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Republicans are now begging Donald Trump to stay away from their districts this fall, as they view his absence as their best chance of getting reelected. One of the most senior House Republicans just told Fox News that the president’s widespread unpopularity is preventing donors from supporting Republican candidates battling for their political lives. Trump just openly confirmed to New York Magazine that he’s focusing his second term on building gaudy monuments to himself because he knows nobody else will after he leaves office. And at one of California’s biggest ICE detention centers, families visiting their loved ones aren’t even allowed to hug their relatives in federal custody.
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Trump is eager to hit the campaign stump for Republicans between now and November. But an increasing number of Republicans are now saying they don’t want him anywhere near their constituents. More than two dozen GOP lawmakers, candidates and operatives told Politico that Republicans are terrified of a historically unpopular president tanking their political careers by dragging them down with him.
Some Republicans in battleground districts have reportedly told the White House that he should refrain from holding events in their backyard. One senior Republican in a district Trump won by double digits just two years ago told the president’s team “he cannot come,” and that he “would not be helpful.” The Republican added that if Trump decided to show up anyway, they wouldn’t be there with him.
Pollsters are also reportedly telling vulnerable GOP lawmakers to refrain from mentioning Trump at all on the stump if they can help it. But the problem is that Republicans also know full well what happens to anyone in the GOP who publicly breaks with the administration, making it a difficult balancing act. One House Republican running for reelection said that the difficulty is that if they mention the president too much then they’re in trouble with voters. But if they stay too quiet and are seen as trying to distance themselves from Trump then they’re in trouble with the White House.
This is all happening while Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC is sitting on over $400 million that candidates are really hoping he’ll use to help them keep their majorities. So far, Trump has apparently decided the best use of his time is to campaign in states he won comfortably, like Texas and Alaska. The districts and states where Republicans actually need help aren’t getting it.
Back in 1974 Republicans didn't wait for an election to find out where their leader stood. Barry Goldwater and two other senior party men walked into the Oval Office and told Nixon straight to his face that he'd lost the party's support. What's happening this fall is the quiet version of that same walk, and it tells you just as much about where things really stand.
A senior House Republican committee chair just admitted on camera that Donald Trump himself is his party’s chief financial obstacle in the midterms.
Republican Congressman James Comer of Kentucky — who chairs the powerful House Oversight Committee — recently went on Fox News and let slip something particularly revealing: small-dollar donors who used to contribute directly to Republican House and Senate candidates are now instead sending their money to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, which so far isn’t spending any money to help vulnerable incumbents.
Those donors are likely sending Trump their money because the president has spent the last several months telling his base that Republicans in Congress are to blame for their woes instead of his administration. He’s made sure to amplify and elevate MAGA influencers accusing Republicans of failing to pass his agenda. He’s said in TV interviews that his supporters aren’t angry with him, but rather with GOP lawmakers, and he’s wondered out loud whether they’ll even show up since his name isn’t on the November ballot.
So small-dollar MAGA loyalists are doing exactly what you’d expect them to do: they’re taking Trump at his word and sending their money to the president’s super PAC instead of to the candidates who are relying on that money to stay in office. And that PAC has laergely been sitting out the midterms with just a few weeks to go before voters head to the polls.
And Trump’s dismal approval ratings also aren’t helping Republicans. The president is deeply underwater in almost all of the key battleground districts, including in typically safe Republican states like Florida, Iowa and Ohio. The voters who strongly dislike Trump significantly outnumber the ones who strongly approve of him. Nationally, those who are diametrically opposed to the administration outnumber MAGA diehards by a three to one margin.
Congress actually tried to fix this back in 2002, when lawmakers passed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill to keep a handful of enormous checks from drowning out millions of small ones. It didn't hold. What's happening with MAGA Inc right now is living proof that the money still runs the show, and the candidates who actually need it are the last ones to see a dime.
Trump recently gave a lengthy interview to New York Magazine’s Ben Terris, in which he sat behind the Resolute Desk surrounded by printed renderings of his massive White House ballroom. He boasted about the building’s Corinthian columns, nuclear-grade concrete, and marble he claims is the best in the world. He said the portico will have columns four rows deep. The president made sure to tell Terris that the Supreme Court building only has three rows, and he wanted to beat that.
The ballroom will be built to accommodate almost 1,000 people and will span approximately 90,000 square feet, which is nearly twice the size of the actual White House building. Price tag estimates land north of $800 million, with taxpayers covering a big chunk of that despite Trump’s claims it’s fully funded by private donors.
