James Carville isn’t a man prone to panic, but when he says, “I would not put it at all past [Trump] to try to call martial law or declare that there’s some kind of national emergency,” around next year’s elections it’s time to sit up straight.

Speaking to NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo, Carville warned that as Donald Trump sees a political shellacking coming in the 2026 midterms — particularly in states like New Jersey and Virginia — he may try something extreme to hold onto power. “The hoof prints are coming,” Carville said, and he’s not wrong.

This isn’t hyperbole. This is history — the history of nations that have lost their democracies like Hungary and Russia — threatening to repeat itself.

Donald Trump has already laid the psychological and structural groundwork to undermine or suspend elections; he just may not need to declare martial law if his fixers pull off what’s happening already this year.

Award-winning investigative journalist Greg Palast, a committed non-partisan, has laid it out in painful detail. And what he’s uncovered should terrify every American who believes in democracy.

Palast argues that Trump’s GOP doesn’t have to wait for November 2026 to win. They plan to win it in 2025, through something he calls The Great Purge, authorized by five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court.

That’s right: before you even cast a vote, millions of names may already be scrubbed from voter rolls. If you’re Black, Latino, a student, a woman who changed her name at marriage, a military service member, or simply someone who moved apartments, you’re already a target.

Let’s break it down:

— In the lead-up to the 2024 election, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission reported over 19 million names purged from voter rolls. While many were valid (deceased or moved), at least 4.47 million were blocked from voting due to bureaucratic tricks like “failure to return confirmation notices,” a tactic voting rights lawyers call “caging.”

— In Georgia, Palast’s team working with the ACLU found that 63.3% of voters purged via caging were wrongly removed. Many were African-American.

— Georgia’s GOP Secretary of State proudly doubled down in 2023, targeting 875,000 voters, and that’s just one state.

— Thirty states now use an error-ridden system called ERIC for voter purging. Not accurate enough? Trump’s legal henchwoman, Cleta Mitchell, is pushing for a new program called EagleAI, the modern version of the GOP’s 1960s “Eagle Eye” voter intimidation operation.

If that wasn’t enough, Republicans have introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would force every newly registered or updated voter to present proof of citizenship in person. And if the name on your birth certificate is different from your passport or driver’s license, you can’t register or vote.

According to Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center, over 21 million Americans don’t have those documents readily available. And 69 million women don’t have their married name on their birth certificate. Many Americans don’t know where their passport or birth certificate is, especially those living in poverty, moving frequently, or serving overseas.

And let’s be clear about the excuse for this law: A racist myth. The Heritage Foundation, pushing the SAVE Act, claims millions of undocumented immigrants vote. But even Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who made it his mission to arrest illegal voters, found exactly zero in court. In fact, his law blocked 36,000 legal Kansas voters and was thrown out for being unconstitutional.

And now they’re bragging that they just purged 5 million new names so far this year, according to Judicial Watch.

Still, these tactics persist. Why? Because they work.

In 2000, George W. Bush won Florida by just 537 votes after tens of thousands of Black voters were falsely labeled as felons and purged by George’s brother, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Today’s tactics are far more sophisticated and widespread, and with a Trumpified Supreme Court, far harder to stop.

Under Trump, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division — once the bulwark against voter suppression — has become complicit. Don’t expect any help from the feds if your name goes missing from the rolls.

In fact, Georgia’s Secretary of State has already requested access to DHS’s SAVE database — a tool used to track deported immigrants — to cross-reference voters. When Florida tried this in 2012, they removed 172,000 voters but only found one actual non-citizen: an Austrian Republican. But thousands of Hispanic voters were wrongly barred because they had common names like Jose Garcia.

That’s not election security. That’s systemic suppression.

While official channels do their damage, Trump’s allies are also organizing a private MAGA militia of self-appointed “fraud hunters.” In 2024, these vigilantes challenged over one million ballots. In 2026, Palast reports, they’re gearing up to challenge even more, targeting key swing states like Georgia and Pennsylvania.  (Editor’s note:  Here in Virginia an organization — operating out of a drop box in a Fairfax strip mall — calling themselves “Electoral Process Education Corporation, is already softening up the population with their phony “studies and analysis” of voting in VA.)

And if state officials don’t comply with Trump’s purge lists, Cleta Mitchell promises her army will go door-to-door, one voter at a time.

Remember, all of this happens before a single vote is cast.

And if that doesn’t work? Now that Congress has funded ICE to become the largest (secret, masked) police agency in America with a network of concentration camps across the country, answerable only to Donald Trump, pretty much anything is possible.

Carville may sound alarmist when he talks about martial law, but let’s remember: Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, summoned a mob to the Capitol, and flirted with using the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against protestors, who he had asked his generals to “shoot in the legs.”

