Political News

President Donald Trump on Friday officially said he wouldn’t sign a bipartisan affordable housing bill that Republicans wanted to run on in this year’s midterm elections, posting on social media in all caps that his decision is in “PROTEST” over the fact that the GOP-controlled Congress hasn’t passed a bill to suppress voting rights. The housing bill—which, among other things…

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Trump says he isn’t corrupt—he’s just lucky…

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American wages have stagnated, while the cost of living—affected by rising inflation and the unending Iran war—continues to climb. Yet the vice president has not been shy about the fact that he is, comparatively, living very large.

JD Vance joined Dirty Jobs star Mike Rowe’s podcast Thursday to chat about faith, family, and the future of America. But amid the pair’s sprawling conversation, the vice president offered a bit of insight into how his new role has offered him a completely new lifestyle.

“My life is—dude, totally transformed,” Vance said, eliciting laughter from Rowe.

Vance earns a base official salary of $235,100 per year as America’s second-in-command, but of course the accoutrements of his high-powered office provide a litany of other perks.

“I don’t go to the grocery store anymore. People go to the grocery store for me. Most of my meals—like, when I cook a meal—I love to cook, actually. Big baker. I like to cook for my kids as a special occasion, but I don’t have to cook anymore because I have an army of people willing to cook my food,” he continued.

“My life is so weird. I fly around on a 757, no more TSA lines for me and the kids. It’s so weird, but it can become the sort of thing that if you internalize it, you start to become an entitled asshole,” Vance said.

Vance: My life is-- dude, totally transformed. People go to the grocery store for me. I don't have to cook anymore because I have an army of people willing to cook my food. No more TSA lines for me. pic.twitter.com/4ystwLEKcG

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) July 10, 2026

Maybe that executive branch dissonance could explain why Donald Trump claimed that Americans need to provide identification in order to go to the grocery store, or why the president has repeatedly insisted that groceries is “an old-fashioned word.”

“We have a term ‘groceries,’” Trump told the leaders of the United Arab Emirates last year. “It’s an old term, but it means basically what you’re buying, food, it’s a pretty accurate term but it’s an old-fashioned sound.”

Affordability is the chief concern for Americans heading into the midterm elections, according to an April Gallup poll. In January, a New York Times/Siena poll found that 65 percent of American voters felt that a middle-class lifestyle was out of reach, while 77 percent said that a middle-class life was more difficult to attain than it was a generation before. All in all, a majority of Americans feel that they’ve been priced out of a broad range of necessities, including education, health care, and having a family.

Those sentiments have surely only been exacerbated in the months since. The cost of oil and gas has skyrocketed since the onset of the Iran war; utility bills have continued to climb; health insurance premiums have drastically outpaced the growth of employee paychecks; and homeownership seems like an increasingly unattainable dream due to low market availability and astronomical prices.

Meanwhile, the White House has repeatedly detached itself from efforts that would aid America’s middle and lower classes. Case in point: Trump’s decision Friday morning to divorce his office from the bipartisan housing bill. Trump did so in another futile attempt to force through his unpopular voter ID bill, the SAVE America Act.

President Trump’s attacks on wind power could have a devastating effect on Minnesota. 

The state has four wind energy projects that could bring 1,200 construction jobs, 4,400 other jobs connected to the projects, and over $168 million in economic impacts to the state, the Minnesota Reformer reports, citing the progressive think tank North Star Policy Action. 

The Trump administration has stopped the Department of Defense from completing legally mandated national security reviews of proposed wind farms, basically halting their construction across the country. In total, over 250 such projects have been stalled, four of them in the Gopher State, with $1.6 billion in investments behind them. 

“Minnesota has spent decades building one of the strongest wind energy economies in the country, and the federal government is now actively dismantling that through a permitting process turned into an indefinite roadblock,” said Aaron Rosenthal, North Star Policy Action’s research director, to the Reformer.

