John Cornyn is holding up Todd Blanche’s attorney general confirmation vote until Blanche puts something in writing: killing the proposed $1.8 billion IRS slush fund and narrowing the audit protections shielding Trump’s family, exactly as Blanche testified under oath he would. So far, DOJ has been “reluctant” to sign anything. We break down why a promise nobody wants on paper is usually the promise that matters most, as we prepare to launch the Trump-Epstein Bookmobile in Washington tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Sen. Mitch McConnell is 45 days into a mysterious absence, missing Kentucky’s Fancy Farm Picnic for the first time in over 40 years, and his empty Senate Rules Committee chair is now gumming up Trump’s SAVE Act. Gov. Andy Beshear had enough this week, sending McConnell a letter that basically says: prove you can still do the job—or step aside. We bring in Charles Booker, the Democrat running to replace McConnell, to talk about what happens next if Kentucky’s seat actually opens up.

And then we lace up with Robert Arnold, who’s trekking 1,000 miles to Memphis for voting rights by partnering with local organizers instead of parachuting in with all the answers. He’s chasing 100,000 new voter registrations, and after getting mocked by Karoline Leavitt at a recent press event for apparently looking like an ICE agent, he’s earned the right to laugh about it with us.

Closing it out, retired NASA astronaut Cady Coleman looked down at Earth from space, decided she’d seen enough of what Trump was doing to it, and came home to found Astronauts for America, with more than 100 of her fellow former astronauts. Their mission now: touring 60 college campuses to get first-time voters engaged before the midterms. Young people might not listen to cable news, but maybe they’ll listen to someone who’s actually been to space!

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Donald Trump has spent a year trying to make the Epstein Files disappear into redactions, sealed chambers, and the swampy fog he’s brought back to Washington, D.C. Well, tomorrow morning on Capitol Hill, we’re going to cut through that corruption on four wheels.

We’re preparing to unveil The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Bookmobile. It’s a truck built to carry all 3.5 million pages of the Epstein Files — digitally and physically — from city to city across America, so that anyone who wants to see the record for themselves can walk right up and do exactly that. The president keeps trying to distract the public and bury the truth by making files disappear off the internet. But it’s considerably harder to bury a truck.

The bookmobile makes its debut bright and early at 8am ET tomorrow at a press conference near the United States Capitol. You can watch LIVE on our social media channels (Substack, YouTube, or at TrumpEpsteinBookmobile.com). Nearly a dozen Epstein Survivors and Members of Congress will speak about the importance of keeping the pursuit of justice alive, exposing corruption, and holding the Epstein-Trump enablers accountable.

This week, Trump is trying to get his “yes man,” Todd Blanche, approved by the Senate as America’s top lawyer. That’s why we’re rolling the truck out when we are, where we are. The press conference will be the “closing argument” against Blanche just outside the chamber where a handful of Republican holdouts are deciding whether or not to find their backbone. But we want to make clear that — no matter how the Senate votes — we are going to demand answers loudly, from now until the midterms and beyond.

By the way, THANK YOU to everyone who has helped get this truck on the road. If you can, please help us HERE to make sure the Bookmobile is free for everyone who visits, to get it to more cities, to enable us spread our anti-corruption message far and wide. We think this will be one of the most high-impact actions we’ve undertaken. Also, you can order materials to get the word out HERE — totes, shirts, stickers — with all proceeds going to the fight.

You’re about to see bravery on display tomorrow. Survivors including Liz Stein, Sharlene Rochard, Jena-Lisa Jones, Marina Lacerda, Andrea Sterling, Marijke Chartouni, Dani Bensky, Alva Johnson, and Sky and Amanda Roberts — brother and sister-in-law of Virginia Giuffre — will all be on hand to speak. They’ve spent years demanding that the files see daylight, while powerful men in both parties hoped they’d get tired and go home. These folks didn’t get tired. Tomorrow they’ll stand in front of a vehicle built to guarantee the daylight they were promised.

Here’s how you can bear witness. You can find the links to join the livestream of the press conference above (tomorrow morning at 8am ET), and you can join us later in the day at 5pm ET for a recap during DEFIANCE Daily, our weekday podcast. After that, we’re literally taking accountability on the road.

Sign up at TrumpEpsteinBookmobile.com to see where the truck is headed next, vote for your city, and share with friends to make sure the story DOES NOT go away like Trump wants. No matter who you are or where you live, you deserve to know exactly what our government knows about the president and his long relationship with a notorious international sex trafficker.

To be clear, Trump is not winning the effort to make this all go away. Judge Emmet Sullivan has ordered the DOJ to hand over a batch of contested, redacted Epstein files by Thursday so he can review them privately before deciding whether they go public. Journalist Katie Phang sued to force their release under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and she’s now asking the court to fine Blanche $1,000 for every day the documents stay hidden. (Katie will join us tomorrow night on our 5pm ET show to talk about her fight — another reason to tune in.)

What’s in the batch Judge Sullivan will see? Emails discussing the exploitation of very young women and girls, with the identities of Epstein’s correspondents redacted… FBI notes on an accuser’s allegation that Donald Trump himself assaulted her in the 1980s, which Trump denies… and a 2007 draft indictment listing Epstein’s co-conspirators, where only Ghislaine Maxwell’s name survived the redaction pen. Interesting that there’s an entire page of names and the Trump DOJ only wants you to see one of them.

Again, no matter what happens with the vote for Todd Blanche for attorney general, we won’t let him off the hook. He met with survivors only after Sen. Thom Tillis shamed him into the room. One survivor described that meeting as an hour of “deflection, interruption, and gaslighting.” Another says Blanche told them, “I’m just the attorney general” — as if the man running the Justice Department were a bystander to the Justice Department. I spent years around powerful officials dodging accountability, and I’ll say this for Blanche: I’ve rarely seen a man work so hard to convince people he’s powerless… yet so clearly obsessed with gratifying the desires of the most powerful man in the world.

The stonewalling has become so brazen that Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna introduced a second bill this month (the Epstein Files Transparency Act II) specifically to give survivors, members of Congress, and state attorneys general the legal standing to sue the DOJ directly when it flouts the first law. That’s quite extraordinary. Congress passed a transparency law, and the Justice Department’s compliance has been so contemptuous that Congress is now legislating the right to sue its own Justice Department for ignoring it.

Trump and his compromised DOJ nominee would love for this to be a story about redactions and legal technicalities. The survivors have other plans. They lived this story, they carry its consequences still, and they are choosing — once again — to take charge of the narrative. So we’re standing beside them with the actual documents, in a truck, parked in public, the day before that vote… and then driving it coast to coast so that Trump cannot shut them up.

See you tomorrow. Tell a friend. And thank you for helping us fight corruption head on.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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New reporting confirms the Pentagon didn’t just glitch its casualty count from 18 to 14 last week; it quietly invented a second, separate “war” to reset Trump’s legal clock on congressional authorization. Same conflict, new folder.

Meanwhile in Venezuela, Trump’s been bragging about a 97 percent drop in drug trafficking. But behind closed doors, officials have told Congress that, after 67 strikes and 221 people killed, the cocaine supply hasn’t budged; the cartels just bought bigger boats.

