgraded his position as part of a plan to cut general officers by 10 percent and four-stars by 20.

Lawmakers are not happy about losing Donahue, and some Republicans are signaling that Hegseth’s preferred pick for Army chief might not survive a confirmation vote.

The White House response was a statement praising Driscoll for outstanding leadership and declaring the Army more powerful than ever, thanks to his work alongside the commander in chief and the Secretary of War. That is about a man who just quit because he could not work with the Secretary of War. Seven months into a war, the Army has no confirmed secretary and no confirmed chief of staff. Nobody is minding it.

Subscribe now

BARI WEISS ORDERED THE RACIST HEADLINE HERSELF

The CBS story attacking Abdul El-Sayed over 9/11 did not come from a reporter working a beat. Sources say network boss Bari Weiss personally directed that the headline call out his deleted posts.

The headline that ran read: “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.” CBS promoted it on social media by suggesting he may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack ahead of the 25th anniversary. Weiss thought the posts were scandalous enough to report, and directed that the headline specifically mention 9/11.

What she was elevating: two 2020 and 2021 posts in which El-Sayed, an epidemiologist, compared the Covid death toll to the toll on September 11 and argued the country should marshal resources for public health the way it did for the war on terror. He did not praise the attackers, minimize the attacks, or push conspiracy theories, which is more than can be said for plenty of figures in MAGA.

Weiss had never worked in television news before Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison installed her atop CBS News. Her newsroom is furious. A former senior staffer called the story shameful and said the racism is overt. Another said they took a small nugget of news and forced it into something much larger. CBS maintains her intervention improved the piece and that nobody is upset. As El-Sayed runs to become the first Muslim elected to the Senate, this is what the network under her leadership decided was the story.

THE SBA IS RUNNING A GAME SHOW WITH NICKI MINAJ AS A JUDGE

The federal agency responsible for American small businesses is staging a Shark Tank knockoff, and one of the judges is Nicki Minaj.

Billionaire SBA administrator Kelly Loeffler announced a live Million Dollar Pitch Competition for September 18, where five small manufacturers in fields like defense technology, metalworking and plastic molding will compete for a share of $1 million. First place gets $400,000. Minaj, who declared herself Trump’s number one fan this year, posted that this is a major key and she is soooooooooo looking forward to it. She will judge alongside Grant Cardone, a private equity manager who has cheerled the tariffs, and Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia. Dean Cain, the former television Superman turned honorary immigration agent, hosts.

This is a pattern now. Sean Duffy released a six-part road trip series funded by corporate sponsors his own department regulates, including Boeing, Toyota, United and Shell. RFK Jr. has a cooking show.

Meanwhile actual small businesses are getting crushed by the tariffs, by energy costs that have jumped more than 35 percent in five years, and by the fallout from the Iran war. The federal response is to make five of them compete on camera for prize money while a rapper judges the pitches. There are more than 33 million small businesses in this country. Five of them get help, and it comes with a host.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this morning’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A congressman naming Epstein coconspirators from the House floor, an Army left without confirmed leadership in wartime, a network boss personally ordering a smear of a Muslim candidate, and a government game show for businesses her own administration is bankrupting. It is the first of the month, our goals for September are ambitious, and we need paid subscribers to join us right now. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Upgrade to become a paid subscriber to make your support go even further.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ and restack this one before you go. That is how these stories find the people who need them. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

ONE MORE THING: CHRISTOPHER CROSS APOLOGIZED TO CANADA AND CALL TRUMP AN ASSHOLE

Start the month with this one. Musican Christopher Cross, 75 years old and playing Toronto, stopped mid-show to apologize to the crowd for Donald Trump. He called Trump an “Asshole President.” He did it, as one person watching put it, on behalf of Americans with brains who love Canada. He did not soften it either, calling Trump exactly what a lot of the room was already thinking and getting an ovation for it. This is what the lake stunt has actually produced. A trade war nobody asked for, tariffs that raise prices on both sides of the border, a billboard in Grimsby, a Blue Rodeo crowd chanting the real name of the lake, and now a soft-rock legend using his stage time to tell Canadians that most Americans are not with this. Trump spent the weekend calling Canada entitled and asking why we subsidize them. Meanwhile an American musician stood in Toronto and did the thing his president will not do, which is treat the neighbors like they are worth the courtesy. Have a good day.

Subscribe now

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Monday, August 31, 2026. Before we get to the news, hit that ❤️ and restack this one. Every restack puts this reporting in front of readers the MAGA propaganda machine would rather never see it.

We have a lot to get into this evening. Trump appeared to nod off in the Oval Office while his own cabinet took turns praising him. His supporters are pushing back on him in his own replies over data centers, and it is all about their bills. CBS ran a story on Abdul El-Sayed’s 9/11 posts that even its own staff is calling Islamophobic. And the president of the United States personally called Apple to demand they relabel a lake. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. Today is the last day of August and we are still behind on our paid subscriber goal for the month. That matters more than usual right now, because Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution. Meta’s changes strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us, and that was a choice, not an accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump, and independent progressive media is what got sacrificed. The one thing no billionaire can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, this is the last night of the month to do it, and we are still short of where we need to be. With Facebook working to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

TRUMP APPEARED TO FALL ASLEEP WHILE HIS CABINET PRAISED HIM

Trump gathered the press in the Oval Office on Monday to celebrate his healthcare record, and then appeared to doze off while it was happening.

The event was built as a showcase. Cabinet secretaries lined up to heap praise on him at a moment when public polling has Republicans facing an uphill climb into the midterms. Mehmet Oz, his Medicaid administrator, was mid-speech about lowering drug costs, loud and gesturing directly at the president, when Trump visibly struggled to keep his eyes open.

The reaction was instant. Drowsy Don strikes again, one commentator posted. Grandpa is cooked, wrote another. One health care advocate suggested they stop scheduling these press conferences during executive nap time. A Democratic communications professional simply noted that Oz was loud and gesturing at him and yet.

This is not the first time. There is a pattern of this president appearing to fade out during events he called himself, and the White House keeps waving the questions away while attacking anyone who raises them. He is 80 years old, he holds the nuclear codes, and his staff built an entire Oval Office production around praising him that he could not stay awake for. The country is allowed to notice.

Subscribe now

TRUMP TELLS AMERICANS THEY’RE “BACKWARDS AND POOR” AND HIS OWN BASE SNAPS BACK

Trump told communities that do not want data centers built near them that they will end up backwards and poor. Then his own supporters turned on him him.

His post Monday was blunt. The only reason communities should not want data centers, he wrote, is if they want to end up backwards and poor, and if they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, they should let Data Reign. He added that China could not be happier with the anti-data-center movement. More than 70 percent of the public opposes having these facilities near them, which means he just called most of the country backwards. Average electricity costs have risen more than 35 percent in five years, and voters are connecting the two.

The pushback in his replies did not come from liberals. One supporter said the worry is their electric bill shooting through the roof and their water supply going low. Another called his framing flawed given what these facilities do to farmland and water. Someone said they would rather stay agricultural than become an IT hub, warning that America cannot eat a data center. Another said property taxes had climbed after new industry arrived, benefiting newcomers who took the jobs while longtime residents paid for it. Several raised privacy and surveillance. Nobody was hostile. They were just telling him he had skipped past what they actually said.

He is not hearing it, and Republicans on the ballot are stuck with it. Even Greg Abbott has paused new data center approvals in Texas. Trump’s own outside advisers have privately worried he looks out of touch. Industry executives who fund his inauguration, his ballroom and his aligned PACs are getting a president who calls their opponents backwards. The people paying the light bill are getting told they are the problem.

Subscribe now

CBS RAN A STORY ON EL-SAYED THAT ITS OWN STAFF CALLS ISLAMOPHOBIC

CBS News published a piece Monday framing Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted 9/11 posts as inviting scrutiny, and the backlash landed within hours.

Here is what the posts actually said. In 2020, the Michigan Senate nominee compared the mounting Covid death toll to the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on September 11 and argued the country should mount a similarly sweeping response. He wrote that he hoped America would spend the next decade fighting a war for public health and against poverty the way it fought the War on Terror, and added that we could save lives rather than take them. A 2021 post mourned those killed and injured that day before contrasting it with the destruction of the wars that followed. The report also revisited his association with a streamer who said in 2019 that America deserved 9/11, a view El-Sayed has explicitly rejected.

The response from Democrats was blunt. Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari called the headline insane and blatantly racist. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib told the network shame on you, calling the targeting intentional and coordinated. A CBS staffer, quoted anonymously, called the piece trash and horribly Islamophobic.

A Muslim candidate wrote that he wished America had responded to a mass death event by saving lives instead of taking them. A major network turned that into a story about posts he had to answer for. He is running well, and this is the treatment.

WEAK TRUMP PERSONALLY CALLED APPLE ABOUT THE LAKE

The president of the United States got on the phone with Apple to demand they change the name of a lake.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum revealed it on Fox Business, explaining that Trump’s executive order pushed the change through the Board of Geographic Names and the US Geological Survey, and that the software cascades down to map providers from there. Then he added that he knows the president reached out to Apple directly, so he expects the change soon. Google already complied over the weekend, telling users it follows official government sources, so Americans now see Lake America while Canadians still see Lake Ontario. Apple has not moved.

Canada spent the weekend enjoying itself. Doug Ford put up a massive billboard on the lake’s Canadian shore in Grimsby reading “Lake Ontario. Now and Always,” then said on television that he does not see the purpose and that the signing looked like a Saturday Night Live sketch. Nobody, he said, is going to call it Lake America.

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew delivered the sharpest cut, comparing Trump to a washed-up rock band playing a casino, trying to bring back a golden oldie that worked once with the Gulf of Mexico. Everybody thinks it is a little sad, he said, and it is not his best work. A Canadian historian asked whether the greatest country on earth really takes this man seriously. And in Toronto, Blue Rodeo had a crowd chant the lake’s real name during a song that mentions it, the frontman asking them to sing for waters that were here long before any of us. The president is making phone calls. They are singing.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this evening’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A president who could not stay awake for his own event, supporters telling him their bills are going up, a network smearing a Muslim candidate over posts about saving lives, and a commander in chief working the phones over a lake. Today is the last day of August and we are still behind on our paid subscriber goal, so if you have been meaning to upgrade, tonight is when it counts. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Upgrade to become a paid subscriber to make your support go even further.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ like button and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach more people. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

ONE MORE THING: THE BOOKMOBILE IS COMING TO DALLAS

End the night on this. Trump built himself a two-day midterm convention in Dallas, the party’s first ever, designed as a celebration of him. A truck is driving there to ruin it.

Former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor announced that a Trump-Epstein Bookmobile is en route, hauling roughly 3.5 million publicly available pages tied to the Justice Department’s Epstein investigation, timed to land exactly when the convention does. Survivors of Epstein’s abuse are flying to Dallas to be there too. If the GOP wants the week to be all about Trump, Taylor said, let the attendees see the scandal that epitomizes his corruption for themselves. He noted that House Republicans running for reelection are being asked to pay upward of $25,000 to attend a convention celebrating a man who has not opened his own campaign coffers to help them. The whole event exists to paper over his misconduct with confetti, Taylor said, so the president can count on one thing next week: there will be paper. And Dallas is only the first stop. The files are scheduled to keep rolling across the country for two months, straight through the midterms. Have a good night.

Subscribe now

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Monday, August 31, 2026. Before we get to the news, hit that ❤️ and restack this one. Every restack puts this reporting in front of readers the MAGA propaganda machine would rather never see it.

We have a lot to get into this morning. Trump posted an AI-generated video claiming he had destroyed Iran’s main oil terminal, and the Pentagon had to admit it never happened. The Pentagon has quietly put conservative social media influencers on the government payroll without telling anyone. A top Republican strategist says his own party is staring at historic losses in November. And the House came back from a five-week break and immediately started asking to go home. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. Today is the last day of August, and we are behind on our paid subscriber goal for the month. That matters more than usual right now. Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution. Meta’s changes strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us, and that was a choice, not an accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump, and independent progressive media is what got sacrificed. The one thing no billionaire can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day, and today is the last day of the month. With Facebook working to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

TRUMP POSTED A FAKE VIDEO OF A STRIKE THAT NEVER HAPPENED

Trump announced late Sunday that Iran’s main oil terminal had been blown to smithereens, and attached an AI-generated video as proof. The strike never happened.