It’s important to mention that Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia has argued on the campaign trail that Donald Trump is spending his second term building monuments to himself because he knows nobody else will do it once he’s out of office. When Terris asked Trump if that was true, the president didn’t even try to deny it. He actually agreed completely with Ossoff’s premise, admitting it was “true” and added “when I leave here, nobody will [build Trump monuments].”
Trump completely destroyed the East Wing of the White House without even warning anyone ahead of time. The commissions that were supposed to review the initial construction plans got stacked with MAGA loyalists early on in the president’s second term. Congress never actually approved funding for the ballroom, with no official votes even from the House and Senate Appropriations Committees.
Legal challenges trying to stop construction ultimately made their way to the Supreme Court, which recently allowed construction to continue in a narrow ruling that didn’t address whether it was actually legal. Chief Justice John Roberts even joined the three liberal justices in dissent, and said Trump’s actions were likely unlawful.
Meanwhile, donor records show that of 27 publicly listed donors for the ballroom project, more than half have already signed new or gotten even more federal contracts worth over a combined $50 billion. If Democrats retake either chamber of Congress in November, it’s a near-certainty that there will be a wave of investigations and subpoenas for those donors.
The framers put the power of the purse in Congress's hands for a reason. It's right there in Article One, Section Eight, written so that no single man could spend the country's money on a monument to himself. That's the whole argument sitting inside Roberts' dissent, and it's the same argument this country has been having with itself since 1789.
At California City, which is the largest ICE detention facility in the state — operated by private prison company CoreCivic — roughly 1,600 people are held behind glass with zero exceptions for physical contact. Not even a hug from their families when they come to visit.
The Guardian reported that Teresa Reyes drove 300 miles to see her son Guillermo on his 32nd birthday. Guards prevented her from handing him a gift, sharing a meal with him and even touching him at all. She had to talk through a phone while separated by glass the entire time, and had to hold back tears so he wouldn’t think she was struggling as much as him.
Allen Tayson has been in federal custody since February after he was arrested at his own green card interview. His wife is seven months pregnant, and he’s missed almost her entire pregnancy. She’s chosen not to visit him at all, because the couple already lived through a similar experience years ago when their young son tried to hug his father and collided with the barrier instead. They’re refusing to put their kids through that experience again.
The Tayson family’s five-year-old daughter asks every day when her dad is coming home. Her mother said she even saw her girl praying alone once, telling God she just wants some help for her dad.
California’s Department of Justice audited the facility and found the contact ban is almost certainly in violation of CoreCivic’s own stated policy, which allows restrictions only for specific security risks. Photos from that audit show a room with picnic tables sitting unused, while detainees are instead confined to a row of windows and forced to talk to their loved ones through a phone.
Detained residents organized to be able to hug their loved ones. They wrote letters and even launched a campaign called Hugs Beyond Bars, and invited advocates to film them pleading their case. So far, CoreCivic and the facility’s warden have yet to give them any response.
Back in 1896 the Supreme Court ruled in Wong Wing v. United States that the Constitution's promise of due process belongs to every person on American soil, citizen or not. That's the principle sitting behind every one of those glass partitions out in the Mojave Desert, and it's the same principle this administration keeps testing to see if anybody's still paying attention.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. If you haven’t yet, click the ❤️ and restack this newsletter so we can break through to the people who need these stories the most. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.
Here are a few stories you may have missed:
North Carolina has officially become the first state to send out mail ballots for its voters ahead of the November midterms. The state’s decision to do so comes as the Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to green-light its restrictive new rules on mail-in voting. A whistleblower complaint made public earlier this week alleges that the new rules the administration is imposing on the U.S. Postal Service would allow for widespread disenfranchisement of millions of voters.North Carolina Sends Out Mail Ballots for Midterms.Ty Cobb, who was a White House counsel in Trump’s first White House, recently warned in an interview that the president was openly planning “to steal the elections where possible.” Cobb said that in addition to Trump pushing new restrictions on mail ballots, that House Speaker Mike Johnson could also simply refuse to allow newly elected Democratic members of the House of Representatives to be seated, as he did for more than 50 days with Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) last year.Former Trump White House Lawyer Warns He Intends ‘To Steal the Elections Where Possible.’Judges in both Maryland and Missouri just handed Democrats two valuable victories in court cases pertaining to congressional redistricting maps. In Maryland, a judge allowed a ballot initiative that would allow a statewide vote on new maps in time for the 2028 election to go through, which could give Democrats an additional House seat in the following cycle. And in Missouri, the state supreme court shot down Republican attempts to ram through a heavily gerrymandered map in time for this November’s election, which overturned a lower court ruling upholding the map. Missouri Republicans are now appealing that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.Democrats Win Redistricting Battles in Maryland and Missouri.