Back home, Michigan is now the epicenter of the country’s largest cyclospora outbreak, with more than 8,100 cases and no end in sight. Trump’s own former FDA food safety chief says the federal response is “approaching catastrophic.” So gutting public health funding makes it harder to trace a foodborne illness—who knew?

And then there’s the manosphere problem nobody in Trump World wants to talk about. Andrew Tate, one of the online figures who helped deliver young men to Trump in 2024, is sitting in federal custody fighting extradition on trafficking and rape charges. Suddenly the White House wants nothing to do with him, despite reportedly intervening on his behalf before. Now there are questions about what Barron Trump knew. We talk with Ross Morales Rocketto—who’s building an alternative vision of masculinity for the same young men Tate spent years courting—about what happens when the movement’s biggest star becomes radioactive.

And finally, we welcome Houston into our DEFIANCE, after residents there reminded everyone what actual solidarity looks like. Over 50 businesses shut down this weekend to demand justice for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was killed by ICE agents in his own neighborhood. Well done, Houstonians.

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I watched Donald Trump talk about nuclear weapons like they were presidential toys. He may be closer to playing with them than you think.

Last week, the president told Axios he was “close” to ordering a “massive attack” on Iran and that Israel “would join in two minutes,” if he asked. The threat had the same ominous feel of his April comments that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” It was an insinuation that he possessed super powers — and might break the world’s nuclear taboo to end the stalemate. As it turns out, the United States actually paused bombing on Friday night in Iran, after Trump’s top military adviser warned that Patriot interceptor stockpiles were reportedly falling to dangerous levels.

But a “pause” is not the same thing as restraint. In the Axios interview, Trump explained why the war is still going at all: “They haven’t received enough pain yet.” Not enough pain. I’ve heard rhetoric like that from him before. And it wasn’t about Iran.

Back in 2017, Trump judged that the only way to bring North Korea to heel was to make it suffer. He tweeted furiously at “Rocketman” Kim Jong-un and promised “fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before” if the hermit kingdom didn’t meet his demands. That was Trump’s first wink-nod to the fact that he possessed an arsenal of nuclear bombs and was ready to use them. Kim answered by threatening to fire missiles at Guam and testing a nuclear-capable missile that could strike the U.S. mainland.

The situation escalated so rapidly that Defense Secretary James Mattis pulled me and other DHS officials aside after a Situation Room meeting and told us flatly to prepare like we were going to war. A nuclear war. So we did. For the first time in the Department of Homeland Security’s history, we ran exercises for a potential real-life nuclear strike on American soil, because frankly, we couldn’t rule out that our own president might take us into such an apocalyptic situation.

Years later, I put it to CNN as plainly as I could:

I will tell you very honestly, Trump in the first term, at least when I was there, fantasized quite openly to advisers about wanting to blow up bombs. It wasn’t more complicated than that, he didn’t have this 3D chess strategy, he wanted to see bombs blown up. That was alarming to people.

Trump wanted to see something blow up, and the rest of us built contingency plans around that desire. Thankfully, he didn’t launch nukes at North Korea. But General Mattis also isn’t at the Pentagon anymore. “Pistol Pete” Hegseth is.

Trump’s nuclear fantasies go way back. When he was a candidate in 2016, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said a foreign policy adviser had come away from a briefing with Trump rattled, because Trump asked, three separate times, some version of the question: “If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?” Candidate Trump also told The New York Times he wasn’t sure it “would be a bad thing for us” if Japan built its own nuclear deterrent against North Korea, and he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Saudi Arabia should have nukes, too, “absolutely.”

Since then, Trump has toyed with nuclear weapons more openly and more recklessly than any American president ever entrusted with the stewardship of the bomb. The closest runner-up is Richard Nixon, who in 1974 — besieged by Watergate and reportedly drinking heavily — told a group of lawmakers, “I can go into my office and pick up the telephone, and in 25 minutes 70 million people will be dead.” That remark so rattled Washington that a senator phoned the Pentagon about restraining a “berserk president,” and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger quietly instructed military commanders to double-check any launch order from the White House.

Nixon’s flirtation with armageddon lasted a few dark months at the end of a collapsing presidency. Trump’s has run for a decade, across two terms, in public, with a smile. And he’s not finished yet.

Which brings us back to last week. The administration signed a nuclear energy deal with Saudi Arabia, effectively leaving the door open to letting Riyadh build a nuke someday, or at least the core ingredients for a bomb. As if that’s not troubling enough, the deal omits standard safeguards that give international inspectors expanded access to nuclear sites. What’s more, the actual signed agreement doesn’t include a no-enrichment promise, as Trump claimed on social media, nor the Abraham Accords condition he tried to retroactively attach.

Nonproliferation veterans are alarmed, to say the least. A former official at the International Atomic Energy Agency said, “The U.S. should never have agreed to enrichment without a really strong inspections regime.” Another Gulf expert called Saudi Arabia’s resistance to inspections “the most glaring problem of the agreement,” since it’s exactly the kind of gap a covert weapons program would exploit.

And remember, it was just a few months ago that Trump ordered a resumption of American nuclear weapons testing, potentially in violation of the treaty banning it, prompting Russia to announce it would follow suit. Between Trump’s unchecked brinksmanship, possible nuclear proliferation to new countries, and broken treaties, you have a radioactive cocktail being stirred on the international stage. Add in the unresolved war with Iran, and you get the picture of a president who’s just one mood swing away from putting his finger on the proverbial red button.

The experts who track this for a living agree we’re not overreacting. In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight — the closest it has ever been in the Clock’s 79-year history — because, in their words, the risk of nuclear use is now “unsustainably and unacceptably high.”

So why does he keep doing this? Why does the president of the United States keep circling back to the most dangerous machinery humans have ever built? I can’t tell you his answer for sure. But based on close study of the man, I can give you my best guess. Donald Trump has spent his entire presidency on a power quest, always hunting for the next most powerful thing he can do. And nuclear weapons are at the top of that list.

I saw the quest begin. When Trump came into office the first time, he queried aides about the outer limits of his authority. In a series of conversations, he was introduced to the Insurrection Act, the closest thing to martial law in the U.S. system. He was delighted. He took to calling these his “magical authorities.” Literally.

But even those magical authorities come with checks and balances, and Trump chafed at every one of them. So he made his next discovery: if he simply defied the checks, he could be more powerful still. In sheer magnitude, his second administration has broken more laws and violated the Constitution with more apparent frequency than almost any other occupant of the Oval Office. (On immigration alone, federal judges have found that Trump’s team illegally detained individuals on nearly 16,000 separate occasions, and they keep going, seemingly undeterred by the rulings piling up against them.)

Trump isn’t shy about where the quest has taken him. He told Axios the Iran war taught him there are “no limits” to his power. Last month, he reposted a document on Truth Social declaring him the most powerful man who has ever lived, ranking himself above Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and William the Conqueror. The document was attributed to “Presidential Historian Dave King.” Reporters checked. Dave King is not a historian. He’s a longtime caddy for the golfer Gary Player.