The post went up on Truth Social with a clip showing a man in an aircraft watching fiery blasts tear through an oil field and harbor. Kharg Island handles roughly 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, so destroying it would be genuinely enormous news. A US official had to tell reporters the military did not target Kharg Island in overnight strikes at all. The head of Iran’s national oil company called the posts laughable and said conditions on the island are calm.

Hours later Trump was back with a rant declaring Iran officially a failed nation, writing that it is dead, that it has no navy, no air force and no currency, and that its leadership is in total disarray.

That was the same night Iran fired ballistic missiles at two US-operated air bases in Jordan. Jordan’s army intercepted eight of them. Trump told Fox News the United States will hit them hard and that a response is coming. So the actual situation is a war in its seventh month, American bases under missile fire, and a commander in chief posting computer-generated explosions of a target nobody hit. His own military had to correct him within hours.

Subscribe now

HEGSETH PUT SECRET INFLUENCERS ON THE PAYROLL

The Pentagon and Hegseth have quietly installed conservative military influencers in undisclosed government roles, where they spend their days defending Pete Hegseth to hundreds of thousands of followers.

Retired Air Force colonel Rob Maness and retired Army colonel Kurt Schlichter both hold active government email addresses with a “.civ” suffix, marking them as civilian employees, assigned to the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. Maness has more than 135,000 followers on X. Schlichter has nearly 620,000. A third, attorney Thomas Anderson, who writes as Cynical Publius to more than 323,000 followers, was listed the same way earlier this year and has since vanished from the records.

The setup uses employment categories that avoid public disclosure. Special government employees are capped at 130 days a year. Highly qualified experts can work full time, with or without pay. The Pentagon declined to say whether any of them draw a taxpayer-funded salary, what their jobs are, or how long the assignments last, from a department that calls itself the most transparent ever.

They kept writing the whole time. Maness published in the Daily Caller arguing Hegseth needs to root out disloyal career employees, and had a letter run in a major paper defending him, never mentioning the Pentagon job. Schlichter posts admiration for Hegseth to his audience. In May all three went to the Army War College for a task force hunting woke ideology, questioning students and faculty about Hegseth and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Some students were not sure whether being honest would cost them.

A TOP REPUBLICAN STRATEGIST SAYS HIS PARTY IS FACING HISTORIC LOSSES

Republicans are two months out from the midterms and their own operatives are saying the quiet part into a microphone.

“It points out the obvious that Republicans are in pretty bad shape going into the midterms and that they’re looking at historic losses,” GOP strategist Terry Holt said. The Senate map is where the panic lives. Aggregate polling has Republicans down 8 points in North Carolina, 7.5 in Georgia, 2.6 in Ohio, 2.3 in Maine, 2 in both Alaska and New Hampshire, and 1.9 in Texas. Republicans hold slim majorities in both chambers.

The recriminations have already started. One strategist working battleground races said it is put up or shut up time for Trump and his allies, complaining there is no sense of urgency even though they are down big in multiple states. Laura Ingraham told Republicans on Fox to get their act together. A conservative activist warned the party could lose both chambers. A GOP pollster insists the private numbers are better than the public ones, which is what pollsters always say in August.

Here is where things stand with the money. Traders now put Democrats retaking the House at roughly 86 percent, with the Senate close to a coin flip. Cost of living is still the top issue, and Trump just restarted a war and a trade fight that make prices worse. Sixty-four days.

Subscribe now

THE HOUSE CAME BACK AND IMMEDIATELY ASKED TO GO HOME

The House returned Monday from a five-week break, and members started angling to leave again before the week even began.

There is exactly one thing they have to do, which is pass a stopgap spending bill to avoid a shutdown and push the deadline to December 11. After that the calendar is empty of must-pass legislation until late in the year. Members are openly speculating that leadership sends everyone home until mid-November, well ahead of the scheduled October 1 exit. One Republican said flatly that they have very little to do. Another texted that he would be happy to be sent home early.

The deeper problem is that Mike Johnson cannot run the floor. Rebel factions have spent the summer tanking the procedural votes needed to bring Republican bills up, so the only things that move are fast-track measures requiring a two-thirds vote. One member predicted nothing passes in September except those.

So what is the agenda for the people running Congress? A resolution condemning socialism in all its forms, and possibly a censure vote on one of their own members over his conduct toward two female staffers. Even they can see how it looks. As one Republican put it, people already think we are on vacation when we are home, so what does it do if we leave Washington again. Groceries cost what they cost. The House is going home.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this morning’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A president posting fake war footage his own military had to disown, a Pentagon paying influencers in secret, Republican strategists bracing for historic losses, and a Congress that came back only to plan its exit. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. Today is the last day of August and we are behind on our paid subscriber goal, so if you have been meaning to upgrade, today is the day it counts most. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Upgrade to become a paid subscriber to make your support go even further.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ like button and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach more people. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

We’ll see you later today.

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Sunday, August 30, 2026. Before we get to the news, hit that ❤️ and restack this one. Every restack puts this reporting in front of readers the MAGA propaganda machine would rather never see it.

We have a lot to get into this evening. Google Maps caved and renamed Lake Ontario for Trump, and Canada answered with a billboard. The White House is bracing for another wave of staffers walking out the door. Top military commanders are formally telling Pete Hegseth on the record that they disagree with his orders. And Olivia Rodrigo turned a music festival into $20 million for women and girls, after Trump cut funding. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution. Meta’s changes strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us, and that was a choice, not an accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump, and independent progressive media is what got sacrificed. The one thing no billionaire can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. With Facebook working to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

GOOGLE CAVED. CANADA DIDN’T.

Google Maps changed the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America this weekend, and the backlash was immediate. Our reporters and staff have committed to not use Google Maps.

This is the second time Google has rushed to match Trump’s preferred geography, after doing the same with the Gulf of Mexico. Users piled on, telling the company it had given one of the Great Lakes the wrong name and asking why it keeps reaching for the label button every time Trump announces something. One commentator said he hopes there is a hearing after the midterms where somebody from Google explains why they went along with it while Apple stayed normal. Apple Maps has not made the change. MapQuest flatly refused and built a tool letting users rename the lake themselves.

The White House is delighted. Communications Director Steven Cheung posted that it is official, Lake America on Google Maps, which is a strange victory lap for getting one American company to edit a label.

Canada was less impressed. Ontario Premier Doug Ford put up a large new sign in his province reading “Lake Ontario, Now and Always.” Mark Carney noted the name predates both Canadian Confederation and the American Declaration of Independence, and said the lake is called Lake Ontario today and forever. Trump can pressure a search company. He cannot pressure a country, and the billboard on the far shore is going to be there a lot longer than he is.

Subscribe now

THE WHITE HOUSE IS BRACING FOR ANOTHER EXODUS

Trump’s inner circle is about to get smaller, with more senior officials weighing the exits in the coming months.

Nearly a dozen staffers have already left in recent weeks, including Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson, Deputy National Security Adviser Andy Baker, the director of cabinet affairs, an adviser to Stephen Miller and the director of media affairs. Karoline Leavitt’s departure caught colleagues off guard and is seen internally as a serious blow to the communications operation, since she was the most visible defender he had. James Braid, his longtime aide running legislative affairs, announced this month he is out within weeks.

Some churn before a midterm is normal. This is not that. The exits are landing while the Iran war grinds through its sixth month, while the Canada trade war pushes prices up, and while his approval sits at a historic low.

A former Republican National Committee communications director put the real problem plainly. This is the hardest time there has ever been to hire into this administration, she said, and the question is not the vacancies but who is willing to walk into the back half of a presidency that is about to face a hostile Congress. People who are good at this work can read a calendar. They know what subpoena season looks like, and they are choosing not to be in the building for it.

Subscribe now

THE GENERALS ARE TELLING HEGSETH NO IN WRITING

The heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force, along with four-star commanders across three continents, are formally recording their disagreement with Pete Hegseth’s orders.

They are doing it through the Secretary of Defense Orders Book, a classified document produced twice a month covering the readiness and movement of American forces. The leaders of European Command, Pacific Command and Southern Command, along with the Navy’s top admiral, each answered Hegseth’s latest orders with a “non-concur.” That is the military’s formal way of saying we will obey, and we want it on the record that we think you are wrong. Army and Air Force leadership went along while stressing that doing so carries significant risk.

Their concern is that the Iran war is hollowing out the ability to handle anything else. The Navy’s only dedicated Pacific carrier, described as a linchpin of deterring Beijing, has been pulled to the Middle East to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln. Patriot interceptors, THAAD interceptors and Tomahawks are running low. A quarter of the Reaper drone fleet is gone. Eighteen troops have been killed by Iranian strikes.

The Lincoln came home after roughly nine months at sea with supply failures so severe that sailors went without fresh food, and conditions got bad enough that some tried to take their own lives. The Pentagon called all of this reporting fake news. The commanders who signed the non-concurs are the ones who have to answer for it.

If you or someone you love is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available around the clock, and veterans and service members can press 1 to reach the Veterans Crisis Line.

RODRIGO’S FESTIVAL TURNED INTO $20 MILLION FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS AFTER TRUMP GUTTED FUNDING

Olivia Rodrigo built a music festival designed to give every dollar away, and by Saturday night the number had doubled. Trump has gutted funding for reproductive rights organizations and Planned Parenthood.

Daisy Chain Fields, held in Irvine, California, was set up so that all proceeds go to ten nonprofits supporting women and girls. Every ticket buyer, every sponsor, and artists who waived their fees got it to $10 million. Then Melinda French Gates walked on stage during Saturday’s show and announced that she and her organization Pivotal would match it, taking the total to $20 million.

The recipients are not vague. They include Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights, the National Institute for Reproductive Health, the National Women’s Law Center, Black Mamas Matter Alliance, which supports Black mothers before and after pregnancy, and Baby2Baby, which gets diapers, formula, clothing and food to children who need them. Others support survivors of gender-based violence and domestic workers. These are some of the organizations the Trump administration has cut.

French Gates said what Rodrigo set in motion will last far beyond a single night, and that it shows a new generation how much their voices matter. Rodrigo said the festival was about what happens when people use their collective power to support one another.

Reproductive rights organizations have spent two years absorbing losses in courts and statehouses. This weekend a 23-year-old musician and her audience handed them $20 million and a stadium full of people who care. That is what building looks like while other people are busy renaming lakes.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this evening’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A tech giant rewriting a map on command while Canada refuses, a White House watching its own staff head for the doors, commanders formally objecting to the orders they are carrying out, and a musician raising $20 million for women and girls. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Upgrade to become a paid subscriber to make your support go even further.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ like button and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach more people. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

ONE MORE THING: THE KIDS LINED UP FOR THE MAYOR

End the weekend on this. When was the last time you saw children line up begging a politician for an autograph? It happened this week at Inwood Hill Park, where a group of neighborhood kids waited for Mayor Zohran Mamdani to finish up at a campfire.

The second he turned to say hello, the whole thing dissolved into joyful chaos, screaming and hugs and autograph requests coming at him from every direction before he could get to his car. He did not rush off. He stayed and gave them real time before heading out for the night. Nobody staged it and there was no camera crew waiting for the shot. It was just a park full of kids who wanted a minute with their mayor, and a mayor who gave it to them. We have spent this week covering a president who cannot get a room of astronauts to clap and whose own staff is heading for the exits. Then there is this. People can tell the difference between someone who wants to be admired and someone who actually likes them. Have a good night.

Subscribe now

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Sunday, August 30, 2026. Before we get to it, hit that ❤️ and restack this one. Every restack puts this reporting in front of readers the MAGA propaganda machine would rather never see it.

No news roundup this morning. On Sundays we like to step back and take stock, and this week gave us a lot to take stock of. Trump had a bad week. Not because of one scandal, but because in courtrooms, in newsrooms, on the National Mall and in a room full of astronauts, people kept declining to go along with him. Let’s talk about that.

Before we get into it, one thing you need to know. Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution. Meta’s changes strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us, and that was a choice, not an accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump, and independent progressive media is what got sacrificed. The one thing no billionaire can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. With Facebook working to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

THE COURTS HELD ALL WEEK

Start with the judges, because this is where the week was won.

A Trump-appointed federal judge refused to throw out Steve Bannon’s contempt conviction, telling the Justice Department it does not get to launder a friend’s criminal record. Judge Alvin Hellerstein told Trump for the third time that he cannot drag his New York conviction into federal court, writing that paying hush money to an adult film star is not subsumed in presidential immunity. Every judge who has considered that argument directly has now rejected it.