The St. Paul-based think tank’s report points out that the four wind projects would have a combined output of 1,119 megawatts, more than that of Xcel Energy’s Prairie Island nuclear power plant in the state. Minnesota has a mandate to have 100 percent carbon-free electricity in the state by 2040, and these wind projects would be a big step forward. 

Under President Biden, wind power got a big boost across the U.S., with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act bringing billions of dollars of federal loans, tax credits, and grants. But Trump has a long-standing hatred of wind power going back to a bitter fight years ago against wind turbines built near his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland. 

On the first day of his second term as president, Trump signed an executive order freezing wind power permits both on- and off-shore. That lasted until June this year, when the administration abandoned its effort to defend the order in court. But Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said last year that he would have to personally approve any federal solar and wind permits, stalling national projects.  

“We have not approved one windmill since I’ve been in office. And we’re going to keep it that way. My goal is to not let any windmill be built,” Trump said in March. To satisfy the president’s vendetta, the federal government has been buying out developers and companies seeking to build wind projects. 

Wind power is abundant in the U.S., especially in the Midwest, and doesn’t produce carbon emissions or pollution. The costs to set up wind farms are rapidly dropping, and it only takes 6 to 9 miles per hour—a gentle breeze—to get turbines to spin and generate electricity. But to the anti-green Trump administration, anything that isn’t oil and gas should be shut down, even if it means higher electricity bills. 

Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch responded to President Trump’s most recent attack, framing the White House’s hostile 162-page July 4 report as a gross misrepresentation of what the storied cultural institution actually does.

“While there will always be room for improvement, this report is not a fair characterization of the work and totality of the National Museum of American History,” Bunch said in an internal letter obtained by ABC News. “At the Smithsonian, our work is driven by scholarship, accuracy, and an uncompromising commitment to tell the fullness of America’s story.… As public servants and the keepers of this institution, we are charged with helping a nation find understanding, hope, and clarity and as part of that duty, we are dedicated to excellence, reflection, and growth.”

The White House’s Domestic Policy Council essentially called the Smithsonian an extremist, anti-white, anti-American organization, writing that the museum “has become subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.”

“As it stands today, it would benefit most Americans, especially parents bringing their children for a tour, if the Smithsonian’s flagship history museum had a label at every entrance that reads: ‘Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country,’” the report concluded.

Bunch, who is the Smithsonian’s first Black chief and whose time leading the institution may very well be limited, encouraged his staff to continue to use their work to “find understanding, hope, and clarity.”

How much can you really love America if you’re not willing to see all sides of its history, from its most triumphant moments to its most abhorrent ones? Everything contained in the Smithsonian museums—from the National African American History and Culture Museum to the American Art Museum—is there because it had an outsize impact on American culture. It seems that the right just can’t handle hearing anything negative about this country at all, regardless of how truthful it is.

President Donald Trump tried to take credit for Walmart’s summer sale, but it seems he didn’t have anything to do with lowering prices.

White House senior deputy press secretary Kush Desai crashed out Thursday when faced with a report that Trump didn’t deserve any credit for Walmart’s recent price reduction on beef, which has seen an average national price increase of 13 percent in the last year.

“The President and Walmart’s announcement was that the sale is extending all summer long,” he wrote on X. “This is a big win for Americans. The media’s obsessive need to try to undermine any good news when it affects President Trump is pathological.”

Trump announced Monday that he’d directed the country’s largest grocer to initiate massive price cuts—but the company’s standard seasonal sale was already underway.

“I have just been informed that one of the biggest, best, and smartest Retailers in America, Walmart, will be lowering prices, by a lot, at my Administration’s request to celebrate our great Country’s 250th birthday,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Walmart will, in particular, be dropping the price for a pound of ground beef by almost 15%, among many other products.”

But a spokesperson for Walmart told The Bulwark Thursday that the retailer had begun one of its price “rollback” events last week—before Trump declared he’d won a discount for millions of Americans.