To say that he’s “toying” with extreme powers is probably the wrong phraseology. He’s addicted to power. Very much like it’s an intoxicant. When his own chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told The Atlantic that her boss had an “alcoholic’s personality,” it wasn’t a mere slip of the tongue. That’s how everyone who’s served the man has come to see him (if they’re being honest with themselves). He has an uncontrollable, pathological, junkie-like urge to power.

For a man chasing ever-bigger thrills, domestic law-breaking will eventually stop delivering the high. Already, Trump has found a more potent drug in foreign policy. Venezuela. Greenland. Boat strikes. Iran. In his second term, statecraft has become the outlet for these cravings, with the result that the recipient of the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize turns out to have quite the predilection for war. Who could’ve guessed?

But if deploying troops to seize foreign leaders and raining missiles on other nations isn’t cutting it anymore, I worry about where the quest leads next. I’ve written before about how close Trump got to using the bomb the first time. Let’s not forget what Trump reportedly absconded with after he left the presidency: U.S. nuclear secrets. Back in office, the fixation has returned with his thinly veiled allusions to the use of civilization-wrecking military force.

Donald Trump is searching for the thrill again. He plainly wants to do something with the bomb, even if it’s just to light one off in a mountain as a test. Our only solace is that — if past is prologue — he’ll be stymied by his own distractions and never get around to it. The man may want to detonate something very big. But it’s more likely to be his own presidency than a nuclear weapon. On that score, I’m happy to help him.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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Stay tuned tomorrow for more information about the Trump-Epstein Bookmobile, rolling into our nation’s capital on WEDNESDAY, July 29! Press conference at 8am ET that day.

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A rally kid stole Trump’s thunder with what might be the greatest impromptu impression of him ever caught on camera. Jack Reacher himself, Alan Ritchson, declined to be his conservative fanbase’s hero. John Thune told the White House to get its own SAVE Act votes if it’s so easy. Mike Lindell, voter fraud’s loudest crusader, apparently couldn’t produce his own Minnesota registration until one mysteriously appeared mid-week. And Citizens Bank finally dropped its financing of GEO Group and CoreCivic after enough pressure campaigns piled up.

But it’s not all comedy. The Pentagon’s Iran casualty count quietly dropped from 18 to 14 overnight, with officials calling it a “data anomaly.” Uh huh, sure. Behind that missing number are real people like Sgt. Michael Swinton, whose widow says he just wanted to come home. Trump used his death to justify the war, and the Gold Star families are appalled—as are we. Meanwhile, Democratic officials are running drills for a stolen midterm, and Alaska just purged 3,000 voters over bad DMV data.

All of it lands at the Solemate Awards, where Sean Duffy defends his crown for gunning to rename Penn Station after his boss, Cynthia Lummis debuts with a crypto bill dressed up as an ethics defense, and Marco Rubio dodges a war crimes question hard enough to earn a permanent nomination. Find out who takes home the crown and licked Trump’s boot the cleanest in tonight’s episode.

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The president of the United States went after journalists for the apparent “crime” of reporting stories that embarrass him. This week, a federal judge thwarted Donald Trump’s plans.

When FBI agents showed up outside the homes of New York Times reporters on a Friday night two weeks ago, the journalists were surprised and alarmed, as several later recounted. In a country with a free press, federal agents don’t just appear at your door, especially not when your job is to cover the White House. And they don’t do it armed with subpoenas and demanding to know the identities of those journalists’ sources.

Donald Trump on the other hand was not surprised. The scene was one he’d spent many years rehearsing. To understand how he’d set the stage, you have to travel back in time a bit.

I won’t forget the president’s reaction in 2018, after I published an anonymous opinion piece in the pages of the Times, warning the public about what was happening behind the scenes. He was incensed that anyone would defy him from within his own administration and say publicly what his own team had been saying privately — that he was erratic, impulsive, and attracted to abuses of power. He wanted to force the news outlet to unmask the seditious criminal.

“TREASON?” Trump tweeted. To the president, internal criticism was subversive and, perhaps, punishable by death. He continued:

“Does the so-called ‘Senior Administration Official’ really exist, or is it just the Failing New York Times with another phony source? If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!”

Trump tried to spin up an internal investigation, including via the White House chief of staff’s office and the Justice Department. But his own appointees balked. Like anyone else, the lawyers could see plainly that such critiques of the president were First Amendment protected speech. No matter how embarrassing the op-ed was, they knew that criticism of a president is not “classified,” nor is it a crime.

The president fumed. He spent years in anger at DOJ for not taking up the case, not exposing Anonymous, and not punishing the Times for daring to publish the writer’s words. And somehow he continued to miss the irony. Anonymous had accused him of abusing his power. Now he was attempting to hunt down a critic by… abusing his power.

“This is a disgrace to our country,” he bemoaned at a campaign rally in 2020 after I unmasked myself. “It shouldn’t happen. And he should be prosecuted. Are you listening to me back in Washington? He should be prosecuted!”

Unfortunately, they were not listening back in Washington. And Trump never forgot it.

When he returned to the White House four years later, the president took care of unfinished business. Trump personally made it a “first 100 days” priority to fix what his disloyal first-term lieutenants had refused to fix. He sat down in the Oval Office in April 2025, in front of television cameras, and signed an order directing his administration to investigate me for “treason.” If federal agencies wouldn’t open up such a case on their own, he would open the case himself — something no president had done in American history.

But there was something almost as notable. This time, Trump’s DOJ was listening. His underlings complied, evidently indifferent to the fact that former federal judges and elected leaders had pointed out that the directive was “profoundly unconstitutional.” No matter. Within days, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a companion directive rolling back the Department’s ban on subpoenas for reporters, citing the investigation the president had ordered into me as DOJ’s justification.

The logic appeared to be: If we can’t catch these leaking traitors on our own, we’ll force reporters to tell us who they are. Perhaps more than that, Bondi’s order set the stage to fulfill one of Trump’s longest-held fantasies: to go after the real “enemy of the people” — not the Miles Taylors of the world — but the American free press. After all, they were the ones who printed what the president did not want printed.

Fifteen months later, the president got his way.

After The New York Times published a story about Trump’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One, he summoned his FBI director to the White House. There, the nation’s top law enforcement official holed up outside the chief of staff’s office and ran an ad hoc investigation into the embarrassing news story, which validated the long-held worry of national security experts that Trump’s luxury jet had security vulnerabilities — and that he never should have accepted such a gift from a foreign government.

Trump administration prosecutors then used their newfound powers to subpoena four New York Times reporters (and their families) over the story. U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to run the entire U.S. intelligence community, signed off. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche personally approved the subpoenas, too, as he confirmed under oath at his own confirmation hearing last week.

I suspect the president slept well that Friday night. He’d spent nearly a decade trying to get the federal government to see the powers of the presidency the way he saw them. The Deep State had run amok, refusing to break laws on his behalf. The press was in cahoots, constantly reporting on the defiance to his lawless directives. And he must be allowed to wield his power to punish them all for their insolence. Finally, Trump had a team that seemed to see it the same way.

Yesterday, it blew up in his face.

