Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. Before we get started, take a few seconds to hit the ❤️ and click restack. Those two clicks are what help us get these important stories in front of the most people.
Last night, Donald Trump told a crowd of his own supporters in Texas they’re too poor to afford dinner at Mar-a-Lago. A federal judge just disqualified the president’s top federal prosecutor in Southern California, saying he’s now illegally serving in the role. A new poll conducted after Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy released his attack ad featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s estranged mother now finds that his supporters are now switching their vote to his opponent. And court documents are now revealing that ICE has built a massive surveillance operation to spy on left-wing activists, drawing comparisons to COINTELPRO during the Civil Rights Movement.
One more thing: independent media outlets like Raw America are rapidly becoming the last bastions of resistance as the MAGA billionaires and the cable networks and newspapers they own increasingly become compromised. And oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are using their platforms to prevent our stories from reaching our followers.
This morning, we interviewed Kentucky Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Charles Booker! Click here to watch and/or read the summary.
Donald Trump made a bizarre closing argument to MAGA voters during a Tuesday night rally in Corpus Christi, Texas: that his average supporter is too broke to afford dinner at his private club.
The president repeated the promise he made at his September midterm convention in Dallas that he would send every American adult a check for $5,000 if Republicans keep their majorities after November 3. Former prosecutors have described that as a bribe, while plenty of political observers doubt he’ll actually follow through on that promise given his track record.
Trump said that there was one catch with the checks: they would have to be spent in the United States. He briefly invited MAGA supporters to spend the money at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, before almost immediately withdrawing the invitation. He told the crowd of working-class voters that all the $5,000 would get them was maybe a hamburger and a small dessert.
Then, a moment later, he dissuaded them from going to Mar-a-Lago, saying it’s “not a good place if you’re price conscious.”
Keep in mind, this is the same billionaire who got reelected to the presidency by promising to bring down high costs for basic needs like groceries and gas prices “on day one.” Instead, he launched a war against Iran, which led to gas prices surging to more than $4 a gallon across the country. The inflation rate hit 3.7 percent last month. Working Americans are getting squeezed at every turn while the president cracks jokes about how they can’t afford to eat at his private club.
Critics jumped on Trump’s remarks. The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis reminded her followers that conservatives have spent the last few days calling Barack Obama an elitist over his quip about the Cheesecake Factory. Former Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison said Trump has “an abusive relationship” with his base and urged Americans to show their disgust with the president at the polls next Tuesday.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination in 1936, he warned us all about the economic royalists who’d come to view ordinary Americans as people who exist solely to serve them. Today, we have a billionaire president laughing in the faces of the exact same voters he’s asking to keep his party in power for another two years. A republic won’t last long when contempt flows downhill from in high, because sooner or later, the American people will figure out whose side the man on the stage is really on.
Out on the West Coast, U.S. District Judge Michael Seabright — an appointee of George W. Bush — ruled Tuesday night that Trump-appointed U.S Attorney Bill Essayli has been “unlawfully serving” as the top federal prosecutor in Southern California. Seabright’s order barred Essayli from overseeing two criminal prosecutions where defense attorneys officially challenged his jurisdiction.
Essayli is a former Republican state legislator and staunch Trump ally who was never officially confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The Trump administration initially named him interim U.S. attorney in April of last year. When that interim period expired after a few months, the administration then named him “acting” U.S. attorney. When a judge ruled that was illegal too, the Trump Justice Department labeled him instead as “first assistant.” The Founders specifically gave the Senate confirmation powers in Article I of the Constitution in order to stop presidents from stacking powerful offices with political stooges, but this administration appears to view that as a suggestion.
The Trump administration tried something similar in Nevada, though the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck it down. Seabright cited that Nevada ruling in his Tuesday decision. The order doesn’t take effect right away, and the DOJ has indicated it will file an appeal. Essayli said in a statement that he “respectfully disagrees” with Seabright’s decision, and that he expects the Supreme Court to settle the matter in his favor and continue serving as U.S. attorney in the meantime.
Defense attorney H. Dean Steward called Seabright’s ruling a victory for the rule of law, and told local media the administration “got caught in Los Angeles” trying to install his toadies as federal prosecutors.
Essayli has aggressively used the power of his office to push Trump’s agenda, which includes targeting immigrants and ICE protesters for prosecution. He’s also pushed the baseless claim that thousands of registered California voters may be non-citizens, and has pushed to have those voters’ ballots set aside and not counted with other votes. California election officials are currently fighting back against that effort.
Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 76 that the Senate’s power to confirm was designed to be a check on a president’s favoritism, so he couldn’t simply hand out offices based on personal attachment rather than whether someone is actually fit to do the job. Playing games to circumvent those checks means Trump knows he doesn’t have a prosecutor upholding the rule of law who answers to the public, but a man who answers to just one boss. And he’s continuing to use that office to intimidate and silence his boss’ critics.
In Ohio, Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s controversial attack ad against Democrat Amy Acton appears to be significantly backfiring. A new poll from Suffolk University and USA Today found that 72 percent of likely Ohio voters had seen or heard about the ad within days of its release last week.
The ad features the testimony of Acton’s estranged mother, who hasn’t spoken to her daughter since 1978. She called Acton a liar in describing her rough childhood. The ad omitted that she stayed married to the man who was criminally charged for raping Acton when she was just 12 years old, who remained a fugitive from justice until he died. Only one respondent said it moved them toward Ramaswamy, while seven said it pushed them toward Acton.
One of those voters was Brenda Malcolm, an independent voter from Columbus. She told pollsters Ramaswamy’s ad “just totally ticked me off,” and pointed out that a mother who hasn’t seen her daughter in 50 years doesn’t know anything about her.
Acton now leads 48 percent to 44 percent, inside the 4.4-point margin of error, so the race is still a toss-up. Ramaswamy has committed more than $4 million to keep the ad on the air through Election Day, even after Republican Governor Mike DeWine and former Governor John Kasich asked him to pull it. Suffolk pollster David Paleologos called it a Hail Mary, the kind of ad a campaign only runs when it’s trailing badly.
When Joe McCarthy was finally broken in 1954, it wasn’t because of any policy. It was because attorney Joseph Welch asked him on live TV whether he had any sense of decency left. Millions of Americans watching at home decided that he didn’t. We still have a floor of basic decency in this country that ordinary voters will still enforce when nobody else does. A candidate spending $4 million to broadcast an ad parading a candidate’s estranged mother in front of the cameras is exactly the kind of thing that makes voters remember their own sense of decency and vote accordingly.
Finally, a new investigation from WIRED magazine is pulling back the curtain on what may be the largest domestic spying operation against American leftists since the 1960s.
Attorneys for the Minnesota 15 — residents of the Minneapolis area who are facing federal conspiracy charges — obtained new evidence that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ran a massive surveillance campaign against activists who helped monitor federal agents during the January ICE crackdown in Minnesota’s largest city.
Roughly 120 agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) worked the case, including 11 undercover agents. They infiltrated local churches, civil rights training sessions, marches and Signal group chats, collecting a staggering 15 terabytes of communications. They flew Reaper drones over the Twin Cities, ran license plates on cars parked outside meetings, and used the PATRIOT Act’s tools built for building financial cases against terrorists to dig through activists’ PayPal transactions and wire transfers.
The undercover operations carried names like Project Whipple Shield and Operation Puppet Master, and they were authorized under Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. The president issued that order after the 2025 killing of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk, directing federal law enforcement to pursue critics of his administration and people espousing so-called “anti-Christian” ideas. The government’s surveillance efforts stretched all the way to include monitoring of activist conferences in Seattle, Chicago, Michigan and New York.
This is way larger than the CIA’s Operation Chaos, which had just 42 agents spying on the anti-Vietnam War movement at its peak. Court records show 119 agents with HSI worked on this particular case. Retired FBI agent Mike German told WIRED these are the exact same tactics former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover used against the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, except today’s government has tons more data to work with.
Attorney Kevin Riach, who is representing Minnesota 15 defendant Isaac Sant, called the operation “the new COINTELPRO.” According to Riach, ICE is the Trump administration’s paramilitary force, while HSI has replaced the FBI as the president’s investigative secret police.
After the Church Committee made Americans aware of domestic spying efforts in 1975, Congress built new guardrails like the FISA court and the attorney general’s guidelines to curb surveillance of political activists. A free people can’t stay free when their government keeps a dossier on anyone who attends a march or goes to an organizing meeting in a church basement. Those guardrails only ever held because the people in power respected them. This administration has decided it won’t.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent journalism. Please make sure to tap the ❤️ and hit the restack button so we can get these stories in front of the people who need them.