In a press release Monday, Walmart announced that it would lower prices for barbecue essentials like ground beef, potato chips, and soda. Nowhere in the press release did the company mention the Trump administration, or the country’s 250th anniversary.

Trump’s Department of Agriculture has begun a pressure campaign on grocers to lower beef prices, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. But when the USDA called up Walmart, the retailer said it already had plans to reduce prices for the summer, including for beef, two people familiar with the matter told the Journal.

Walmart ran a Walmart Deals campaign between June 22 and June 28. It appears that the company already had plans to extend the sale after that date without any urging from Trump at all.

Under orders from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the U.S. Navy is set to adopt a rule that would allow Black soldiers to be purged simply because of their facial hair. Currently, the Navy issues permanent shaving waivers to members with certain skin conditions caused by shaving, especially a condition known as pseudofolliculitis barbae, commonly known as razor bumps. This is a condition…

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Consider supporting my work so I can continue creating it: Substack: https://nickanderson.substack.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/editorialcartoons Ko-Fi: https://www.patreon.com/c/editorialcartoonsCartoon Related | Trump’s big birthday bash for America was a bust…

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Nine months after delivering his widely mocked “beardo” speech, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is still fuming about the military’s (according to him) lax attitude toward grooming standards.

Hegseth has recently complained in private about seeing service members with facial hair, going so far as to suggest that the military’s senior leadership has not fully embraced his new appearance and hygiene requirements, according to U.S. officials that spoke with CBS News Friday.

One unidentified official told the network that Hegseth was frustrated that his speech last year did not produce immediate results.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell attributed Hegseth’s anger to his high expectations.

“Secretary Hegseth maintains the highest expectations for our service members to uphold the professional standards of appearance, fitness, and discipline that define our warfighting force, and he continues to emphasize consistent enforcement of hair, weight, and grooming standards across all ranks,” Parnell said in a statement to CBS News.

“Commanders at every level are expected to lead by example by meeting these standards, implementing these requirements, and they will be held accountable for delivering results as the Department works to restore a culture of excellence and readiness,” Parnell continued. “Our Armed Forces are stronger when every service member meets and exceeds these expectations.”

Last September, Hegseth ordered hundreds of America’s top military commanders to leave their international posts to attend a mandatory in-person assembly in Quantico, Virginia, during which the hairphobic ex–Fox News host unveiled his agenda to de-woke the country’s armed forces.

The plan involved snipping away shaving waivers, despite the disproportionate impact that the requirement would have on Black service members, who are more frequently diagnosed with pseudofolliculitis barbae—or chronic razor bumps—due to the curl pattern of the hair and the subsequent injurious effects of frequently shaving their faces. The painful inflammatory condition has been estimated to affect somewhere between 45 percent to 83 percent of the Black male population in the U.S.

“No more beardos,” Hegseth said during his address. “Calling someone to shave, or work hard, is exactly the kind of workforce we want.”

“The era of rampant and ridiculous shaving profiles is done,” Hegseth noted at the time, adding that anyone unwilling to comply should look for a “new position or a new profession.”

Branches of the military have distributed their own internal guidance per the new grooming mandate, revealing that even those with medical exemptions will not be allowed to receive accommodations past 12 consecutive months.

The Trump administration wants to fence off parts of Pennsylvania Avenue outside of the White House, shutting down a historic space for political protests.

The Washington Post reports that the administration and Secret Service plan to put fences where Pennsylvania Avenue crosses 15th and 17th Streets NW, allowing them to close pedestrian access if they decide there are security risks.

Multiple presidential administrations have used temporary barriers on Pennsylvania Avenue, but the Secret Service’s suggestion to erect permanent fences there has faced pushback as a clear attempt to restrict public access to the White House. The Trump administration is also planning to put up permanent fencing around Lafayette Square, a public park across from the White House and another historic protest space.

The fences on Pennsylvania Avenue would affect multiple organizations that are located on the street, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery and the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. And new fencing could cut off the public’s view of the White House and deter, if not outright bar, pedestrians from getting through.

