Politics

A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | What the f-ck is the First Lady Melania Trump Opera House?

PoliticusUSA is independent news and analysis delivered to you daily. Our readers solely support us, so please consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now It is a question that often arises when Democrats seek leadership. Someone will ask, Where is Barack Obama? Former President Obama is retired from active politics, which means that, regardless of how chaotic things become, he mostly stays quiet. Obama respects the traditional sideline role of ex-presidents. It takes something extreme to get Obama to engage in current politics at any level beyond campaigning for Democratic candidates, but when Trump accused the former president of masterminding a coup against him and called for the ex-president to be criminally charged, that was enough to get a statement issued by former President Obama’s office. PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Obama said through his office, “Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.” The one word that many think defines Trump in all aspects is weak. The calls to arrest Obama are a clear distraction that was targeted at Trump’s base. Racism toward Obama was what launched Trump’s political star in the Republican Party almost a decade and a half ago. It has been argued by some academics that Trump’s 2016 victory was a direct response by a segment of the American population to the election of a black president. The distraction effort involving Obama came after Trump tried to distract with slurs against Native Americans. Trump seems to know that a core part of his base supports him, not because of policies, but due to deep, ugly cultural fault lines and divisions on issues like race and gender. Donald Trump’s choice of distraction reveals who he thinks the MAGA movement is. Trump should have known better than to mess with Barack Obama. The former president knows how to not fuel the fire Trump is attempting to create, while at the same time understanding how to brush Trump off and minimize him in the most ego-damaging way possible. Donald Trump has always had an inferiority complex when it comes to Obama, and the popular ex-president’s brush-off was a blow square to Trump’s fragile ego. What do you think about Obama’s response to Trump? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Leave a comment

President Donald Trump lied to congressional Republicans on Tuesday night, falsely claiming his approval ratings have increased since his administration’s failure to release government files on accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. In reality, Trump’s ratings have tumbled since the scandal heated up last week. “I have the best numbers I’ve ever had,” Trump said during a White House reception for Republicans. “You know, it’s amazing I watch people on television: ‘Well, what about Donald Trump’s polling numbers?’ Yeah, they’re the best numbers I’ve ever had. “And with this made-up hoax they’re talking about, my numbers have gone up 4 and 5 points—they want to do anything to get us off the subject of making America great again, and we’re not going to put up with it,” he continued. YouTube Video It isn’t true. Polling has shown a noticeable Epstein-related dip for Trump and his handling of the story. In 15 of the most recent public opinion polls collected by The New York Times, Trump has a net-negative approval rating in 14 of the polls, with most showing a double-digit disapproval rating on net. Datawrapper Content For instance, in a CBS News/YouGov poll released on Sunday, Trump had his lowest approval rating since being sworn in in January—42%. That is 11 percentage points lower than his rating in early February in that same poll. The same poll also showed significant public disapproval of how Trump has handled the Epstein case. Eighty-nine percent of Americans said the Department of Justice should release all of its information, a stance opposed by Attorney General Pam Bondi. Activists in London put up a poster showing President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, on July 17. An overwhelming majority of independents (83%) and Democrats (92%) were dissatisfied with how the administration has handled the Epstein case. Meanwhile, Republicans were almost evenly split: 50% were satisfied with the administration’s handling of the case, while 49% weren’t. The Trump administration is also over 30 points underwater on its handling of the Epstein investigations, according to an Economist/YouGov poll released on Tuesday. That finding was corroborated by a Quinnipiac University poll released on July 16, in which 63% of voters disapproved of his administration’s handling of the case. Trump’s lie highlights his desperation to blunt criticism on his ties to Epstein and his handling of the case, controversy that has ensnared his presidency for weeks. Congressional Republicans, who shut down Congress instead of facing Epstein-related votes, are also feeling the fallout from the story, while Democrats continue to push for further disclosures. Trump has now resorted to throwing out multiple distractions—conspiracies about former President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for instance—in an attempt to drown out Epstein-related headlines. But it isn’t working, and his approval is nowhere near “the best numbers” he’s ever had.

