As soon as Trump started speaking on Thursday night, the networks that decided not to air his primetime speech on election security looked really smart. CBS was the only network that didn’t air Biden’s speech on elections and democracy in 2022 but did air Trump’s speech in 2026.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) was asked by Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face The Nation, “Has your committee been given evidence to back up those claims that suggest a direct ability to interfere?”

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Warner took time out of his answer to blast CBS News management for airing Trump’s speech, “No, absolutely not. And matter of fact, here is the- there are so many absurdities and falsehoods in Trump's Thursday night speech, and I'm glad that most media treated it not as serious news. And I know some folks at your network- the journalists, I have huge respect for. I was disappointed that your senior management made the decision to cover it as news.”

Warner differentiated between the journalists at CBS who care about the truth and management, such as CBS News Editor-in-Chief, and MAGA lackey Bari Weiss.

Sen. Warner wasn’t done with debunking Trump’s speech.

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In a court ruling that won’t get splashed across cable news or generate front-page headlines but is vital to limiting Trump’s power, a federal judge rejected the Trump administration’s claim that the Executive Branch has the power to cancel congressionally appropriated grants.

A coalition of 20 states New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin, three governors, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Governor Laura Kelly of Kansas, and Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky, and the District of Columbia sued the Office of Management and Budget after they unilaterally canceled federal grants to the states.

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This case concerned the Spending Clause, more commonly known as the congressional power of the purse, and the Termination Clause, which allows the Executive Branch to cancel federal grants if recipients have not complied with the grant's conditions.

The Trump administration claimed that the Termination Clause gave it the power to override the Spending Clause and cancel congressionally appropriated grants.

The administration has been using this interpretation to cancel grants involving everything from medical research to social programs to women’s health care.

A coalition of Democratic states sued the administration, and U.S. District Judge Indira Talwan ruled:

Plaintiffs’ argument carries more force. Both the first clause of 2 C.F.R. § 200.340(a) and the Termination Clause impose conditions on grants. Under the first clause, the Federal agency or pass-through entity may terminate the grant “if the recipient or subrecipient fails to comply with the terms and conditions of the Federal award[,]” 2 C.F.R. § 200.340(a)(1), and under the Termination clause, the Federal agency or pass-through entity may terminate the grant if it “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities[,]” 2 C.F.R. § 200.340(a)(4).

If the terms and conditions of the Federal award, and the program goals and agency priorities are known at the time the grant is awarded are known to the State, the State can make an informed choice to accept the grant, as required by Pennhurst. But if the regulation is construed to allow the program goals and agency priorities the grant is being measured against to change, the required notice is lacking.

The Trump administration has canceled grants to states and continues to threaten to cancel grants, but this ruling states that the administration can’t change the terms of the grants after they have been issued.

Importantly, Trump can’t cancel grants because he wants to.

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At his big White House speech, where he tried to undermine the midterm election, Trump said something that has now taken on a whole different meaning.

The president said:

 This cannot be allowed to continue. Every American, whether you're a Republican, Democrat, independent, or otherwise, should be able to agree that we deserve the most secure, honest, and fair election system anywhere in the world Secure elections should be a partisan, really should just, we should be together, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, everybody.

And it should not be a partisan issue. It should cause to unite us, not to divide us. This should be a cause. We should be united, not divided. In light of the brand-new and irrefutable information I have revealed tonight, my administration is in the process of notifying the states whose election data was compromised by the People's Republic of China and many others.

How Trump’s mental decline sabotaged his plot to undermine the election:

Then people started looking at the documents that Trump declassified that supposedly proved foreign election interference.

If you look at the screenshot from the declassified National Intelligence Council assessment that was conducted by the first Trump administration’s NIC, it reveals that Trump administration officials were working with Putin to spread the fake story about Biden corruption and Burisma.

The documents also revealed much more.

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Trump is blaming China for his 2020 election loss, but how he got there was cartoonish and absurd to the point where it was unbelievable.

Multiple networks refused to televise this speech, and those networks were quickly proven correct, as Trump spent five to six minutes at the beginning of his remarks trying to spin his failures and the damage he has done to the country.

The Trump lunacy included a claim that China created fake ballots for Joe Biden in 2020:

 Raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that China's activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden.

Documents show that during this period, dozens of significant CIA and NSA reports about China's election targeting were kept out of the presidential briefing. These were briefings I would get almost every day. Everything was kept out that was of importance.

One email among intelligence analysts admitted that they had, quote, "deliberately massaged the presidential daily briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election." Another official inside the FBI wrote that she was running, quote, "a shadow government," unquote, to keep intelligence about China's election meddling from becoming known and to keep it away from the honorable press.