“This would mean that residents and tourists alike would be unable to see the White House from any reasonable distance, especially if Trump plants more trees in the Park,” said Michael McGill, a former General Services Administration official who also served on the Capitol Planning Commission, in an email to the Post, referring to Trump’s other plan to plant 47 trees in Lafayette Park.

In May, parts of Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Lafayette Square were painted with yellow lines to allow cars to park during special events over the summer, including President Trump’s “UFC Freedom 250” birthday fight and fan festival at the Ellipse. Trump has gone out of his way to remake the White House (like his ballroom) and the parts of Washington near it without any regard for public opinion.

The men who were in Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s vehicle when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed him on Tuesday say he did not try ram the immigration agents’ unmarked car—directly contradicting ICE’s version of events.

The agents stated that Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and father of three who was on his way to work, had ignored their verbal commands, “weaponized his vehicle,” and tried to run over one of them. The agent shot him and claimed self-defense.

“That is a lie,” Jose Trinidad Rojas, 51, said in a handwritten statement offered to The Washington Post by his lawyer, Hugo Balderas-Ibarra. “It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over.... There were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.... Lorenzo thought we had lost them but suddenly they surrounded us.”

Balderas-Ibarra said he spoke to Rojas and the two other passengers—Daniel Tirado Pantoja and Victor Salgado, Salgado Araujo’s brother—separately, and each stated that ICE lied about Salgado Araujo’s violent intent. Victor also said that agents began firing from their vehicle’s passenger side, striking his brother in the abdomen and then mocking him while he bled out, saying, “You wanted to escape, right?”

All four men in the car had been in the United States for at least two decades. They were arrested and taken into custody shortly after the shooting.

Not only do these witnesses say ICE is lying, the footage of the incident suggests they were too. Video obtained by local outlet KHOU 11 shows the agents tried to box Salgado Araujo’s car in with their unmarked black SUV, initiating the conflict. When Salgado Araujo made a U-turn and fled in the other direction, the agents (who could have been anyone to him, as they were in an unmarked vehicle) followed him. Even worse, The New York Times reported that Salgado Araujo wasn’t even the intended target—they were hunting two immigrants from Guatemala. Now Salgado Araujo is dead for no reason. He is the tenth person to be fatally shot by federal immigration agents since President Trump returned to office.

The conventional media wisdom is that Maine GOP Senator Susan Collins is sitting back and laughing this week, and well she might be. The collapse of Graham Platner’s campaign is an implosion for the ages, and it puts the state’s Democrats in a tricky situation they need to navigate skillfully in these next two weeks.

But November is a long way away. If—and it’s a big but by no means insurmountable if—the Democrats make it through these next two weeks without too many bruises and unite behind a nominee, Collins is still going to be fighting for her life in a Democratic state where Donald Trump’s approval rating is 36 percent, where 85 percent say the state’s economy is fair or poor, and where the generic Democratic congressional edge in one recent poll is a hefty 11 percent. Those are all terrifying numbers for Collins, and she knows it.

Before we get into all that, a few closing thoughts on Platner. I wrote about him a month ago, after The New York Times published some unsavory revelations about his treatment of some former girlfriends (while others said he was fine toward them), and right before the primary. I wrote that since he was almost certain to be the nominee, national Democrats needed to back him.

I did, however, add three caveats, as experience has taught me to do in such situations: “Short of revelations involving murder, rape, or a taste for child pornography, Platner needs to be backed by Democrats to the hilt.” Well, he managed one out of three, but one is enough. It’s utterly and obviously disqualifying.

Some Platner defenders have tried to say, What about innocent until proven guilty? That’s ridiculous in the context of running for office. Yes, it means everything in a court of law, where a defendant is on trial for his very freedom; there, he is absolutely entitled to a presumption of innocence, and he must be given his day in court so that we all hear his side. But a political campaign isn’t a criminal trial. In a political campaign, political judgments must be made, and the clear political judgment here is that no party can back someone facing a credible allegation of rape, for God’s sake.

