Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
The White House is reportedly panicking as Donald Trump’s approval ratings sink over his mishandling of the affordability crisis. A crowd of Republican voters in deep-red South Carolina just booed Trump when a GOP congressman mentioned his name during his concession speech. In Texas, an ICE agent charged with shooting a man in Minnesota and then lying about it could walk free from jail as soon as tomorrow. And a Republican-appointed federal judge just struck down a Texas law that banned drag shows, while saying anyone who doesn’t like drag shows can simply avoid them.
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Both Donald Trump and his inner circle are becoming increasingly anxious. Not just about the war with Iran or courts that keep ruling against the administration, but about the cost of living.
The White House’s internal polling shows that most Americans say high grocery and gas prices are their single biggest worry heading into the midterms, which are now just over two months away. And with the clock ticking, Trump’s team is scrambling for a way out of the hole.
That’s a difficult task, as the president himself has spent months calling the affordability crisis a “hoax” cooked up Democrats. But Republicans aren’t exactly lining up to make that argument to voters who are seeing firsthand how much a pound of ground beef costs.
One White House source told Politico they’re banking on making it look like the administration is sympathetic and understands the problem. So last week, Trump announced he was waiving tariffs on 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef for the next 90 days. He made sure to blame former President Joe Biden for high beef prices and promised he would bring prices down while helping ranchers at home.
American cattlemen weren’t exactly thrilled. Bill Bullard, who runs the beef trade group R-CALF USA, said ranchers had no warning at all about the importation announcement. He said he thought Trump had already abandoned this same plan once before, only to turn around and resurrect it.
According to Politico, the beef import plan likely won’t have any meaningful impact on beef prices before November. But it paints a revealing picture of just how desperate the Trump White House has become. The administration is apparently willing to anger cattle ranchers, who make up a major part of the MAGA coalition, if it means the administration can get a small win on affordability.
The polling illustrates just how dire the situation is for the administration. A new Reuters/Ipsos survey found voters typically trust Democrats over Republicans on cost-of-living issues by a solid eight points. Trump’s public approval rating is also flatlining at just 33 percent, making it the lowest number of his entire second term.
There was a time when a government facing runaway food prices did something other than stage a photo op. In 1942, Congress passed the Emergency Price Control Act and stood up the Office of Price Administration, an agency with real authority to cap what sellers could charge, and the difference between that and a Truth Social post isn’t a matter of tone, it’s whether anybody in power still believes government is supposed to work.
Trump’s flagging popularity is even visible in deep-red states like South Carolina.
Republican Congressman Ralph Norman lost last night’s Senate primary runoff to incumbent Senator Darline Graham, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham who Trump appointed to fill his seat. The president gave Graham’s campaign his full endorsement, held rallies for her and even proclaimed that voting for Lindsey Graham’s sister would be one of the best political decisions any South Carolinian would ever make. A Trump-aligned super PAC even poured more than $800,000 into her primary race.
But when Norman mentioned Trump’s name during his concession speech, the crowd erupted into boos. He even said that Democrats got what they wanted y having Darline Graham be the GOP nominee.
The congressman tried to stay diplomatic toward Trump, saying he agreed with the president’s policies and that he had the right to get involved, even if he didn’t personally understand why the president decided to give an endorsement in the first place. But the more he kept trying to smooth things over, the louder the crowd booed.
Eventually, Norman tried to put the booing to rest by promising something good will come out of this, though with the caveat that he didn’t know what that something was.
This is Norman’s second statewide loss this year. He also placed third in South Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial primary back in June.
Graham herself is a political neophyte. After her brother died in July, she was vaulted into the upper chamber of Congress. And when it comes to foreign policy — which was her brother’s specialty — she revealed a significant weakness. In one GOP primary debate, she admitted to the moderators and the audience that national security isn’t her strong suit.
A crowd of Republican voters booing the mention of Trump’s name in a deep-red Southern state is incredibly significant, and shows just how much his grip on his own base has slipped.