U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian grilled federal prosecutors in Manhattan this Thursday in a case that will be cited for many years. He raised what he called “profound First Amendment” concerns with the administration’s actions. He openly questioned whether the government had even tried alternative avenues before hauling in the press to shake them down for their sources. He threatened sanctions over what may have been false statements in the government’s own subpoena application. And, in one of the courtroom moments of the year, he called out the FBI for serving one journalist while the man was at home watching a movie called “The Sheep Detectives” — about sheep seeking to solve the murder of their shepherd — noting that the DOJ had managed to fall short of the moral standard set by a children’s movie.

“I can’t think of anything more inconsistent with ‘Sheep Detective’ than an FBI agent showing up at your door,” the judge deadpanned. He made DOJ’s lawyers assure him it wouldn’t happen again.

The Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas altogether.

I want to be clear about why Trump’s DOJ lost this case. It wasn’t just because a judge intervened to stop something very bad from happening. It was because the Times refused to roll over. Its lawyers filed a motion to quash the subpoenas instead of quietly producing the records, which they could’ve done, capitulating as other news organizations have to Trump’s intimidation. When pressured, some news outlets have changed their reporting; others have written checks to the president to settle frivolous lawsuits.

Yet the Times had no interest in “making a deal.” They wanted to make the Trump administration look at the Constitution and respect it. And for taking on that fight, they’ve performed a service for YOU that you may not have realized they were performing. The paper made it harder for the government to censor what you read; they made it harder for the president to keep a lid on stories that might embarrass him; and they made it just a little bit harder for any administration to silence dissent. A precedent has been set.

Of course, this isn’t the end of the story. The White House and DOJ are composing themselves and will surely plot their next affront to the First Amendment. Other outlets will be tested in the years to come — and sooner.

Tonight, the test moves to a ballroom in D.C. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, postponed since April’s shooting, is finally happening, and hundreds of veteran journalists along with eight press freedom organizations are publicly demanding the White House Correspondents’ Association use the occasion to “forcefully stand up” for press freedom with Trump sitting in the room. Of all nights, this is not one to make nice with the president. They cannot pretend a year of subpoenas, the arrests of reporters, threats to broadcast licenses, and leak investigations never happened.

We’ll see whether the room finds its spine. If they decide to search, the New York Times and an honorable federal judge just showed them where to look.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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Donald Trump threatened to bomb Iranian bridges and power plants, one for one, every time Iran fires on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran promised to return the favor against American infrastructure. And when Marco Rubio was asked point-blank whether targeting Iranian civilians would be …

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By threatening to take over the midterms, surveys show the White House has created unprecedented energy among Democrats and Independents. They’ve also sent a message to MAGA voters: “You can skip the polls.”

This week, House Republicans did something they’ve now tried three separate times. They crammed the SAVE America Act into a “must-pass” bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, and forced it through on a 216-214 vote, hoping that by tying it to funding for U.S. troops they might have a shot of getting it through the Senate.

The move reeked of desperation… desperation foisted upon the GOP by Donald Trump, who is clearly panicking that he’ll lose the midterms if he doesn’t rig them successfully. And that desperation is leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. New data suggests that the harder Trump tries to manipulate the midterms in his favor, the more he’s doing to ensure his side is defeated.

To be fair, his panic is justified. The latest polling is abysmal for the White House. The president’s approval rating has cratered, with a recent poll finding a meager 30 percent of Americans approve of the job he’s doing. Politically, that’s catastrophic territory, and it’s only possible when millions of your own supporters have turned against you. Trump’s numbers on the economy — once his strongest card — just hit the worst marks of either of his terms. So the writing is on the wall. Even Fox News (hardly a hostile outlet!) published a midterm forecast last week conceding that the GOP’s gerrymandering blitz is the only thing keeping the House majority within the Republican’s reach at all.

But Trump’s unpopularity is only part of the story. The real headline is that the president is sabotaging his own side’s turnout in the very act of seeking to meddle in the election. It’s like a burglary that’s backfiring in real time. Trump is trying mightily to break into democracy’s back door but making such a racket with his crowbar that he’s woken up the whole neighborhood. And now, the neighbors are shouting over the fences and grabbing their baseball bats. Democrats and Independents are more motivated than they’ve been in decades to defend their rights.

Indeed, Democratic enthusiasm is higher than it was even in the 2018 “blue wave” election, when they turned out in historic numbers and crushed Trump’s side with a gain of 40 seats in the U.S. House. Today, a whopping three-fourths of Democrats say it’s “more important” to vote in 2026 than in previous midterms. That’s energy, if I’ve ever seen it.

And it gets worse for the president. Every lever he pulls to “tilt” the playing field risks convincing his own voters they don’t need to show up at all. Remember when he told MAGA faithful that if they re-elected him, they wouldn’t need to go to the polls again? “We’ll have it fixed so good,” he boasted, “you’re not gonna have to vote.” It seems like they took it to heart.

Data shows Republicans aren’t nearly as animated about the midterms as Democrats. In fact, the same Post-Ipsos survey from this month finds that GOP voters are ten percentage points less likely to say they’ll vote in the elections in November. That means if the vote were held today, millions more Republicans than Democrats would be staying home — the type of enthusiasm gap that could decisively sway the outcome.

For this, the president has only himself to blame. He’s sent the loudest possible signal to the MAGA base that he’s taking actions that will guarantee them victory for years to come, without any of them having to lift a finger, let alone getting off their couches to go cast a ballot. In his July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore, Trump even bragged that if he succeeds in enacting his voter suppression schemes, like the SAVE America Act, Republicans “will not lose an election for a hundred years.”

(By the way, if you’ve ever played a sport, it’s not exactly the best strategy to tell your team they can relax on the bench because they’re guaranteed to win.)

What a signal he’s sent. In just eighteen months, Trump has pushed to require citizenship papers — a passport or birth certificate — simply to register to vote, cheered as states passed their own versions of restrictive laws, and pressed Texas to redraw its congressional map mid-decade to conjure five new Republican seats out of thin air, kicking off a nationwide gerrymandering arms race. His allies have openly promised that ICE will “surround the polls” in November. His administration has demanded voter rolls from the states (carting off roughly 200 boxes of 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, along the way) and tried to rewrite mail-ballot rules by presidential decree. And much more.

Again, each of these election-rigging maneuvers tells the MAGA base: relax, the fix is in! Unfortunately for the Republican Party, the data shows its voters are getting the message. They’re becoming more indifferent. Meanwhile, each attempt to manipulate the outcome sets off another alarm bell for Democrats across every neighborhood where Trump jingles door knobs and swings his crowbar.

The president wanted to mount the biggest midterm election operation in modern history. Well, congratulations, Mr. President. You did it. Your “get out the vote” operation is massive. The only catch is that it’s inspiring the opposition, not your own team.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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The beating heart of DEFIANCE.org is our Weekly Mission Briefing. Every Wednesday at 5p ET on DEFIANCE Daily, we take real action to counter Donald Trump’s corruption.