He’s mused to his followers, “You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” That’s not subtle. That’s a warning.

And while right-wing pundits like Bill O’Reilly chuckle and offer “18 muffalettas” in mockery, the groundwork for a democratic backslide is already laid, through legal loopholes, voter suppression, intimidation of Republican legislators like we saw yesterday, misinformation, and judicial capture.

Martial law may not arrive with tanks. It may come in the form of a national emergency declaration, a manufactured riot, or the pretense of mass fraud. Trump doesn’t have to cancel the election; he just has to delegitimize it enough to override it.

So what do we do?

As Palast warns: don’t despair. “They can’t steal all the votes all of the time.” But they sure as hell can steal enough.

We need:

— Massive voter education on how to confirm your registration and re-register early.

— Lawsuits and court challenges in every state adopting suppression tactics.

— Federal action, if not from the Justice Department, then from an organized, relentless citizenry.

— Election monitoring from independent and international groups.

— And, when Democrats are again in power (God willing), a law that explicitly says we have a right to vote. It’s insane that government has to get a court order (thanks, Supreme Court) to take away your gun, but doesn’t even have to notify you when they take away your vote.

If Trump succeeds in today’s ongoing massive purge of largely Democratic voters and delegitimizing results, he won’t need martial law. The authoritarian train won’t arrive with a bang; it’ll glide in silently, on rails we failed to see being laid down this year.

So yes, James Carville is right to sound the alarm. And Greg Palast has done the reporting to prove it.

Now it’s up to us to stop it. Pass it along.

Donald Trump’s latest activities have even some in his administration worried about his physical and mental health. Mind you, no one wants to talk about it openly — though there are a few who will spend the holiday break speculating.

A member of Trump’s team bluntly told me, “I’d lose my job if I talked about this publicly. Or worse.”

The causes for concern, according to a couple of members of Trump’s circle, are his recent lackluster public appearances, his gait, his apparent befuddlement, his propensity to govern via Truth Social postings, his sloppy attire and his lack of engagement at the White House with others.

Trump hasn’t shown up in the Oval Office on Mondays in about a month. His recent golf outings have been at a course in Sterling, Va., instead of at Mar-A-Lago or Bedminster, “and that’s because he doesn’t have to be gone from the White House as long,” I was told. “I don’t think he’s in good physical health.”

If Trump is having cognitive difficulties, do not expect the press to be there to report on much of it. On Wednesday, Paramount settled a nuisance lawsuit to the tune of $16 Million on Tuesday night over the editing of a Kamala Harris interview on “60 Minutes.” The suit was both specious and ridiculous. ……………….(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/07/03/trumps-befuddled-behavior-sparks-health-concerns/

Watch this.  It’s 19 minutes of powerful truth.

The most horrible thing in the recent poll results . . .

 . . . for the approval rating of Trump.

 The 1st is that 40% of our fellow Americans approve of what is being done.

• They approve of depriving people of healthcare and leaving them to illness, pain and needless death.
• They approve of profiling people based on ethnicity and grabbing them off the streets.
• They approve of stripping food from the mouths of hungry children and giving that money to Bezos, Zuckerberg, Thiel and other billionaires.
• They approve of the President of the United States taking bribes.
• They approve of the President of the United States extorting businesses, countries, law firms and universities.
• They approve of the people they detain dying in custody.
• They approve of the POTUS using the military to throw a parade for himself for his birthday.
• They approve of doctors and nurses being watched and hunted by police for providing medical care.
• They approve of ending suicide hot-lines that save people’s lives.
• They approve of overt discrimination against LGBTQ+ people.
• They approve of Supreme Court Justices lying to Congress and also hiding their corruption. 

So many more awful and despicable things have been done and yet 40% of those polled approve of these things. That such a large percentage of the population of this country appears proud to be pure scum of the earth is a shocking percentage. Sure we have always known that a percentage of the population was despicable. But this level of support for the horrors going on now isn’t explained by just attributing it to their personal selfishness and them feeling it’s OK because it’s not happening to them.

In this large of a percentage it demonstrates that these people enjoy the misery being inflicted upon people by the actions of Trump.

These are the people who would smile while torturing animals. These are the people who would slam their door shut if an accident victim came to them needing help. These are the people who abuse their children and claim nobody should be able to step in. These are the people who want rapist athletes to get a pass. These are the people that say victims of police violence had it coming. These are the people who also seem to be OK people living in decent neighborhoods and attending churches etc.