As for the intentionally weak vetting of Platner by the young leftist strategists who “discovered” him: I hope people have learned some obvious lessons. Daniel Moraff, the person who’s apparently largely responsible for this debacle, told The Wall Street Journal last month that he sensed a public thirsting for non-cookie-cutter candidates who challenge the status quo. That’s surely true, in a lot of places, but it hardly means you don’t need to put your candidates through the usual paces. It’s grotesquely arrogant and irresponsible, and if Collins ends up winning, Moraff will bear a huge share of the blame.

However: I still say, Moraff and Platner aside, Collins could well be in far more trouble with a new Democratic nominee. Kamala Harris beat Trump by seven points in the state. And as I noted above, in a recent poll, respondents said that for Congress, they’d choose a Democrat over a Republican by 53 percent to 42 percent. On top of that, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Hannah Pingree, who will be at the top of the ticket, looks like she’s going to beat her Republican foe by around 15 points. That means Collins is going to have to convince a lot of independents to switch from the D column to the R one as they move down the ballot from governor to senator.

Collins has won such voters before, but I would remind people, as they look over past elections for parallels, to take note not only of what’s similar but of what’s different.

The main (as it were) case in point here is 2014. Shenna Bellows, the current secretary of state and a leading contender to replace Platner, was the Democratic nominee against Collins that year. Collins blew her out by 30 points, which some say should raise a lot of red flags.

Well, there are a host of differences between 2014 and today. One, Bellows was a 39-year-old novice then, who had never held office and whose claim to fame was that she had been the head of the state’s ACLU. Two, it was the sixth year of a Democratic incumbent presidency, a notoriously hard year for candidates of said party. Three, the Maine of 2014 was in such a cantankerous state that it reelected embarrassing extremist loudmouth Paul LePage as its governor. Four, it was pre-Trump, which changes everything. Five, it was before Collins’s vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice because she took him at his word that Roe v. Wade was “settled law.”

I’m not saying Bellows should be the choice. I don’t know enough about the available candidates or the ins and outs of Maine politics. That’s up to those 600 Democratic delegates to sort out and decide. I’m just saying that what’s past isn’t always prologue. The point is what’s going on now. And what’s going on now, nationally and in Maine, is a strong anti-Trump sentiment—and a GOP incumbent senator who voted to confirm 22 of Trump’s 23 Cabinet nominees.

What the Maine Democratic Party, and to some extent the national Democratic Party, has to do here is run a process that is widely accepted as having two qualities: It must be transparent, and it has to feel fair. The party needs to give voters and citizens regular updates on the process—this is happening today; this is happening next Tuesday—so that everyone feels they’re in the loop and no one feels sandbagged. And it needs to feel fair so that in the end, everyone at least feels that they need to accept the outcome.

As for the national party, I hope Chuck Schumer has the sense to stay completely out of this. His fear of Platner turns out to have been justified, but the way he pushed Governor Janet Mills—who ran as if she didn’t really want to be there—into the race only helped Platner score the nomination. If Schumer and national Democrats are perceived as putting their finger on the scale for a candidate—for instance, in order to stop former state Senate Majority Leader Troy Jackson, who is widely seen as most Platner-like in his populist politics—they’ll only sow rancor and help Collins in the long run.

In the short term, this was a good week for Susan Collins. But to paraphrase Harry Hopkins, people don’t vote in the short term. They vote in November. By then, she could very well be regretting this week’s events.

Republican primary voters really one-upped the contest for who can pick the most unpalatable nominee, officially choosing Victor Marx—a lunatic who has made wild claims about everything from killing people to being a military hero—as their nominee for governor in Colorado. Marx was officially declared the winner on Thursday evening, besting state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer by less than half a…

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On Monday,  Ulises Peña López, represented by Disability Law United and Pangea Legal Services, sued the US government and private prison contractors GeoGroup and CoreCivic over his arrest by ICE officers and his following treatment in ICE detention facilities. Peña López was deported to Mexico in October 2025 after spending six months in ICE detention.

