Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. Before we get to the news, take a second and tap that ❤️ and restack this post. Big Tech’s algorithms were built to smother reporting like the stories below, and a share from you is what helps us break through.
America’s top military leaders are making it clear to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that Donald Trump’s war with Iran has stretched U.S. forces to a breaking point. Hegseth has also apparently built a secret network of paid MAGA influencers inside the Pentagon while posing as independent voices online. Michigan’s Republican Senate candidate is now having to walk back a fundraising email in which he falsely suggested that he saw Osama bin Laden’s dead body firsthand. And in Texas, Republicans are in a state of panic as Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico dominates the airwaves all while Trump is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars that he isn’t spending to help Ken Paxton.
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According to new reporting from The Washington Post, several top military commanders have warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that Trump’s war with Iran simply can’t keep going much longer. That warning, dated August 14th, showed up in a classified Pentagon planning document called the Secretary of Defense Orders Book.
All of the respective heads of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force signed off, along with the four-star generals overseeing U.S. military operations in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
The Pentagon is in damage-control mode. Defense Department spokesman Sean Parnell called the publication of the orders book a crime and insisted the initial reporting was inaccurate. However, he also confirmed that Hegseth routineyl deals with formal disagreements from commanders.
We’re now six months into the Iran war and the strain on America’s military is growing more untenable by the day. Ships, aircraft and troops dedicated toward watching other parts of the world have been pulled away to support Trump’s war, even including forces meant to help defend the U.S. defend itself from foreign attacks.
Several commanders formally registered what’s called a “non-concur” in the document, which is military language for “we disagree with this order, but we’re duty-bound top follow it anyway.”
The Navy’s top admiral, Daryl Caudle, had the most alarming assessment for Hegseth. He said the U.S. Navy simply cannot sustain its current commitment to Iran without an exit strategy. Barely a quarter of America’s destroyer fleet is even ready to deploy right now, which is a sharp drop from where the fleet was before the war started in February.
Sailors on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier — which was only just relieved — had their deployments extended by several months. Some have reported dire conditions on board like meager and spoiled food, poor plumbing and broken laundry facilities. There have even been reports of sailors attempting to jump overboard after so many months at sea with no clear end in sight.
Both the U.S. Army and Air Force went along with Hegseth’s plan to keep troops deployed in the region, but they admitted the risks can’t be ignored. Roughly 2,000 paratroopers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division were deployed in March and are expected to stay in the Middle East at least through September. And their mission could be extended further depending on what happens this fall.
Trump’s war has also significantly drained America’s arsenal. Nearly a quarter of the Pentagon’s Reaper drone fleet is gone. Patriot and THAAD interceptors, which are the missile defense systems that protect U.S. troops from incoming attacks, have also been depleted by this war. They were already stretched thin given that they’ve been helping Ukraine ward off Russian attacks since 2022.
Meanwhile, America’s Pacific allies are raising alarms of their own, with Taiwan concerned that they could be more vulnerable to an attack from China with the U.S. depleting its arsenal in Iran. The only dedicated aircraft carrier the Navy had stationed in the Pacific is now taking the place of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.
The Trump administration insists reports of munitions shortages are inaccurate. But the generals and admirals who are actually managing the war are painting a very different picture.
The men who wrote the Constitution were so afraid of a permanent war machine that they built a hard limit right into Article One, Section Eight. Congress can’t fund an army for more than two years at a stretch. They wanted every war shoved back in front of the voters again and again, because they understood that an executive who never has to ask permission is truly dangerous. Six months into a war nobody voted on, with barely a quarter of our destroyers ready to sail and admirals putting their objections in writing, we’re finding out exactly what those men were worried about.
The Post has also found that Pete Hegseth quietly hired a team of pro-Trump trolls at the Pentagon, without disclosing what they’re actually doing.
Here are their names: Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel with more than 135,000 followers on X. Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel with nearly 620,000 social media followers. And Thomas Anderson, a retired colonel who posts under the name “Cynical Publius” to his 300,000-plus followers. These accounts all frequently defend Hegseth and Trump from criticism.
Maness and Schlichter had active government email addresses as of last week. Both men are working out of the office of Anthony Tata, who is the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. Anderson was in Pentagon records earlier this year with the same kind of address and office, though he was no longer listed as of late last week. Those addresses carry a “.civ” suffix, marking them as civilian employees rather than military personnel or contractors. That status means they can potentiall shape government policy, even as the Pentagon refuses to publicly say what their jobs even are.
They were apparently brought on as “highly qualified experts” or “special government employees.” Special government employees are legally capped at 130 working days in any 365-day period. However, highly qualified experts face no such limit and can work full-time or part-time, on a paid or unpaid basis. Schlichter carried the highly qualified expert designation according to the federal database reviewed by the Post.
Whatever their listed duties are, their online activity is revealing. These accounts consistently heap praise on Hegseth and Trump while attacking anyone who criticizes them. Maness wrote a July column urging the administration to fire “disloyal” Pentagon employees while condemning longtime careerists, accusing them of treating the department as their permanent fiefdom. His author biography identified him as a retired colonel, though it said nothing about his current role at the Pentagon. Another wrote a glowing post about Hegseth’s visit to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, where sailors have reportedly tried jumping overboard due to the brutal conditions on board.
There could be more aside from these men. Another influencer who goes by the moniker “DataRepublican” has close to a million followers. She was recently revealed to be a Defense Department special government employee after spending months holding press credentials inside Hegseth’s handpicked Pentagon press corps of MAGA loyalists.
Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said the Pentagon appeared to be using taxpayer money to hire propagandists to push out partisan talking points, and he pointed out there could be more we still don’t know about. It’s worth asking how many more supposedly independent online voices complimenting Trump and the GOP are actually getting taxpayer dollars to do so.
Back in 1913, Congress got so uneasy about federal agencies hiring publicists to sell the government to its own citizens that it passed a law banning the practice. No appropriated money for publicity experts unless Congress says so out loud. That statute is still on the books. This was a Congress that had watched corporations perfect the art of the press agent, and it decided the government’s job was to inform Americans, not to manage them. When the Pentagon starts quietly bringing on the people who tell you what to think about the Pentagon, you’ve stopped being a citizen who’s owed the truth. You’ve become an audience that’s being worked.
A Republican Senate candidate is now in trouble over a fundraising email.
Former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers of Michigan, who is running for the Mitten State’s open U.S. Senate race, recently sent supporters a fundraising email that appeared to suggest he played a direct role in the killing of Osama bin Laden back in 2011.
In the email, Rogers claimed he worked “in the shadows, hunting down terrorists,” and then, in bold text, claimed he “saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America.”
But Rogers wasn’t in Abottabad, Pakistan when Osama bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team Six operatives. He wasn’t in the White House Situation Room either, where then-President Barack Obama and other officials watched the raid unfold in real time. Rogers was at his Washington, D.C. home, where he got a phone call from CIA Director Leon Panetta informing him about the raid. As chair of the House Intelligence Committee at the time, he was later shown photographs of bin Laden’s body.
That’s a very different thing than what his fundraising email implied.
Rogers’ campaign is so far staying tight-lipped. Azi Paybarah, the reporter who first surfaced the message, suggested Rogers could have been referring to having seen those photographs, rather than claiming direct involvement in the actual raid.
This isn’t the first time Rogers has stretched the truth. The day after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary on August 4th, Rogers posted a statement to social media saying he never imagined he’d be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11. But El-Sayed never said that. Rogers got expoed by FactCheck.org, along with Snopes and PolitiFact. El-Sayed himself said in April that he doesn’t think 9/11 was justified. That comment was from Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who campaigned with El-Sayed, and later walked back that comment. El-Sayed distanced himself from Piker in his April interview with Raw America.
Joseph McCarthy campaigned as Tail-Gunner Joe and told Wisconsin voters he’d flown thirty-two combat missions. He was an intelligence officer who briefed pilots, and historians who’ve gone through the records put his real number at a fraction of that. The leg injury he described as a war wound came from a shipboard initiation ceremony. He built a career on a war story he’d inflated, and then he spent that career questioning everybody else’s loyalty. That’s the pattern worth watching here. The exaggeration isn’t the whole story. The exaggeration is what buys a man the standing to tell voters that a Muslim American doctor thinks his own country had 9/11 coming.
Republicans are watching a key Senate race slip further from their control by the day.
Democratic state representative James Talarico is running for Texas’s open Senate seat against scandal-ridden Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. So far, Talarico has had Texas’ airwaves almost entirely to himself.
Since June, Democrats have outspent Republicans on TV ads in Texas’ Senate race by a margin of nearly $31.5 million to just $4.7 million. Most of that Democratic spending is coming directly from Talarico’s own campaign, which has proven itself particularly adept at raising money. Paxton’s campaign has spent just over $150,000 on advertising in that same stretch.
Senate Republican leaders warned Trump before the May primary runoff that if he endorsed Paxton over longtime incumbent John Cornyn, the president’s political operation would have to fund an expensive general election to keep Paxton competitive. Paxton has long been beset by bribery and corruption allegations, including a 2023 impeachment vote in the Texas House. The state Senate later acquitted him.
So far, Trump has yet to cut any checks. Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., is sitting on more than $400 million but hasn’t yet to committed real resources to defending Paxton. One top Republican said MAGA Inc. keeps promising to spend but hasn’t.
Paxton himself has been begging for help on conservative media, telling Newsmax he was “a little behind on TV.” He’s confident more support is coming, but he hasn’t said anything specific on where that help is supposedly coming from.
Some outside GOP groups have tried to fill the gap with attack ads hitting Talarico over his opposition to a 2025 bill that Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott signed preventing Texas land sales to buyers from China and other countries designated as national security threats. However, Talarico’s campaign is pushing back by pointing to a 2019 trip Paxton took to China with other state attorneys general that was reportedly concerning to other staff in the attorney general’s office.
Texas-based GOP strategists say the real danger for Paxton is that he’s just not an inspiring figure for non-MAGA Republicans. One source told CNN the situation as “frustrating to watch,” and stressed that Paxton could be viewed as a much weaker nominee compared to Cornyn if he fails to close the gap with Talarico.
Even Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, wouldn’t commit to funding Paxton’s campaign in the final months of the campaign. Scott insisted Texas was going to remain in Republican hands and that money is on its way, saying he expects Trump’s super PAC to get involved.
Notably, when Senator Cornyn was asked whether he plans to campaign for Paxton, he simply answered “no.”
When the Supreme Court handed down Citizens United in 2010, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that independent spending can’t corrupt anybody, because it’s independent. Sixteen years later, a Texas attorney general impeached by his own party’s House is going on cable television to beg a super PAC to notice him. Four hundred million dollars sits in one account while a state of thirty million people waits to learn whether it’s worth advertising to. That isn’t independence. That’s a handful of donors deciding which candidates Texans are allowed to hear from, and Kennedy’s promise looks thinner with every cycle that passes.
Think about why you had to come to Raw America to get half of these stories. News outlets controlled by pro-Trump billionaires like David Ellison at CBS and Patrick Soon-Shiong at the Los Angeles Times don’t want you to know about Republicans panicking over p…