Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were watching wildfire smoke turn the sky over half the country the color of a nicotine stain, three US service members died in a war the President keeps insisting he ended, ICE shot two more men and the White House told the mourners to keep it down, Trump went on primetime to reveal China stole the 2020 election, the Secretary of Defense turned military jets strafing a public beach into policy, and a senator’s been missing so long his own party thinks his proof-of-life photo is a deepfake. Let’s start with the war Trump keeps ending.

Three American service members are dead this weekend, two in Jordan and one in Iraq, defending against Iranian missiles and drones, with one still missing. That’s sixteen troops dead now in a war Donald Trump has declared over so many times he’s earned a signing-ceremony punch card. He signed the latest ceasefire last month, held the pen up like he’d cured cancer, told you it was finished, and this week Iran’s Supreme Leader reviewed that signature and called it, “worthless.” Trump spent the week bombing civilian bridges and ports, Iranian missiles are landing on oil fields in Kuwait, and this morning he ordered fresh strikes to “swiftly punish” the country he keeps attacking. Asked about the dead Americans, he said it was “a very sad thing,” the way you’d mention a rained-out barbecue. He keeps announcing peace and ordering airstrikes in the same breath, and it’s other people’s kids who come home in the boxes.

At home, ICE spent the week shooting people. On July 7 in Houston they killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a man they’ve admitted they mistook for someone else. On July 13 in Biddeford, Maine, they killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. And spare me whether they had the right guy, since no name on a warrant turns shooting an unarmed man at a traffic stop into anything but a killing. None of it was on camera, either. Congress gave ICE the money for body cameras and ICE spent it on anything else, a real stroke of luck for the people holding the guns. Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary finally paused most vehicle stops to slow the body count, but that only lasted about a day before the Orange menace overruled his own secretary on Truth Social and posted “keep those Crime Stat Records coming,” about human beings his agents are shooting. Then border czar Tom Homan went on Fox to explain whose fault the killings really are. Not the agents. Not the guns. The people who said the killing was bad. His message to anyone upset that ICE keeps killing civilians was to “shut their mouth” or there’ll be “more bloodshed.” I’m sorry? Are you threatening to unlawfully kill people for speaking out about you unlawfully killing people? What the actual feck?

Then Trump commandeered primetime to whine yet again the 2020 election was stolen by China. a story his own intelligence agencies looked at and threw back. He declassified a fat stack of documents that turned out to be five-year-old news in a fresh binder. He waved around 278,000 noncitizen voters that officials in Nevada and Pennsylvania read once and set on fire. And he slurred through all of it at the speed of a man deflating, ranting about a “shadow government” while attacking CISA, the election-security agency his own administration runs, the one that called 2020 the most secure election in American history. My dude, you keep warning us about the shadow government. You are the shadow government. He’s oh for sixteen in court trying to pry loose the state voter rolls, so now he’s writing the excuse months early, that if Republicans lose the midterms, it was stolen. He’s pre-drafting the tantrum.

On July 15 the Blue Angels screamed over a packed Pensacola Beach so low that lawn chairs took flight and people dove into the sand, a maneuver the military calls reckless and this administration files under content. The Navy opened a safety review. But hairgel hegseth, looked at fighter jets flinging umbrellas across a beach full of families, waved the review off, and asked for an encore. Eric Trump chipped in by calling everyone alarmed by it the “low-T mainstream media,” which is a strange thing to say about people who just don’t want a flying cooler to the skull. This is combat aircraft and taxpayer jet fuel burned to run a monster truck rally over a crowded beach.

And then there’s the senator no one can produce. Mitch McConnell, 84, went into a hospital on June 14 and hasn’t been seen since, while Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear says two federal agencies called him to report McConnell had died. So the office released a photo of McConnell holding up a newspaper like a kidnapping victim, to prove he’s alive, and it went so well that his own MAGA base declared it AI-generated and Laura Loomer pronounced him brain dead. Now Beshear is considering appointing the replacement himself and flipping the seat to Democrat. Republicans are racing to sue him under the law they wrote to stop exactly that. Control of a 53-47 Senate now hinges on whether anyone can confirm one man has a pulse.

And in the lightning round. Truth Social announced it’ll sell Wall Street a milliseconds-early peek at Trump’s market-moving posts, so the firms that pay can trade on his next war or tariff before you finish reading it, and since he owns the company, he’s charging admission to front-run his own mouth. Then the White House called his teleprompter operator a disgrace for quietly making six figures betting on Trump’s speeches, the exact hustle Trump just incorporated. And Stephen Miller stood at a State Department podium calling the American left “enemies of civilization” and rolling out a plan to disrupt, defund, debank, and prosecute left-wing groups, which is a lot of verbs for putting the people who protest him on the terror list.