Before his arrest, Peña López, a carpenter, already lived with disabilities due to a mini-stroke, which was diagnosed in August 2024, and was managed before his detention. The lawsuit contends that after ICE officers detained Peña López in February 2025 in Sunnyvale, California, they took him to an alleyway and beat him until he lost consciousness and required CPR.

His wife, Aby, and their young daughter witnessed part of the beating by ICE, according to the lawsuit.

Peña López’s ongoing symptoms, the lawsuit says, include new and worsening “headaches, weakness and numbness on his right side, eye pain, hearing loss, insomnia and nightmares, blurry vision, back pain, and difficulty walking.” Peña Lopez is unable to work to support himself, according to an interview with the NPR afilliate KQED.

“What I want more than anything, I can’t get back: to recover my health, to be with my wife and daughter, and to be able to work again,” Peña López told KQED.

The lawsuit filed for Peña López’s complaints cites the Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which mandates that places receiving federal funding, like ICE detention centers, accommodate disabled people, among other laws. Peña Lopez’s wife and children are also part of the lawsuit due to the distress his arrest and subsequent treatment caused them.

During Peña López’s eight months in ICE detention in facilities operated by GeoGroup and CoreCivic, the lawsuit says, López received inadequate medical care and was also mocked by employees for his disability.

The lawsuit alleges that staff’s verbal abuse was particularly cruel at Golden State Annex, operated by GeoGroup. Detention staff reportedly told Peña López that “motherfucker, you don’t get to be asleep” and “you’re never gonna walk again.”

During Peña López’s transfer to California City Detention Center last August, the lawsuit says, “detention staff denied Ulises timely administration of his daily medication, violated his disability rights, and subjected him to unnecessarily harsh conditions,” such as not getting adequate medical care. At the facility operated by CoreCivic, Peña López also struggled to get his medications. As a result, Peña López’s health worsened before he was deported.

A spokesperson for CoreCivic told Mother Jones that while the company does not generally comment on active litigation, “we can share that the safety, health and well-being of the people in our facilities is our top priority.”

For Peña López’s lawyers, this lawsuit represents not only a pursuit of López, but also of others mistreated by ICE.

“This lawsuit seeks accountability for the physical and emotional harms our clients suffered, but it also joins a growing wave of lawsuits challenging abusive ICE enforcement and detention practices,” said Elena Hodges, co-director at Pangea Legal Services, which is representing Peña López and his family, said in a press release.

“We hope this case will send a powerful message to immigrant communities that they are not alone,” Hodges, said, “and that ICE officials and private prison contractors are not above the law.”

The White House Office of Budget and Management is planning massive changes to the way federal grants are handed out, making it so that government funding can only be spent on programs that are “aligned with administration policies and priorities.”

If passed, the new rules would also allow President Trump’s political appointees to supersede federal agencies’ merit-based decisions in order to ensure the grants “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” There is also a portion of the proposal that bans the use of “theories of disparate-impact liability”—a legal concept that helps determine when a policy is disproportionately discriminatory.

Experts argue that the change would give Trump’s political appointees, most of whom are not experts, undue control over what kind of research gets funded. 

“This touches all parts of American life,” Veterans Administration psychiatrist Dr. Eric Rafla-Yuan told the Los Angeles Times in an article published Friday. “Control of how all of the federal grants and programs are funded will fall under a small group of highly partisan individuals who would have very few limits on how they spend these billions of taxpayer dollars.… If there’s a specific age range that is at higher risk for suicide, and we want to figure out, well, what’s going on with people that are aged 14 to 19 … we can’t do that under the wording in this rule.”

A massive group of various experts in fields ranging from cancer research to public housing have come out against the proposal, and there are over 100,000 comments on it. OMB published the proposed rule in the federal register in May, and the comment period ends July 13.