PoliticusUSA is 100% supported by readers like you. As other forms of media fall to Trump, we can stay strong if you support us by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) was one of the first Democrats in leadership to see that there was an opportunity for his party in the MAGA demand of their president to release the Epstein files. Jeffries saw an opening to not only split Trump from his congressional Republican protectors, but also to tie Epstein to the corruption of Trump and the Republican Party. Leader Jeffries was right. He has been able to drive a wedge through Republicans and Trump is floundering. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) was the first to grab the issue in early July, and it was soon embraced by Jeffries, who has unified Democrats and told all of the Democratic committee leadership in the House to keep the Epstein pressure on. Politico reported on the success of the Democratic strategy: The strategy has effectively hijacked the House, derailed Hill Republicans’ agenda and forced Speaker Mike Johnson to send lawmakers packing for an early August recess. That’s not to mention embarrassing Trump in the process and exposing the surprising limits of his sway on a party he’s held in his clutches for the better part of a decade. “We’ve been trying to say Trump is full of shit for years and it hasn’t really stuck, right? But something about this topic is making a healthy portion of MAGA world — particularly folks who are not ideologically aligned with Trump but kind of flirted with him last year when they pulled the lever for him — be like, ‘Yea, he’s definitely full of shit,’” a senior Democratic campaign aide boasted to me. (This aide and others in the story were granted anonymity to speak candidly about dynamics on the Hill.) … “Everyone’s always talking about Trump being ‘Teflon’ — obviously that’s because all Hill Republicans are pretty much a suit of armor for him, right? But in this instance, they’re not,” said a senior Democratic aide discussing the strategy. “And so it exposes him, I think, to more attacks that otherwise would be brushed off — and makes it easier for us to drag his numbers down while creating chaos among the Republicans.” Democrats have been so successful that they forced Speaker Mike Johnson to shut down the House and send everyone home because the Speaker doesn’t want to hold any votes or debate on Epstein. Trump’s power comes from the protection that Republicans in Congress give him, and on this issue, that protection is gone. Trump Described As Furious And Paralyzed Read more

Please consider supporting PoliticusUSA by becoming a subscriber. Subscribe now When incumbent Republican US Senator Thom Tillis announced that he would not be seeking reelection in 2026, Democrats knew they would have an opportunity to pick up the seat. Party leadership has been recruiting former Gov. Roy Cooper to run, and it is being reported that Cooper will announce his campaign on Monday. PoliticusUSA is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Axios reported: Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) is preparing to launch his Senate campaign next week, multiple sources told Axios. Cooper is the Democratic Party’s top recruit in 2026, bolstering their chances of flipping a critical seat from Republicans. Cooper, a popular former governor, will instantly become the Democratic favorite to challenge the GOP for the open Senate seat next year. … Cooper and Democrats will now await a decision from Lara Trump, President Trump’s daughter-in-law, who essentially has the right of first refusal on the GOP side. Donald Trump is pushing for his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to run for the seat, but with Trump’s approval ratings in the dumpster and his presidency sinking more by the day, running Lara Trump against a popular former two-term governor would be a gift to Democrats. The reality is that even if Lara Trump runs, Cooper should be the favorite. The North Carolina Senate seat is essential because if Democrats can flip it, the Republican majority will be lowered to three seats, given the number of 50-50 ties that have been broken by VP JD Vance on everything from nominations to the tax cuts for the rich, gaining one more seat could allow Democrats to join with the Republican moderates to block Trump’s agenda. Elections aren’t won in candidate recruitment, but they can be lost if the party doesn’t have good candidates. Roy Cooper is a very good candidate, and getting a top name to run suggests that Democrats at all levels see 2026 as potentially a very blue year. What do you think about Roy Cooper running for the US Senate in North Carolina? Share your thoughts in the comments below. Leave a comment