That’s your week in tyranny. Welcome to the golden age.

Sources:

https://www.ms.now/news/us-service-members-killed-missing-jordan-iran-war-centcom

https://www.commondreams.org/news/tom-homan-bloodshed

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/7/17/headlines

https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/5971473-blue-angels-low-flyover-review/

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2026/jul/13/tweets/mitch-mcconnell-rehabilitation-photo-ai-reused/

https://www.jezebel.com/even-republican-senators-think-mitch-mcconnells-proof-of-life-photo-is-fake

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/7/17/headlines/truth_social_plans_to_sell_priority_access_to_trumps_posts

https://truthout.org/articles/miller-labels-leftists-a-cancer-that-world-must-root-out-in-fascistic-speech/

Hey fam, welcome back to the Gilead Gazette, your cheerful weekly digest of every fresh new way the government would like to manage your uterus. Big week for the fellas. Today: your birth control gets reclassified as abortion, the anti-abortion movement throws a tantrum and gets a present, the Attorney General falls in love with a law from 1873, red states go doctor-hunting across state lines, and the CDC goes dark. Let’s get into it.

We begin with wonderful news for millions of women: your birth control has been quietly reclassified as abortion. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is clear that IUDs and the pill prevent fertilization and are not abortifacients. But the movement needs them to be, because once your contraception is legally an abortion, every abortion ban and every mail restriction they’re building can reach it too. So they got to work. The administration rewrote Title X, the national family planning program, to steer women toward natural family planning, which you may know by its stage name, the rhythm method. Then the EPA added birth control to a list of water contaminants, so the pill is now officially pollution. You can’t ban a thing for being an abortion until you first decide it’s an abortion. And they’ve decided.

Now to a movement in mourning. Last year Republicans passed a one-year ban on Planned Parenthood billing Medicaid for the boring stuff, cancer screenings, birth control, STI testing, none of it abortion, which they’re already barred from funding. That ban expired on July fifth, and the anti-abortion crowd assumed Congress would simply renew it in the next big bill. Congress did not. The new ninety-five-billion-dollar package found room for defense, farm aid, and grants to make voting harder, but somehow no room for their one little wish. So on Thursday they gathered at the Capitol in matching Defund Big Abortion shirts, and Senator Josh Hawley took the microphone to describe cancer screenings as the mutilation of our children. Students for Life was so devastated they gave every single member of Congress an F. And here’s the part they left off the shirts: the Congressional Budget Office scored it, and defunding Planned Parenthood would actually raise federal spending by fifty-two million dollars. Their dream money-saving plan costs money. But the base was sad, so the administration sent a little something to cheer them up.

And that little something was Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General and Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, which is exactly the background you want hovering near your prescriptions. At his confirmation hearing this week, Senator Ted Cruz asked him to take a fresh look at the Comstock Act, a delightful anti-obscenity law from 1873, a simpler time, when women couldn’t vote but the postal service was already deeply concerned about them. Blanche would like to use it to stop the abortion pill, mifepristone, from traveling through the mail anywhere in the country. And his evidence was airtight. He told the United States Senate that he saw a video. Not where. Not who made it. Just a video, somewhere, of pills that, in his words, come dumped out of a little plastic bag. Case closed. Then Senator Katie Britt made the strongest case of all. She brought up a woman whose partner had drugged her with abortion pills against her will, and arrived at the solution: take abortion pills away from all women. The abuser walks. You lose access. Chivalry lives.

Several states aren’t waiting for the mail ban. They’ve gone straight for the doctors who prescribe abortion pills. Louisiana has an extradition order out for Dr. Margaret Carpenter for the crime of writing a prescription. Texas is chasing another provider for a hundred thousand dollars over pills mailed into the state. California watched all this and wrote a bill to require its future governors to refuse those extradition requests, for doctors who provide abortion pills or gender-affirming care, because right now your doctor’s freedom depends entirely on whether your governor happens to be in a protecting mood. So far, two Democratic governors have refused Louisiana. The rest are a coin flip.

Now an update from the CDC. Every year the agency publishes a report on abortions in America, how many, where, for whom. It’s how the public and the doctors and the researchers actually see what the bans are doing to people. This year, for the first time since 1969, there’s no report, because the administration fired the entire division that writes it. No staff, no report, no evidence. And that’s the tidy part: the same people who stopped publishing the anonymous national tally are drawing up a plan to force every state to report abortions in far more detail, individual detail, with your state’s Medicaid money on the line if they refuse. So the public numbers vanish, and the personal files grow. They’d rather not count how many of you there are. They’d very much like your name.