If you’re in the club with us, you’re already in the top one percent of civically engaged Americans. That comes with a re…

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In Donald Trump’s second term, something extraordinary is happening. Without an amendment to the Constitution, he has invented something new. I call it the “super pardon.”

A Bloomberg report out this week dives into Trump’s latest corrupt feat, revealing how he’s become the first president in modern times to issue pardons for companies. If you’re baffled, you should be, but it’s even more alarming than you think because Trump’s not simply forgiving corporate crimes. He’s giving companies what amounts to a hall-pass to carry out misconduct in the future. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Let’s start with the plain fact that he’s doling out pardons for corporate malfeasance.

The freshest example landed just days ago. Ryan LaLone, a Michigan diesel shop owner convicted of tampering with emissions systems, received a presidential pardon and so did his actual business, Diesel Freak LLC. With the stroke of the pen, Trump erased a $750,000 penalty that LaLone and his company were facing, after the man became a cause célèbre in MAGA world for being a purported victim of Biden-era overreach (LaLone was charged with deleting controls on vehicles that were meant to stem emissions). Now both the man and the LLC have been absolved.

It’s important to take a beat to understand how radical this is. For the 239 years since the Constitution was ratified, the pardon has typically been understood as an act of mercy for individuals. Presidents grant clemency to people who committed crimes but are seen as deserving a reprieve, whether because their sentences were unusually harsh or their convictions were unjust. The founders saw the power as a safety valve to temper the severity of the law and, on occasion, restore domestic tranquility. They didn’t envision it as a magic wand to be waved over entire corporations, i.e. legal fictions that cannot sit in a jail cell, cannot be executed, and cannot, in any meaningful sense, be shown “mercy.”

The precedent-shattering case came last year with a company called BitMEX, the crypto trading platform that pleaded guilty to flouting anti-money-laundering laws. When Trump took office, he axed the Biden-era crackdown on unregistered crypto exchanges, and BitMEX found itself with friends in the highest of places. The company wasted no time in currying favor, launching a swap listing tied to the $TRUMP memecoin (a business venture that personally earned the president $636 million last year), while cofounder Arthur Hayes penned a fawning essay celebrating Trump’s embrace of meme coins. Weeks later, on March 27, 2025, Trump signed pardons for Arthur Hayes and three other former executives of the BitMEX crypto exchange. Then, in a first, he pardoned the company itself the very same week its $100 million fine came due.

Since then, Trump has extended clemency to nine companies and counting. As Bloomberg reports, the president has been wielding the pardon power in ways akin to a king granting favors to feudal landowners. His fortunate subjects span industries, from an auto supplier to a media startup to a crypto platform. In the process, almost $200 million in financial penalties (some of it intended for victims of wrongdoing) has been wiped out.

He’s not the first president to have flirted with the idea, to be clear. Jimmy Carter confronted the question in 1977, when a mob-connected company sought a pardon. In the end, he declined. Every president before and after him left the line pretty much uncrossed, though many famous corporate executives themselves have received presidential mercy. But Trump has discovered that forgiving companies themselves is, apparently, a marvelous way to ingratiate himself with them.

True to form, he’s operationalizing the practice. The corporate pardon now works like a well-oiled machine, less than two years into the second Trump administration. And the opportunities for corruption are seemingly limitless.

Frank Bowman, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Law, put it this way:

“In any previous era no president would touch this with a barge pole. Maybe individual cases with some compelling reason, but the systemic elimination of criminal liability of major financial crime would never have happened before, and it didn’t.”

Yet the literal presidential pardons are only the visible tip of the scheme. Trump is cobbling together other executive powers to forgive companies and to give them wider latitude with which they can conceivably carry out misconduct in the future. That’s why I call Trump’s newfound powers the “super pardon.”

The full arsenal Trump can use for corporate forgiveness is staggering. He’s realized he can regulate an industry or de-regulate it… he can award federal contracts or yank them away… he can open investigations or quietly close them. Wielded separately, each of these is a routine exercise of executive power. But wielded collectively and transactionally, they amount to something new: again, what I call the “super pardon.” Trump has hacked together a way to make criminal liability, regulatory burdens, and competitive disadvantages all disappear for companies that he favors.

As a consequence, he now holds more raw power over American industry than any recent occupant of the Oval Office and arguably any in history. Not because of any new authorities but because of a novel and corrupt combination of them. Together, those powers open the door to unprecedented pay-to-play schemes.

We’re already seeing it happen. A Public Citizen report found that in the administration’s first year alone, the Justice Department canceled or halted 159 enforcement actions against 166 corporations. At least 18 corporations accused of lawbreaking avoided paying $3.1 billion in penalties for misconduct. Who’s off the hook? Bank of America, Binance, Capital One, Charles River Laboratories International, GE Healthcare, Globe Life, Paypal, Peloton, Pfizer, Polymarket, and Toyota, to name a few. Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has dismissed dozens of public enforcement cases. Enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act has been largely halted. Inspectors General across the government were fired in the administration’s opening days. And over at the FBI, the elite public corruption squad was dismantled, and under Director Kash Patel, federal law enforcement has pivoted away from white-collar and corporate crime altogether. (The administration has even paused criminal enforcement of the law that prohibits U.S. companies from paying bribes to foreign officials! Yes, bribes!)

If you harbor any doubt about whether this administration is granting broad reprieves for reasons that are “above board” or on the “merits,” here’s your warning sign. A cottage industry has already sprung up to profit from it. Lobbyists, lawyers, and self-styled clemency advocates are lining up to bring pardon cases to the president, because they know there’s money to be made at the front of that line. A group of former Trump campaign and administration officials even started their own federal lobbying practice to focus on the pardon business, where millions are being made by bringing the cases to the president’s attention.

And now they know that they can press for more than just a pardon on a piece of paper for a specific crime. While they’re at it, they should also try to bundle in regulatory help, enforcement relief, and maybe even seek a federal contract or two. If they donate to Trump’s ballroom or super PAC, perhaps they’ll get the full super-pardon package.

Let’s dispense with any notion that these acts reflect presidential “generosity.” In Trump’s orbit, I can attest personally, there is no such thing. After all, this is the man whose New York charity was shut down by court order, ordered to pay $2 million in fines for misusing his own foundation’s funds for personal benefit, and who was barred from running charities in the state because even his philanthropy was judged a sham. Everything with Trump is transactional, which means every one of these super pardons raises the same question: What did Trump get, or what will he get, in exchange?

The only solace I have about the president granting what amounts to “super pardons” is that he’s given us a gift. When power changes hands, he’s telling us exactly what to investigate. And he’s left much of it in the public records. Cheers, Mr. President.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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Start with Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran, the Mexican tourist killed running from ICE agents in St. Augustine. The right rushed to call him “illegal.” He wasn’t. He was in the country legally, two days into a vacation, with a return flight already booked. And accordi…

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Donald Trump may not want the rest of the Epstein Files released. But we’re revealing something next week in Washington, D.C. that he cannot redact (and won’t be able to look away from).