“A significant number of the provisions in this proposal would in fact increase administrative complexity, create uncertainty for grant recipients, reduce transparency in funding decisions, and undermine the merit-based processes that have effectively guided federal research investments,” the American Association for Cancer Research said in a statement. “This OMB proposal is reckless and does not meet the high U.S. standards required for a meritorious, impactful research grant program.”

The Planetary Society wrote in its own statement, “Science is the backbone of the American economy, generating a 3-to-1 return on the taxpayer’s investment. Our nation has always relied on merit-based, independent scientific review to select the best ideas and new technologies for development. The proposed rule changes would all but end the use of scientific merit in the selection of grants and programs across the government.”

Even Republican Senator Susan Collins expressed her concern, writing that it would “inject uncertainty into the Federal award process, especially for awards that span multiple years and phases and make these awards more costly.” She also noted that the “termination of clinical trials would leave patients without treatment and could well result in significant scientific and financial losses to both the recipient and the Federal government.” 

The OMB, led by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, has been one of the president’s most favored tools of administrative destruction, as it’s helped him do everything from slashing crucial programs like U.S. Agency for International Development to shifting money toward his White House ballroom.  

Donald Trump is pitching a fit over a potential bipartisan legislative win in a futile attempt to advance the SAVE America Act.

“I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT, which is polling at 97 percent with the Republican Party, and very high with the non-politician Dumocrats,” Trump posted on Truth Social Friday morning.

But Trump’s protest is pointless: The Constitution states that bills automatically become law after 10 days if the president neither signs nor vetoes them. The housing affordability measure passed both chambers of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support, and Trump has not indicated that he will issue a last-minute veto of the measure.

The SAVE America Act, on the other hand, sparked nationwide controversy earlier this year, particularly over a detail in the first version of the bill that would have made it more difficult for married women to vote. Backlash over the bill has been so severe that, in the months since Trump insisted it should be Congress’s top priority, dispute over the voter ID bill has gummed up efforts to fund the Department of Homeland Security, stalled attempts to pass the National Defense Authorization Act, and upended Trump’s own Cabinet nominations.

The original SAVE America Act suggested numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, including line items that would abolish mail-in voting, require voters to bring proof of citizenship and proof of residency to register to vote, require voter ID, and mandate voter roll purges every 30 days.

But the bill has been radically pared down since then, in large part due to the improbability of passing it in whole. House Speaker Mike Johnson has claimed that the current iteration of the act proposed by the lower chamber preserves the “backbone” of what Trump is pushing to pass in the Senate. That includes requirements to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote—such as a birth certificate or a U.S. passport—and a mandate to present photo identification when casting a ballot. Trump has also insisted that the bill ban mail-in voting, describing the procedure as “crooked” and “corrupt,” despite the fact that he himself has cast several mail-in ballots.

“THE SAVE AMERICA ACT’S non-passage is CRAZY, and a serious threat to any politician who votes against it!” Trump continued in his Friday post. “If the Dumocrats, or any RINO (or worse!) working with them, do not allow a positive Vote on SAVE AMERICA, TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, and pass this, and every other Bill that true Republicans have ever dreamt of (In addition to the upcoming Budget BOMB and the 1929 catastrophic style DEBT CEILING BILL!).”

This is a developing story.

A newly released video appears to show Senator Mitch McConnell being loaded into an ambulance on a stretcher as he was transported to the hospital last month.

CNN spoke to a neighbor of the Kentucky senator and former Senate majority leader, who said that they saw two ambulances, a fire truck, and Capitol Police officers blocking their street at 8:30 a.m. on June 14. That neighbor took a video of emergency responders pushing a person, whose face is not visible, on a stretcher to an ambulance.

Breaking new video obtained by @cnn shows Mitch McConnell being carried out on a stretcher.

America deserves answers now! This Republican coverup needs to stop! pic.twitter.com/q8yTAGBn52

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) July 10, 2026

When the neighbor asked what was going on, police officers said that there was a medical emergency. The neighbor then asked if the person having the emergency was McConnell, to which the officers replied they would close the street for any person, according to CNN. The neighbor said that another witness told them that McConnell was the person on the stretcher and wasn’t wearing an oxygen mask.