Time for the speed round. The administration canceled fifty-three of sixty-seven teen pregnancy prevention grants, a bipartisan program that actually reduces teen pregnancy, which one Fox analyst called a problem, because fewer pregnant teenagers is apparently the emergency now. Democracy Forward and Planned Parenthood are suing to put it back. And happy anniversary to Iowa’s six-week ban, which just turned two. To celebrate, the Chicago Abortion Fund reports it has spent seven hundred seventy-four thousand dollars helping Iowans cross the state line into Illinois for care, a hundred and seventy-seven percent jump in Iowans calling for help since the ban took effect.

Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.

Sources:

Follow Jessica Valenti

https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/practice-bulletin/articles/2017/11/long-acting-reversible-contraception-implants-and-intrauterine-devices

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5975417-anti-abortion-activists-planned-parenthood-funding-reconciliation

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5970583-blanche-pledged-stop-mail-mifepristone/

https://msmagazine.com/2026/07/17/todd-blanche-abortion-pill-mifepristone-comstock-act/

https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/abortion-trends-before-and-after-dobbs/

https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/abortion-reporting-requirements

David Brouillette, the ICE agent who murdered Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero last week, is a wife-beater with a documented history of violence and serious mental illness, and the federal government gave him a gun and a badge and pointed him at your street.

Guerrero was 26 years old. A husband, a father, authorized to work here, and not even the person ICE came for. He was just there.

Here’s what the agency either didn’t find or didn’t care about. Brouillette’s own relatives went to the Associated Press to say he has struggled with serious mental illness since childhood and a long history of violence, and that he should never have been handed a badge and a gun. One woman played the AP a voicemail from last winter where he said someone should slit her throat. His first ex-wife says that while she was pregnant, he threw boiling water on her while she was holding their baby, and her mother says the same. Hundreds of court records in Augusta detail years of alleged abuse of another ex-wife and his own daughters.

Less than a year ago, this man was selling houses. Then ICE gave him a firearm.

His criminal background check came back clean, and I refuse to pretend that’s a defense. His violence lived in family court, in the protective orders and custody files where you learn exactly who a man is when he thinks no one important is watching. An agency arming a man to point a gun at civilians is supposed to look there. ICE built a hiring machine that doesn’t, because Stephen Miller wanted thousands of officers on a quota yesterday, so the standard didn’t drop, it detonated.

Think about what that selects for. The military, for all its failures, has spent decades barring domestic abusers from carrying a weapon, because arming a man who beats his family is a bad idea. ICE looked at that same standard and decided it was optional.

Then there’s the tell. Brouillette’s own 18-year-old daughter told the AP that her father called her and confessed, said flat out that he shot and killed Durán Guerrero. He phoned his kid to tell her he’d killed a man.

And DHS has said nothing. They won’t defend the hire, they won’t explain the vetting, they still haven’t said his name. Their whole public position is the boilerplate, that an officer fired fearing for public safety.

So don’t let anyone shrink this into an immigration story. In January, an ICE officer shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis. She was 37, a US citizen, sitting in her own car in her own city, and DHS ran the same “weaponized her vehicle” line they just ran on Guerrero. Good was a citizen. Guerrero wasn’t even the target. The pattern was never about who these men are sent to hunt. It’s that we keep arming men who should never hold a gun, and the bodies are never only the ones they were pointed at. A man who scalds his pregnant wife doesn’t check your passport before he fires. That badge makes him a danger to whoever’s next. That’s you. That’s me. That’s anyone on the wrong corner at the wrong second.

What the actual feck.

UPDATE: ICE claims Brouillette had “nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience,” but won’t say where or when, and the only recent job the AP could document was real estate. Draw your own conclusions about the vetting. Also worth knowing: per AP, at least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since the crackdown began.

Sources:

https://apnews.com/article/ice-david-brouillette-johan-guerrero-maine-shooting-dbc30d6d59e2a95fb470afc188e125c6

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5974608-maine-ice-shooting-officer-dhs-david-brouillette/

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, a crew of Trump’s elves crept into George Washington’s house, tore a slavery memorial off the wall, and left a whiter, “friendlier” version of history in its place. Like racist shoemaker elves, cobbling together lies instead of loafers.

The site is the President’s House in Philadelphia, where Washington ran the country in the 1790s. The city built the memorial to honor nine enslaved people, Washington kept inside the house itself, cooking and serving for him while he ran a nation built on liberty. Philly handed the memorial over to the Park Service in 2010 and they decided it now had to go because Trump signed an order telling federal sites to quit “disparaging Americans” and start celebrating the country’s greatness.