Sign up for Trump’s Return, a newsletter featuring coverage of the second Trump presidency. Imagine you were an elected official who discovered that an old friend had been running a sex-trafficking operation without your knowledge. You’d probably try very hard to make your innocence in the matter clear. You’d demand full transparency and answer any questions about your own involvement straightforwardly. Donald Trump’s behavior regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case is … not that. The latest cycle of frantic evasions began last week, after The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had submitted a suggestive message and drawing to a scrapbook celebrating Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, in 2003. This fact alone added only incrementally to the public understanding of the two men’s friendship. Rather than brush the report off, however, Trump denied authorship. “I never wrote a picture in my life,” he told the Journal—an oddly narrow defense for a man reported to have written “may every day be another wonderful secret” to a criminal whose secret was systematically abusing girls, and one that was instantly falsified by Trump’s well-documented penchant for doodling. On Truth Social, Trump complained that he had asked Rupert Murdoch, the Journal’s owner, to spike the story, and received an encouraging answer, only for the story to run. Under normal circumstances, a president confessing that he tried to kill an incriminating report would amount to a major scandal. But Trump has so deeply internalized his own critique of the media, according to which any organ beyond his control is “fake news,” that he believed the episode reflected badly on Murdoch’s ethics rather than his own. [Helen Lewis: MAGA influencers don’t understand what journalism is] Having failed to prevent the article from being published, Trump shifted into distraction mode. In a transparent attempt to offer his wavering loyalists the scent of fresh meat, Trump began to attack their standby list of enemies. On Friday, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, renewed charges that the Obama administration had ginned up the Russia scandal to damage Trump. None of the facts she provided supported this claim remotely. The entire sleight of hand relied on conflating the question of whether Russia had hacked into voting machines (the Obama administration said publicly and privately it hadn’t) with the very different question of whether Russia had attempted to influence voters by hacking and leaking Democratic emails (which the Obama administration, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and a subsequent bipartisan Senate-committee investigation all concluded it had done). Why did Gabbard suddenly pick this moment to release and misconstrue 2016 intelligence comprising facts that the Obama administration had already acknowledged in public? Trump made the answer perfectly clear when he used a press availability with the president of the Philippines to deflect questions about Epstein into a rant about the need to arrest Obama. “I don’t really follow that too much,” he said of the Epstein matter. “It’s sort of a witch hunt. Just a continuation of the witch hunt. The witch hunt you should be talking about is that they caught President Obama absolutely cold.” Trump has yet to specify why the “witch hunt” he’s been stewing over nonstop for nearly a decade remains fascinating, while the new “witch hunt” he just revealed to the world is too tedious to address. In fact, Trump himself suggested that the two matters were related. He described the Epstein witch hunt as part of a continuous plot that culminated in Joe Biden stealing the 2020 presidential election. (“And by the way, it morphed into the 2020 race. And the 2020 race was rigged.”) You might think that this link would increase Trump’s curiosity about the Epstein matter, given his inexhaustible interest in vindicating his claim to have won in 2020. Not this time! By invoking 2020, Trump managed to make the Epstein conspiracy theory sound more world-historically important—while attaching his protestations of innocence to claims that were hardly settled in his favor. Again, imagine you were in Trump’s position and were completely innocent of any involvement with Epstein’s crimes. You would probably not try to compare the Epstein case to the scandal in which eight of your associates were sentenced to prison, or to the other time when you tried to steal an election and then got impeached. Instead, Trump is leaning into the parallels between the Epstein case and his own long record of criminal associations and proven lies, arguing in essence that the Epstein witch hunt is as fake as the claim that Biden won the 2020 election (i.e., 100 percent real). [Ashley Parker and Jonathan Lemire: Inside the White House’s Epstein strategy] Yesterday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, faced with demands by some Republican members to pass a nonbinding resolution calling for full disclosure of the government’s files relating to the Epstein investigation, announced that he would instead shut down the House for summer recess. Given that Trump had previously been eager to squeeze as many working days out of his narrow legislative majority as he could get, and the impression in Washington that Johnson will not so much as go to the bathroom without Trump’s permission, declaring early recess communicates extreme desperation on the part of the president. Also yesterday, the Trump administration announced that it was releasing thousands of pages of documents relating to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It is difficult to see why this disclosure was suddenly necessary. Trump’s contention that the Epstein scandal is too dull and familiar to be worth discussing seems to be ever so slightly in tension with the notion that the death of King, in 1968, is fresh material. If anything, the disclosure of documents nobody asked to see painfully highlights his unwillingness to disclose the documents everybody is clamoring for. If the police ask to look in your basement for a missing hitchhiker recently spotted in your car, and you offer to let them inspect your desk and closet instead, this will not dispel suspicions about what a basement inspection might