The Epstein Files continue to haunt the president, for good reason. The scandal became a flashpoint again last week in the confirmation hearings for Trump’s personal lawyer, who’s seeking to become attorney general (and who had to be pressured by a sitting Republican senator to meet with the Epstein survivors). Vice President JD Vance was forced to answer for the botched rollout of the files on Joe Rogan’s podcast, conceding in the understatement of the decade that it was “mishandled.” And the subject has continued to loom over a widening war in the Middle East that many observers speculated at the outset was a convenient diversion from the controversy.

Try as he might, the president cannot get away from this self-imposed scandal. And we’re about to make it even harder for him.

But first let me say this. In my view, the monstrous cover-up of Donald Trump’s relationship with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein symbolizes almost every facet of the president’s defects. In one single episode, it has showcased the breadth of his seemingly limitless deceit… his gross mistreatment of women… his willingness to abuse power… and how he’s hijacked the federal government and the Republican Party into vehicles for his personal self interest.

So unlike Todd Blanche, we’re not just ticking a box and moving on. We’re making sure the Epstein files stay front and center until Epstein’s victims finally see some accountability for what they endured. Back in May, we teased that we were going to launch a reminder to travel the country ahead of the midterms to make sure the coverup is not, well, covered up.

Thanks to your support, the Trump-Epstein Bookmobile will be rolling into Washington, D.C., one week from today.

The Institute for Primary Facts (IPF) and DEFIANCE.org will unveil a retrofitted truck to take the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room on the road. The mobile installation — a touring “bookmobile” version of the NYC pop-up museum that drew national media coverage earlier this summer — will travel to cities, landmarks, and communities across the country, putting the physical weight of the DOJ’s Epstein Files in front of Americans who couldn’t fly to New York to see them.

As our friend and co-organizer of the effort, David Garret, put it:

“The reading room in [NYC] proved something important: when you put 17,000 pounds of evidence in front of people, they can’t look away. Now we’re putting it on wheels. We’re going to drive this to every city we can afford to reach. The DOJ stopped investigating. The public hasn’t.”

The Bookmobile will be a conspicuous physical reminder that justice remains unserved, because Epstein’s most powerful former friend sits in the White House. On July 28, we’ll unveil it in Trump’s backyard, steps from where senators are deciding whether to hand the nation’s top law enforcement job to a man who has torched his career to protect the president’s personal agenda rather than the nation’s. Survivors of Epstein’s trafficking network and Members of Congress will speak. And 3.5 million printed and digital pages of documents will be crammed into the truck, prepared to be hauled across the country for Americans to see, in open public view.

We are going to make sure the truth keeps surfacing, whether the administration wants it to or not. We know the message is resonating. Indeed, it’s one of the reasons Trump’s MAGA coalition has begun to fall apart. They felt lied to. And they were.

Just this week, Roza Gilles, a woman who was abused by Epstein, spoke publicly about her experience for the first time. She described being assaulted while working as a secretary for his Florida Science Foundation and watching a sheriff’s deputy have a cordial chat with Epstein at his home and leave without an arrest. In that moment, she understood that no matter what she did, she would never see justice. This administration is working overtime to hold that line.

Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee is finding out how far the Epstein money trail runs. It just released a transcript of its closed-door interview with billionaire Leon Black, one of Epstein’s primary sources of income after he was already a registered sex offender. Black walked out of the June interview, refusing to answer questions about nondisclosure agreements he’d signed with women. He’s now facing two subpoenas and is expected to sit for a deposition on September 3.

And across the Atlantic, Thames Valley Police are preparing to fly to the U.S. to interview the family of Virginia Giuffre about her allegations against Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Giuffre was one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers, who spent years demanding accountability before her tragic suicide in 2025. Her brother has kept fighting in her name every step of the way, refusing to let her story get buried along with everything else the powerful would rather forget.

We stand with Roza, Virginia’s family, and everyone seeking truth and accountability. From D.C., the Bookmobile will hit the road, with tour stops in cities and communities across the country in the weeks ahead. Wherever you are, we want you to be able to stand next to this thing and see for yourself what the sheer volume of these files looks like. And we want to remind Americans that Donald Trump’s name is all over them… and that’s just what’s been released.

Here’s how you can be part of it:

• Next week, the site will go LIVE. Sign up to be the first to see it and to watch the unveiling: TrumpEpsteinBookmobile.com.

• You’ll be able to track the tour, plan your visit, and sign the petition demanding the remaining files be released.

A cover-up only works if people stop paying attention. Donald Trump and his friends are working hard to make sure you’re distracted. But survivors are still coming forward, billionaires are still getting subpoenaed, and investigators are still piecing together one of the biggest criminal conspiracies in modern times.

Once again, thanks to your help, we’re not going to let any of it fade from view.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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Because everything else didn’t. Iran is escalating into what one U.S. official is now calling a “wider war,” American troops are dying, and even some of Trump’s own supporters online are starting to ask why, if h…

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A top White House aide just previewed the next phase of Trump’s revenge campaign against his political opponents, and he declared that appeals to civil liberties “must fall on deaf ears.”

Too bad for him, we were listening.

Last Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gathered representatives from 66 countries at the State Department for something called the “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” Stephen Miller was there to help rally the world against “far-left political terrorism.” The actual purpose was something else. Trump’s team was road-testing its blueprint for using America’s counterterrorism machine against the president’s enemies. And buried in the speeches was the legal trick they’re planning to use.

To understand what’s being built (and why) you have to start with a little fact the White House hates. There is no such thing as a “domestic terrorist organization” under U.S. law. The government can only designate foreign terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah. When I helped run the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in the first Trump administration, those labels allowed us to take powerful action against global adversaries, including asset seizures, sweeping surveillance, and prosecutions that could put a group’s supporters away for decades.

Again, there is no domestic equivalent. So Trump came back and immediately set off to find a workaround. Last year, he issued an executive order declaring that antifa is a “major terrorist organization,” which had no legal meaning but massive significance. He sent the FBI, DHS, and other agencies spinning into overdrive searching for antifa plots, members, and network connections across all 50 states.

Yet antifa isn’t an organization. It has no headquarters, membership rolls, or leadership team. When Rep. Bennie Thompson asked a senior FBI official under oath to simply say where antifa is located and how many members it has, the official couldn’t answer. So the “number one domestic threat” to America is a group the FBI cannot describe, even as real foreign threats go unwatched.

We know why they’re doing this. It’s a fake label. They’re using it to open investigations into groups that don’t like the president. Even still, they cannot use the government’s most sweeping anti-terror powers against these folks. They must find other crimes if they want to bring a prosecution, like money laundering or fraud.

Which brings us to the workaround. The administration has been quietly working on a plan to get around these pesky legal restrictions. And if you missed the State Department event last Thursday, it became clearer how they’re going to do it.

ONE, they’ll designate foreign groups and call them “antifa.” Last November, the State Department added four obscure European far-left groups to the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list, labeling all of them “antifa.” Almost nobody reported this tiny detail: only one of the four — a German outfit called Antifa Ost — even identifies with the antifa movement. There’s no clear evidence linking any of them to activists in the United States. That didn’t matter. The point wasn’t the groups. The point was getting the word “antifa” onto the FTO list. And Rubio promised this past Thursday that “more designations” are coming.