They swapped the panels in the dark while the whole city was packed for an All-Star Game thrown for America’s 250th birthday, the big tough America First government skulking around a slavery memorial like a raccoon in your trash. If you’re proud of your work, you do it in broad daylight. You only do it at 2 a.m. because some part of you already knows it’s a lie.

Down came the panel titled “The Dirty Business of Slavery.” Up went one called “Celebrating Independence Throughout the Years.” They walked into a slavery memorial and hung a cruise brochure. They also hauled off the map of the slave trade routes and the timeline of slavery, because you can’t throw an independence party with the receipts on the wall.

Then they rewrote Washington himself. The new panel says he “navigated a nation deeply divided over slavery.” He didn’t navigate it, he profited from it. In 1786 he wrote, “there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition” of slavery. Bold words from a man who cycled his nine household slaves down to Virginia every few months so they’d never hit the six month mark Pennsylvania established that would have required them to be set free. He put it in writing that slavery should end, but personally made sure his enslaved remained chained.

And it wasn’t only the people he owned. He signed the Fugitive Slave Act, the 1793 law that let slaveholders hunt down people who escaped and punished anyone who helped them. The panel notes it passed by a veto-proof majority, like that’s a defense. He was the president. He could have refused. He could have made a statement. He signed.

Erasing nine enslaved people to flatter the man who owned them is the real disparagement. It tells you exactly who Trump counts as an American, and who he doesn’t. The nine didn’t make his list. Neither does anyone descended from them.

Michael Coard, the Philadelphia attorney who spent years getting this memorial built, calls it the Ministry of Truth, the office in Orwell’s 1984 that deleted facts and printed prettier ones.

They tried this once already. Ripped the panels out this winter, a judge ordered them restored, and an appeals court ruled the city lost its say when it handed the site over to the park service. Not that erasing history is legal. Just that the city can’t stop it.

Philadelphia’s asking for another hearing, so this isn’t over. But while the lawyers argue, let me read the nine they keep trying to delete. Oney Judge. Hercules. Austin. Christopher Sheels. Giles. Paris. Moll. Joe. Richmond. Say them in daylight, loud, because Donald Trump is a scared little man who does his bravest work at 2 a.m. with the lights off.

Sources:

https://whyy.org/articles/presidents-house-slavery-trump-exhibit-philadelphia-replaced/

https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/presidents-house-slavery-exhibits-changed-20260715.html

https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/george-washington-and-slavery

Pete Hegseth woke up this week, looked at the most powerful military on earth, and decided its two biggest problems were low testosterone and successful women. So he fixed both.

The Secretary of Defense says every service member over thirty now gets an annual testosterone test added to their health screening, with optional hormone therapy at the end. He announced it on his official X account, under a caption that read, his words, The High-T Department of War.

He slapped a sponsor on the Department of Defense like it’s a NASCAR hood. High-T is a testosterone booster they sell at GNC.

Hegseth says this keeps troops on the “leading edge of lethality.” My dude, the leading edge of lethality is a Tomahawk missile, not a testosterone gel. And the irony writes itself: the same man who purged trans troops for needing hormone therapy just put everyone else on it.

And the science? There isn’t any. The FDA only approves this for men with actual low testosterone. This is the crowd that put Dr. Oz over Medicare, rejects vaccines on no data, and thinks we’re drinking abortions in the tap water. Junk science with a flag on it.

Then there’s the faith angle. In April, Hegseth axed the flu-shot mandate on religious grounds. His words: your body, your faith, your convictions, not negotiable. So a flu shot offends God, but boosting your testosterone doesn’t? I went through basic. It’s a Petri dish with bunk beds. Apparently the Lord will let you catch the flu, but low T is where He draws the line.

And too much testosterone does what? Mood swings. Aggression. They want to pump it into the guys we hand live ammo, from a crowd that calls women too emotional to lead. They’ve clearly never met a bodybuilder three weeks into a cycle.

While that circus played out, Hegseth gutted his second Navy promotion list in two months. In June he pulled the one-star list: two women, two Black men, gone. This month, the two-star list: seven struck, five of them women or people of color. Former defense officials call it unprecedented. The rules only let him strike a name for cause. He gave none. And for the first time in over a decade, not one active-duty woman will make admiral in the Navy this year.

One of the women he struck was Rear Admiral Amy Bauernschmidt. First woman ever to command a nuclear aircraft carrier. Thirty years in, three thousand hours in helicopters, five thousand sailors under her, and today she runs a carrier strike group. You don’t erase a résumé like that unless you’re threatened by it. That is the smallest-dick energy this building has ever produced.