For months, no Republican in either the House or the Senate spoke out more forcefully, or more consistently, against cutting Medicaid than Josh Hawley. As President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” was weaving its way through Congress, Hawley argued repeatedly that stripping health insurance from the poorest Americans would be “morally wrong and politically suicidal” for a party that, in the Trump era, has relied on millions of votes from people who receive government assistance. Back home in Missouri, the senator was making the same case in private, according to several people I spoke with who met with him or his staff this year. His deep engagement on the issue impressed advocates representing Missouri’s hospitals, doctors, and rural health centers, all of whom were having trouble getting GOP lawmakers to take their concerns seriously. The changes, these advocates argued, could cost Missouri billions of dollars in federal funding, take away insurance from an estimated 170,000 residents, and force hospitals and rural health centers to close. “I did believe that he was genuine,” Amy Blouin, the president of the Missouri Budget Project, a nonpartisan think tank, told me. “I do see him as a different type of Republican.” Yet Hawley ultimately joined almost every other Republican in Congress and voted for the bill, which independent analysts project will cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and leave 10 million Americans newly uninsured. With three Republicans opposing the legislation in the narrowly divided Senate, Hawley’s support proved decisive. In a statement, Hawley said that the bill’s benefits—chiefly the extension of Trump’s first-term tax cuts—outweighed his concerns. “Gotta take the wins where you can,” the senator told a reporter. Then, last week, Hawley’s Medicaid journey took yet another turn when he introduced legislation that would prevent some of the deepest reductions from taking effect—essentially proposing to repeal a major provision of the legislation he had just voted to enact. [Read: No one loves the bill (almost) every Republican voted for] Hawley’s contortions on the bill were perhaps the starkest illustration of how a Republican Party, under pressure to deliver a quick win for the president, ended up slashing a core social-safety-net program much more deeply than many people expected—and more than some of its own members, including Trump himself at times, seemed to want. Republicans are only now beginning to assess the fallout from their enactment of such a far-reaching law. Polls have found that the bill is unpopular, and its Medicaid cuts especially so. But the law puts off its most painful provisions until after the 2026 midterm elections. Trump himself won’t face voters again, so lawmakers like Hawley will be left to deal with the bill’s political and real-world consequences. Democrats have roundly mocked Hawley, painting him as one more weak-kneed Republican who talked a big populist game on Medicaid only to fold quickly under pressure from Trump. “It was a performance worthy of a gold medal in political pretzel gymnastics,” Russ Carnahan, a former Missouri representative in Congress who is now chair of the state Democratic Party, told me. Hawley’s effort to immediately restore the cuts, Carnahan said, was a cynical attempt to fool Missourians: “He turned his back on helping people when he had the chance.” A former three-term Republican senator from Missouri, John Danforth, was barely more sympathetic. Danforth was once a political mentor to Hawley but broke with him after he backed Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He told me that Hawley’s new legislative proposal is tantamount to a press release. “It has no real consequence,” Danforth said, dismissing the measure as “simply a way of saying ‘whoops.’” Hawley’s office declined to make him available for an interview. Instead, a spokesperson pointed to victories that the senator had secured in the GOP bill, including additional relief for Missourians living with cancers linked to Manhattan Project work that took place in the state more than 80 years ago. This morning, at an event hosted by Axios, Hawley said he had drawn a “red line” on benefit cuts for individual Medicaid recipients, and that the bill did not contain any. Hawley had seemed to be an unlikely savior for those looking for a Republican willing to thwart Trump’s agenda. Outside Missouri, he is best known as the senator who held up a fist of support for the Trump faithful storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and then, hours later, was seen on video fleeing the same mob. Unlike moderate Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Hawley does not have an extensive record of breaking with Republicans on key votes. Nor does he have an imminent campaign to consider; Hawley won reelection last fall by nearly 14 points. The Missourians I spoke with presume that Hawley’s populist rhetoric reflects his national ambitions. With an eye toward the 2028 presidential race, he might be trying to stay loyal to Trump—a requirement for political survival in today’s GOP—while