So at it’s heart it isn’t explained by just latent racism and hate left over from previous decades and passed down. There is a malevolence inside those nice homes in the suburbs of America, inside some cops and some military veterans. Inside a huge percentage of the people in those categories and those wearing suits and ties and nice clothes is a sickness that has a need to inflict pain and suffering on people and they like knowing that the pain and suffering is going on and it feeds that malevolence inside them.

Decent people in America always knew we had people who were like this. But we mostly thought it was a small percentage. We were wrong and now the ones they chose to do horrible things to the rest of us in order to feed their malevolence are in control. They wanted this. They needed this. They’re feeding on it. They counted on it.

Her finger is on the trigger.  A drill sergeant would have reamed her a new asshole.  YOUR FINGER DOES NOT GO ON THE TRIGGER UNTIL YOU ARE READY TO FIRE.

“All that matters is he has a piece of paper to sign that cuts taxes for him and his wealthy friends and donors…”

The real reason Republicans are rushing to pass the Trump megabill

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/senate-republicans-big-beautiful-bill-vote-rcna215558

And remember, the bill is massively unpopular, and it becomes even less popular the more voters learn about its provisions. Eight years ago, Republicans thought a tax cut bill would save them in the midterms; instead, that bill was so unpopular that they largely stopped talking about it before that campaign was even finished. Surely Republicans want to avoid reprising that disaster, so why not take a beat over the holiday, reassess and see whether there are other bills to give the president a legislative victory?

The answer is: There is no plan B. The megabill is not just the most important legislation of Trump’s first year; at this point, it is the only major legislation of Trump’s first year. If the bill is “big” and “beautiful,” that is by default. Republicans have to pass it because Trump wants them to pass something.

What that something looks like does not matter to the president, who has been consistently incurious as to the bill’s contents. Earlier this month, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said Trump was surprised to learn the Senate bill would limit a tax on health care providers that states use to fund Medicaid — a provision that was a key source of savings. On Thursday, as my colleague Steve Benen noted, the president claimed: “Your Medicaid is left alone. It’s left the same.” In fact, the bill would kick millions off Medicaid. On Friday, he claimed — for the second time in two days — that the bill would eliminate taxes on Social Security. It would not.

But whether this bill would cut taxes on Social Security — or throw millions off their health care or batter rural hospitals — is ultimately immaterial to the president. All that matters is he has a piece of paper to sign that cuts taxes for him and his wealthy friends and donors. Trump has his wish, and in today’s Republican Party, everything else comes second to making his wish come true.

Kristi Noem Secretly Took a Cut of Political Donations

by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski
June 30, 2025, 5 a.m. EDT

In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show.

In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.

Noem then failed to disclose the $80,000 payment to the public. After President Donald Trump selected Noem to be his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, she had to release a detailed accounting of her assets and sources of income from 2023 on. She did not include the income from the dark money group on her disclosure form, which experts called a likely violation of federal ethics requirements.

Experts told ProPublica it was troubling that Noem was personally taking money that came from political donors. In a filing, the group, a nonprofit called American Resolve Policy Fund, described the $80,000 as a payment for fundraising. The organization said Noem had brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

https://www.propublica.org/article/kristi-noem-political-donations-income-dark-money-dhs-ethics

 

Remember when Noem staged a visit to a prison in El Salvador where she posed in front of a cell jammed with prisoners while she was wearing a $60,000 Rolex watch?  Now we know how she could afford the watch.

President Donald Trump was brutally mocked over the weekend after he referred to Japan’s leader as “Mr. Japan.”

The president made the statement during an interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo about tariffs. As his July 9 deadline for tariff deals approached, Trump said he would rather send a letter to countries instead of negotiating.

“But I’d rather just send them a letter, a very fair letter, saying, congratulations, whether it will allow you to trade in the United States of America,” Trump told Bartiromo. “You’re going to pay a 25% tariff, or 20% or 40% or 50%. I would rather do that.”

“We’ll send a letter and we’ll say we would consider it a great honor, and this is what you’ll have to do to shop in the United States,” he opined. “We’re like a department store to shop in the United States, and you’ll pay a 25% tariff, or we wish you a lot of luck, and that’s the end of the trade deal.”

“I could send one to Japan. Dear Mr. Japan, here’s the story. You’re going to pay a 25% tariff on your cars.

‘Brain is peanut butter’: Trump mocked for calling Japanese leader ‘Mr. Japan’ – Raw Story https://share.google/xVJmpN2djtr3kj3VV

COMMENT:

Why is Trump sending letters to something like 40-50 countries, telling them what tariffs the US will impose on them?  I thought he was going to “from Day One” negotiate beautiful tariff deals” because, of course, he is the world’s greatest deal maker — which is why he declared bankruptcy seven times and went broke running a casino.