Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
A sitting Republican member of Congress just quietly deleted Donald Trump’s endorsement from his own campaign website. A former staffer for Georgia Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Collins is found to have posted images of himself in Ku Klux Klan robes along with a swastika made out of a slur. The Department of Education posted a movie clip aimed at complimenting Trump, except the quote in it is about Adolf Hitler. And Trump’s White House is continuing to bleed out staff right as Democrats are expected to retake potentially both chambers of Congress and launch historic investigations into the Trump administration.
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The rural California congressional seat vacated by Republican Doug LaMalfa, who died in January, is now held by Republican James Gallagher after he won a June special election. President Donald Trump endorsed Gallagher on multiple occasions. In February, he wrote that Gallagher had his “Complete and Total Endorsement” and declared that “HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN.” At the time, Gallagher said he was deeply honored.
For months, that endorsement was prominently featured on the endorsements page of Gallagher’s campaign website. But at some point between early June and late July, it vanished.
A Daily Beast review found that Gallagher’s team removed every trace of Trump from that page without giving any announcement or explanation. This is despite Trump going out of his way to praise Gallagher on his Truth Social site, calling him a “very successful Family Farmer, Attorney, former County Supervisor” in a post before the June special election, urging the MAGA base to cast their ballots for him.
By the way, those Truth Social posts are still up as of today. Trump hasn’t taken anything down. Gallagher’s team is the only party doing the scrubbing.
It isn’t just Gallagher trying to wash off Trump’s stink. Kentucky congressional candidate Ralph Alvarado also wiped Trump’s name and image from his site. GOP Congressman Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania also quietly removed MAGA talking points from his own website, including language about opposing “forever wars.”
It’s easy to see why Republicans are increasingly viewing Trump’s endorsement as a liability. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 35 percent of Republicans say they “strongly approve” of Trump’s job performance. His overall net approval sits at 33 percent, a new record low.
The White House is trying to minimize and downplay the president’s sinking approval ratings, with spokesperson Davis Ingle saying Trump has already made “historic progress” and that this is “just the beginning.” Sure thing, Davis. But you should know that when your own party’s candidates are erasing your name from their campaign sites with the election just months away, that’s not exactly a sign of confidence.
Every strongman movement in history has run on the illusion of inevitability, and the moment politicians start quietly editing their websites you know that spell is wearing thin. But notice what Gallagher didn't do. He didn't renounce a thing, didn't say a word about why, he just hid the evidence, which means it all goes right back up the second the polls turn, and a party that only opposes a demagogue when it's safe isn't opposing him at all.
The Georgia U.S. Senate race between Republican Mike Collins and incumbent Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff has taken a new ugly turn.
The Washington Post discovered that a former Collins staffer named Preston Parra shared images on social media of a swastika and another image of himself dressed head-to-toe in a Ku Klux Klan uniform. The swastika was spelled out using the word “twink,” a slur referring to slim young gay men.
Parra interned for Collins in 2024 and was later paid roughly $8,000 for fundraising consulting through Collins’s leadership PAC. In one post, he celebrated Collins campaign signs going up. Just a few hours earlier that day, he posted a German phrase widely associated with Nazi propaganda.
When the Post asked him about it, Parra defended the image of him wearing Klan robes as “satirical,” and said he made it with AI and described himself as a provocateur. He also blatantly argued that “the white race contributes more to the world.”
As tempting as it may be to explain this as a rogue former staffer, Collins seems to have a pattern of hiring staffers with problematic behavior. His and former chief of staff, Brandon Phillips, was fired after Collins’s own campaign account mocked a rival’s campaign operative during Georgia’s Republican primary. Phillips is also the subject of a House ethics review over allegations he hired someone he was personally involved with for a taxpayer-funded internship that she reportedly never actually showed up to.
Collins’s next chief of staff, Kip Talley, was also eventually fired. Slate reported that Talley was part of a group chat that included prominent white nationalists like Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who spoke at the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Then there’s Collins’s own son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, who’s shared Nazi imagery online. He also made a video arguing that Adolf Hitler’s legacy may be getting a second chance from Gen Z men. Additionaly, Collins’ former digital director, William Paul — the son of Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky — reportedly shouted antisemitic insults at Republican Congressman Mike Lawler of New York back in May.
Even Georgia Republicans are noticing the pattern. Tea Party organizer Debbie Dooley reminded Collins that if you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas. And a conservative radio host in Georgia even said he’s endorsing Jon Ossoff over the company Collins keeps.
Collins responded by called the ethics probe into his former chief of staff a “nothingburger,” and insisted the staffing scandals are nothing more than disgruntled former employees lashing out. But this is a problem for Republicans, who are counting on flipping a Senate seat Trump won just two years ago in order to keep their majority.