Video:

If you thought that was crazy, we haven’t even gotten to the Obama part.

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Political prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket try to get around gambling bans by claiming that their users wager against each other about event outcomes, but they are not gambling.

Even though the mechanics of prediction markets function like sports gambling, there is one key difference. The prediction markets are an open door for insider trading and corruption.

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Given that it is so easy for people with insider information to cheat and make a profit by betting on outcomes that they know will happen, it is the least surprising thing in the world that the most corrupt presidential administration in at least a century would weaken regulation and enforcement of prediction markets.

People who work for the Trump administration or have access to government information have been suspected of or found to have been cleaning up on the prediction markets, but the corruption is so deep that even Trump’s teleprompter operator has been caught insider trading.

ABC News reported:

Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator is believed to have made tens of thousands of dollars by placing bets on that speech and more than a dozen others on the prediction market Kalshi, federal investigators with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

The scheme was petty and showed that the low character of the president is running through his entire administration.

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The jet that wasn’t safe enough for Donald Trump to fly home from the NATO summit hasn't been forgotten by Democrats in the Senate.

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The fact that the President Of The United States accepted a jet from a foreign government, spent billions of taxpayer dollars modifying it, only to find out that the jet still isn’t secure enough to use, and then Trump is planning on keeping the jet, has kept the attention of a group of Senate Democrats who are determined to make sure that Donald Trump does not leave office with that plane.

According to the office of Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT):

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, alongside U.S. Senators Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), introduced legislation to block President Trump from taking the luxury jumbo jet gifted by the Qatari government with him for his own personal use after he leaves office.

Trump’s second administration has already featured a long list of corrupt and impeachable offenses, but the fact that Trump accepted this jet and then plans on taking it with him must be stopped.

Read more about the bill to stop Trump from taking the jet with him below.

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There is a good reason why whispers are growing louder about Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) potentially running for president in 2028. Ossoff is someone who has been tested and challenged in Georgia. He articulates clear values, and he has shown that he is not willing to accept anything about MAGA and Trumpism.

Trump nominated Jay Clayton to be his Director of National Intelligence. Coming into this confirmation, Clayton was thought to have a fairly easy path to confirmation, but then Sen. Ossoff questioned him.

Ossoff asked Clayton, “ Yes or no? Did the President of the United States pardon a convicted narcotrafficker?”

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 Clayton answered, “Yes.”

Sen. Ossoff then asked, “Who won the 2020 election?”

Clayton then showed why he is unfit to be confirmed: “Uh,  you know, we're not, I'm not, I'm not gonna do this with you.”

The man who wants to be the Director of National Intelligence, a person who would be in charge of evaluating and gathering intelligence about potential foreign interference in US elections, but he won’t state the obvious fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

The fact that Trump’s choice to be the DNI has decided to place his loyalty to Trump ahead of his country is a disqualifying answer.

Sen. Ossoff reminded Clayton about why he was at the hearing.

 This is a job interview. We've established that you have an obligation- It's a pretty interesting job ... to be honest and forthright with the committee. You do have an obligation to be honest and forthright with the committee?

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The writing was on the wall last month when only 4 Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee voted against the NDAA. The defense funding bill was doomed to fail as Republicans put forward legislation that called for $1.15 trillion for the Department of Defense and to deepen military and intelligence ties to Israel.

Both of those points were non-starters for Senate Democrats.

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The final vote was 50-46. Every Democrat who was present voted no. Republicans Jim Justice of West Virginia and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Democrats John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Alex Padilla of California did not vote.

Reuters reported:

Democrats are concerned that authorizing a huge Pentagon budget would be seen as approval of the war on Iran that began with strikes by the U.S. and Israel on February 28. They also object to the Trump administration's push to increase military spending to a total of $1.5 trillion this year, including several hundred million dollars he has requested in a separate spending bill, even as social programs for Americans are being cut.

The procedural vote on the NDAA that failed in the Senate marks a major turning point in support for Israel and defense funding.

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There was a line of thinking at one time that Donald Trump’s policy reversals were part of a calculated strategy to keep the world off guard. Trump was an unpredictable wild card, his allies said, claiming that the president’s behavior was deliberate.

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We now know that there was no 3-D chess behind Donald Trump’s moves. His erratic behavior was unpredictable because he was broken and unable to devise and stick to coherent policies.

On Monday, Trump sat in the Oval Office and told reporters:

We’re protecting by the countries that we’re helping. For instance, you look at the five countries. You have Saudi Arabia, you have UAE, you have Qatar or Qatar, as I always say. You have Qatar, Bahrain. And by the way, you have others. You have Kuwait, and you have others. And they will do very well, but we think it’s appropriate that we’re-- we don’t need them.