Movements built on fear don’t collapse all at once, they collapse the moment the fear stops working. In June of 1954, Joseph Welch asked Joe McCarthy on live television whether he had any sense of decency left, the room turned against McCarthy in a way it never had before, and within six months the Senate had censured him and his four-year reign over American politics was finished.
In Minnesota, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent named Christian Castro is facing charges of assault and false reporting after local prosecutors say he fired his gun through the front door of a Minneapolis home in January.
Castro’s bullet hit 24-year-old Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg and eventually struck the wall of a child’s bedroom. Hennepin County prosecutors say Castro then falsely claimed Sosa-Celis and another man attacked an ICE officer with a broom handle and a snow shovel. ICE was forced to walk back that claim after body camera footage didn’t back up Castro’s story.
Castro has been sitting in a jail in Brownsville, Texas, ever since he was apprehended, while Minnesota is trying to extradite him to face justice. Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who is in a right reelection race against Democrat Gina Hinojosa, has yet to agree to extradition. Texas law stipulates Castro has to be released after 90 days if the state doesn’t act. That deadline is tomorrow.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, both of whom are Democrats, filed a lawsuit aiming to force Texas to send Castro back to the Gopher State and to stop the county sheriff from letting him walk free.
During a recent hearing, Minnesota attorneys argued that once Castro is released, it will be much harder to get him to face charges. And if he disappears in a state as large as Texas, that could become nearly impossible.
U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez, who Donald Trump appointed in 2018, said he was leaning toward letting Castro be released. However, he promised a formal ruling on the request for a restraining order.
Abbott’s office defended the governor’s failure to agree to extradition by saying they aren’t sure whether Castro counts as a legal fugitive. He also tried to justify it by pointing to fraud investigations into Minnesota’s social welfare programs — which Trump has also pointed to in order to justify his vastly unpopular immigration crackdown.
Keep in mind, this is all stemming from ICE shooting a man through his own front The agent who pulled the trigger is accused of lying about it after the fact. And the governor of Texas may simply let him walk rather than allow the justice system to work as intended.
The Framers saw this coming, which is why Article Four, Section Two of the Constitution says that a person charged with a crime who’s found in another state shall be delivered up on the demand of the state he fled. They chose the word “shall” because they understood that if governors got to pick and choose which fugitives they’d hand over, we wouldn’t have a union at all, we’d have fifty separate sanctuaries sorted by whoever the local governor happens to like.
Here’s some better news out of Texas: a federal judge just struck down the state’s 2023 law restricting drag shows, on the grounds that it violates the First Amendment.
U.S. District Judge David Hittner, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, ruled that the drag ban improperly restricted free speech. That ruling blocks Attorney General Ken Paxton — Texas’ Republican nominee for U.S. Senate — from enforcing it.
The law imposed fines of as much as $10,000 for small business owners hosting drag events and allowed for criminal charges against performers, who could face up to a year in jail for walking onstage.
Hittner had already ruled this law unconstitutional after the law’s initial passage in 2023. An appeals court sent the case back to him last November with instructions on how to reevaluate it, and allowed the law to go back into effect while the process played out.
In his new ruling, Hittner pointed to the law’s vague language banning anything that appeals to what it calls “prurient interest,” and noted that under that standard, someone could be prosecuted for impersonating country music legend Dolly Parton. He mentioned her by name, on the same day her family announced her death.
He wrote that plenty of popular, entirely legal performances contain elements that could get swept up under the definition of the 2023 law, to illustrate just how broad and vague the statute really was.
One of the plaintiffs, a performer who goes by Brigitte Bandit and is known for her Dolly Parton tribute act, celebrated the ruling. Parton had actually given her a rhinestone guitar back in 2023. Bandit says she’ll honor Parton by performing as her at an Austin bar this weekend.
Hittner made sure to write in his ruling that anyone offended by drag performances has a simple way out: “Just don’t go.”
Hittner didn’t invent that logic, he inherited it. Back in 1971, in Cohen versus California, Justice John Marshall Harlan told the state it couldn’t prosecute a man for a jacket with a four-letter word on it simply because some people would rather not see it, because anyone who’s offended is free to look away, and one person’s vulgarity is another person’s lyric.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.
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