Then there is Joyce Beatty, who won a ruling keeping Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center, watched his hand-picked board vote to defy it anyway, and marched straight back into court on Thursday. His lawyers responded by suggesting the building might just fall down without him. She kept going.

And Judge Emmet Sullivan is running out of patience with an attorney general who answered a court order about the Epstein files with two pages and no sworn statement.

None of these people got a parade. They did their jobs on ordinary weekdays while being told the president is above the process. That is what a functioning check looks like, and it held four separate times in five days.

Subscribe now

THE PEOPLE CLOSEST TO IT REFUSED TO PLAY ALONG

The quieter story this week was the people inside the machine who would not cooperate.

Three Stars and Stripes journalists were fired one day after their paper reported food and water shortages and flagging mental health aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Their publisher was ordered to hand them the notices and refused. Now all three are suing the Secretary of Defense. They could have taken the exit quietly. They filed instead.

On Friday, Trump flew to Texas to hand the Artemis II crew the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. He kept them waiting on stage for half an hour, then talked about himself, then told a room full of NASA people that the space program had been limping along without him. Nobody clapped. He tried complimenting how the astronauts looked. Still nothing. That silence was a choice, made in real time, by people who know exactly what a 23 percent budget cut does to their work.

Three senators demanded an investigation into a Trump appointee accused of pulling firefighting aircraft toward his own ranch. A Florida grand jury put on the record that $10 million meant for sick children was spent on campaign ads.

Bullies depend on everyone deciding it is not worth the trouble. This week, a lot of people decided it was.

MOCKERY IS DOING REAL WORK RIGHT NOW

Trump renamed a lake this week. Watching what happened next has been one of the great pleasures of the year.

Mark Carney simply refused the premise, saying that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario, then, now and always. MapQuest, of all institutions, posted a screenshot of the lake and four words: we’re not changing it. That post cleared 70,000 likes from an account whose entire July output topped out at two. JB Pritzker answered by renaming Trump Tower to Natalie Tower. Ottawa’s city council voted unanimously to start stripping his name off a residential street, with Taco Avenue and Canada Goose Avenue among the leading suggestions.

And Abdul El-Sayed, running for Senate in Michigan, treated a presidential outburst the way you would treat a tired toddler, suggesting the man had simply had too much iPad for the week.

This matters more than it looks. Authoritarian politics runs on the idea that the leader is enormous and you are small. Laughter breaks that spell faster than any argument, because you cannot laugh at something you are afraid of. A week of jokes at his expense is a week of people remembering he is a 80-year-old man who cannot make a mapping company obey him.

AND THEN THEY MARCHED

On Friday, thousands gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington 2026.

They came sixty-three years after Martin Luther King Jr. stood on those steps, and the theme this time was Defend the Vote. Union members, students, members of Black Greek-letter organizations, families who drove and flew in from across the country. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network organized it alongside Martin Luther King III and Arndrea Waters King’s Drum Major Institute, with more than 90 partner organizations. Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hakeem Jeffries spoke. Marc Morial named the stakes plainly: they know they are fighting powerful forces, and that is precisely why they showed up.

They marched because the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act this year and Republican statehouses across the South started redrawing maps within days. That is a real loss and nobody on that Mall pretended otherwise.

Here is where things stand looking ahead. The forecasters moved Texas to a toss-up and Iowa toward the Democrats this month, and the money now favors Democrats retaking the House in November, with the Senate close to even. Sixty-five days.

None of it is decided. It never is. But this was a week when the courts held, workers spoke up, a country refused to be bullied, and thousands of people stood on the same ground where King stood and said the work is not finished. That is not nothing. That is how it starts.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

Weeks like this one are why we do this. Judges holding the line, journalists suing rather than going quietly, a room that would not applaud, a march on the National Mall. These are the stories that get flattened into a paragraph or skipped entirely in newsrooms owned by people with something to lose. We chase them down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Upgrade to become a paid subscriber to make your support go even further.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ like button and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach more people. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

ONE MORE THING

Sixty-three years ago, people stood at the Lincoln Memorial and demanded the vote. On Friday their grandchildren stood in the same spot and demanded it again. That is not a sign the fight was lost. It is a sign it was never abandoned, not once, in three generations. Whatever this week took out of you, somebody older and more tired than you has held this line before and handed it forward intact. Rest today. We will see you soon.

Share

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Saturday, August 29, 2026. Before we get to the news, hit that ❤️ and restack this one. Every restack puts this reporting in front of readers the MAGA propaganda machine would rather never see it.

We have a lot to get into this morning. Trump spent Friday night attacking a female reporter for writing that he is skipping Ground Zero, then confirmed her story in the same post. Kash Patel’s FBI has quietly loosened its hiring standards for applicants with criminal pasts, such as prostitution and bestiality. A federal judge is running out of patience with Trump’s attorney general over the Epstein files. And three Stars and Stripes journalists are suing Pete Hegseth for firing them over their reporting. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution. Meta’s changes strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us, and that was a choice, not an accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump, and independent progressive media is what got sacrificed. The one thing no billionaire can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. With Facebook working to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

TRUMP ATTACKS A REPORTER, THEN PROVES HER STORY RIGHT

Trump spent Friday attacking New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman for writing that he is skipping the Ground Zero ceremony because they will not let him give a speech. Then he confirmed it.

The Truth Social post was long and ugly. He called the Pulitzer Prize winner a maggot, a scammer, a phony and a stalker, went after her appearance, and said she should be forced to hand over every dollar she has made reporting on him. He called the Times failing and corrupt, threatened new revelations in his $15 billion lawsuit against the paper, and floated another lawsuit against the Pulitzer board that honored her work. Four reporters shared the byline. He singled out the woman.

Then came the part he did not think through. He insisted Haberman invented the story that he would skip the World Trade Center ceremony because he cannot speak there, and that he is going to the Pentagon because he is a featured speaker. Both halves of that sentence are the story she wrote. He added that he would love not to speak, since this is a day to remember the victims. He is the featured speaker at the Pentagon.

Jake Tapper called it disgusting and beneath the office, and he is right, but notice the pattern underneath the insults. A reporter wrote something true. Trump could not deny the substance, so he attacked her looks and threatened her livelihood. That is not a man defending the record. That is a man who got caught and reached for the nearest woman to punish.

Subscribe now

PATEL’S FBI QUIETLY LOWERS THE BAR FOR APPLICANTS

The FBI under Kash Patel has quietly relaxed the rules on hiring people with criminal histories, including prostitution and bestiality.

The changes went out to vetting personnel in an internal memo dated June 16. An applicant who paid for sex is no longer automatically disqualified, provided it happened more than ten years ago and fewer than three times. Stealing from an employer no longer ends a candidacy either, as long as three years have passed. And bestiality and animal cruelty are off the automatic disqualification list too, so long as the applicant committed the acts before turning 18. That is the actual written standard now at the agency that investigates federal crime.

There is one exception worth sitting with. Someone in a position of trust who hired a prostitute is still barred outright, and those jobs include public safety, education, health, social work, finance and law. The military is not on that list. The bureau insists this is about flexibility rather than standards, saying it is false to suggest criminal behavior is no longer disqualifying and that its background process remains wide-ranging and extensive.

Here is the context the FBI would rather you skip. The bureau lost 1,139 special agents in 2025 out of roughly 13,700, driven out by firings, forced resignations and retirements under this administration. Patel gutted the place, could not fill the holes, and rather than fix why nobody wants the job, he moved the line for who gets to carry a badge.

The “before turning 18” line is doing work for us, not against us. It’s the FBI’s own carve-out, and stating it plainly makes clear this isn’t an inference on our part. Anyone who wants to defend it has to say out loud that teenage animal cruelty is fine for a federal agent.

Subscribe now

A JUDGE IS LOSING PATIENCE WITH TRUMP’S ATTORNEY GENERAL

Attorney General Todd Blanche’s Justice Department is edging toward a contempt finding over its refusal to hand over Epstein records a federal judge has ordered produced.

Judge Emmet Sullivan has directed the department to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, including turning over a redaction log and a sworn declaration about a required Federal Register notice. He has also ordered production of handwritten FBI notes tied to a woman who says Trump sexually abused her when she was thirteen years old. Those allegations have not been proven in court, and Trump has denied wrongdoing. The records are exactly what the transparency law was written to force into daylight, and the department is not producing them.

What Blanche’s DOJ filed instead was two pages. No affidavit, no sworn statement, and a passage complaining that its attorneys had worked nights, weekends and holidays including Christmas Day. A government lawyer also claimed the department had not previously produced handwritten interview notes in the matter, an assertion the plaintiff’s legal team says is flatly untrue, pointing to more than a hundred examples of exactly that.

The suit was brought by lawyer and journalist Katie Phang, who argues the DOJ improperly redacted the files. Legal analysts watching the docket say Sullivan has reached his limit and the next step is contempt with a date certain attached. Congress passed a law ordering these files released. The attorney general is running out the clock, and a judge is about to stop letting him.

FIRED STARS AND STRIPES JOURNALISTS SUE HEGSETH

Three journalists fired from Stars and Stripes are suing Pete Hegseth in federal court, and the timeline in their complaint is damning.

Publisher Max Lederer, editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and reporter Lara Korte received separation notices last week, charged with insubordination. The alleged insubordination was a CBS interview they gave five and a half weeks earlier, in which Korte said she works for Stars and Stripes, not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker. Nobody moved on it for over a month. Then the paper published a story detailing food and water shortages and flagging mental health aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, nine months into deployment. One day later, the notices went out.

Lederer refused to deliver them. He had already announced he would retire at the end of September over fundamental differences with the Defense Department. The Pentagon fired him before he could go.

Stars and Stripes has been publishing since the Civil War and has guarded its editorial independence for decades, reaching an average of 1.4 million people a day, including troops in places where the internet does not reach. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell already vowed to refocus it away from what he called woke distractions. These three reported what sailors were living through on that carrier, and the department that could not fix the conditions decided to fire the people who described them. Now it has to explain that to a judge.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this morning’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A president savaging a reporter for a story he then confirmed, an FBI quietly rewriting who is fit to carry a badge, an attorney general stonewalling a judge over the Epstein files, and journalists fired for reporting what sailors were enduring at sea. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Upgrade to become a paid subscriber to make your support go even further.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ like button and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach more people. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

BONUS: OTTAWA IS TAKING HIS NAME OFF THE STREET

Ottawa’s city council voted unanimously on Wednesday to begin renaming Trump Avenue, a residential street in the Central Park neighborhood that has carried his name for about 25 years. The vote came the day before Trump signed his order rechristening Lake Ontario, and councilors say the name has simply become an embarrassment. The suggestions rolling in are the best part: Obama Avenue, Ontario Avenue, Canada Avenue, Beaver Avenue, Canada Goose Avenue, Pelosi Avenue, Gulf of Mexico Avenue, Rosie O’Donnell Avenue, and Taco Avenue, that last one standing for Trump Always Chickens Out. Councilor Tim Tierney says it will take time, since a majority of the street’s residents have to agree and nothing moves until after October’s municipal elections. He also made clear the names are a sideshow next to the tariffs hurting both countries. “Stop with the lame name game,” he said, “and let’s get back to the table.” Trump can rename a lake on paper. He cannot stop a neighborhood from deciding it would rather be named after a goose. Have a good weekend!

Subscribe now

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Friday, August 28, 2026. Before we get to the news, hit that ❤️ and restack this one. Every restack puts this reporting in front of readers the MAGA propaganda machine would rather never see it.

Trump had a horrible day. We have a lot to get into this evening. Trump flew to Texas to honor the Artemis II astronauts and delivered a speech so bad the room refused to clap. A federal judge told him for the third time that he cannot escape his New York conviction. His ambassador to Italy is conducting American diplomacy from a $450 million yacht while Italian taxpayers pay for his security. And CNN’s chief White House correspondent says Trump already expects to be impeached again. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution. Meta’s changes strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us, and that was a choice, not an accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump, and independent progressive media is what got sacrificed. The one thing no billionaire can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. With Facebook working to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

TRUMP BOMBS IN FRONT OF THE ARTEMIS ASTRONAUTS

Trump flew to Texas Friday to award the Artemis II crew the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, and the room would not clap for him.