separating himself from rivals whose emphasis on fiscal austerity alienates the president’s working-class supporters. Hawley cited Trump’s own past pledges to protect Medicaid in explaining his initial opposition to the cuts, and he was one of a few Senate Republicans who publicly welcomed the idea (which the party ultimately abandoned) of raising taxes on the rich in the GOP megabill. The bill contains several major changes to Medicaid, and Hawley is trying to prevent only some of them. He continues to support, for example, the work requirements for nondisabled adults that could add administrative burdens to the program and result in millions of people losing insurance. The cuts that Hawley opposes would affect the amount of money that states such as Missouri could receive from the federal government for Medicaid. Hawley has taken credit for the fact that the enacted bill delays the start date of those provisions until at least 2028, and for securing a $50 billion rural health fund in the bill that could partially offset the loss of federal money for states. His

Conservatives in America control every lever of the federal government’s power, but they remain infuriated that they do not control the levers of culture and entertainment. Surely that cannot be because the type of entertainment they push is garbage no one wants to watch. No, it must be because the right studio, backed by the right multimillionaires, hasn’t come along. Enter Founders Films—ugh. Backed by high-level employees of Vice President JD Vance benefactor Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies, surely this will be the way that conservatives crack the entertainment market.  Do Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar, early Palantir employee Ryan Podolsky, or investor Christian Garrett have any particular background that would make you want to give them money to run a studio? Not particularly, although Sankar is getting to play-act as a soldier, having been one of four tech executives that the Army invented a detachment for. Why? So that they could all pretend to be lieutenant colonels despite never having served a day. Shhh. No one tell Sankar, as he thinks it is real and did a wildly embarrassing piece about it for Bari Weiss’s Free Press for Eugenics Enthusiasts.   Related |Army gives shady offer to tech bros so they can play soldier So, what do these big brains have planned once they sucker some other multimillionaires out of their not-actually-hard-earned money? Such blockbuster ideas as “Operation: Pineapple Express” about the “botched withdrawal” from Afghanistan; a 9/11 movie celebrating “courage”; and a yet-unnamed flick about the 2020 assassination of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. Surely all of those will be blockbusters. Move over, Marvel! There’s also a three-part adaptation of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” planned, because of course there is. Were the people demanding a new Ayn Rand trilogy? Couldn’t they just go watch the trilogy that came out like 15 years ago? Sure, the first part got mercilessly panned by critics, and the second part got mercilessly panned by critics, and the third part got mercilessly panned by critics. Actual moviegoers didn’t, well, actually go, particularly by the time Part III rolled around. But surely now America is ready for six to nine hours of Ayn Rand beamed into their eyeballs, right? Hopefully Founders Films will have better luck than the producers of the previous trilogy, who had to recall 100,000 DVDs because the jacket described Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged: as “a timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice,” and Randians 100% do not believe in self-sacrifice.  Perhaps Americans will rush to the cineplex to see some other Founders Films fixations, which will be “unafraid of offending Chinese audiences” and will use “American cultural power to spread skeptical views of the Chinese government.” Definitely what we are all looking for.  Actor Gina Carano’s extremist views got her shunned by mainstream Hollywood producers. But Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire Studio gave her another chance to flame out. No matter how much money the Palantir dudes and their pals throw at this exercise, it’s likely just going to be Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire Studio 2.0. Did you know conservative gadfly Shapiro had a movie studio? Okay, be honest: Did you know Ben Shapiro had a movie studio because you were ever organically aware of one of his entertainment offerings, or only because of coverage of his failed attempts to break out of the right-wing ecosphere? Thought so.  Shapiro’s studio already offers what Founders Films promises: jingoistic trolling starring a combination of fading stars and people that the rest of Hollywood doesn’t want to work with because it’s weird when people keep yelling about wokeness when you’re just trying to do your job. Who could have predicted that “Terror on the Prairie,” a 2022 Daily Wire joint starring Gina Carano after she went full anti-vaxxer transphobe, would have flopped? Everyone, actually.  In the end, perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing. If conservatives want to light their money on fire by giving it to other millionaires to make bad, ham-handed movies that no one wants to watch, who are we to say no?

