Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann.
Panicked Republicans are telling Raw America that Donald Trump’s importing of Argentinian beef is going to cost them their House and Senate majorities. An active-duty soldier is now raising his six-year-old daughter alone after ICE deported his wife, even though she has no criminal record. An explosive new report reveals Trump ignored multiple warnings before launching his war on Iran that’s now dragged on for six months and cratered his approval rating. And election denier Mike Lindell has found yet another excuse to avoid paying for the Minnesota gubernatorial recount he swore he’d personally pay for.
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Republicans on Capitol Hill are in a full-blown meltdown over Trump’s plan to import beef from Argentina.
Beef prices have been climbing for awhile, and Trump’s answer was to suspend tariffs on up to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef for the next three months, with a promise that he’ll sell it at 25 percent below current market prices. While that might sound like a good deal for consumers, American ranchers and cattlemen — who make up a significant chunk of Trump’s own base — say it’s going to destroy them.
Some Republicans have been willing to publicly criticize the president over the plan. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote on social media that beef prices are high because America’s cattle herd is too small, and that flooding the market with cheap imports “will only put more pressure on our cattlemen.”
Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana went even further on his own X account, saying he personally warned Trump against this for the last year. He wrote that American ranchers have been struggling against meatpacking monopolies for decades, and that this move will only make things worse. He also reminded Trump that most of those ranchers are MAGA Republicans.
But the real story is what several unnamed Republican staffers confided to Raw America White House reporter Brian Karem. Sources inside the offices of Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Trump was, in their words, “an idiot who doesn’t understand economics and doesn’t understand math.” One staffer added that Trump is “the same president who thinks he can hand Americans 600 percent discounts on medicine,” who “simply doesn’t grasp the laws of supply and demand.”
Trump’s ongoing trade war with Canada is also making Republicans fear a blue wave with the midterms rapidly approaching in a couple of months. House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana is still publicly standing with Trump, but one senior member of his staff told this publication: “Trump is making it next to impossible for us to retain our majority.”
Another member of House Republican leadership told Karem that Trump is “Democrats’ secret weapon for success.”
Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who’s in a tight reelection race of her own, has also spoken out publicly against the administration’s trade policies. A member of her leadership team privately summed up their feelings about the midterms in a two-word response to Karem: “we’re screwed.”
That kind of language from Republicans about their own president speaks volumes about how badly this beef deal and the trade war is landing with voters.
In 1930, more than a thousand economists signed a public plea begging Herbert Hoover to veto the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, and he signed the thing anyway because he couldn’t afford to cross his own party. The farm belt got flattened, Republicans got buried in the next two elections, and it took them twenty years to win back the White House.
Trump’s draconian immigration policies aren’t sparing military families, despite previous administrations operating with the understanding that the immediate family members of enlisted men and women are off limits.
Army Sergeant Hedar Leonel Turcios Juarez, an active-duty soldier stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, is married to Cristy Maryori Villafranca-Trejo. On Monday, federal authorities deported her to Honduras, which she fled a decade ago at age 18 due to gang violence and political instability.
She’s now at least the seventh spouse or parent of an active-duty service member who has been deported by this administration. The Associated Press has identified more than 50 cases where immediate relatives of American troops were detained after Trump quietly rolled back protections for military households.
Villafranca-Trejo was detained back on July 11 outside a Walmart near the base. Since then, her husband has been trying to maintain his military duties along with raising their six-year-old daughter by himself. Instead of training in the mornings, he’s been dropping his daughter off at first grade. He’s already had to delay a scheduled assignment to another base.
He told the AP he doesn’t know if he can keep his Army career while also being a single parent.
DHS defended the deportation by saying Villafranca-Trejo received due process. According to the agency, she was issued a final removal order in 2017, during Trump’s first term, after missing a hearing. Her husband says she never got notice of that hearing and didn’t even know about the removal order until they applied for her green card following their marriage in 2022.
Turcios Juarez became a U.S. citizen in 2024, two years after enlisting in the Army. His wife’s lawyer says her motion to reopen the case was denied last spring, and an appeal was still pending with the Board of Immigration Appeals. She’d also been waiting for almost a year for a decision on a program specifically designed to allow immediate family of service members stay in the U.S. while sorting out their legal status.
Her husband argued they were following the rules and did everything they could on their end to fix the problem. His wife, by the way, has no criminal record.
A former ICE deputy chief counsel who worked in Trump’s first administration said this kind of removal is almost completely unheard of. If someone is married to an active-duty service member and working toward a green card, he said they wouldn’t be detained, let alone deported.
Democratic Congresswoman Veronica Escobar of Texas, who represents the El Paso area, opened a formal inquiry into the case and visited Villafranca-Trejo in detention earlier this month. She said her heart breaks for the family and for a soldier who almost certainly feels betrayed by the country he’s fighting for.