He made the astronauts wait on stage for half an hour before he showed up. Then he opened by talking about himself, recounting how he watched the launch during a very important meeting with the biggest people in the country, maybe some of the biggest people in the world. He got through a brief mention of the four honorees before wandering off into a story about inheriting his love of space genetically from his uncle. “He loved space, he used to tell me about space, space, all space,” Trump said. “He would throw in the word nuclear every once in a while.”

After announcing he should not get political, he gave shoutouts to Ted Cruz, Dan Patrick and a couple of Texas congressmen. Back on his prepared remarks, he told the room the American space program had been limping along while he was out of office, and that now he is back, nobody limps. Nothing. Silence. Growing desperate for any reaction at all, he pivoted to complimenting how the astronauts looked. “This is a good looking group of people.” Still nothing.

There is a reason a room full of NASA scientists sat on their hands. Trump has proposed cutting the agency’s 2027 budget by 23 percent. You cannot gut the thing people have devoted their lives to and expect applause for showing up late to take credit for it.

A JUDGE TELLS TRUMP NO ON HIS CONVICTION FOR THE THIRD TIME

A federal judge ruled Friday that Trump cannot drag his New York criminal conviction into federal court, the third time the same judge has told him no.

Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records over a $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. Since then he has tried to move the case to a friendlier forum, arguing the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision wipes the verdict out. Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected it again, ruling Trump was far too late and that immunity would not save him anyway. Paying hush money to an adult film star and covering up an embarrassment, the judge wrote, are not subsumed in presidential immunity.

Every judge who has directly considered this argument has rejected it. Hellerstein wrote that Trump’s grounds were neither new nor legally sufficient and that he had failed to show good cause or diligence. Trump’s team appealed within hours, calling the ruling baseless and lawless and promising to keep defeating what it calls Democrat weaponization at every turn.

This was the only one of his four criminal cases that ever reached a jury. The other three went away after he won. He has spent two years trying to make this one disappear too, through immunity claims and forum shopping and a fixer who changed his story. A Clinton appointee in Manhattan keeps saying the same thing: the verdict stands.

Subscribe now

TRUMP’S AMBASSADOR IS DOING DIPLOMACY FROM A $450 MILLION YACHT

Trump’s ambassador to Italy has spent his summer conducting American foreign policy from a $450 million superyacht, with the Italian government footing the bill for his security.

Tilman Fertitta, the Texas billionaire who ranks 109th on the Forbes 400, has been cruising the Italian coast since June aboard the Boardwalk, a 380-foot, six-deck vessel with two swimming pools, two helipads, a putting green, a spa with his-and-hers massage tables, a cinema, a glass elevator and a submarine the crew calls the limo. At each port he hosts receptions for local officials and business leaders. Italy provides the security detail, for an undisclosed amount.

Fertitta says he is a normal person. He gave a tour while eating cold leftover taco meat out of a plastic tub, pointing out that his yacht is unusual for having a family kitchen at all. On the Italian security his government is not paying for, he offered that the guards are getting good practice, since there are a lot more important people than him they protect at times. Protesters in Venice greeted him with the same message they gave Jeff Bezos last summer.

This is what the job looks like now. Ambassadorships have always gone to donors, but the man representing the United States in Rome is running an unofficial embassy off a boat that cost more than most countries spend on their entire diplomatic corps, and having someone else cover the guards. He calls it catching lightning in a bottle. He says he hit the jackpot. That part is true.

CNN’S TOP WHITE HOUSE REPORTER SAYS TRUMP EXPECTS IMPEACHMENT

Trump already assumes he is going to be impeached again, and CNN’s chief White House correspondent says the fight this time will be uglier than the last two.

Kaitlan Collins laid it out this week. If Democrats take the House, she does not believe this administration will handle congressional oversight the way it did in the first term. Trump hated being impeached so much, she said, that there will be far more pushback from the Justice Department and the White House than anyone saw before. Her co-hosts expected Trump to fold and try to reinvent himself as a dealmaker. Collins does not buy it, and she says her prediction comes from reporting, not a hunch.

The map is moving under him. Cook Political Report shifted Texas from lean Republican to a toss-up last week and moved Iowa from toss-up toward the Democrats, after moving Alaska to a toss-up in July. Al Green filed another impeachment resolution on Monday, and at least three are now pending, citing everything from militarizing domestic law enforcement to threatening federal judges.

Here is where things stand with the money. Markets now give Democrats roughly a 47 percent chance of taking back the House and Senate in November.

Trump told an interviewer this month that it is hard to believe they could impeach him. His own correspondents, his own party’s forecasters and the betting markets all disagree. Sixty-six days.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this evening’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A president bombing in front of the astronauts he came to honor, a judge refusing for the third time to erase his conviction, an ambassador running diplomacy off a superyacht on somebody else’s security budget, and a White House already bracing for impeachment. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Upgrade to become a paid subscriber to make your support go even further.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ like button and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach more people. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

ONE MORE THING: THEY MARCHED AGAIN TODAY

Some hope to end on. Thousands gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on Friday for the March on Washington 2026, sixty-three years after Martin Luther King Jr. stood on those same steps, and the theme this time was Defend the Vote. Union members, students, members of Black Greek-letter organizations and families who traveled from across the country filled the National Mall. It was organized by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and by Martin Luther King III and Arndrea Waters King’s Drum Major Institute, with more than 90 partner organizations including the NAACP and the National Urban League. Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hakeem Jeffries spoke. The march came after the Supreme Court weakened a key piece of the Voting Rights Act this year, setting off a scramble in Republican statehouses across the South to redraw congressional maps before November. Marc Morial of the National Urban League named the stakes plainly: they know they are fighting powerful forces, and that is exactly why they rallied. King III put it another way, that this was a call to march again not only in remembrance but in action. Sixty-three years later, on the same ground, the answer to having your vote chipped away is still to show up in person and say so.

Have a good weekend!

Subscribe now

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Friday, August 28, 2026. Before we get to the news, hit that ❤️ and restack this one. Every restack puts this reporting in front of readers the MAGA propaganda machine would rather never see it.

We have a lot to get into this morning. Trump is skipping the 25th anniversary of 9/11 at Ground Zero because the memorial will not let him give a speech. Classified intelligence says Putin now looks at the United States and sees a country too depleted by Trump’s Iran war to stop him. A senior Trump official is under investigation for allegedly pulling firefighting crews off active fires to protect his own Idaho ranch. And federal safety investigators just tied Trump’s ballroom construction to a near miss involving the helicopter he was riding in. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution. Meta’s changes strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us, and that was a choice, not an accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump, and independent progressive media is what got sacrificed. The one thing no billionaire can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. With Facebook working to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

TRUMP SKIPS GROUND ZERO BECAUSE THEY WON’T LET HIM SPEAK

Trump plans to skip the 25th anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero, and the reason is that the memorial will not let him give a speech.

His team had signaled he would attend and had done advance visits to the site. Those plans changed once organizers reminded them that politicians have been barred from speaking there since 2012, a rule adopted after years of political fights left victims’ families feeling their loved ones were being overshadowed. On the anniversary, families read the names aloud for hours while officials from both parties stand together and say nothing. Trump will go to the Pentagon instead, where he is allowed to talk.

JD Vance will represent the White House in New York. The bipartisan lineup expected at Ground Zero includes Rudy Giuliani, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George and Laura Bush, and Barack Obama. Logistics helped seal it too. Trump is flying to his golf course in Doonbeg, Ireland the next day, and leaving from Joint Base Andrews is easier than leaving from New York. His advisers have also discussed the federal government taking control of the memorial and museum outright.

Twenty-five years, nearly 3,000 dead, and one rule: nobody makes it about themselves. Trump could not accept those terms. He is choosing the venue with a microphone, and the golf trip is booked for the morning after.

Subscribe now

PUTIN SEES A WEAKENED AMERICA AFTER TRUMP’S IRAN WAR

Fresh classified intelligence indicates the Kremlin now believes Trump’s Iran war has left the United States too weak to stop Russia from escalating against American interests and allies in Europe.

That assessment came right before CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a secret trip to Moscow this week, the first known visit by a CIA director since 2021. Ratcliffe warned Russian officials that ramping up the war in Ukraine would backfire and push Trump toward Zelensky. One person familiar with the trip put it plainly: this was less about Putin being cornered in Ukraine and more about Russia calculating that America is depleted and cannot intervene.

The stockpiles back up the calculation. Patriot air defense systems, Tomahawk cruise missiles and Army Tactical Missile Systems have been severely drawn down by six months of war against Iran, and the United States has lost roughly a quarter of its Reaper drones, aircraft that run $30 million to $50 million apiece. Allies in Asia are asking whether Washington could still deter China. Pete Hegseth publicly denies there is any serious shortage while quietly pressing manufacturers to build faster.

Trump’s answer Thursday was to wave it off. Putin, he said, is not going to attack NATO territory. That is the whole strategy: a promise from a president whose war emptied the shelves, and a bet that Vladimir Putin will be polite about it.

TRUMP OFFICIAL ACCUSED OF SENDING FIREFIGHTERS TO HIS OWN RANCH

A senior Trump official who oversees the US Forest Service is facing calls for an investigation after allegedly pushing the agency to throw firefighting resources at a fire near his private ranch.

Michael Boren, the undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment, reportedly owns a 480-acre ranch in Idaho’s Sawtooth National Recreation Area. In mid-July he contacted Forest Service officials repeatedly to ask why more aircraft were not being used on the Cabin Creek fire burning nearby. Six current and former Forest Service officials described the response as far bigger than a fire that size would normally get. The fire started from an unattended campfire on July 12, was fully contained by July 15, and burned seven acres.

Senators Ron Wyden, Amy Klobuchar and Martin Heinrich are demanding a full investigation and want answers from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins by September 10. In this record fire season, they wrote, far larger fires have not received a fraction of the same commitment of resources. USDA says Boren simply reported a fire near his property and at no point pressured anyone or ordered more resources.

Somewhere in the West this summer, a crew did not get the aircraft it asked for. Wildfire resources are finite, and every plane sent to a seven-acre burn near a political appointee’s ranch is a plane that was not over somebody’s town.

Subscribe now

TRUMP’S BALLROOM CONSTRUCTION HELPED CAUSE A MARINE ONE NEAR MISS

Federal safety investigators have tied Trump’s White House construction spree to an incident where the helicopter carrying him came dangerously close to a passenger jet.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report on the August 4 incident blames communication failures. Marine One’s crew could not reach air traffic controllers to give the required three minutes’ notice before liftoff, so departures from Reagan National were never halted the way they normally would be. The helicopter took off anyway and lost separation with an American Airlines regional jet bound for Florida. The two aircraft came within 0.82 nautical miles laterally, well inside the 1.5 miles federal rules require.

Here is where the ballroom comes in. Helicopter flights were moved off the South Lawn to the Ellipse in May because of Trump’s construction projects, including the ballroom replacing the East Wing and a new helipad. Controllers had already flagged the problem on July 30, and the crew acknowledged communications had been spotty and agreed on a backup. On August 4 the backup failed too. Controllers briefly lost contact with Marine One again on Thursday.

Washington already watched a helicopter and an airliner collide in January 2025 and kill 67 people. Now a vanity ballroom has pushed the president’s own helicopter into a workaround that has failed twice. The people flying commercial out of Reagan did not sign up for that risk.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this morning’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A president skipping Ground Zero because the microphone was off limits, an intelligence assessment that his war left America too weak to deter Russia, an official accused of diverting firefighters to his own ranch, and a ballroom project entangled in a near miss over Washington. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Upgrade to become a paid subscriber to make your support go even further.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ like button and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach more people. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

BONUS FEEL GOOD: MAPQUEST WON’T DO IT

Some hope to end on, from an unlikely place. After Trump signed his order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” MapQuest posted a screenshot of the lake with four words: “We’re not changing it.” The post cleared 70,000 likes. For scale, not one of the account’s two dozen posts in July broke two likes. MapQuest went further and built a tool letting anyone rename the lake whatever they want and generate a screenshot, and the replies came back with “Lake of Hormuz” and “Lake Gulf of Mexico.” Eric Trump turned up in the comments to sneer that he thought the iPhone 3 had killed MapQuest fifteen years ago, which is a strange flex about a company currently getting more attention than the executive order. Trump’s orders bind federal agencies. They do not bind private companies, mapmakers, Canada, or anybody else. Mark Carney summed it up: naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario, then, now and always.