By Tuesday morning, that idea was long gone.

Why?

Middle Eastern countries told him they aren’t giving him one cent.

So Trump unleashed a barrage of lunacy, one suspects, in the hope that no one would notice what he did.

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Somebody else is always going to pay for it. During his first campaign, Trump promised that Mexico would pay for the border wall. Mexico did not pay for the border wall. The American taxpayers paid for what little bit of construction was accomplished on the border.

Trump launched a war of choice with Iran, and since he knows nothing about foreign affairs, the president thought that he would drop a few bombs, Iran would say oh noes, and give up.

Donald Trump was very wrong.

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Iran responded to the bombs with economic warfare and closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump responded with a blockade of the strait, and then he started lying and claiming that the strait wasn’t actually closed. After a brief pause, during which Trump tried to surrender numerous times, he announced that the war was back on again.

The rest of the world did not ask to be plunged into an energy crisis, but thanks to Donald Trump, here they are.

Once it became clear that Trump could not win the war on his own, he began trying to get the rest of the world to fight the war for him, so they said no thanks. We’re good.

Trump is now demanding that the rest of the world pay him for the war.

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The idea that a sitting president could sue their own administration and negotiate a settlement using taxpayer money with themselves was always fundamentally undemocratic and absurd.

Presidents can’t negotiate with themselves, but that is what Trump did to arrive at a settlement that would ban the IRS from ever auditing him or his family while creating a slush fund to allow Trump to pay off his allies who attacked the Capitol and tried to overturn the 2020 election.

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Judge Kathleen Williams wrote:

In dismissing the non-parties’ claims of collusion, Plaintiffs reveal the true position of the Parties and say the quiet part out loud: “Regardless of whether Plaintiffs had ever filed this action, the Government and Plaintiffs still had the power to resolve all disputes between the parties.” (DE 89 at 15). The power to resolve was never a question before this Court. Whether Executive Branch actors can privately agree to give themselves and their former clients blanket immunities and billions of dollars in tax monies for legally undefined grievances was never an issue advanced to this Court.

The question is whether the Parties could do so by claiming to be adverse and engaging the legitimacy of a court proceeding. The answer is a resounding “no”: the Lead Plaintiff and the Government are

one, a fully realized unitary interest. Because “Plaintiffs have no answer for the fact that the [L]ead Plaintiff, President Trump, directs and controls the Defendants[,]” this “renders this lawsuit non-adversarial, collusive, and jurisdictionally improper.” See DE 94 at 4.

And because this fact was so obvious and so insurmountable, the Court finds that this matter was brought for an improper purpose—to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a “settlement” that had no viable basis in law or fact. As was observed in another matter brought in this District, “this case is part of Mr. Trump’s pattern of misusing the courts to serve political purposes.” Trump v. Clinton, 653 F. Supp. 3d 1198, 1219 (S.D. Fla. 2023).

The lawsuit was a sham that used the courts to create an air of legitimacy around the settlement. However, both sides were working for Trump, which is why Trump’s lawyers are facing punishment from the court.

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The corporate media’s reaction to the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) overnight has not been to reflect on a complicated political legacy, which isn’t complicated upon examination, but it has been to give Graham what he always wanted.

All of those Sunday morning show appearances and never meeting a camera that he didn’t love mean that Graham is getting lionized by the corporate media because he played their game.

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For those who don’t know, Graham’s death was announced overnight in a brief statement from his office:

On the evening of Saturday, July 11, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham passed away from a brief and sudden illness. Senator Graham’s family appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period.

Graham has spent the past decade spending almost all of his time gluing himself to Donald Trump.

The president posted on his Truth Social account:

Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known, is dead! He was always working, and was a true American Patriot. Lindsey will be greatly missed!!!

It is typical of Trump that the death of a man who trashed the legacy that he was building to serve him gets two sentences on social media. Trump has spent years going on longer rants about windmills on the platform, but Graham gets two sentences.

A special Republican primary must be held by August 11 to pick a new Senate nominee for the party, and South Carolina Gov. McMaster will appoint a temporary replacement to finish out the remainder of Graham’s term.

In the bigger picture, the death of Lindsey Graham is another political highway marker in the death of Trumpism.

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Trump just had a physical in May at Walter Reed, where he took a cognitive test. The test in May was his fourth cognitive test in less than four years. Trump has now been dementia screened four more times than any president in US history.