That’s the jagoff remaking the military I served in. A part-time major who taught a few classes, never commanded more than forty people, never once ran a ship, and got the job on a single tie-breaking vote from the Vice President. And he’s the one telling officers who commanded warships and led thousands that they don’t make the cut.

So this is the leading edge of lethality. A blood test and a tube of gel.

Sources:

https://apnews.com/article/hegseth-pentagon-testosterone-testing-troops-47333bbf3af9e4cac432722332ff1383

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5969935-hegseth-testosterone-testing-dod/

https://www.notus.org/defense/testosterone-troops-hegseth-testing

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/hegseth-blocking-promotions-women-military-leadership

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-pete-takes-aim-at-women-in-secret-crackdown/

Donald Trump erased nearly three million acres of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments yesterday, and the official justification his own White House put in writing is that the canyons are “too generic.”

I am not making that up. The proclamation says the monument protects, quote, “deep sandstone canyons, broad desert mesas, forested mountaintops dotted with lush meadows.” And then it says, quote, “while scenic, these generic features are not landmarks worthy of protection.” My dude. You just described one of the most beautiful places in North America and then wrote it up like a Zillow listing you are trying to lowball.

It gets dumber. The petroglyphs apparently don’t count either, because petroglyphs are, quote, “found across the American West.” There are a hundred thousand archaeological sites inside Bears Ears. The White House looked at all of it and said, meh, seen it.

Here is the damage. Bears Ears drops from one point three six million acres to a hundred twenty one thousand. Grand Staircase, from one point eight seven million to a hundred eighty two thousand. It is the largest rollback of protected land in American history, breaking the record Trump set in 2017, when he gutted these same monuments and Biden restored them.

He signed it while Bears Ears is on fire. The Babylon Fire has been burning inside the monument since June, and it is the largest wildfire in the country. So there is the president in the Oval Office handing Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox a commemorative pen while the ground is still smoking.

Oh and Trump’s public reason for doing this: out there you can’t hunt, you can’t fish, you can, quote, “virtually not even walk.” Steve Bloch of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance confirmed that hunting, fishing and camping are all allowed. The real reason for doing this is in the proclamation, which cites critical minerals, uranium and copper. Under Grand Staircase sits the largest coal field in Utah. Trump says he is giving the land back to the people of Utah. And by “the people” he means Energy Fuels, the mining company sitting on a hundred and seventeen claims inside the old boundary and a uranium mill six miles away.

Seventy one percent of Utah voters want Bears Ears kept, per polling from the Center for Biological Diversity. Utah Center Utah Senator Mike Lee is the architect of this, and he doesn’t just want these two. Last year he tried to force the sale of three million acres of public land across eleven western states. His own party killed it. So he skipped the voting part.

Bears Ears is also the first national monument Indigenous nations ever asked for. Five of them. Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, and two Ute nations. They built a commission to co-manage the land with the federal government. Trump’s proclamation dissolves that commission.

I’m sure you’re thinking, Can he even do this? Short answer. No. The Antiquities Act lets a president create a monument. It says nothing about destroying one. In 1938 the attorney general ruled that a president cannot abolish monuments. Last year Trump’s Justice Department overruled him. He wrote himself a permission slip.

But they’re doing this on purpose. It’s a trap. The tribes will have to sue to keep the land, and the case will climb toward a Supreme Court where John Roberts has already put his contempt for the Antiquities Act in writing. Win there and it is not two monuments. It is every acre any future president could ever protect.

None of this takes effect for sixty days. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance will be the ones in that courtroom. Fund them.

Unless you think these places are too generic.

Sources

Reporting by Jim and Will Pattiz at More Than Just Parks .

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/07/modifying-the-bears-ears-national-monument/

https://www.kuer.org/politics-government/2026-07-13/trump-shrinks-bears-ears-grand-staircase-escalante-utah

https://utahnewsdispatch.com/2026/07/13/president-trump-shrinks-bears-ears-and-grand-staircase-escalante-again/

https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/trump-slashes-bears-ears-grand-staircase-escalante-national-monuments-for-second-time-2026-07-13/

https://www.grandcanyontrust.org/blog/update-white-mesa-uranium-mill/

https://www.justice.gov/olc/media/1403101/dl

https://www.hcn.org/articles/doj-opinion-puts-national-monuments-at-risk/

https://www.propublica.org/article/utah-mike-lee-public-lands-sell-off

https://suwa.org/national-monuments/

Welcome back to This Week in Tyranny. While you were busy watching Argentina put one past Switzerland in the hundred and twelfth minute, here’s everything you missed, because tyranny does not take a match day off.