“He’s in a stretcher, and he’s in some sort like orange foam looking blanket type thing,” the neighbor told the news outlet, adding that they could see McConnell’s uncovered feet, which did not appear to be moving. The first responders did not seem to be moving urgently, the neighbor noted.

“In a situation where perhaps time is of the essence, there seems to be a little bit more urgency, but there was no urgency here,” the neighbor said to CNN.

Very little information is known about McConnell’s condition, as his office hasn’t divulged much information in the nearly one month he’s been at George Washington University Hospital, only to say that he’s been receiving “excellent care.” Some on the right speculate that McConnell is brain dead or worse, as no pictures or audio of the senator have been made public.

McConnell’s congressional colleagues claim to have spoken to him on the phone, but the public has not seen anything about McConnell’s physical or mental state. Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear is demanding answers from McConnell’s office on what’s going on.

Donald Trump has completely neutered the Election Assistance Commission.

The last three remaining members of the four-member bipartisan commission were forced out of the independent agency Thursday. The two Democratic appointees—Thomas Hicks and Benjamin W. Hovland—were fired via an emailed notice from the White House Presidential Personnel ​Office, according to inside sources that spoke with Reuters. The agency’s Republican commissioner—Christy McCormick—recieved a call and was asked to resign, reported NBC News.

“On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance ​Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” read the termination email delivered to the two Democratic appointees.

The EAC was created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to help states administer elections. It has also provided consultation on voting procedures. Its fourth commissioner left the agency in April.

The mass overhaul comes in the immediate wake of a Supreme Court decision—Trump v. Slaughter—that granted the president more power over independent agencies late last month. The 6-3 decision overturned Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 91-year-old precedent that had historically shielded staffers at such agencies from political interference by protecting them from being fired by the president at will.

The White House confirmed the terminations later Thursday, suggesting that the EAC commissioners had not passed the Trump administration’s loyalty test.

“The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring ​every legal vote is counted,” a White House official said in a statement that cited the Supreme Court’s decision.

The White House told NBC News that all of the EAC’s members “will be replaced,” though doing so will require presidential appointments and subsequent Senate confirmations. Considering Capitol Hill’s current appointment turnaround times (as influenced by Trump’s SAVE America Act demands), that process could take an extraordinarily long amount of time at a point when America only has a few short months until a contentious midterm season.

If President Donald Trump’s brazen meddling didn’t give you enough reason to cringe at the World Cup, there’s some more bad news for soccer fans. France’s national team, which beat Morocco 2-0 in their quarterfinal match on Thursday, has been traveling to game venues in Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. on the same airline that the Trump administration uses to deport immigrants.

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The federal immigration agents who shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican father of three in Texas, weren’t even looking for him.

When ICE agents conducted a deadly traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday, they were looking for two people from Guatemala, two people familiar with the matter told The New York Times. Agents believed one of the people they were looking for drove a white van—instead, they found Salgado Araujo and three men he was driving to work.

Before conducting the traffic stop, federal agents knew they had the wrong man. They reportedly looked up the owner of the van and learned it was Salgado Araujo, who was undocumented. The supposedly “targeted operation” ended in ICE’s tenth fatal shooting this year.

In the hours after the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security claimed the officer had fired in self-defense after Salgado Araujo refused to comply with orders and “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.”

But the other three men in the car who were arrested by ICE told their lawyer that was a lie—there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. Surveillance footage from the traffic stop also doesn’t support DHS’s claim. One video showed that agents boxed in Salgado Araujo’s car, before he attempted to U-turn and drive the other way. Another video showed that there was no damage to the ICE agents’ vehicle.

In another potentially dark turn in the saga, the three men who were with Salgado Araujo are under pressure from immigration officials to agree to self-deport, Juan Proaño, a representative for the families and CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said in an interview with The New Republic.