TWO, they’ll declare it one big transnational network. This is what the ministerial was really for. Rubio told the assembled diplomats that today’s far-left militants “coordinate,” “communicate,” and “act together” across borders and that they can “raise money in one country,” train in another, and strike in a third. Miller claimed antifa factions worldwide draw from “common networks of funding, organization, and information sharing.” Notice what’s happening. They’re constructing a factual predicate that American activists are connected to the foreign groups they just designated. Which leads me to…

THREE, they’ll use “material support” as the bridge to go after American citizens. Under federal law, knowingly providing “material support” to a designated FTO is a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison. And material support is defined in breathtakingly broad terms. It can be money, “services,” “training,” “expert advice or assistance,” or “personnel.” Critics of the statute have warned that even sharing a Wikipedia link with a designated group could qualify.

Once the government claims a left-wing nonprofit or a protest network is somehow providing “material support” to a foreign terror movement, the entire post-9/11 arsenal unlocks. That means it’s easier for them to activate spy powers meant to monitor al-Qaeda; freeze bank accounts; seize assets; add individuals to terror watchlists; track financial transactions; and more. They don’t have to commit violence. They just have to be linked (by the government’s own say-so) to a network the government itself defined. That’s the workaround.

If you doubt this is where it’s headed, read Scott Bessent’s speech from Thursday. The Treasury Secretary announced that his department is “expanding its efforts” to scrutinize nonprofits and charities as potential “vehicles for illicit finance,” examining where “tax-exempt status has been exploited,” and warning that officers and directors will be held “accountable.” Financial institutions, he said, “must know their grantees.”

Here’s the translation: pro-democracy funders, progressive foundations, and civil-society groups are being told that the tools built to bankrupt Hamas are now pointed at them. Bessent teased it. Treasury is mobilizing “the same tools that we have deployed against terrorists abroad” to confront threats “here at home.”

And as I’ve written before, Trump officials don’t care whether prosecutions ultimately succeed. The process is the punishment. Last year, I warned that Trump was already gearing up for this. NSPM-7 directed every federal agency to “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute” so-called left-wing terrorists. Attorney General Bondi ordered the FBI to build files on anything “antifa-related,” using indicators like “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christian,” and “anti-American,” which are of course political viewpoints, not crimes. Then last week’s ministerial took the next step to unlock sweeping counterterrorism powers.

Now, let’s talk about that shield. Because the administration is hoping to scare you into forgetting that their “workaround” will walk straight into a gigantic wall. It’s called the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court has held that material-support laws can reach speech only when it’s coordinated with a designated foreign group. In other words, you have to be working in direct coordination with a designated foreign group. While Trump’s team will surely try to stretch the definition, it won’t hold up in court. Calling the president a fascist is protected. Marching in a protest is protected. Donating to an anti-Trump nonprofit is protected. Period.

My former colleague, Stephen Miller, knows this. He knows that Trump’s foes have a shield stronger than whatever powers the president tries to use against the political opposition. In Miller’s speech, he griped that “the left” always tries to appeal to “civil liberties” in order to “protect itself from facing criminal punishment.” (How outrageous — that Americans would have the audacity to invoke the laws against unlawful government conduct!)

Here Miller sounds like someone who uses the Constitution as a door mat:

“It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears. When the leftist…protests that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has been perpetrated against him.”

Those aren’t the words of a confident man. They’re the words of a scared and petulant boy. Someone who’s hatching a plan to break the rules and wants you to know the rules are unfair anyway — and should be ignored. Someone like that is admitting guilt before committing the crime. And it never ends well for that kid.

Groups like ours are ready to block the administration’s illegal anti-terrorism plans. Indeed, a regime that calls dissent “terrorism” deserves to be protested twice as loud. And they just told 66 countries exactly how they plan to come after us.

Unfortunately for them, it didn’t fall on deaf ears. We heard every word.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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Donald Trump commandeered primetime last night to make the case that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Instead, he declassified the receipts proving it wasn’t.

I have to say that yesterday evening’s speech was one of the more remarkable instances of presidential “blowback” we have ever seen. Again and again, the president made sweeping claims and pointed Americans to data, documents, and a public record that proved the literal opposite of what he was saying. Trump shot himself in the foot repeatedly without realizing it.

In a roughly 30-minute address from the East Room (which major networks didn’t carry live), the president unveiled a trove of newly declassified intelligence documents that he claimed would expose a vast foreign plot against him and a “Deep State” conspiracy to bury it. What the documents actually show when you read them, in the government’s own words, is that the plot was minor, that the bigger foreign operation was run for him rather than against him, and that the national security professionals he spent the evening demonizing are the reason the 2020 election stayed secure.

Rarely has a president worked so hard to disprove his own case without even understanding how. Indeed, he handed his critics the evidence file. I’m going to walk you through what I wrote down last night as the TEN biggest claims that he tried to make… and how he proved the opposite.

ONE, Trump tried to prove that China “fought like hell” to steal the 2020 election. I really want you to key in on those words. He told the nation that Beijing “fought like hell” to meddle in the vote, citing what he described as long-suppressed intelligence about their plot to undermine the presidential election and Trump himself. He even read aloud from what he described as CIA documents showing Beijing would “leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the US president” to reduce his vote count.

Instead, he released documents admitting China’s efforts were “low-level.” The assessment from the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber and the Director for Election Threat Analysis (now posted on the White House’s own website) says Beijing took “low-level, exploratory steps” to shape voter perceptions, and notes that even this was a minority view: it “differs from the IC’s judgment that Beijing has considered but not deployed influence efforts to affect the Presidential election.” The analysts assigned themselves “low-to-medium confidence.” The documents further assess that China deliberately avoided its “most aggressive options” because Beijing “wants to minimize the risk of blowback.” Whoever wrote his “fought like hell” remarks in the speech was hoping no one would go read the actual documents.

TWO, Trump implied that China stole data that could’ve affected the outcome. The centerpiece was his allegation of a Chinese hack of more than 200 million U.S. voter records, which the president portrayed as a smash-and-grab on American democracy itself, full of insinuation that this data represented the keys to the kingdom electorally.

His own documents show much of that data came from public websites… and that the Chinese apparently didn’t do anything with it. To be clear, this data was not the ballots themselves but the lists of people who are registered to vote, their addresses, etc. One of the declassified records states that voter registration information was downloaded from “U.S. commercial websites,” e.g. data brokers, the same type of “people search” websites you can go sign up for right now. This is the internet’s digital white pages. As election officials were quick to point out last night, voter rolls are largely public records in most states. If a foreign actor unlawfully scrapes that data, it’s unlawful, but it doesn’t touch a single ballot, a single tabulator, or a single result. The same document adds that the data from Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island “was downloaded by a Chinese actor on 14 January 2022.” Check that date again. January 2022. Fourteen months after Joe Biden won. And what did the Chinese do with this data to “upend” our elections? One of the declassified documents said Chinese officials conducted “public opinion analysis.”

THREE, Trump said the “Deep State” hid the Chinese plot from him. He cast himself as the last to know, as if personnel in the national security community deliberately tried to keep the information from him. He claimed outright that the “Deep State” intelligence community never informed the White House or Congress about this bombshell information.

