Good evening. I’m British Chris, and this is Raw America. If you’re watching this on Substack right now, take a second to click the ❤️ and tap the circular restack button. That’s the easiest way to make sure these important stories reach the most people.
Today, Donald Trump was caught on video waving and saluting before boarding Marine One, despite there being no one with hundreds of feet in either direction. The top PAC for Senate Democrats is now investing $1.2 million into deep-red Mississippi, where Democratic district attorney Scott Colom is running in an increasingly close race with Republican incumbent Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. Voting rights groups and election officials in Arizona are ramping up efforts to respond to the possibility of Trump deploying U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to the polls on November 3. And Scott Kirby, the CEO of United Airlines, is now calling for Congress to impose a national wealth tax and to tax inheritances at rates near 100 percent.
A quick ask before we dive in: can we count on you to keep our independent journalism going for 17 cents a day? David Ellison now not only owns CNN, but his father — billionaire Trump donor Larry Ellison — is now leveraging his partial ownership of TikTok to suppress all information about the damning new Elon Musk documentary. Every day we see more examples of billionaires using their puppet cable networks and newspapers to churn out propaganda while suppressing information we all need to know. This is why independent media is so critical right now.
Yesterday afternoon, before Donald Trump left the White House to headline a rally in Kansas, news cameras captured the president wandering off by himself, waving, saluting and bowing as if there were a crowd seeing him off. But when the camera zoomed out, there wasn’t anybody within hundreds of feet of him.
Video captured from another angle shows the 80 year-old president dragging his right leg and then patting it while walking to Marine One. He was then seen suddenly stopping and waving at no one while two aides approached from a different direction. He later boarded the helicopter along with his intensely devoted 35 year-old blonde staffer, Natalie Harp, who some have sarcastically referred to as “First Lady Natalie Harp.”
Several social media users wondered whether Trump was hallucinating or perhaps waving at his own reflection. Neither one is all that comforting considering we’re talking about the man who controls the nuclear codes. Podcaster Brian Krassenstein tweeted that he now has “absolutely no doubt” about Trump experiencing significant mental decline. He then asked everyone to envision the coverage on Fox News if Joe Biden had done something similar while he was president.
It’s happened before. Last October in Japan, Trump seemed to forget where he was going while walking past dignitaries and a military band, at one point leaving Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi behind. Since returning to office, he’s repeatedly lost track of his thoughts, his surroundings, and occasionally the English language.
Senate Democrats are now making an eyebrow-raising move that would’ve sounded like pure fantasy just a year ago.
Senate Majority PAC, which is aligned with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, is now spending $1.2 million on statewide TV ads on behalf of Democratic Senate candidate Scott Colom that will run from Wednesday and through Election Day on November 3. PAC spokeswoman Lauren French said Colom has put Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith “on her heels.”
The ad refers to the incumbent Republican a “do-nothing” senator who hasn’t passed one single piece of legislation in the decade she’s been in office, but did vote last year to kick thousands of Mississippians off of Medicaid. Colom was already outspending Hyde-Smith by margin of roughly $1.4 million, according to the firm AdImpact. The senator’s campaign manager, Jake Monssen, said GOP money is arriving late, but projected confidence by saying voters would reject what he referred to as Colom’s “radical agenda.”
Democrats putting real money in the Deep South is already huge news, but that goes double for Mississippi, which is about as red as it gets. Trump carried the Magnolia State by nearly two dozen points two years ago. No Democrat has won a Senate race there in more than 40 years. But Hyde-Smith ran six percentage points behind Trump in the 2020. And now that she’s asking for another six years from an electorate already fatigued with high grocery and gas prices — along with the deeply unpopular Iran war that she voted for multiple times — Republicans are having to play defense even in GOP strongholds. Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia recently campaigned alongside Colom last week. Former Vice President Kamala Harris is speaking at a rally for him on Thursday.
Colom would be Mississippi’s first Black U.S. senator since the Reconstruction era, when Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce both held seats there. Republicans are currently hoping to cling to their thin 53-47 majority, which Democrats could capture by flipping four Republican-held seats across the country. Warnock told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he hopes Democrats won’t miss a real opportunity to invest seriously in growing their bench across the Deep South. The nonpartisan cook Political Report on Tuesday officially moved the race from “solid Republican” to “likely Republican,” suggesting Democrats may actually have an edge even in the Magnolia State.
In Arizona, voting rights groups are already making preparations in the event the Trump administration deploys ICE agents to the polls on November 3. Living United for Change in Arizona, also known as LUCHA (Spanish for “fight”), has already trained hundreds of poll observers to document and report any instances of federal agents showing up at voting precincts. LUCHA organizer Karime Rodriguez recently showed trainees a map of the metro Phoenix area, and highlighted verified ICE sightings and how close those were to polling places in Arizona’s largest city.
It’s not a conspiracy theory that Trump may send armed agents to polling places in defiance of federal law. Back in May, the president said he’d do “anything necessary” to ensure honest elections when reporters asked him directly about whether he would send ICE or National Guard troops to polling places. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says ICE won’t patrol polling places, though it didn’t rule out the possibility of agents serving warrants or responding to unnamed threats close to where people would be voting.
It’s important to note that armed troops have been expressly banned from voting sites since 1865. Various election and legal experts believe any deployment of federal agents would be quickly shot down by the federal judiciary. Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes believes the real aim of Trump’s cagey remarks about ICE at the polls is to decrease voters’ motivation to show up. Longtime Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg agreed, saying those kinds of rumors are meant to drive down voter turnout.
We saw what may have been a trial run when Arizona held its primaries. Votebeat reported that ICE agents were seen near a voting site in the Maryvale neighborhood, which is a predominantly Latino neighborhood in the Phoenix area. The group Mi Familia en Acción, along with eight other groups, have since filed a federal lawsuit to prevent ICE officers from being near polling places. The ACLU of Arizona also made sure to send election officials in every Arizona county a full list of all laws banning armed agents from showing up at voting precincts.
In Pima County, which houses the Democratic stronghold of Tucson, County Recorder Gabriella Cázares-Kelly said local prosecutors already have paperwork ready to “literally run to a judge” for a restraining order should armed agents show up at voting sites. And even in deep-red Pinal County, Republican Recorder Dana Lewis tightened up her own office’s tolerance policies toward federal agents at election sites after Trump’s FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia elections center.
Our last story should give us a little hope: a Fortune 500 CEO is now demanding Congress pass significantly higher taxes on people like him.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby recently told the New York Times that wealth inequality has become a dangerous threat to American society. He then urged Congress to pass a national wealth tax, arguing that state wealth taxes still leave an escape hatch for the ultra-rich. He also wants a new tax on inherited wealth “close to 100 percent at some level.” He also made it clear he would happily pay those new taxes.
Kirby still made sure to remind us he was an airline CEO, as he used that same interview to defend higher fees for passengers sitting in window and aisle seats, so he’s not exactly Bernie Sanders. But Kirby’s comment puts him in the same group as other wealthy corporate executives like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Marc Benioff of Salesforce in arguing that the people with the vast bulk of the wealth should pay higher taxes. Trump and Capitol Hill Republicans went in the opposite direction by passing the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” last year, which extended lower tax rates for the richest Americans for another decade at the cost of significant cuts to Medicaid and food stamps. The federal estate tax exemption now sits at $15 million per person, meaning only 0.2 percent of estates actually owe anything on inheritances.
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