An initiative to fill in historical gaps from the Muir Woods National Monument disappeared under pressure from the Trump administration. By Jessica Kutz or The 19th Under pressure from the Trump administration, the National Park Service (NPS) removed historical context from signage that explained the role women played in the creation of the Muir Woods National Monument and highlighted the racist ideologies of some of the men associated with the site. A ranger for the monument confirmed that the information removed last week originated from an initiative by NPS officials called “History Under Construction” that filled in gaps in the timeline of the park to offer a more comprehensive history of the monument in Marin County, California, which is known for its old-growth redwood trees. An article on the National Park Service (NPS) website explains what new information park officials had added to the interpretive signs in 2021. This had included highlighting the work of a women’s club, called The California Club, which launched the first campaign to save what was then known as Sequoia Canyon. Related | Trump wants you to snitch on national parks The updated text also detailed the racist backgrounds of otherwise celebrated men associated with creating the monument. For example, it added the political views of William Kent, who was credited with buying and later donating the land that would become the national monument to President Theodore Roosevelt. The additions referenced that he worked on anti-Asian policies during his time in Congress, which laid the groundwork for Japanese mass internment during World War II. It also pointed out that important conservation figures of that time like Gifford Pinchot, who was appointed chief of what is now the U.S. Forest Service in 1898, was also a eugenicist who believed the human race could be improved by “selective breeding.” He served a 10-year term on an advisory council of the American Eugenics Society. Protesters at Muir Woods National Monument decry the Trump administration’s firing of park workers on March 1. The additional text also highlighted the original caretakers of the land, the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo tribes, as well as pointing out that their lands were stripped from them and later became places like the national monument. All of the additions associated with the initiative have been removed. NPS did not respond to a request for comment by The 19th as of press time. The monument’s ranger office confirmed that the language was taken down at the direction of the NPS’s Washington, D.C., office following a secretarial order issued by the Department of Interior (DOI). The order outlined how the agency would implement the Trump administration’s executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, that stated the federal government would take action to ensure that any monuments, memorials, statues or markers managed by DOI do not contain “descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” Instead it stated the agency should focus “on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.” In a March press release, Alan Spears, senior director of cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit that advocates for the park system said, “The president’s executive order could jeopardize the Park Service’s mission to protect and interpret American history.” He continued, “Every American who cares about our country’s history should be worried about what people, places, and themes disappear next.” A separate follow up order issued in June by the DOI asks land managers to report any language that was added after 2020 that could potentially violate the executive order. It also required land agencies to post notices that would allow members of the public to report any language via a QR code. Related | Why conservatives are obsessed with erasing history—except the Confederacy Prior to the executive orders, the Trump administration was already taking action to revise information on park websites that did not align with its priorities. For example, NPS removed references to transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument’s webpage in February. The monument, in New York City, was created to honor the LGBTQ+ civil rights movement.

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