The record shows he was briefed on Chinese meddling as far back as 2018 and even spoke about it publicly. The documents the White House released are the briefings. They were produced by his own administration’s analysts, during his own presidency, and delivered to his own White House. Even if the president didn’t actually read them, his team did. And I can personally attest that he was verbally briefed on the threats. Because I was one of the briefers. In fact, Trump was so taken with what we told him about foreign meddling that he made a speech about it to the United Nations. Unfortunately, he refused to talk about the countries we told him were interfering in elections to help his candidacy (Russia) and only wanted to warn about the countries that might not want to see him re-elected (China). What’s more, one of the main classified assessments underpinning Trump’s arguments last night — that he was kept in the dark by the spy community — was delivered to the president and congressional leadership on January 7, 2021, while Trump still occupied the Oval Office.

FOUR, Trump attempted to stitch the disparate facts together to prove his candidacy was hurt by the interference. The framing of the evening was Trump-as-victim, showing that he was a president besieged by hostile powers and betrayed by his own government.

He revealed documents showing foreign actors actually worked to boost his candidacy, undermine his rival, and may have had help from inside Trump’s own movement. The most damning material in the release concerns Russia, not China. A National Intelligence Council product describes Putin and senior Russian officials personally “overseeing efforts by proxies” (including sanctioned agents) to “orchestrate a high-profile corruption scandal implicating former Vice President Biden and the Democratic Party at the peak of the 2020 US presidential campaign.” Their stated aim: “to defeat the former Vice President and ensure the President’s victory.” The documents note these narratives were advanced through “U.S. officials and other prominent persons,” through “documentary film releases via US and Ukrainian media outlets,” and that “U.S. persons are key to propagating these narratives.” Another assessment states flatly that “Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media.” In other words, Trump declassified proof that the Kremlin ran a pro-Trump influence operation using American amplifiers that was far more significant in scope than any Chinese efforts.

FIVE, Trump went further and claimed that the “Deep State” not only hid all of this from him, but they hid it from the American people. It was a cover-up, he said, of catastrophic proportions. The documents, he insisted, had been hidden from him and from the American people.

The intelligence community published a public assessment five years ago, and last night’s “bombshells” were already included in it. On March 16, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence publicly released its declassified assessment, Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections. It disclosed Russia’s pro-Trump influence operation, Iran’s anti-Trump efforts, and the debate over China’s intentions, including the minority view Trump now brandishes as suppressed truth. Multiple documents in last night’s release explicitly reference it. Nothing Trump “revealed” differs in substance from what the American people were told in 2021. Trump’s team learned the hard way last night that you cannot expose a “cover-up” by basically linking to a press release that’s been sitting on the internet for half a decade.

SIX, Trump tried to make Americans believe voting in this country is not safe. Election security, he warned, “falls catastrophically short.” He claimed the newly released documents reveal “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” and warned that American voting systems are at risk of being “rigged and stolen.”

His own documents say the opposite in bold print. One declassified assessment states that vote tabulation systems “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results,” noting the systems “are not connected to the Internet.” The March 2021 assessment’s very first key judgment found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process” — registration, ballot casting, tabulation, or reporting. So Trump held a primetime address to terrify voters about their election systems and then quietly linked to documents that certified those systems as sound.

SEVEN, Trump directed officials to investigate people inside the U.S. government who supposedly enabled these plots by hiding them from view. He threatened that heads would roll and that his administration would pursue prosecutions.

The material he released shows that the U.S. government “Deep State” successfully protected the elections — including Trump’s own campaign effort. If anyone owes anyone a thank-you note, Trump should be writing to the career intelligence officers who spent 2020 tracking and countering plots aimed at his campaign, Biden’s campaign, and the election writ large. Instead, the president publicly trashed them. But page by page, the documents he declassified show quite clearly how the U.S. government became aware of foreign interference and proactively kept it at bay. Indeed, the people Trump was excoriating were the very same people who discovered the plots against him and Biden, tracked them in real time, warned policymakers (including Trump), and briefed the public. China, Russia, and Iran all wanted to meddle, yet there is still no evidence a single vote was changed. That’s the opposite of a scandal; it’s a success story.

EIGTH, Trump warned about systemic “corruption” inside the U.S. government. He seemed to suggest that it was more than just a handful of individuals who were responsible for the claims he made last night.

The president inadvertently highlighted how all the election protection structures — that worked to protect democracy in 2020 — are being dismantled by him in 2026. Every page declassified last night exists because America built a serious election-defense architecture after 2016, including FBI election task forces, DHS infrastructure monitoring, ODNI fusion cells, and more. One of the major ironies of Trump’s speech is that he brought a spotlight back to the fact that he’s dismantled each of them. His team shut down the FBI election task force. His team has been breaking up the main DHS election defense agency. His team is in the process of gutting ODNI. And just last week, he purged the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission — the federal agency that helps states secure their voting systems. Put another way, the systemic “corruption” is being carried out by Trump himself, who is trying to cover the U.S. government’s eyes and ears to future election interference.

NINE, Trump tried to use the speech to justify the SAVE America Act. The speech was a primetime lobbying pitch for the stalled voter-ID bill he has made his singular legislative obsession, refusing to sign other legislation until it reaches his desk. He declared that the only reason anyone could oppose the bill is an intention to “cheat.”

But nothing in his own evidence has anything to do with voter ID. Not one document described a threat that a photo ID at a polling place would have stopped. The foreign influence operations, data scraping, and social media manipulation he described have nothing to do with voter ID. If Congress took the president’s evidence seriously, it would restore funding to the election-protection systems his administration is tearing down. That mismatch gave away the whole game last night. The SAVE America Act was never about the threat; rather, the threat was conjured to sell the bill, albeit very unconvincingly.

TEN, Trump hoped the night would suggest he was the rightful winner in 2020. That was the emotional core of the speech, and it’s the wound he cannot stop reopening, to the dismay of Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Instead, he reminded the world that he’s a sore loser, and he re-upped evidence about who actually tried to corrupt the 2020 election. By dragging the country back to 2020, Trump resurfaced the criminal allegations he’d rather bury. The recorded phone call pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes; his own Attorney General, Bill Barr, telling investigators the stolen-election claims were baseless; the dozens of courts that threw out his challenges; the fake electors scheme; January 6th. The most extensive, best-documented attempt to interfere with the 2020 election wasn’t run from Beijing or Moscow. It was run from the White House by the man who stood in the East Room last night, six years later, still litigating his loss on national television. Social media was flooded with those examples before, during, and after Trump’s speech. It was as bad of a “self own” as you could manufacture.

Trump wanted last night to be the opening argument for overturning the past and pre-litigating the future, a predicate for crying foul in November. What he delivered was a confession dressed up poorly as an exposé. He showed us that the foreign plots against him were minor and defeated, and he reminded us that the big one was run on his behalf… that the “Deep State” saved the election… and that the loudest election saboteur of 2020 was the man at the podium.

Donald Trump aimed for vindication last night. But he shot himself in both feet.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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