Good evening. I’m British Chris, and this is Raw America.
Top staffers in Donald Trump’s White House keep heading for the exits, and the latest to go is the president’s key point of contact for Congress. White nationalist organizers held a strategy summit in Rome and openly celebrated the collapse of local newspapers as a golden opportunity to organize in rural America. Nearly every major podcaster who helped deliver young men to Trump in 2024 has now turned on him, and Trump continues to embrace the same politically toxic data centers that Republicans are desperately trying to distance themselves from before November.
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White House legislative affairs director James Braid is out. His entire job was building bridges between the White House and the razor-thin Republican majority in Congress. He only lasted 19 months. The timing could not be worse for Trump.
There are just 75 days left before the midterms, with Republicans bracing for what could be a bloodbath even worse than the 2018 Blue Wave in Trum'p’s first term. And the man most responsible for ushering through Trump’s big ugly bill through Congress is calling it quits.
Braid is merely the latest key White House official to leave just this month, after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced she was leaving at the end of August to spend more time with her new baby and her husband — who is 30 years her senior. Additionally, deputy chief of staff James Blair left the White House to run Trump’s political operation from outside Washington. DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin left last year.
The list of former White House officials who have left in less than two years is staggering. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi was fired, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was forced out along with her senior advisor and rumored paramour, Corey Lewandowski. Former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is also gone. Tulsi Gabbard resigned as Director of National Intelligence. Joe Kent resigned from the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of the Iran war back in March.
That war could be a big reason for Braid’s departure. Trump attacked Iran alongside Israel in February without getting approval from Congress, and now even top Republicans are refusing to fund it as it’s dragged on far longer than the president initially promised. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll has his approval rating sitting at a dismal 33 percent, tying the lowest point of both presidencies. 64 percent of Americans say they don’t trust him at all. Trump losing his key legislative liaison is the last thing he needs right now.
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While Washington is engulfed in chaos, white nationalists were organizing in Rome. Roughly 50 racists gathered inside the headquarters of an Italian neo-fascist organization to discuss how to grow their ranks in the United States. Nashville reporter Phil Williams broke the story for the Confront the Hate Substack.
Far-right activist Kevin DeAnna told the audience that vanishing local newsrooms in rural America meant there’s no one left to hold local elected officials accountable, and told the crowd they should find that development exciting.
DeAnna specifically called on attendees to run for county sheriff, leaning on the widely debunked “constitutional sheriffs” theory that a sheriff can somehow disregard both state and federal laws. He added that organizing in rural communities gave racists the best return on investment, since there’s less scrutiny from the media and fewer reporters left to call attention to their activities.
The meeting also served as a fundraising strategy session. One attendee at the summit floated the idea of finding a sympathetic billionaire to fund their movement. Another pitched directing money toward lawsuits designed to bankrupt their opponents in legal fees. This is all happening while Northwestern University’s Medill School has identified 213 “news deserts,” which it defines as counties with no local newspapers.
The fact that racists are celebrating the absence of local media and are trying to recruit billionaires to their cause is just further proof that independent journalism is more necessary now than ever before. Become a paying subscriber to Raw America right now and help us keep this work going.
The so-called “manosphere” was largely responsible for cultivating the Gen Z male cohort in Trump’s 2024 coalition. This includes podcasters and YouTubers like Joe Rogan, Theo Von, the Tate brothers and the Nelk Boys. The podcasters’ warmth toward Trump was made possible with the help of the president’s 20 year-old son Barron, who personally connected to alleged sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate to build the network. The strategy was successful, as approximately 56 percent of young men broke for Trump in the last election.
Now, that same network of podcasters are all making great efforts to distance themselves from the Trump administration. Rogan, who endorsed Trump in October just as voters prepared to head to the polls, called his Iran war is “crazy” and “insane” and said Trump has betrayed his own followers. Theo Von, who attended Trump’s second inauguration, is calling the war “diabolical.”
The Tate brothers are the most high-profile manosphere figures to threaten to abandon Trump and the MAGA movement. They were released from Romanian custody after Vice President JD Vance and special envoy Ric Grenell pressured Romanian officials. The brothers both attended Trump’s UFC birthday event alongside FBI Director Kash Patel. In June they flew to Russia as guests of Vladimir Putin, and a few weeks later Britain charged them with 59 criminal counts including human trafficking, rape and child pornography. The White House has since gone silent on them.
Their lawyer gave Trump an ultimatum: if he doesn’t come out in support of the Tate brothers, they’ll publicly break from MAGA and the GOP. Democratic Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari of Arizona is already pushing for a formal investigation, and has Barron Trump’s name on her subpoena list. If Democrats win back control of the House in November, Trump’s youngest son could find himself in front of a congressional panel.
Trump recently stood next to crypto executives at the White House and told everyone that if he were a local elected official, he’d be first in line to greenlight data center development because of the jobs and the tax revenue. Of course, Trump’s financial disclosures also show that he personally has roughly $25 million invested in construction companies that build data centers. And while Trump’s remarks may sound fine to a bunch of suits in a corporate boardroom, it’s absolutely poisonous on the 2026 campaign trail.
This is a common fact for both Democratic and Republican candidates in both red and blue states. The GOP’s own Senate campaign arm warned that data center backlash could cost them a Senate seat in reliably red Ohio. Communities are furious about sky-high utility bills, strain on freshwater resources, constant and excessive noise and tax breaks handed to companies that build facilities larger than football stadiums while somehow also only providing a negligible number of permanent jobs.
In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown is hammering incumbent Republican Jon Husted with ads branding him “the face of data centers in Ohio.” Local residents are organizing for a statewide ban. The NRSC’s own memo called data centers a “sleeper issue” and said if Husted loses, it will signal to politicians everywhere that data centers are a political loser and that everyone should avoid them like the plague.
This scene is playing out in other states as well, like Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin. Governors who once bragged about landing big AI investments are now promising tougher rules, fewer tax breaks and stronger protections for water and power supplies.
Trump is continuing to double down, even telling Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott that going against data centers is “a mistake.”
This is what happens when a president who only cares about lining his own pockets cares more about Big Tech’s profits than the people who’ll actually live next to the noisy, polluting monstrosities.
These four stories prove why independent journalism is important. Big Tech billionaire Jeff Bezos would never let the Washington Post talk about how data centers have become political kryptonite. MAGA oligarch David Ellison doesn’t want CBS covering how white nationalists are rooting for the collapse of small-town newspapers. But Raw America is able to bring you these stories precisely because we don’t have a billionaire owner telling us to pull stories they don’t like. We only answer to you, our readers.
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I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. We’ll see you tomorrow.
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