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In Dallas last night, Trump promised to hand every adult in America a $5,000 check, but only if Republicans win in November. His midterm convention then managed to flash a photo of a nearly-naked left-wing streamer on the jumbotron in front of the entire crowd. Meanwhile, the Trump FCC’s pressure campaign scared ABC into yanking Jimmy Kimmel’s interview with James Talarico off the air. And a stunning new documentary has two dozen Israeli soldiers exposing the secret systems behind the mass killing of civilians in Gaza.
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Closing out the first night of the GOP’s first-ever midterm convention in Dallas, Trump made a promise that would be laughable if it weren’t so brazen: he’ll send every adult citizen in America a $5,000 check, but only if Republicans keep control of both the House and the Senate.
“Here is my promise,” he told the crowd. “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them... I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”
Branding it the “Trump dividend,” he compared it to a company handing cash to its shareholders. He claimed the government can afford it “because we’ve done so well and because our country is making so much money.” The only catch was that the money had to be spent inside the U.S. “We don’t want you going to Canada to spend the money,” he said. “We don’t want you going to China, to Germany.”
There are just under 270 million American adults, which means Trump’s little cash splash would run up a tab of around $1.3 trillion. That’s on top of the $1.8 trillion the government is already borrowing every year, and a national debt now sitting near $40 trillion. And of course it isn’t even his to promise. A payout like this needs congressional approval, and every economist not on the White House payroll will tell you dumping that much cash into the economy would send inflation roaring back.
Then there’s the matter of it being a crime to pay people to vote a certain way. Trump didn’t offer $5,000 to every American. He offered it on the explicit condition that his party wins. That’s not a dividend. That’s a bribe with a teleprompter.
Even Fox News, broadcasting live from the convention, couldn’t help but note that the last time Trump promised everyone free money — a $2,000 tariff “dividend” last November — the checks never showed up. Before that it was the “DOGE dividend” that Elon Musk floated and that vanished the moment DOGE collapsed. The pattern is always the same: announce the free money at full volume, collect the applause, and quietly let it evaporate once the cameras are off.
Congress made it a federal crime to pay anybody for their vote back in 1925 with the Corrupt Practices Act, because the Gilded Age had already taught us that when elections can be bought with cash, the people who end up owning the government are the ones with the most cash. A president dangling a check in front of 270 million voters is testing whether a century-old law still has any teeth when the man breaking it also runs the Justice Department.
If you want a single image that captures how badly organized Trump’s convention was, here it is: at some point Wednesday night, the giant screen inside the American Airlines Center displayed a photo of left-wing streamer Hasan Piker posing in his underwear.
The picture was pulled from Piker’s own Instagram and dropped into a narrated video meant to frighten the crowd about the radical left. The same reel featured Democratic strategist James Carville, Black Lives Matter footage, and Trump warning that communism “is not gonna work this time.”
Somewhere in the middle of all that ominous messaging, somebody at Trumpapalooza decided the thing to put on the world’s biggest screen was a shot of a shirtless internet personality in his skivvies.
Piker, watching it unfold live on his own stream, could barely believe it. “They fing posted the meat pic!” he said, grabbing his chest. “They posted the meat pic at the fing Trumpapalooza!” A vocal supporter of Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico over Republican Ken Paxton, Piker joked on X that the whole thing might actually flip Texas.
The undies incident was hardly the night’s only stumble. The convention opened with long lines in 95-degree Texas heat, attendees needing medical attention, and swaths of empty seats inside the arena. The event was supposed to fire up the base.
Instead, a movement that spends its every waking hour policing other people’s bodies, bathrooms, and private lives put a half-naked man they despise up on a fifty-foot screen, and then blurred him, because even they got shy.
Anthony Comstock spent the 1870s and the decades after hounding publishers, doctors, and artists in the name of protecting American virtue, and history remembers him as a prude with a badge rather than a defender of anything. Every movement that appoints itself the guardian of other people's morality eventually gets caught with its own pants down, and this one just managed it in front of a packed arena.
