Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. If you’re watching this right now on Substack, help us out by tapping the ❤️ and clicking the restack button so we can get these stories in front of the most people.
Today, Dolly Parton’s sister says her voting machine in Nashville kept trying to switch her vote to that of Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, even though she said she’d never vote for Blackburn for any office. Donald Trump is threatening a major news outlet with “consequences” unless it retracts three stories about the president and his White House chief of staff. Trump’s public approval rating on economic issues just hit the lowest point of both of his administrations, with less than two weeks to go before voters cast their ballots. And a slew of Trump-backed Republican candidates are mired in embarrassing scandals that are both uniquely bizarre and genuinely disturbing.
A quick ask before the news: Donald Trump is going to war with the free press and we need your help. In this newsletter you’ll read about Trump ordering Politico to retract stories and apologize lest they face “consequences.” He also recently banned a reporter from the press pool after calling him a slur. This is all while his White House is locking our very own Brian Karem out without any explanation. We’re planning on taking him to court, but legal battles require resources, and unlike major outlets like Politico, we don’t have an army of lawyers on retainer.
Catch our interview with Kentucky Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Charles Booker tomorrow at 12 PM ET. Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
Stella Parton, who is the younger sister of the late Dolly Parton, said something weird happened while she was voting early at the Hermitage Library in Nashville. According to local NBC affiliate WSMV4, Parton says her ballot kept defaulting to Republican Senator Blackburn when she tried to select a different candidate.
In a post to her Facebook page, Parton said she had to go back and correct her vote three different times, adding she “would never vote for [Blackburn] for anything.” She was able to finally correct her choice before submitting her ballot, but she made sure to tell voters not to rush through the process just because they don’t want to hold up long lines. She then wrote: “Don’t let them rig this election.”
According to WSMV, some early voters in Williamson County (which houses Nashville) described running into a similar issue, with machines showing a different candidate than the one they selected.
The office of Republican Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett says it’s only received one complaint like this out of roughly 400,000 ballots cast so far across the state. Hargett’s office reminded voters to check their choices on the selection screen, the final review screen and the paper record the machine prints to confirm their vote. Anyone who sees a discrepancy should notify an election worker before officially submitting their ballot.
In Florida during the 2000 presidential election, a confusing butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County resulted in thousands of Al Gore’s voters casting their ballots for Pat Buchanan, allowing George W. Bush to win Florida by 537 votes, giving him an Electoral College majority. Nobody needs to prove a voting machine was rigged to understand this important lesson, because a democracy only works when people trust that their vote is properly counted. So before you leave the polling place, slow down, read the screen carefully, check the paper record and don’t let anybody hurry you out of the booth until you’ve made sure your vote is accurate.
Donald Trump’s White House is once again targeting Politico. In an official letter dated Monday, White House counsel William Scharf demanded Politico Global Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Greenberger to retract three separate articles about White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and promptly issue corrections, or else they would “face the consequences.”
The first story suggested Trump may have been seeking a replacement for Wiles. The second reported that the first one caused the president to have a meltdown in the West Wing. The third article claimed Wiles was responsible for former White House press secretary Katie Zacharia sitting down for disastrous Fox News interview with Sean Hannity before she was fired. Politico has since corrected that third story, saying that follow-up reporting indicated Wiles didn’t actually play a direct role in Zacharia’s interview with Hannity.
Scharf demanded Politico issue a public apology to both the president and his chief of staff, and warned that Politico’s relationship with the White House may soon be “reviewed,” and that there could be potential legal action down the road. The outlet’s attorneys wrote Wednesday that Politico “categorically rejects” the claims, and said the letter is part of a pattern of unconstitutional conduct from the White House. The publication also vowed to continue its reporting in spite of the government’s intimidation campaign.
The letter came a month after the White House banned Politico, CNN and MS NOW from the White House grounds (after it also banned Raw America White House reporter Brian Karem). U.S. District Judge Tim Kelly — a Trump appointee from his first term — later reversed that ban. Politico was also barred from Air Force One earlier this month. And Trump was recently seen on video telling The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg that he’d “better be careful,” before banning him from the White House press pool. He called CNN host Kaitlan Collins “a low-IQ person.”
When Richard Nixon tried to stop the New York Times from printing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the Supreme Court shut him down, and Justice Hugo Black wrote that the press exists to serve the governed, not the governors. A president who threatens a newsroom with consequences for stories he doesn’t like isn’t protecting his reputation, he’s trying to turn a free press into a court stenographer, and that’s always the first move of a man who’d rather rule than govern.