Turcios Juarez says he still hasn’t found a way to explain any of this to his young daughter. And despite everything, he says he still wants to keep serving the U.S. in uniform. He just doesn’t know how he’s going to do it.
In 1949 the family of Private Felix Longoria, a Mexican American soldier killed in the Philippines, was told the funeral home in Three Rivers, Texas wouldn’t let them use the chapel, and it took a sitting United States senator stepping in to get him buried at Arlington. A country that asks a man to put on the uniform and then treats his family like they don’t belong here hasn’t just broken a promise, it’s told him exactly what his service was worth.
According to a new report, Trump got repeated warnings from his own intelligence and military leadership that attacking Iran would be a disaster, but he ignored them and attacked Tehran anyway.
The Wall Street Journal reported on a February Oval Office meeting where the president asked his advisors whether a strike to both dismantle Iran’s nuclear program and force regime change could actually work. Tulsi Gabbard, who at the time was Trump’s director of national intelligence, told him that would likely close the Strait of Hormuz and trigger a global oil crisis. She also warned that killing Iran’s leader would likely lead to a new ayatollah even more determined to develop nuclear weapons.
Military leaders reportedly said the same thing, urging Trump against a war with Iran, as it would cost troops’ lives and rapidly drain America’s arsenal.
Trump forged ahead anyway, attacking Iran in conjunction with Israel. All of the warnings he ignored came true. Iran closed the Strait, oil prices skyrocketed, and Trump has nothing to show for it nearly six months later.
The Nuclear Threat Initiative told the Wall Street Journal this was an entirely predictable result. The group’s vice president said it’s easy to draw a straight line from launching a war with no clear objective to the current mess that’s eating Trump alive.
For a moment, Trump thought he’d won. At a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser on the night of the initial strikes, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and special envoy Steve Witkoff told him Israel had killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Trump had both men announce it to the room, and sources say he even crossed his arms and puffed out his chest while he reveled in applause.
But that moment of elation quickly passed as the Strait of Hormuz stayed closed. Saudi Arabia and Qatar began urging the White House to find a quick way to end the war, while even Republicans told the president their midterm chances were sinking fast given the deaths of 18 U.S. service members and soaring prices at the pump.
Officials confided to the paper that this all infuriated Trump, who reportedly kept asking his staff why Iran wasn’t giving up. At one point he reportedly asked someone whether he should just drop as many bombs as he could to try and end the war, but the person on the other end told him that would only prolong the war even more.
The White House continues to argue the Iran war has been a resounding success, saying Trump broke Iran’s military and crippled its nuclear program. The White House also points to the Naval blockade and new sanctions targeting Tehran. But after six months with no clear way out and mounting political costs, that’s becoming a harder sell.
James Madison wrote that the executive is the branch of government most interested in war and most prone to it, which is exactly why Article One hands the power to declare war to Congress and nowhere else. The framers weren’t worried about a president who’d be poorly informed, they were worried about one who’d be told the truth and go ahead anyway.
MyPillow CEO and 2020 election denier Mike Lindell finished in second place to Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth in the Gopher State’s Republican gubernatorial primary. He previously promised to personally pay for the cost of a recount. The Secretary of State’s office told him he had until Monday to officially submit the recount request and the $825,000 payment. Lindell’s campaign said the money was “primed and ready.”
However, Monday came and went, and neither the recount request nor the money have been submitted because Lindell’s camp is now apparently disputing the scope of the recount. State officials plan to recount only the votes cast for Lindell and Demuth, rather than every vote cast for every Republican candidate. Lindell’s campaign argues that’s a violation of Minnesota law, which defines a recount as tallying the votes validly cast for the office in question.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon’s office pushed back in an official statement, saying the plan was approved by the State Canvassing Board last week, follows both state law and administrative rules and matches the process used for recounts over the last 20 years.
It also needs to be stated that there’s no evidence of any fraud in the GOP primary. Demuth beat Lindell by more than 45,000 votes in a double-digit rout. Lindell told reporters on primary night that his team was concerned about unspecified “anomalies,” though he of course failed to produced any corroborating evidence.
Demuth will face Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar in November, who is aiming to succeed outgoing two-term Governor Tim Walz. Klobuchar is currently favored to win.
In 1884 the Supreme Court heard a case about men who beat a Black Georgian to stop him from voting, and Justice Samuel Miller warned that if the sources of power can be poisoned by corruption without any legal restraint, the country’s in real danger. Lindell isn’t beating anybody, but poisoning the source is the entire business model, and a man who demands a recount and then won’t pay for the one he demanded was never really after a number.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thank you for reading, and thank you for supporting independent media.