See you later today for our evening update.

Subscribe now

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Thursday, August 27, 2026. Trump spent today renaming a lake he does not own while his corruption caught up with him in three different places.

Before we get into it, tap that ❤️ and restack this edition. The algorithms were built to smother reporting like the stories below, and a share from you is what breaks through.

There is a lot tonight; Trump has a meltdown today. It was like watching a child have their toy taken away. Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” and Mark Carney refused to blink. A sealed Florida grand jury report says the DeSantis administration took $10 million meant for sick kids and funneled it into political committees. A nearly billion-dollar wind farm settlement is landing in the pocket of one of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago neighbors. And Joyce Beatty is still standing between Donald Trump and the Kennedy Center’s marble facade. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. Facebook has severely limited our content distribution, which means many of our own followers are not even seeing our reporting in their feeds anymore. This came after we reported on Zuckerberg cozying up to Trump. That is not a coincidence. That is what happens when independent media tells the truth about a billionaire. The one thing no algorithm can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that does not flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Subscribe right now or upgrade your subscription. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you have not upgraded to a paid subscription yet, tonight is the night. With Facebook working to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they cannot silence. Subscribe right now or upgrade your subscription. Join us here:

Subscribe now

TRUMP RENAMES LAKE ONTARIO AND CARNEY REFUSES TO FLINCH

Trump signed an executive order Thursday ordering the United States government to call Lake Ontario “Lake America,” effective immediately. He said Canada had been ripping us off for a long time on trade.

Mark Carney did not blink. “In the face of unjustified American tariffs, Canadians have shown resolve, purpose, and strength,” the Canadian prime minister wrote, adding that his government is protecting Canadian workers, businesses, and families. The lake in question is 52% inside Canadian territory. Trump’s order only changes what the U.S. federal government calls it. Canada is under no obligation to play along, and it will not.

The stunt landed in the middle of a real trade war that is costing real money. After negotiations collapsed, Trump slapped 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods, including liquor, dairy, toys, clothing, electrical equipment and hockey gear. Carney suspended the talks and promised to hit back dollar for dollar. Ottawa followed through Tuesday with retaliatory tariffs of up to 50% on about $20 billion in American products, including steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics. Those take effect September 8. Trump has also threatened 50% tariffs on Canadian cars, trucks and auto parts starting January 1, 2027, aimed at an auto industry whose supply chains cross the border constantly.

Republicans see what is coming. More than a dozen GOP senators recently pushed back on Trump’s own decision to let in tariff-free foreign beef, and party officials are increasingly nervous that higher prices on cars, gas and groceries become their problem in the midterms. Trump’s answer to voters worried about affordability was to rename a body of water. He then joked that with a gulf and a lake in the bag, all he needs is an ocean, floating the Atlantic or the Pacific as next.

Here is the part that hits your kitchen table. Tariffs on Canadian inputs raise what American manufacturers pay, and tariffs on finished goods raise what you pay at the register. Renaming the lake costs Trump nothing. The trade war costs you.

Subscribe now

FLORIDA GRAND JURY SAYS RON DESANTIS MISAPPROPRIATED $10 MILLION MEANT FOR SICK KIDS

A sealed Florida grand jury report found that Ron DeSantis misappropriated $10 million in taxpayer money and called the transfer part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities.

The money came from a settlement with Centene, the health care giant caught overbilling Florida for prescription drugs under the Florida Healthy Kids program. Florida was owed $67 million. In September 2024, after letting the case sit for three years, state officials suddenly moved, and the settlement was rewritten so $57 million went back to taxpayers and $10 million went to the Hope Florida Foundation, a nonprofit tied to first lady Casey DeSantis, and it was gone within 25 days. From there it moved through two outside groups and into political committees. A forensic accountant found that Attorney General James Uthmeier’s PAC, Keep Florida Clean, received $8.5 million of it. That PAC then sent $7 million to the Republican Party of Florida. The money was spent in 2024 to defeat Amendment 3, the citizen initiative to legalize marijuana.

The timeline is the tell. Centene was required to wire the $10 million to Hope Florida within seven days while it got more than a year to repay the $57 million owed to taxpayers. The grand jury believes the rush was because the election was 45 days away. There was no press release. There was no notification to the Legislature. Two of the signatures were collected in the chaos after Hurricane Helene made landfall, including from a Department of Health chief of staff who testified she had never seen the agreement before, did not know a settlement was in the works, and would not have signed had she known the money was headed to a political committee. The former Hope Florida chairman said he approved sending the money out because he assumed it was for hurricane victims, then told the grand jury the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Nobody has been charged. The grand jury said it could not find sufficient evidence to prosecute because, in its words, nobody would take responsibility for the decision or remember who made it. Uthmeier has called the whole affair a nothingburger and says he has not been indicted or targeted. DeSantis says he was not involved in the settlement agreement and is very happy with how everything was done. He still calls it a hoax. The report has been sealed since January 28, and one source familiar with the investigation says people named in it, Uthmeier among them, have spent seven months fighting to keep it from the public.

Uthmeier is on the ballot in November. So is Ashley Moody, the attorney general at the time, who the grand jury found knew of the plan and authorized her deputy to sign. That $10 million was supposed to buy health insurance for poor children. It bought campaign ads instead, and the men responsible are asking Floridians for a promotion.

Subscribe now

$900 MILLION FROM A KILLED WIND PROJECT IS HEADED TO A MAR-A-LAGO NEIGHBOR

Trump is paying a German energy company $1.2 billion in taxpayer money to abandon offshore wind leases in New York, California and Louisiana, and $900 million of that is about to land with a billionaire who lives down the road from Mar-a-Lago.

Here is how it works. The settlement with RWE does not just hand over the cash. It requires the company to turn around and invest in conventional energy. RWE is using the bulk of the payout, $900 million, to buy a stake in a Louisiana liquefied natural gas project. The seller is Stonepeak, the private equity firm run by Australian billionaire Michael Dorrell, who gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and owns a home near Mar-a-Lago. Dorrell has bragged publicly about the access, describing it as a once-in-a-lifetime thing and saying he has brought a bunch of friends to sit fifteen meters from the president.

Trump has spent years attacking offshore wind as ugly, expensive and bad for whales. Killing it is not free. These settlements have now cost close to $4 billion, paid out to make energy projects disappear, while his administration works to expand fossil fuels.

The White House says there is nothing to see. Spokeswoman Taylor Rogers called it a brazen attempt to insinuate a conflict of interest that does not exist and blamed agenda-driven reporting. RWE says it acted on its own, and Interior says nobody at the department told RWE where to invest. Congressman Jared Huffman was blunter, calling the settlements an insane waste of taxpayer funds and saying this adds the stench of corruption.

Follow the shape of it. Your money goes out to cancel a power project, gets routed by federal requirement into fossil fuels, and ends up enriching a man who paid for the inauguration and lives near the president’s club. You are paying for the whole trip.

JOYCE BEATTY IS STILL HOLDING THE LINE AT THE KENNEDY CENTER

A federal judge already told Donald Trump he cannot put his name on the Kennedy Center. His hand-picked board voted to do it anyway. Joyce Beatty dragged them back into court Thursday.

Judge Christopher Cooper ruled this summer that Congress made it crystal clear the memorial honors the assassinated president and cannot carry another formal name on Trump’s unilateral say-so. The letters came down. The scaffolding and white tarp are still up outside the building, with only “The John F.” and part of a K currently visible. Earlier this month the Trump-dominated board voted again, this time to add “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” beneath Kennedy’s name, plus a line crediting the Trump Kennedy Center Fund once it hits $100 million. The board also voted to rename the grounds President Donald J. Trump Plaza.

Beatty’s lawyers called the vote a breathtaking act of defiance and filed an emergency motion to block it. Their filing put the administration’s own argument in plain English: the government has essentially told the court what a nice Kennedy Center you have here, what a shame if something happened to it. “This is a breathtaking assault on the rule of law. It is delusional. And it must stop,” her legal team wrote. Outside the courthouse, Beatty attorney Nathaniel Zelinsky said the administration is courting a constitutional crisis for one man’s vanity.

The threat is not subtle. The Justice Department argued the venue is at risk of deteriorating and eventually being demolished without Trump as its sole hope. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick showed up to make the case personally, calling Trump the most credible person in the world and the greatest builder in the world, and explaining that a building from 1964 that does not get renovated eventually gets torn down. Asked why the name could not simply wait until the renovation is finished, Lutnick said that is not usually how it works.

This is what it looks like when someone refuses to be bullied. A sitting congresswoman went to court, won, went back when they defied the ruling, and is still there. Trump has the board, the Justice Department and a cabinet secretary doing the talking. Beatty has a court order and the nerve to enforce it. So far, that has been enough.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If tonight’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A president renaming a lake while his tariffs raise your grocery bill, a state grand jury finding $10 million meant for sick children got spent on campaign ads, a billion-dollar settlement flowing to a man who lives near Mar-a-Lago, and a congresswoman holding the line in court while a cabinet secretary threatens a national memorial. These are the stories that get softened or skipped in newsrooms owned by people with something to lose. We chase them down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page and on you. If you have been reading Really American on a free subscription, tonight is the night to upgrade. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Your support is what puts these stories in front of millions of people and keeps the pressure on. Subscribe today or upgrade your subscription now.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ and restack this one before you go. It makes a bigger difference than you would think, and it helps these stories reach the people the algorithm would rather they did not.

— The Really American Team

ONE MORE THING: TRUMP RENAMED A LAKE, PRITZKER RENAMED A TOWER IN AMAZING TROLL

End on a laugh. Hours after the White House account announced that Lake Ontario is now LAKE AMERICA, complete with a flag emoji and a map, JB Pritzker answered with the only response the moment deserved. The Illinois governor posted a photo of Trump Tower in Chicago, the president’s name crossed out in red, one word slapped across the glass in white block letters. “EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY: Trump Tower is renamed to NATALIE TOWER!” No explanation necessary. Everybody got it instantly, which tells you how completely Trump’s obsession with his aide has escaped the White House and become public property. That is the trouble with governing by renaming things. It is a game anyone can play, it costs nothing to play it, and the other guy is funnier. Trump can rename a lake he does not own. He cannot make people stop laughing. Have a good night.

Subscribe now

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Thursday, August 27, 2026. Before we dive in, take a second to tap that ❤️ and restack this edition. These algorithms were built to smother reporting like the stories below, and a share from you is what breaks through.

We have a lot to get into today. Trump is furious at his social media team as his own Education Department posted a video that accidentally cast him as Hitler, then scrambled to delete it. Newly revealed documents indicate the nation’s health secretary lied to the Senate under oath. A Trump-appointed judge just refused to erase Steve Bannon’s conviction. And a rising Democratic star turned Trump’s obsession with Natalie Harp into the joke of the week. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. Facebook has severely limited our content distribution, which means many of our own followers aren't even seeing our reporting in their feeds anymore. This came after we did reporting on Zuckerberg cozying up to Trump. That is not a coincidence; it is what happens when independent media tells the truth about a billionaire. The one thing no algorithm can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. If you believe this reporting matters, subscribe right now or upgrade your subscription. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. With Facebook working to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Subscribe right now or upgrade your subscription. Join us here:

Subscribe now

TRUMP’S EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ACCIDENTALLY COMPARES HIM TO HITLER

The Department of Education posted a video meant to make Trump look strong. Instead, it cast him as Adolf Hitler, and then quietly deleted the whole thing. Trump is absolutely furious about this. This is not the first time his social media team went off the rails — they’ve been slammed for racist videos portraying Obamas as apes and depicting Trump as Jesus.

On Wednesday, the department’s official account posted a 19-second montage captioned “No one does it like us,” followed by a tiger emoji. It opened with a scene from Darkest Hour, the 2017 Churchill biopic, in which Gary Oldman as Churchill snaps, “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth!” The clip then cut to a montage of Trump raising his fist and pointing, set to rap music. There was just one problem. In that scene, the “tiger” Churchill refuses to reason with is Hitler and Nazi Germany.

People noticed immediately. Even Pedro Gonzalez, a former Trump supporter, spelled it out: the right “plays this game where it winks at white supremacists and even fascists,” and the clip uses the tiger, meaning Hitler, to stand in for Trump. “Nudge nudge wink wink,” he wrote. Others asked the obvious question: isn’t the tiger in that scene literally Nazi Germany? The department deleted the post after the story went public.