Georgia's been down this road before. In the 1920s the Klan wasn't a handful of cranks hiding out in the woods, it was mainstream enough to help put governors and senators and even a Supreme Court justice in office, and it got that way because respectable politicians decided the votes were worth the company they were keeping. That's how this poison always goes mainstream, not with a march but with a hire nobody wants to talk about, and calling it a “nothingburger” is exactly how you find out what a man will tolerate to win.
The Department of Education’s official X account recently posted a clip from the film “Darkest Hour,” in which Gary Oldman delivered an Oscar-winning performance as Winston Churchill. In the clip, Churchill declared, “you cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.”
Linda McMahon’s Education Department captioned the post “No one does it like us” with a tiger emoji, apparently trying to suggest that Donald Trump was the tiger Churchill was referring to.
But anyone who actually saw the film knows that Churchill wasn’t talking about personally being a tiger, but that the tiger in question was Adolf Hitler.
In the movie, Churchill was making the case for why Britain couldn’t appease Nazi Germany as his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, famously did with the Munich Agreement. The crux of that quote is that you can’t negotiate with a monster that’s bearing down on you.
Social media users immediately took notice. One account pointed out that the clip wasn’t even a real Churchill quote, and that the tiger in question was Hitler’s Nazi regime. Another was quick to ask what any of this had to do with public education policy in the United States. Another commenter wryly observed that the Department of Education’s apparent lack of media literacy by misinterpreting the scene was “beautifully poetic.” Eventually, the department received the message and deleted the post.
Trump has compared himself to plenty of historical figures, and British commentator Piers Morgan once gave Trump a replica of Churchill’s famous hat. But according to the book “Regime Change” by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Trump has also suggested that he has more power now than fitures like Napoleon, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin. He was also careful to add, however, that those men “maintained power though fear,” and asked — perhaps rhetorically — who would do a thing like that.
It might behoove the Education Department social media team to actually watch the movie before clicking the post button.
Thomas Jefferson warned us that a nation can’t be both ignorant and free, and that’s the entire reason we built a public school system in the first place. Now the very agency charged with defending that idea can’t recognize a scene about appeasing Hitler while it’s playing on their own screen, and these are the people busy dismantling the schools that teach our kids how tyranny works. When a country forgets its history, it stops being able to see the tiger, and that’s not an accident, it’s the goal.
Trump is helplessly watching an exodus of his most senior staff with the midterms just around the corner. People who have previously worked in the White House say this is happening for a very specific and obvious reason.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt is leaving at the end of August to go back to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. Her press shop colleague Abigail Jackson is already gone. Director of legislative affairs James Braid is also leaving at the end of September, and his deputy left in April. The White House’s Senate liaison left in June. A special assistant for legislative affairs also left earlier this summer. This means the White House staffers in charge of making sure the administration keeps Congress in line with its priorities are all gone.
Former officials say this is eerily similar to 2018, when Democrats flipped 40 House during Trump’s first term. Back then, staff quit in anticipation of a blue wave and likely congressional investigations that would grind the business of governing to a screeching halt.
One former White House official told Bloomberg that responding nonstop to congressional inquiries means that any actual work is indefinitely on pause.
Harrison Fields, a former Trump communications aide, said filling the vacancies in the legislative affairs office is a top priority, since Republicans haven’t had to attempt to actually find common ground to pass legislation given the trifecta they won in 2024.
Financial incentives are also prompting Trump staffers to see if the grass is greener on the other side. The Trump White House scrapped the traditional “cooling off” period meant to prevent former staffers from immediately cashing in as lobbyists. Alex Jacquez, who advised former President Joe Biden, said the two-year mark before the midterm elections is precisely when former staffers have the most leverage, and exactly when the lobbying firms start recruiting.
Burnout also plays a significant role. Alex Gray, who spent all four years as the National Security Council’s chief of staff in the first Trump administration, said the job is brutal on staffers’ health, and that the two-year mark is when many decide whether they want to spend another two years in a high-stress role.
Data from the Brookings Institution shows Trump’s second-term turnover rate is particularly high even when compared to his chaotic first term. Whatever the mix of reasons, fatigue, opportunity, or plain dread about what a Democratic House might do with control over congressional committees, the exodus is real, and it’s happening even sooner than last time.
Watch where these folks land, because killing the cooling off period turned government service into a two year apprenticeship for K Street, and the same people writing the rules for the pharmaceutical and oil companies this fall will be cashing their checks by spring. And the other half of this is even simpler. Nobody runs from work they're proud of, so when the staff starts clearing out before the subpoenas even show up, that's a confession, and it's a reminder that congressional oversight is the one tool the Framers left us that actually scares these people.
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