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While Trump was promising free money in Dallas, his administration was busy doing the thing it actually cares about: silencing critics.
Jimmy Kimmel revealed this week that a planned Thursday interview with James Talarico, the Texas Democrat challenging Ken Paxton for a U.S. Senate seat, would no longer air on ABC. Instead, it’s being shunted to YouTube. The reason, according to Kimmel, is that the Trump-controlled FCC leaned on the network hard enough that ABC blinked.
“The FCC,” Kimmel told his audience, “has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations, based on simple, traditional, editorial decisions, guest bookings it would seem they don’t like.”
This isn’t the first time. Last year, Trump-appointed FCC Chair Brendan Carr forced “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air for a week over Kimmel’s comments about the right’s reaction to the murder of activist Charlie Kirk.
This time, Kimmel says he pulled the Talarico interview himself rather than bring more federal heat down on ABC’s Texas affiliates. When he told the studio audience it would only be on YouTube, the crowd booed.
Kimmel pointed out the exquisite hypocrisy. Trump was perfectly happy to sit next to a late-night host when he was the one being interviewed as a candidate. “For some reason, and I can’t seem to figure out what that reason is,” Kimmel deadpanned, “something has changed.”
What changed, of course, is that Trump now controls the federal agency that licenses broadcasters, and he’s discovered he can use it to punish networks for booking guests he doesn’t like. A government that can decide which candidates get airtime and which don’t isn’t refereeing the marketplace of ideas; it’s rigging it.
In 1969 the Supreme Court ruled in Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC that the airwaves belong to the public, and that it's the rights of viewers and listeners, not broadcasters and certainly not politicians, that come first. When a president uses the FCC to decide which candidates you're allowed to see on your own television, he isn't regulating the public's airwaves, he's stealing them.
Finally, a story that deserves the world’s attention. A new documentary has pulled back the curtain on the secret systems the Israeli military used to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and the testimony comes not from outside critics but from two dozen Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers who operated those systems themselves.
The film is called NAZA, and it premiered Thursday at the Venice International Film Festival, where it’s the only documentary competing for the top prize, the Golden Lion. It was produced by The Guardian and directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the filmmakers behind “No Other Land,” which won the Oscar for best documentary in 2025. NAZA is an Israeli military acronym used as a euphemism for the civilians expected to be killed in a given attack.
The interviews were filmed at night on Tel Aviv rooftops, with participants speaking only on the condition of anonymity. Their faces and voices were digitally altered to hide their identities. It took the directors three years to persuade these insiders to describe their work. And what they describe is not the fog of war or a few rogue soldiers. It’s a system.
The soldiers detail AI-based programs built to generate huge lists of low-ranking Hamas suspects, who were then bombed in their homes at night, with the full knowledge the strikes would kill their wives and children too.
According to the documentary, the military hacked into phones to pinpoint targets, and in some cases covertly listened in on a man’s conversations with his family in the moments before all of them were killed.
Interviewees describe the deliberate destruction of neighborhoods where the army itself estimated up to a quarter of residents were still sheltering inside. They also recount the systematic burning of homes, and the killing of civilians at a food distribution site. Several say they worked in a secret intelligence unit reporting directly to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office; one said their mission was to “thwart peace.”
The directors were careful to say the film isn’t about “sporadic war crimes committed by rogue soldiers.” It’s about “the orders themselves, the policies, the accepted practices, the language and logic that make those practices possible.”
The numbers are staggering. Israeli attacks since 2023 have reportedly killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and allegedly wounded more than 174,000, together amounting to over 10 percent of Gaza’s prewar population.
Israel’s restrictions on food shipments produced a man-made famine last summer, and its military is said to have destroyed or damaged more than three-quarters of all homes.
Israel’s war came in response to the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, in which Hamas killed more than 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 hostage. Most were also civilians.
The world established at Nuremberg in 1945 that "I was only following orders" is no defense, and the people who built and ran these systems clearly know it, which is why they'd only speak on darkened rooftops with their faces scrambled. A democracy that arms and funds this machinery doesn't get to look away when the operators themselves start describing how it worked.
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