This is the government’s education agency, the one meant to teach children history, so historically illiterate it accidentally likened the president to Hitler while trying to flatter him. Either they did not understand the clip they chose, or they understood it perfectly. Neither is comforting.

DOCUMENTS INDICATE RFK JR. LIED TO THE SENATE

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary who wants to prosecute others for lying to Congress, appears to have lied to Congress himself.

Newly revealed documents indicate Kennedy misled senators during his confirmation hearings about a 2021 trip to Samoa, according to the Guardian. Kennedy claimed he traveled there for an Independence Day celebration and to discuss a medical tracking system. But officials at the State Department and UNICEF privately discussed that the trip was about vaccines. Kennedy has long been one of the country’s most prominent anti-vaccine activists, and the visit came during a period tied to a deadly measles outbreak that killed dozens of Samoan children. Senators including Ron Wyden and Ed Markey say Kennedy lied or misled the Senate.

The hypocrisy is staggering. Just last month, Kennedy suggested former health official Dr. Anthony Fauci could face perjury charges for his own congressional testimony. Now the same man stands accused of exactly that, under oath, to win his confirmation.

This is who runs American health policy: an anti-vaxxer who appears to have lied to the Senate about an anti-vaccine trip tied to children dying of a preventable disease. He wants perjury charges for his enemies. The documents suggest he should look in the mirror first.

Subscribe now

TRUMP JUDGE REFUSES TO ERASE BANNON’S CONVICTION

Even a judge Trump appointed will not go along with the administration’s attempt to rewrite Steve Bannon’s criminal record.

A Trump-appointed federal judge on Wednesday denied the Justice Department’s request to throw out Bannon’s conviction for contempt of Congress, according to The Daily Beast. Bannon, the MAGA architect, served four months in prison after a jury convicted him in 2022 for defying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. In February, Trump’s ultra-loyalist US Attorney Jeanine Pirro filed a motion to vacate the indictment entirely, trying to erase the conviction from the books.

The judge said no. The DOJ, which is supposed to prosecute crimes, went to bat for a convicted Trump ally, and a member of Trump’s own bench refused to let it happen.

This is the weaponized Justice Department caught in the act, not going after enemies this time but trying to launder a friend’s conviction away. That it took a Trump appointee to stop it tells you how far this DOJ has strayed from its job. The law is supposed to apply to Bannon like everyone else. One judge just remembered that.

EL-SAYED TROLLS TRUMP OVER NATALIE HARP

Trump’s obsession with aide Natalie Harp has become such an open joke that Democrats are now needling him about it on national television.

After Trump fired off another bizarre social media outburst, Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed pounced. “Natalie, I think he’s had a little too much iPad for the week,” El-Sayed wrote on X, addressing the president’s ever-present aide directly. “He needs his rest.” The jab landed because everyone now knows the reference: Harp, the 35-year-old aide whose devotion to Trump has consumed the White House for weeks, treated like the minder of a cranky toddler.

El-Sayed did not stop there. At a Wednesday town hall, he mocked Trump’s grasp of economics, saying the president got “money from daddy, become a nepo baby and all of a sudden you think you’re some kind of master businessman.” He called the Canada tariffs pure ego: “These tariffs are simply about his ego, and he wants us to have to pay for them.” Then he turned on his Republican opponent Mike Rogers, who flipped from Trump critic to loyalist, calling it cowardice. “It is one thing to be an idiot,” El-Sayed said. “It is another entirely to be so small as a human being as to know the other person is an idiot and do what they want anyway, because all you want is power.”

This is how you beat a bully. Not with hand-wringing, but by naming exactly what everyone sees. El-Sayed treated Trump’s meltdowns as the punchline they are, and the room laughed along. Fear is a spell, and mockery breaks it.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this morning’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A government agency accidentally comparing the president to Hitler, a health secretary caught misleading the Senate, a DOJ trying to erase a friend’s conviction, and a Democrat turning Trump’s chaos into a punchline. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Your support helps us bring you these stories to millions of people and keeps the pressure on those in power. Subscribe today or upgrade your subscription now.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach people the algorithm would rather they didn’t. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

We’ll see you soon!

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Wednesday, August 26, 2026. Trump’s week is not going well.

Before we dive in, take a second to tap that ❤️ and restack this edition. These algorithms were built to smother reporting like the stories below, and a share from you is what breaks through.

We have a lot to get into this evening. Tonight, Trump’s own party is in open revolt over his trade war, with a White House insider calling his plans “ridiculous.” Two dozen states just sued to stop his mail-voting crackdown before ballots go out next week. Repairs on his botched Reflecting Pool are exposing just how shoddy the work really was. And with his press secretary gone in days, Trump still cannot find anyone to take the job. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. The newsrooms most Americans rely on are being swallowed by billionaires, from Bezos at the Post to the Ellisons taking over CBS and CNN. When the richest men in the country own the press, the stories that make them or their allies look bad get softened, buried, or never told at all. The stories below are exactly the kind those newsrooms will not tell the same way. Really American answers to none of them. We are funded by readers, not billionaires, and that independence is the whole point. Becoming a paid subscriber is what makes it possible to report plainly on all of it without worrying about who it upsets. Every paid subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. While the billionaires buy up the rest of the press, every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

TRUMP’S OWN PARTY REVOLTS OVER HIS TRADE WAR

Trump promised his trade war with Canada and his foreign beef scheme would help Americans. Now even his own White House is calling it “ridiculous.”

A senior White House source told Really American’s White House Correspondent, Brian Karem, on condition of anonymity, that the president’s approach is self-defeating. “Making prices higher for average Americans while picking a fight with a neighbor who shares the longest unguarded national border in the world is just nuts,” the source said. On Capitol Hill, Republicans are piling on. One GOP staffer told us Trump effectively “screwed” his own party in the midterms with the beef gambit, asking, “How can you claim to put America first when you’re putting foreign ranchers first?” Another compared the Canada tariffs to “shooting yourself in the foot for no reason” barely two months before the election.

The senators are not hiding either. Wyoming’s John Barrasso said Americans want US beef on the table, “not foreign imports.” Trump loyalist Tom Cotton called the beef plan “ill-advised.” Thom Tillis called it “a mistake.” Mike Rounds said it was out of step with any real America-First policy. Former Senator John Danforth went furthest, urging Congress to invoke its constitutional powers and rein in the tariffs before they do more harm.

When the president’s own White House, his Senate allies, and the ranchers he claims to champion are all telling him the same thing, the problem is not messaging. Trump picked a fight that raises your prices and hurts his own voters, and his party knows it. They are just no longer willing to stay quiet about it.

Subscribe now

TWO DOZEN STATES SUE TO SAVE MAIL VOTING

The fight over Trump’s attack on mail voting just escalated, with about two dozen states going to court to stop him days before ballots go out.

Tonight, 25 Democratic attorneys general filed a new lawsuit Wednesday against the Postal Service over a Trump rule that would require federal approval of states’ ballot envelope designs and demand they hand over lists of eligible voters. Election officials warn the rule is impossible to implement in the days before the first mail ballots go out next week. “USPS has no authority to decide who can and cannot vote by mail,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James.

The suit landed two days after the Supreme Court ruled against an earlier Democratic challenge, though the justices notably did not say Trump’s order was legal, only that the challenge came too early. Trump has spent years falsely blaming mail voting for his 2020 loss and has openly said Republicans should “take over” vote counting in Democratic areas.

This is the fight that matters most. Mail voting is how millions of working people, seniors, and service members cast a ballot, and Trump is trying to jam the gears right as the election begins. Two dozen states just stood up to stop him. The right to vote does not defend itself, and this is what defending it looks like.

Subscribe now

THE POOL REPAIRS EXPOSE JUST HOW BAD THE JOB WAS

Trump’s crews went in to fix his botched Reflecting Pool, and instead they proved how shoddy the whole thing was.

Video shared Wednesday showed workers power-washing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and pulling up chunks of the “American Flag Blue” sealant by hand, flaps of the liner peeling loose as they worked. This is the same pool Trump had painted blue, only for it to spawn the biggest algae bloom in years and start peeling almost immediately. Astonishingly, the same contractor behind the original disaster, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, was rehired for the repairs, with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum insisting “they did a fantastic job.”

Trump still blames “vandals” for the damage, even though his own prosecutor, Jeanine Pirro, dropped charges after concluding it was a botched installation. New signs on the fence keep pushing the vandal story and blaming past administrations for neglect going back to 1922.

This is the whole operation in one leaky pool. A rushed vanity project, done badly, blamed on everyone else, then handed back to the very contractor who botched it. They would rather rewrite history on a fence sign than admit the job was bad. The pool tells the truth even when they won’t.

NOBODY WANTS TO BE TRUMP’S PRESS SECRETARY

Karoline Leavitt walks out the door in days, and Trump still has no one to replace her. That may be because no one wants the job.

Trump insists he is drowning in applicants. “I have never had so many job applications in my life,” he told reporters. “They all want that job.” The reality is that there are no front-runners, and top officials will have to split briefing duties on a rotation once Leavitt leaves Friday. The floated names are not exactly clamoring. CNN’s Scott Jennings, an early favorite, said only “I don’t know” when asked. Trump’s former attorney Alina Habba publicly ruled herself out. Pressed on who he wants, Trump has tossed out random answers, even telling one reporter, “Maybe you.”

The job used to be one of the most coveted in Washington. Now it is a rotating hot seat defending a president polling in the low 30s, and the qualified people are taking a pass.

An empty podium says a lot. When the most visible job in the administration cannot find a taker, it is a sign of an operation people are trying to leave, not join. The rats are not lining up for the sinking ship. They are looking for the exits.

Prediction markets show a dead heat between Scott Jennings and Anna Kelly, but the end result could be someone else entirely.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If tonight’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A party revolting against its own president, two dozen states fighting to protect your vote, a vanity project peeling apart in real time, and a White House nobody wants to work for. The billionaires buying up America’s newsrooms have no interest in framing these stories honestly, because too often the stories are about them. We answer only to our readers. Becoming a paid subscriber is what makes it possible to report plainly on all of it without worrying about who it upsets. If that matters to you, subscribe or upgrade today.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ and restack this one before you go. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach people the algorithm would rather they didn’t. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

ONE MORE THING: OHIO COULD TURN PURPLE AGAIN

Some hope to end on. Ohio, a state that has drifted deep red in recent years, is suddenly up for grabs. According to The New York Times, polls show dead heats for governor and a coveted Senate seat, with enough House races in play to help decide control of Congress. The reason is the thing you feel every day: prices. Voters across every region and demographic are furious about groceries, gas, utility bills, rent, the Iran war, and unpopular data center projects being forced on their communities. A former Republican congressman is warning his own party that independents have every reason to stay home. Sherrod Brown is mounting a Senate comeback. Even lifelong conservatives are saying business conditions have gotten “scary.” The anger is real, and it is bipartisan, and it is pointed straight at the people in power. Nothing is decided, but a state everyone wrote off is back in play, and that is how the map starts to change. Have a good night.

Subscribe now

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Wednesday, August 26, 2026. Before we get to the news, do us a quick favor: tap that ❤️ and restack this one. The algorithms are designed to smother reporting like this, and nothing breaks through them like a share from you.

We have a lot to get into this morning. It all spells disaster for Trump. Today, Trump’s handpicked Senate candidate won her runoff and then made the single strangest argument against healthcare you will ever hear. Trump is about to blow $400 million making the midterms all about himself, which may be the best gift he could hand Democrats. The trade war is coming for something in every American bathroom. And the RNC sent out a fundraising text so tone-deaf it has to be read to be believed. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution. Meta’s changes strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us, and that was a choice, not an accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump, and independent progressive media is what got sacrificed. The one thing no billionaire can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Becoming a paid subscriber ensures that we keep the lights on and bring more investigations directly to you.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. With Facebook working to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

GRAHAM WINS, THEN MAKES THE CASE FOR HER OPPONENT

Darline Graham won her Senate runoff Tuesday night, and then, in her victory speech, made possibly the strangest argument against universal healthcare anyone has heard.

Graham, appointed to her late brother Lindsey’s seat and pushed across the line by Trump, used the speech to attack her Democratic opponent, pediatrician Dr. Annie Andrews, for supporting healthcare as a human right. “Her views are those of Bernie Sanders and AOC,” Graham said. Then, seconds later, she told her own story to prove she understands hardship. “My parents worked long, hard hours. If they were sick, they had to get up and go to work,” she said. “My mother passed away when I was 11 and my father just over a year later.”