This week: the Justice Department sent federal agents to reporters’ front doors. ICE killed a homebuilder in his own work van, and the only witnesses are being pressured to deport themselves. Trump fired the last two Democrats off the bipartisan election commission with a hundred and sixteen days to go before the midterms. A congressman quietly asked the VA to strip the VFW of its ability to help disabled veterans get their benefits. And the leader of the free world is building an unclimbable wall around the park where people go to yell at him.

Let’s start with the the new air force one.

Qatar handed Donald Trump a four hundred million dollar jet. He then poured tens of millions of your dollars into fixing it up, and he would not shut up about it. His big beautiful plane that definitely wants a bribe.

And the New York Times found out that his beautiful plane wasn’t secure enough to fly him home from the NATO summit. He had to take the old one. The four hundred million dollar gift he’d spent a year bragging about, and he couldn’t ride in it.

Now, there were two available responses. Fix the plane. Or admit the plane is broken.

He went with door number three, which was to send the Justice Department after the reporters. Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, Eric Schmitt. Federal agents served some of them at their houses. Their houses. Men with badges on a reporter’s front step, in front of the neighbors.

And nobody leaked a troop movement here. Nobody burned a source. Everyone told him that plane wasn’t secure the day Qatar handed it to him, and the Times reported that they were right.

David McCraw, the paper’s lawyer, said federal agents at a reporter’s door should alarm anyone who believes in the Constitution. That’s the polite version. The real version is that the most powerful man alive got humiliated by an airplane and went looking for someone to punish for it. He cannot absorb a failure. Somebody else always pays for it.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fifty two years old. He’d been in this country thirty five years. He built houses, he owned the company, he had three sons, one’s a teacher and two are engineers, and he had no criminal record. His family says he was close to finally getting legal status. Tuesday morning he was driving his crew to a job site when an ICE officer fired through the side of his van and hit him in the abdomen. He died at the hospital.

DHS says he weaponized his vehicle. That’s their phrase, and they use it constantly. Every time they kill somebody in a car, the car did it. Sure. Sure sure sure.

The three men riding with him, one of them his brother, all say the same thing. No agent was ever in front of that van. There was no threat. The shots came from the side. The Harris County medical examiner ruled it a homicide. Oh, and DHS eventually admitted they were looking for a different guy entirely.

Also, there’s no footage, because the officer wasn’t wearing a body camera. Here’s the explanation for that, word for word. Quote. “The officers involved in the incident in Houston had not been issued body worn cameras due to back to back Democrat shutdowns.”

BTW- in April, after the shutdowns, Congress handed Homeland Security twenty million dollars specifically to buy body cameras. The line item says procurement, deployment, and operations of body worn cameras. Four months later, DHS still hasn’t put cameras on the officers who are killing people, and is blaming a shutdown that ended before the check cleared.

They can’t even keep the story straight. Publicly, DHS says cameras are in more than half of their field offices. Privately, acting ICE director David Venturella told Congresswoman Sylvia Garcia that fewer than a third of officers have them. And apparently they’re all in Chicago.

Meanwhile the three men who watched Lorenzo die, the only living witnesses, are sitting in ICE detention getting pressured to sign self deportation papers. That is the pattern. ICE has pushed people to self deport after killings before. Send the witnesses to Mexico and the case goes with them.

Venturella has also conceded he owes the family an apology, not for agents murdering him, no, for releasing Lorenzo’s name to the press before anybody told his sons their father was dead. And his family still cannot claim his body.

A hundred and sixteen days before the midterm elections, Trump wiped out the Election Assistance Commission. There is now nobody on it. Zero commissioners. The only federal agency whose entire job is helping states run elections cannot legally do anything, four months before the midterms.

And here’s what the White House gave as the legal basis. The Slaughter decision. The Supreme Court ruling I told you about two weeks ago, the one that handed Trump the power to fire the heads of independent agencies at will. This is what he did with that power. So he’s making it harder to register, harder to vote. And now deleting the referee.

Two weeks ago I told you that Congressman Mike Bost, who chairs the House Veterans Affairs Committee, accused the VFW of promoting political violence over a protest cartoon. A cartoon the VFW first ran in 1933, the last time Congress tried to balance a budget on veterans’ backs, and reprinted now because Bost is trying it again.

Here’s what we just learned. On the same day he put out that statement, Bost and Congressman Jack Bergman quietly sent a letter to the VA asking them to review whether the VFW should keep its accreditation.