In May, Trump posted on Truth Social:

The results of my Physical Examination, taken at Walter Reed Military Medical Center, and just released, were extremely good. Unlike other U.S. Presidents, none of whom have ever taken an approved, high difficulty, Cognitive Test, I scored a perfect 30 out of 30, considered ‘extreme intelligence.’ Are the Dumocrats really surprised? In fact, this is my fourth such test, all PERFECT or, 120 correct answers out of 120 questions asked! It is very rare that anyone gets a Perfect Score, especially when achieved four times in a row. All people running for President and Vice President should be forced to take high difficulty Cognitive Tests. Congress, and the Dumocrats, should demand it!

PolitiFact fact-checked Trump’s claim that the test demonstrated his extreme intelligence:

“The test measures cognition,” including attention, concentration, language, memory, abstract thinking and calculation skills, said Ziad Nasreddine, a Quebec-based neurologist who created the 10-minute Montreal Cognitive Assessment in 2005. “Cognitive function is correlated with IQ. But the test was not designed to detect the genius level of cognitive performance. It’s meant to reassure that cognitive functions are normal.”

Patients might have to read a list of words and recall them; repeat a list of numbers forward and backward; subtract a one-digit number repeatedly starting from 100; repeat a sentence; draw comparisons between two objects; and know the time of day and their location.

No other president has been cognitively tested, so it is even more alarming that Trump has been tested again for the second time in three months, but it makes sense after Trump claimed at the NATO summit that the US is at war with the Islamic Republic of Japan, and kept calling Ukrainian President Zelenskyy Putin during their meeting.

Trump said that he “just finished another physical,” which suggests that he has been tested again:

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Maybe the key to Graham Platner’s popularity was that he was running against Susan Collins?

When she was a candidate, Gov. Janet Mills was running even with Collins. When Graham Platner became the party’s Senate nominee, he was either tied with or had a small lead within the margin of error over Collins.

Now that Platner will drop out of the race on Monday, Maine Democrats are lining up to become the new nominee.

The process that the Maine Democratic Party will be using is a convention that will feature hundreds of delegates selecting the new Senate nominee. The convention will throw back to decades past, but the one part of the convention that needs to stay in the past is the backrooms.

The Maine Democratic convention to pick a new Senate candidate needs to be open, transparent, and televised.

What is already very clear is that there is no shortage of candidates who will give Susan Collins a tough race.

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On a day when Donald Trump claimed that America is at war with the Islamic Republic of Japan and kept referring to Zelenskyy as Putin during their meeting, the mentally failing president closed out his NATO misadventure by stumbling into a mess of his own creation when asked why he isn’t flying his Bribe Force One plane back to the US.

Trump was asked, “ I'd like you to address, uh, speculation that you're leaving Ankara not in the new Air Force One because of security concerns involving Iran. You've spoken today twice about them possibly assassinating you and possibly being successful. Did that concern have something to do with it?”

This shift in plans comes a day after a congressional investigation was launched into the plane.

The president rambled and claimed Iran is trying to kill him:

Well, I speak about it a lot because, you know, the life of a president is very dangerous. It's 5.2%. You know what a race car driver is? One tenth of 1%. A bull rider, that looks pretty dangerous. I mean, it's one tenth of 1%. No, it's, uh, 5.2% is you don't make it. You should have told me. You're an excellent reporter. I- You should have told me that years ago. Maybe I wouldn't have run. It's a very dangerous profession.

Trump keeps talking about Iran wanting him dead like it is going to rally the country around him, so something, but it was what the president said next that demonstrated how mentally gone he is.

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Remember, almost a decade ago, when Trump would meet with NATO allies and bluster and bully? Those days are long, long gone. Donald Trump of 2026 increasingly looks like a lost old man rather than the president of the most powerful nation in the world.

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It was bad when Trump showed up in China looking disheveled and completely out of it, but his appearance in Turkey for the NATO summit was even worse.

Trump deboarded Bribe Force One and began looking at the assembled troops there to greet him. With no emotion, and to be honest, we can’t be totally certain that the president knew where he was or what he was looking at.

At one point, Trump just stopped walking and turned his head to look at something. The Turkish president, Erdogan, had to take Trump’s arm and stop the wandering president by directing him to keep walking forward.

Video:

This is the same Donald Trump who fell asleep on Monday during a 4th of July fireworks display that contained 850,000 munitions.

Trump obviously can’t handle anything close to a presidential schedule, but here he was showing up in Turkey and having to be guided around by the hand.

The president must have thought that he had something important to say that JD Vance couldn’t handle, so let’s see what he talked about.

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Progressives have been championing a theory of candidate recruitment that, at its core, believes that the key to winning back white working class voters, especially in red areas, is to run candidates from the working class.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is the modern champion of this theory, and even though it hasn’t yet proven to be effective, there is a segment of progressivism in the United States that tends to fall in love with candidate biographies and overlook red flags.