Read that again. She trashed a plan to make healthcare accessible, then described her own parents working through illness and dying young as the reason she gets it. The internet did not miss it. Critics called it the craziest argument against universal healthcare they had ever seen. Even Grace Chong, an executive at Steve Bannon’s media company, piled on: “This is what’s wrong with Rs. ‘My parents suffered, so yours should too.’”

It was not Graham’s first stumble. Last week she admitted on a debate stage that “national security is not my thing.” Her own primary opponent, Ralph Norman, told a booing crowd in his concession that Graham’s win was good news for Democrats.

This is who Trump spent a rally and countless Truth Social posts dragging over the finish line. She made her opponent’s argument for her on the biggest night of her campaign. Democrats could not have scripted it better.

Subscribe now

TRUMP HANDS DEMOCRATS A $400 MILLION GIFT

Trump has decided the best way to save the Republican Congress is to make the midterms all about the least popular thing on the ballot: himself.

According to The Atlantic, Trump met with advisers this month to plan how to spend the $400 million his MAGA Inc. super PAC is sitting on. His approval is stuck in the low 30s, and Republican strategists are worried he will drag their candidates down. His advisers gently suggested his problem was just messaging, that voters simply do not know his accomplishments. Trump’s response was to order a wave of ads about himself. “Go look at the clips,” he reportedly told his ad team. “I cite accomplishments all the time.”

One person familiar with the plan said Trump is “essentially going to be on the ballot.” That is exactly what Democrats want. History is brutal here: since World War II, the president’s party has gained House seats in a midterm only twice. Nationalizing this election around a president polling in the low 30s is not a strategy. It is a gift.

Trump cannot help himself. Told his brand is the problem, he decided to put more of his brand on the ballot. Every dollar of that $400 million spent making November a referendum on Trump is a dollar spent reminding voters exactly why they are unhappy.

TRUMP’S TRADE WAR IS COMING FOR YOUR TOILET PAPER

Trump’s trade war with Canada is about to hit Americans in a very personal place: the bathroom.

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs, matching Trump’s “dollar for dollar,” target nearly 900 American goods starting September 8, and paper products are among the hardest hit. Here is the problem, according to the Guardian. American toilet paper is often made domestically, but it leans heavily on lumber-rich Canada for the raw pulp. The US imported $328 million worth of Canadian toilet paper in 2024 alone, more than from any other country, and Charmin’s maker already warned last year that tariffs would force price hikes. Liquor, dairy, cars, and lobster are all in the crossfire too.

Trump’s own trade representative insists none of this will touch consumers. “There’s no possible way” the dispute hits Americans, Jamieson Greer said. “The fundamentals are good. I don’t think this is going to affect anything.”

They always say that. The tariffs are paid by American importers, who pass the cost to you. A president picked this fight, lost it, and now the bill lands on your grocery receipt and, yes, your toilet paper. The “fundamentals are good” line is what they tell you right before the prices go up.

THE RNC SAYS THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD

The Republican Party accidentally told voters exactly what it thinks of their struggles, and it did it in a fundraising text.

On Tuesday, the RNC sent a text in JD Vance’s name that read: “If you can’t give right now, don’t. Groceries cost what they cost.” The line, flagged by a Washington Post reporter, was meant to sound folksy and honest. Instead it landed as a shrug from a party that has done nothing about the cost of living. The linked letter promised to “tell you the truth, including the parts you don’t want to hear,” then got to the point: “The Republican National Committee needs money.”

The tone-deafness is the story. The message came days after Vance stood in his Ohio hometown claiming the administration was reviving the “American dream of homeownership” and falsely asserting rents were falling for the first time in years. Meanwhile the actual fundraising page nagged donors for a preselected $47, a recurring gift, and an extra $47 on August 28, under the all-caps warning that “ILLEGALS ARE TAKING YOUR MEDICAID BENEFITS!”

“Groceries cost what they cost” is the most honest thing the RNC has said in years. It is a party telling you your pain is just the price of things, right before asking for your money. Voters tend to remember that kind of honesty.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this morning’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A Senate candidate arguing against her own voters, a president spending $400 million to remind everyone why they dislike him, a trade war hitting your bathroom, and a party shrugging at your grocery bill. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ like button and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach more people. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

Subscribe now

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Tuesday, August 25, 2026. Before we get to the news, hit that ❤️ and restack this one. The algorithms were built to bury exactly this kind of reporting, and nothing cuts through them like a share from you.

We have a lot to get into this evening. Tonight, Dolly Parton, one of the most beloved figures this country has ever produced, has died at 80, leaving behind a legacy of generosity that puts her critics to shame. The family of a nurse shot in the back by federal agents is breaking their silence and demanding the justice Trump’s government keeps burying. Trump was cornered into a rare apology as his Pentagon tears itself apart from the inside. And a Michigan congresswoman turned his latest tantrum into the punchline it deserved. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution. Meta’s changes strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us, and that was a choice, not an accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump, and independent progressive media is what got sacrificed. Look at who owns the rest of it now: the same billionaires whose names show up in these stories, from Bezos at the Post to the Ellisons taking over CBS and CNN. The stories below will not be told the same way in newsrooms they control. The one thing no billionaire can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every paid subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. With Facebook working to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

DOLLY PARTON, AN AMERICAN TREASURE, DIES AT 80

Dolly Parton is gone, and the country is a little dimmer tonight.

The music legend died peacefully in Nashville on Tuesday at 80, her family announced. She was the best-selling female country artist of all time, an 11-time Grammy winner, the voice behind “Jolene” and “Coat of Many Colors,” a movie star in 9 to 5 and Steel Magnolias. But the numbers that matter most tonight are the ones she gave away. Her Imagination Library has mailed more than 332 million free books to children under 5 over 31 years, all because her own father never learned to read. In 2020, she donated $1 million to COVID research at Vanderbilt that helped fund the Moderna vaccine. Now, Trump and RFK Jr. are attempting to dismantle and discredit that research, which saved millions of lives.

She used her voice for more than singing. “I do not believe that we should criticize and judge other people,” she once said in defense of the LGBT community. “We’re all God’s children. You should be allowed to be who you are.” She twice turned down Trump’s offer of a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Not everyone treated her generosity with the respect it deserved. Missouri Republicans cut $4 million in funding for her Imagination Library, gutting a program that asks nothing of a child but that they love to read.

Dolly Parton spent her life giving books to kids, standing up for the outcast, and treating everyone like family. She spent her life standing up to bullies like Trump. She donated and served when she did not have to. She was everything that Trump was not. That is what a life well lived looks like. Rest easy, Dolly. You earned it.

A FAMILY SPEAKS AND DEMANDS JUSTICE FOR ALEX PRETTI

Seven months after federal agents shot their son in the back, the family of Alex Pretti is done staying quiet.

Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and US citizen, was killed in Minneapolis on January 24 while filming a protest against Trump’s immigration crackdown. Eyewitness video shows two agents shot him about 10 times in five seconds after wrestling him to the ground. In their first TV interview, which aired Tuesday on Good Morning America, the family demanded answers the government still refuses to give. The agents have never been officially identified. The DOJ has refused to share the investigation with the family. “We want accountability for the people that did this to Alex,” his father Michael said.

The cruelty did not stop at the killing. Administration officials, including Stephen Miller, smeared Pretti as an “assassin” and “domestic terrorist.” Trump called him an “agitator” and possible “insurrectionist.” The footage tells a different story: Pretti was recording, tried to help a woman an agent had shoved, and was pepper-sprayed, beaten, and shot. His mother Susan’s words cut through everything: “What did he do to deserve to be murdered? To be left cold, on the ground, dead, my child? What did he do?”

A US citizen was killed by his own government, and that government has spent seven months protecting the shooters and slandering the dead. This family deserves the truth. So does the country.

Subscribe now

TRUMP HUMILIATED AND CORNERED INTO A RARE APOLOGY

Donald Trump does not apologize. This week, he did, and he threw his own defense secretary under the bus to do it.

According to The New York Times, Senator Joni Ernst called Trump after Pete Hegseth abruptly fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, a fellow Iowan she considered one of the Army’s best. Trump’s response was telling. He pinned the firing on Hegseth, then offered a message for the ousted general: “Tell the general I’m sorry.” Ernst had believed she’d secured assurances that George would serve out his term through 2027.

The episode pulls back the curtain on a Pentagon in turmoil. Hegseth fired George in a 15-second phone call. His handpicked replacement now lacks the Republican votes to be confirmed. And Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, once given a public vote of confidence by Trump, is reportedly “barely on speaking terms” with Hegseth and expected to leave. One earlier report described Hegseth as consumed by “paranoia” about being pushed out himself.

When the president is quietly apologizing for his own defense secretary’s decisions, the chain of command is broken. This is not strength at the top of the military. It is chaos, and it is Trump’s to own.

DINGELL TURNS TRUMP’S TANTRUM INTO A PUNCHLINE

Trump threatened to rename a Great Lake. A Michigan congresswoman made him regret it.

After trade talks with Canada collapsed, Trump posted Tuesday that the US was giving “serious consideration” to renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” even sharing a mocked-up map in gold lettering. Rep. Debbie Dingell, whose state borders those very lakes, had the perfect reply. “Let’s just call it Lake Natalie so we know you’ll start protecting our Great Lakes,” she wrote, tying his Canada meltdown to Natalie Harp, the aide who has consumed his White House all month.

It was a clean hit, and it landed. The jab folded two of Trump’s worst weeks into one line: a trade war he is losing to Canada, and the strange devotion of an aide whose letters called him her “Guardian and Protector.” MAGA loyalists melted down in the replies, which only spread it further.

Sometimes the sharpest response to a tantrum is not outrage but a punchline. Dingell reminded everyone that a president reduced to renaming lakes is not a strongman. He is a punchline waiting for someone to deliver it.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If tonight’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A beloved icon’s passing honored on our terms, a family’s fight for justice the government wants buried, a Pentagon in chaos, and a president reduced to a punchline. These stories will not be framed the same way in newsrooms owned by the same billionaires who appear in them. We chase them down without any of that pressure, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Becoming a paid subscriber ensures that we won’t stop reporting the truth even as the billionaires try to stop us.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ like button and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach more people. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

ONE MORE THING: A BAKER STANDS HIS GROUND AGAINST ICE

We’ll leave you with a small act of courage. In Charlotte, North Carolina, Manolo Betancur, owner of Manolo’s Bakery and a well-known champion of his immigrant community, confronted former Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino in his own parking lot on Sunday and told him he was not welcome inside or in Charlotte. Betancur says standing up for his community has cost his business tens of thousands of dollars, a year he calls worse than the 2008 recession or COVID. Still, he isn’t backing down. “I just want to serve bread, man,” he told the Charlotte Observer. “I want to serve cakes, and I just want to keep chasing the American Dream.” Sometimes fighting back is as simple as one person deciding who gets to walk through their door. Have a good night.

Subscribe now

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Tuesday, August 25, 2026. Before we get to the news, hit that ❤️ and restack this one. The algorithms were built to bury exactly this kind of reporting, and nothing cuts through them like a share from you.

We have a lot to get into this morning. Today, a leaked Oval Office warning shows Trump was told his Iran war would be a disaster, and he charged in anyway. A conservative judge is sounding the alarm that Trump may try to seize power outright if Republicans lose in November. The Kennedy Center’s money collapsed the moment Trump slapped his name on it. And after getting torched by Canada, Trump is now threatening to rename a Great Lake. Let’s get into it.

Here is the reality of this moment. Trump is flailing, and a flailing president with this much power is exactly when independent media matters most. Facebook has choked off our reach on purpose. Meta rewired its algorithm, tens of thousands of you lost the thread that led here, and that was no accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year making nice with Trump, and reporting like this is what got sacrificed for it. The one lever no billionaire controls is a direct subscription. If you want journalism that keeps its footing while the powerful lose theirs, this is how you protect it. Share this newsletter with someone who needs it. Every subscriber is one more person they cannot silence. Make your support go even further by becoming a paid subscriber now to help us keep the lights on.