That accreditation is what lets a VFW service officer file a veteran’s disability claim, fight the denial, and win the appeal. It’s a mountain of paperwork with a thousand ways to lose, and most veterans do not get through it without one. Bost wants the VA to look at taking that away.

Because they reprinted a ninety three year old cartoon about his bill. A horrible bill Which cuts disability compensation for a million and a half veterans.

That is not a policy dispute. That’s a committee chairman trying to use a federal agency to take the megaphone away from the people who called him out.

And Trump, meanwhile, is fortifying the White House. Against? Shrug?

The Secret Service is reinforcing the actual front doors of the White House. The columns went under scaffolding in June, which the White House called standard restoration work, and that scaffolding is now draped in a giant tarp with columns and a lamp printed on it. He hung a picture of the White House on the White House. Because? He needs to be reminded where the entrance is?

Then there’s the fence. It would go around Lafayette Park, directly across from his front door, and possibly across Pennsylvania Avenue itself. Eight or nine feet. Permanent. And in the proposal, they call it “non scalable.”

Non scalable. Like the border wall was non scalable, right up until people started scaling it with ladders they bought at Home Depot.

But the reason for the fence is what matters, and they put it in writing. The plan says Lafayette Park and Pennsylvania Avenue are a focal point for the public to gather for demonstrations. It says those assemblies elevate into non peaceful demonstration. And it concludes that a properly anchored permanent fence would assist in de-escalating most potentially violent protest.

So he’s spending millions to wall off the park where Americans go to hold up signs. The last people to actually storm a federal building in this city, he pardoned.

Violent insurrectionists walk. People with cardboard get a nine foot fence.

And let’s not forget the granite helipad going in on the South Lawn. Thirteen million dollars, rushed, with an extra eight hundred and seventy five thousand thrown at the helipad alone to finish it in time for a state visit they won’t name. Reinforced doors. Unclimbable walls. Private helicopter pad. One point two billion dollars in construction.

That’s not maintenance. That’s a man hardening a position. You don’t spend a billion dollars making a house impossible to approach if you’re planning on handing the keys to somebody else.

Lightning round. Trump took another unannounced physical at Walter Reed, his second in two months, and he let it slip mid rant at New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman while volunteering that he’d requested a cognitive test and aced it, something he brought up unprompted for no reason whatsoever. He also threatened to bomb Iran for a full year if they assassinate him. My dude, who is do you think is going to run that bombing campaign? You think JD will be out there avenging you? Meanwhile, the administration has spent months insisting the Strait of Hormuz is open but is now demanding Iran publicly admit that it’s open, so somebody in there needs to pick a lane. FBI Director Kash Patel was on the tarmac about to fly the Bureau’s jet to Chicago to watch his girlfriend sing at a country music festival when Trump’s people yanked him back, and he responded by calling the reporters who broke the story gold plated dumbasses. The Great American State Fair was cancelled on the final day of its run because - nobody showed up. which means the Freedom 250 celebration of American greatness was killed by American indifference, and honestly, that’s the most patriotic thing that’s happened all year. And in the middle of a housing crisis, the biggest housing bill in thirty years just became law without Trump’s signature, because he sulked when Congress wouldn’t pass his voter ID bill, and he didn’t dare veto it either, because it passed eighty five to five and he knew he’d get overridden. So the first federal ban on private equity buying up your neighborhood is now law. He was too proud to sign it and too weak to stop it. But sure, he totally cares about your well being.

That’s your week in tyranny. Welcome to the golden age.

Sources:

https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-election-assistance-commission-trump-dismantled

https://www.votebeat.org/national/2026/07/09/trump-fires-election-assistance-commission-members-hicks-hovland-mccormick/

https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/immigration/2026/07/10/556770/ice-shooting-houston-lorenzo-salgado-araujo-passengers-dispute-dhs-account/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-to-know-about-the-fatal-shooting-of-lorenzo-salgado-araujo-by-ice

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/07/10/white-house-fortifying-front-door-where-tarps-hang-amid-trumps-construction-blitz/

Kristofer Goldsmith MeidasTouch Network

Emma Waters is a 28-year-old policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, and she says hormonal birth control can make a woman attracted to her own brother. She’s compared IVF to Hitler’s breeding program, wants to end no-fault divorce, and wrote the plan to teach high school girls period tracking instead of contraception. Heritage wrote Project 2025 and staffs this administration, and they’re building her into the next Phyllis Schlafly. Her podcast has 42 views.

Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services is reorganizing its Office for Civil Rights around “conscience and religious freedom.” Law professor Liz Sepper says the target is EMTALA, the law that requires an emergency room to stabilize you. A conscience exemption would mean a hospital gets to decide whether saving your life is something it’s comfortable with.

