Good evening. I’m British Chris, and this is Raw America.
Texas just suspended more than 1.2 million voter registrations a little more than two months before voters cast their ballots in the midterms. President Donald Trump’s own niece says his round-the-clock reliance on 35 year-old aide Natalie Harp is proof of his rapid decline. A GOP governor in a deep-red state is pushing back on the Trump Justice Department’s “aggressive” election monitors. And new financial disclosures show Trump making stock trades tied directly to his own war and foreign policy decisions.
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More than 1.2 million Texas voters — a full six percent — have had their voter registrations suspended with just a little over two months to go before Election Day. A suspension means their county doesn’t have a voter’s confirmed address, or thinks they’ve moved.
That won’t stop anyone from voting in November, but it does make the process more complicated. If someone shows up at their polling place with a suspended registration, they have to fill out a residency form before they get a ballot. And if they’ve moved to a new county, they either have to go back and vote in their old county or settle for a provisional ballot, which may or may not actually be counted.
This isn’t isolated to rural counties. Dallas County alone has more than 129,000 suspended voters. Tarrant County, which houses Fort Worth, has over 73,000 suspensions. Collin and Denton counties, which are also part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area, each have more than 56,000. Voters have until October 5 to fix their status, but reaching 1.2 million people between now and then will be a significant lift, especially for people who never moved and just got caught up in a bureaucratic mess.
The timing of the suspensions is particularly worrisome given the tight polling in Texas’ marquee races. The latest polls show Democrat James Talarico has a narrow lead over Republican Ken Paxton in the U.S. Senate race, while Democrat Gina Hinojosa is in a dead heat with Republican Governor Greg Abbott. Additionally, Texas already handed its voter rolls to the Trump Justice Department. Given that context, over a million suspensions on the eve of a major election looks less like bureaucratic confusion and more like Republicans pulling all the stops to prevent a Republican stronghold from flipping blue.
One of the president’s relatives is now speaking out about a significant development within Trump’s inner circle. Mary Trump, who is the daughter of Trump’s brother, Fred, told Substack host Jim Acosta that 35 year-old Natalie Harp’s constant presence at Trump’s side proves that he’s declining significantly and needs round-the-clock care.
Harp, is the former One America News host who is fiercely devoted to the president and never leaves his side. She’s earned the nickname “human printer” for her habit of carrying around a portable printer to hand him physical copies of flattering articles from right-wing sites and pro-Trump memes for his personal enjoyment. And she’s paid $150,000 a year to do it.
Mary Trump said it makes her uncle look like a frail old man who needs a woman young enough to be his granddaughter constantly babysitting him and feeding him flattery, most of which she said is probably completely made up. She added it was a very bad look for the 80 year-old president.
Trump biographer Michael Wolff described Harp’s role in a similar way, saying her entire job is to hunt down praise of Trump and make sure he sees it. Mary Trump thinks that need for constant reassurance has only gotten more intense as her uncle’s approval ratings keep dropping and more members of his own party turn on him. She also argued Trump lashing out because his fragile ego is under attack, meaning Harp has to fill that gap by constantly feeding him compliments.
There could also be something even more weird happening underneath the surface. The Daily Beast recently published letters Harp wrote in 2023, in which she called Trump her “Guardian and Protector in this life” and that he’s all that matters to her. Mary Trump called that fawning obeisance extreme and over the top, and said Harp is clearly someone who is also mentally unwell. But she said what worries her most isn’t the personal dynamic between Harp and her uncle, but the fact that the man with the nuclear codes needs constant flattery.
Wyoming Republican Governor Mark Gordon is breaking with his party on Trump’s latest push to send “election monitors” to states across the country ahead of the midterms. Gordon said Justice Department observers at last week’s primary were behaving in an “aggressive” and “irregular” way.
The governor told the state’s canvassing board that state and local officials weren’t given advance notice of the DOJ’s plans before they showed up. He was careful to say that while he didn’t object to observers being present, their conduct went well beyond what Congress actually authorized them to do.
Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee, who is also a Republican, agreed. She called the Justice Department’s monitoring a poorly managed exercise that showed a complete disregard for Wyoming law. She said monitors asked for training guides, inquired to about how the county bought its voting equipment, and tried to examine vote tabulation machines directly. Lee said she had to personally turn down their requests to directly interview voters.
The DOJ says it sent two attorneys from its Civil Rights Division to Laramie County as part of a broader deployment of dozens of election monitors across seven states during the recent spate of primaries. The idea of sending federal monitors is a common practice, as the Biden DOJ had observers in nine states during the 2022 midterms. However, Trump is doing it at a much larger scale.
Democracy Docket reported last week that the Trump administration is planning to deploy roughly 1,000 election monitors for the midterms. That number has caused significant alarm among voting rights advocates given Trump’s pattern of making baseless and repeatedly debunked claims about voter fraud. It’s notable that this time, the pushback is coming from Republicans, seeing as most GOP officials have gone along with Trump’s election trickery up to this point.
New financial disclosures show Trump made over 1,000 stock trades in June alone, and many of them line up a little too well with his own policy decisions. The filings show him buying and selling stocks in energy companies directly tied to his ongoing war with Iran, along with trading stocks in Big Pharma companies like Eli Lilly and Merck. He’s also made investments in AI companies like Nvidia.
The White House continues to argue that Trump’s investment portfolio is managed independently by outside firms and that he has no input on what gets bought or sold. But the patterns are nonetheless worth looking into. In June, right as the Iran war was pushing oil prices to new highs, Trump sold and then repurchased stock in ExxonMobil, along with buying and selling Chevron stock on three separate occasions. He sold shares in ConocoPhillips three times in June along with selling shares of Valero, while buying stock in Occidental Petroleum.
Perhaps most notably, Trump traded stocks of major defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and RTX right when Iran negotiations were underway. Some of those sales came just one day after he bought the stock.
All of this adds to a pattern of Trump padding his own net worth by billions of dollars at a scale no prior president has approached. Between all of the stock trades, his cryptocurrency ventures and his royalties and property income, the president is making out like a bandit.
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I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.
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