The Democratic Party put itself in a difficult position in the Senate primary in Maine when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer backed Gov. Janet Mills in the Democratic primary. Mills is an older Democrat who, according to those in Maine, never expressed much interest in running in the primary, leaving a big opening for progressives in the state to win the Senate nomination.

I am not a Democrat or a Republican, so I have no dog in the fight over who should have been the party’s Senate nominee, but as a political scientist, I saw red flags around Graham Platner’s candidacy, and it was also understandable why he won the primary.

The problem is that those red flags have turned into a raging five-alarm fire.

Politico first reported the allegation of rape against Platner:

A woman who dated Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.

The woman, a 41-year-old Maine resident named Jenny Racicot, detailed the alleged incident to POLITICO in three interviews over the past two weeks. POLITICO also spoke with a man Racicot dated and confided in the years after the alleged incident, and reviewed documents, including emails between Racicot and her therapist and messages between Racicot and an acquaintance whom she warned against getting involved with Platner years before he ran for office.

The accuser is a Democrat who shares Platner’s views, and the more details there are, the more troubling the story becomes.

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You may have forgotten about Trump’s Board of Peace. The vanity organization created by Trump appears to have been put together as Trump’s vehicle for getting a Nobel Peace Prize by creating a front organization that he put himself in charge of that is supposed to be about solving conflicts and creating peace.

However, billions of dollars have been poured into the board, and nobody knows who is in control of the operation or where the money is going.

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A big red flag went up when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office applied for a trademark on the Board of Peace for Donald Trump.

Democrats in Congress have been quietly fighting this trademark because if Trump holds the trademark, he would be able to monetize the Board of Peace for financial gain.

House Judiciary Democrats have been pressuring the Patent and Trademark Office to drop the application, and they have.

House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said in a statement:

The USPTO’s decision to abandon its disturbing trademark applications for the ‘Board of Peace’ is a welcome and necessary course correction. From the start, the USPTO’s Director’s baffling and unprecedented decision to apply for trademarks for President Trump raised serious concerns about its legality given that the Lanham Act forbids applications on behalf of another person unless you are their lawyer, which the Director specifically denied.

House Judiciary Committee Democrats have been aggressively investigating whether the USPTO is being manipulated and misused to conceal the true owner of what appears to be an unregulated global slush fund bankrolled by both foreign governments and U.S. taxpayers but effectively controlled by President Trump, the Board’s self-appointed ‘Chairman for Life.’

The structure and the shadiness of the Board of Peace should raise red flags, as the top House Judiciary Committee Democrat went on to explain.

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Believe it or not, there was a time during the 2016 presidential campaign when Donald Trump could stick to a message and make a point. I recently went back and looked at some of his speeches and rallies from a decade ago, and many of them, while still full of lies and misstatements, were in the 30-minute range. Trump appealed to people because he offered simple answers, which were not based in reality, to complicated problems.

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Looking back on it, Trump’s decline started to show itself by 2018, and since then it has been like an avalanche down a mountainside.

In July of 2026, the United States has a president for whom the purpose of events and people in attendance is meaningless. His fractured mind is going to talk about whatever it wants.

No president has ever looked more uncomfortable around children in the television era than Donald Trump.

The event was supposed to be about new savings accounts for kids called Trump Accounts, but here was Donald Trump positioned beside children:

Trump is standing there rigid like Frankenstein’s monster and doesn’t look at or acknowledge the kids. When his head turns in their direction, the president looks above them, like they aren’t there.

The White House messaging was already off to a bad start, and then Trump spoke.

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Donald Trump talked a big game and promised that a massive crowd would be in attendance at the National Mall to hear him speak before a massive fireworks display was launched

Trump’s Great American State Fair has been empty, so the fact that some people showed up should be considered an accomplishment. However, the crowd estimates ranged from around 15,000 before a weather delay, and storms caused the Mall to be evacuated. It was reported that many attendees did not return once the weather cleared and the gates reopened.

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Half of Trump’s VIP section in front of the stage was empty as the president spoke. Trump said 150,000 people were in attendance.

The truth is that the crowd was at least 10 times smaller than Trump’s stated number.

Those who did stick around to hear Trump speak got to hear an aging president slur his words, rant about communism, demand that the SAVE America Act be passed, while occasionally working in some American history, and getting lots of things wrong in the process.

It was a good thing that Trump started speaking so late, because most Americans get to keep living their lives without any knowledge that this speech happened.

The real newsworthy event that isn’t being covered by the sanewashing corporate media happened during the fireworks display.

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