So if you have not upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. While Facebook works to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they cannot shut down. Join us here:

Subscribe now

THE WARNING TRUMP IGNORED BEFORE STARTING HIS WAR

Trump was handed a roadmap of exactly how his Iran war would fall apart, and his ego steamrolled right over it.

According to details of a February meeting leaked to the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, warned him that attacking Iran would slam shut the Strait of Hormuz, throw global oil and energy markets into chaos, and that killing Iran’s supreme leader would only bring a successor who chased nuclear weapons harder. Top military leaders warned him the war would kill American troops and drain US munitions stockpiles. Every one of those predictions came true. Trump launched anyway, because he wanted the win more than he wanted the truth.

What followed reads like a man losing control of his own war. Told early on that Israel had killed Iran’s supreme leader, Trump had aides announce it at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser, then reportedly “crossed his arms and puffed out his chest” while the room applauded. The strut did not last. As the Strait stayed shut and gas prices soared, Gulf leaders begged the White House to end the war, Republicans warned it was sinking their midterms, and 18 US service members died. A rattled, furious Trump reportedly demanded to know why Iran would not fold, and even floated whether to “bomb the s--t out of Iran” to make the whole mess disappear.

“This was all predictable and predicted,” one nuclear policy expert told the Journal.

That is the story in a sentence. A weak, impulsive president was told precisely what would go wrong, ignored it to feel strong for an afternoon, and now cannot find the exit. Nearly six months in, Americans are paying for his ego in blood and at the pump.

A CONSERVATIVE JUDGE WARNS OF TRUMP’S “HIGH NOON” POWER GRAB

A president confident of winning does not plot how to cling to power after losing. Trump, it seems, is already plotting.

Former federal judge Michael Luttig, a lifelong Republican, laid out the scenario on his podcast, and it reeks of a White House bracing for defeat. If Democrats sweep the midterms, Luttig said, the danger hits on January 3, 2027, when the new Congress is sworn in. He warned Speaker Mike Johnson could try to keep Republicans in power by blocking newly elected Democrats from being seated, calling it “the final battle for America’s democracy.” Johnson has already shown he will do it, having once stalled a duly elected Democrat’s swearing-in for 50 days.

The scheme is as desperate as it is dangerous. At noon on January 3, the Speaker loses control of seating members, and the House Clerk takes over. Luttig said there are already discussions that Johnson could fire the clerk and install a loyalist, who could simply leave elected Democrats off the roll if friendly states refuse to certify their wins. Trump gave the game away in February, telling a MAGA podcaster that Republicans needed to “control the midterms to win the elections,” a line Luttig called “breathtaking.”

Strength does not need a backup plan to overturn an election. This is what weakness looks like when it is cornered. A president who senses the voters turning is reportedly already war-gaming how to ignore them. The way to make the plot collapse is to win so big it cannot be hidden. That fight starts now.

THE KENNEDY CENTER COLLAPSED THE MOMENT TRUMP’S NAME WENT UP

Everything Trump touches to make it his own seems to fall apart, and the Kennedy Center is the latest wreck.

According to confidential documents obtained by the Washington Post, ticket sales and donations cratered the moment Trump’s board renamed the center for him and bolted his name to the building. The institution is now on track to fall nearly $100 million short of its revenue target, facing a $23 million deficit even after gutting a third of its expenses. One official described the collapse without flinching: “Donors disappeared, ticket sales disappeared, artists disappeared, like it was doomsday.”

The spin could not survive contact with the numbers. Trump’s board publicly bragged that his “unique stature” as a fundraiser and developer had rescued the center from “financial ruin,” while the internal projections showed him personally driving it into the ground. An arts expert who reviewed the documents called it “a nosedive” and noted that nearly every other major cultural institution stayed stable this year. The Kennedy Center’s freefall was the exception, and Trump’s name was the cause.

This is the whole Trump act in miniature. He seizes something, slaps his name on it, declares a historic triumph, and the thing quietly rots. Audiences and donors walked out the door. No amount of gold lettering hides a failure this size.

Subscribe now

TRUMP THREATENS TO RENAME A GREAT LAKE

Losing a trade war he picked, humiliated by a Canadian premier, Trump reached for the last tool a cornered man has: renaming things.

Still stinging from Doug Ford branding him a “dictator” and “the king of bankruptcies,” Trump posted Tuesday morning that the US was giving “serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America” because it does not “expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer.” He signed off with his usual “Thank you for your attention to this matter.” It is the same tic that produced the “Gulf of America.”

The tantrum has a backdrop of total failure. After talks collapsed, the US hit Canada with 50 percent tariffs, Canada is retaliating dollar for dollar, and Prime Minister Mark Carney called the tariffs an act of war. Even JD Vance piled on Monday, sneering that Canada is a “state” before playing it off as a “Freudian slip.” None of it is working. Canada will not fold, and Trump is out of leverage.

So he is renaming a lake. This is not a man negotiating from strength. It is a man who got beaten by his own neighbor and is now picking a fight with a body of water to save face. The lake will be fine. His trade war is a smoking crater.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this morning’s edition showed you a president losing his grip, that is exactly what the billionaire-owned outlets would rather you not see. A war he was warned not to start, a judge sounding the alarm on his next power grab, a landmark collapsing under his name, and a trade war reduced to renaming lakes. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If you want independent reporting that holds steady while the powerful come apart, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Become a paid subscriber and help keep our reporters' coffee pots full so we can bring you the most important news.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ like button and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach more people. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

ONE MORE THING: TRUMP LOOKS LIKE “AN OPEN CAN OF SPAM”

We will leave you with this. Anthony Scaramucci, who famously lasted 11 days as Trump’s communications director, went on the record with The Times of London about the president’s beauty routine, and it is a gift. Scaramucci said his mother, an “old-school Italian” makeup artist, cannot stand Trump’s signature glow. “It’s like an orange bronzer he buys from a supply shop in the Bronx,” he said. “He looks like an open can of Spam without makeup.” Asked if he had actually seen Trump bare-faced, Scaramucci confirmed the president applies the tanner himself every morning and sometimes reapplies at night, and “thinks it looks fantastic, by the way.” It tracks with old reporting that Trump’s staff once had to prep two and a half bottles of Swiss face makeup for him daily. The man threatening to rename the Great Lakes is, by his own former aide’s account, spackling on Bronx bronzer between tantrums. Have a good one.

Share

Good evening, this is Really American. It is Monday, August 24, 2026. Before we get to the news, hit that ❤️ and restack this one. The algorithms were built to bury exactly this kind of reporting, and nothing cuts through them like a share from you.

A lot happened today, and our reporters tracked it all. Today, Trump tried to belittle Ontario’s premier and got buried for it, called a “dictator” and “the king of bankruptcies” as the trade war deepens. His White House is hemorrhaging staff, with insiders admitting they see the writing on the wall before Democrats take Congress. The Supreme Court cleared his crackdown on mail-in voting, the very method Trump uses himself. And his own farmers are turning on him, warning he put American agriculture last just as the midterms close in. Let’s get into it.

Before the news, one thing you need to know. Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution. Meta’s changes strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us, and that was a choice, not an accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump, and independent progressive media is what got sacrificed. The one thing no billionaire can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.

So if you haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today is the day. With Facebook working to bury us, every paid subscriber is one more voice they can’t silence. Join us here:

Subscribe now

DOUG FORD BURIES TRUMP, CALLS HIM ‘A DICTATOR’

Trump tried to belittle Ontario Premier Doug Ford. It went badly for him.

After the US slapped 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion in Canadian goods, Trump took to Truth Social Monday to dismiss Ford as a blustering “flunky” and declare the US had been “carrying Canada for decades, but no longer.” Ford did not flinch. “I don’t respond to a dictator like President Trump, a bully like President Trump,” he shot back at a press conference. “I’m not gonna take any advice off a guy that’s the king of bankruptcies.” He stood by an earlier remark telling Trump to “kiss my a**,” adding with a laugh, “I have a lot of real estate on my a**, so he has a lot of room.”

Ford went further than insults. He accused Trump of taxing his own people and made a direct appeal to American voters. “When it comes to the midterms, I have a message to the Americans: don’t vote in a person that’s gonna kill your jobs,” he said. “If I was allowed to, I’d be down there door-knocking.” Trump answered Monday by threatening yet another round of tariffs, 50 percent on all cars, trucks, and steel starting January 2027.

Here is where the whole standoff stands now. After talks collapsed, the markets that track this stuff basically gave up on a deal. The chance of a US-Canada agreement before September sits at just 7 percent, and before October only 17 percent. In other words, nobody serious expects this to get fixed soon.

Trump thought he could bully a neighbor into folding. Instead, he got a defiant premier telling Americans to vote his allies out, and a trade war with no exit in sight. The tariffs land on your prices. The humiliation lands on him.

Subscribe now

THE WHITE HOUSE IS FALLING APART, AND STAFFERS ARE LINING UP FOR THE EXIT

The exits are piling up, and the people leaving are not hiding why. Expect more “departures” over the next couple of months.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced her resignation earlier this month. Since then, Legislative Affairs Director James Braid, White House Counsel Dave Warrington, and Pardon Attorney Ed Martin have all said they are heading out too. According to Politico, more are expected to follow as staffers brace for Democrats taking Congress and launching investigations. “I think people are seeing the writing on the wall,” one former Trump official said, predicting Republicans lose the House and possibly the Senate, leaving the agenda stalled.

The reasoning is coldly practical. “If you want a decent job downtown, you need to bounce now, because there are still relationships to trade on in the majority,” another person close to the administration said. “It might be the last time clients get anything done.” Translation: get out while proximity to Trump is still worth something, before the subpoenas start and the doors close.

This follows a brutal year of turnover, from Kristi Noem to Pam Bondi to Tulsi Gabbard, and Trump recently raged about “hunting down” the leakers feeding reporters. When your own people are quietly updating their résumés because they think the ship is going down, that tells you more than any poll. The insiders closest to Trump are betting against him.

SUPREME COURT CLEARS TRUMP’S MAIL VOTING CRACKDOWN

Unfortunately, not all the news today was good, but we still have to cover it because it matters. The difference is that corporate media will put a spin on this for Trump, and we won’t. The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for Trump’s crackdown on mail-in voting, just as the midterms come into view.

The justices let Trump move ahead with his March executive order restricting mail ballots, according to the Associated Press. The order directs his administration to build lists of eligible voters and tells the Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on those lists. Trump has spent years falsely claiming mail voting breeds fraud, despite strong evidence to the contrary. The ruling does leave room for more court challenges, and with some states set to mail ballots within weeks, it is unclear how much can actually be imposed in time.

Here is the part that gives it away. Trump votes by mail himself. The method he is working to restrict for you is the one he uses without a second thought.

Mail voting is how millions of working people, seniors, and members of the military cast their ballots. Making it harder is not about fraud that does not exist. It is about deciding who gets to vote, and that should alarm anyone who believes elections belong to the people.

TRUMP’S OWN FARMERS TURN ON HIM

The people who grow America’s food are done pretending Trump is on their side, and Republicans should be shaking in their boots tonight for what is to come in November.

John Boyd Jr., a cattle and soybean farmer who leads the National Black Farmers Association, went on MS NOW Monday and tore into Trump’s beef import scheme. “I believe that this is a raw deal,” Boyd told Katy Tur, saying Trump “keeps making the announcement that he loves farmers, he loves cattlemen, and then undermines us with 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef that we don’t even know where it’s coming from.” His verdict was blunt: “He put the American farmers last.”

Boyd laid out the crushing math. American farmers are facing the highest input costs in history, he said, driven by Trump’s policies and his war with Iran, with diesel running $5 to $6 a gallon and fertilizer prices soaring. The country is losing an average of 77 farmers and cattlemen every day, with 300 foreclosures pending. Boyd said the beef deal helps meatpackers, not ranchers, and offers no guarantee of lower prices at the grocery store. “The president makes another sour deal and punches the American farmers in the face.”

This is Trump’s base talking. Rural America carried him, and now its farmers are watching their farms disappear while he floods the market with mystery foreign beef. When the people who feed the country say the president put them last, that is not a Democratic talking point. That is a warning shot heading into November.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA

If this evening’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A premier who refused to be bullied, a White House rushing for the exits, a voting crackdown from a man who votes by mail, and farmers turning on the president they backed. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down. Become a paid subscriber right now to make your support go even further.

Subscribe now

Tap the ❤️ like button and restack this one before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach more people. Thank you for everything you do.

— The Really American Team

Share