A new CNBC All-America Economic Survey has some worrying numbers for Republicans. According to the poll, eight out of ten Americans rate the current economy as either “fair” or “poor,” making that the highest share of respondents since December of 2023.
Donald Trump’s economic approval rating also dropped to 34 percent, which is down from 38 percent in July. Americans’ disapproval of Trump’s handling of the economy is now at 65 percent. That net rating of -31 is the worst of either one of Trump’s terms in the White House. That disapproval number is the highest CNBC has recorded for any president dating back to Barack Obama, when he presided over the Great Recession of the late aughts and early 2010s.
One big reason for those poor numbers is Republicans, with 35 percent of them now saying they’re pessimistic about the U.S. economy, which is a six-point increase from three months ago. GOP pollster Micah Roberts said the tiny margin of Republicans who say the economy is either “good” or “excellent” has “kind of broken.”
Voters now want Democrats to run Congress by a margin of 52 to 45 percent. Independent voters prefer Democrats by 16 percentage points, while women are moving in Democrats’ direction by a 22-point margin. Democrats are more fired up to vote this year, with 72 percent of them saying they’re “highly interested” in the upcoming election compared to just 62 percent of Republicans. Democrats’ lead on which party can be trusted to lower grocery prices has more than doubled since July.
Respondents are nearly unanimous on the issue of corruption, with 93 percent saying elected officials — including the president — shouldn’t be allowed to buy or sell stocks in companies that currently have federal contracts.
The last time a Republican president kept insisting the economy was fine despite his tariffs driving up prices for consumers was Herbert Hoover, who was famous for the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff. Voters responded by smashing his party in the midterms that fall, and followed that up by tossing Hoover out of office two years later. Working Americans always know what’s in their grocery cart before the pollsters. And when 93 percent of a bitterly divided country can still agree that politicians shouldn’t trade stocks in the companies being awarded federal contracts, that’s a stark verdict on a government that’s been for sale to the highest bidder.
Our last story this morning: Mother Jones is pointing out that many Trump-endorsed candidates are mired in embarrassing self-inflicted scandals. On the podcast Stress Test, D.C. reporter David Corn and co-host Garrison Hayes pointed to Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Victor Marx, who said any couple that lives together before marriage could end up being possessed by demons. They also highighted Georgia Republican Senate candidate Mike Collins, whose son-in-law has promoted white nationalist and antisemitic content while being on the campaign’s payroll.
Additionally, Mother Jones reporter Abby Vesoulis looked into thousands of pages of filings involving Republican Congressman Max Miller of Ohio, who is facing allegations of brutal domestic abuse from his ex-wife Emily Moreno, who is the daughter of Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno. She told police that Miller threw boiling water at her, held a gun to her head and shoved her against a wall. Miller denies the allegations, but the nonpartisan Cook Political Report has since moved his once-safe GOP seat to a toss-up.
Reporter Noah Lanard found that David Flippo, a Trump-backed Republican running for a House seat in the Reno, Nevada area, never actually received the Bronze Star he’s said he was awarded. Flippo also never filed four required financial disclosures, and has poured more than $2.5 million into his campaigns without revealing a source for the cash.
Garrison Hayes argued that it seems like Republican base voters don’t care if a candidate traffics in open racism and antisemitism. Voters will get to have their say in less than two weeks.
George Washington used his 1796 farewell address to warn that rabid partisanship was a fire that, left untended, would consume the entire republic. When the president continues to endorse candidates who lie about receiving military honors, believe in demonic possession and hire white nationalists, that party has ceased to be a legitimate political organization. That’s exactly the kind of partisanship Washington warned us about.
Democracy requires a media that shines a light on the rich and powerful. But when billionaires aligned with the regime in power are buying up the biggest media outlets, democracy gets quietly snuffed out. That’s why independent media is so vital right now. But we can’t survive without readers willing to step up and support us.
I’m Thom Hartmann. As always, thank you for reading, and thank you for supporting independent media. If you haven’t already, please take a moment to hit the ❤️ and tap the restack icon so we can make sure these stories get read by the people who need them most.
Tomorrow, we’re interviewing Kentucky’s Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, Charles Booker, at 12 PM ET. Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