Delaware’s attorney general settled with the Alliance Defending Freedom and stopped enforcing a law that required crisis pregnancy centers to post a notice saying they are not a licensed medical facility. Delaware is also paying ADF about $50,000.

Congressmen Randy Fine and Greg Steube wrote a formal letter to the governing body of Irish dance in Dublin, and Florida AG James Uthmeier threatened legal action, all to stop one trans girl from competing in Orlando.

Students for Life wants a House Judiciary hearing on the Clean Water for All Life Act, which would require “biohazard catch kits” so women who miscarry at home collect the tissue themselves and return it. Kansas Rep. Ron Bryce says there’s no scientific data on abortion pills in the drinking water, which is why he wants Trump’s EPA to go find some.

Speed round: SBA Pro-Life America endorses Vivek Ramaswamy. Indiana’s Todd Rokita moves to cut Planned Parenthood off Medicaid. Iowa and Oklahoma restrict abortion pills. Kat Cammack. And Graham Platner drops out in Maine.

Nearly all of this is Jessica Valenti and Kylie Cheung reporting at Abortion, Every Day. Follow them.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/30/trump-religious-freedom-health-lgbtq

https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2026/05/19/gov-kim-reynolds-signs-laws-restricting-access-to-abortion-pills-hpv-vaccine/

https://www.thehandbasket.co

My testimony before the National Capital Planning Commission against Trump’s arch at Arlington.

I was a combat photographer and public affairs sergeant with the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, deployed to Iraq in 2004, and I’m the daughter of two retired National Park rangers. I came to the commission as the person this arch claims to honor and the person raised to protect what it would destroy. It betrays both.

The Park Service’s own report says the arch can be built 20 hours a day, year round, for up to three years, under cranes taller than the arch itself. Arlington buries its dead close to thirty times a day. Under this plan, families would lower their loved ones into the ground to the sound of pile drivers. We ask our dead for everything. The least we owe them is silence, and for three years we would deny them even that.

Memorial Circle looks like empty lawn. It isn’t. It was left open on purpose, so the line between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington could hold its meaning: a country made whole after the Civil War. The excuse for skipping Congress is a ninety-year-old permission for two columns we were wise enough never to raise.

Free nations build arches to the dead, not to their living rulers. America’s own Commemorative Works Act forbids a memorial to any person until twenty-five years after their death, so history, not vanity, decides. Asked who this arch was for, President Trump said, “Me.” America does not gild the living. Dictators do.

On June 4th this commission refused to approve the arch and demanded answers on its height, on air traffic, on pedestrian safety. Those problems have not been cured, and the deepest ones cannot be. Congress never authorized it. The design was sole-sourced to avoid open bidding. And Interior now swears it is “not a memorial,” even as the President calls it his, so it can slip past the law entirely.

This is National Park Service land, meant in the words of the Park Service’s own founding law to stay “unimpaired for those who come after us.” I asked the commission to reject this arch.

This is my testimony to the National Capital Planning Commission on July 9 against Trump’s arch at Arlington. The vote happened, but the fight isn’t over. Call your representatives and tell them Congress never authorized this.

I’m standing in Memorial Circle in Washington, D.C., directly in front of Arlington National Cemetery, where the brothers and sisters I served with, and generations who served before me, are laid to rest.

This spot was built after the Civil War as a sacred sightline connecting Arlington House and the Lincoln Memorial. Trump now wants to erect an arch here, one he has said himself is for him.

Under his plan, construction runs 20 hours a day for the next two to two and a half years. Arlington holds between 20 and 30 funerals a day. That means families burying their loved ones will never get a moment of silence, only the circus of construction now and bright lights, crowds, and an observation tower later. They claim it won’t block the view between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington. I’ll be sharing images on my social media that show you absolutely will not.

This is also lawlessness. Trump moved to do this without the authorization of Congress and without proper procedure, on National Park Service land. My parents are retired National Park rangers who spent their careers protecting this country’s lands and history for future generations, and he would wipe that out to build a monolith to himself. Private funds or not, the result is the same.

We asked our service members to give everything. The least we owe them is silence. I’m testifying before the National Capital Planning Commission to help stop this arch.

Call your representatives. Talk to your loved ones. If you know a service member, tell them you care about them. Don’t let this pass in silence. Trump is counting on the chaos to drown it out, and we’re here to make sure no one forgets.

The National Capital Planning Commission takes up the arch at its public meeting Thursday, July 9, 2026, at 1:00 PM ET (hybrid, in person and virtual). Meeting info and how to comment:

https://www.ncpc.gov/review/meeting/

https://www.ncpc.gov