Republicans Ditch Trump’s Biggest Ask in Attempt to Pass Budget Bill
https://newrepublic.com/post/213213/republicans-ditch-trump-save-act-budget-bill
Republicans Ditch Trump’s Biggest Ask in Attempt to Pass Budget Bill
House Republicans want nothing to do with Trump’s toxic SAVE Act.
House Republicans released a much-anticipated continuing resolution Friday—and it omits Donald Trump’s biggest ask.
Despite Trump specifically ordering his congressional allies to include his unpopular voter restriction bill in the government funding mechanism during a late-night address to the nation the night before, Republicans’ 15-page C.R. makes no mention of the SAVE America Act.
“Congress must pass the SAVE America Act. How easy is that to do? Unless you want to cheat,” Trump said Thursday night. “The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat, because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way.”
Instead, Republicans offered a clean funding package. If passed, it would fund the federal government until December 4.
The president has predicated his support for any legislative effort on the Save Act’s passage. Since the beginning of the year, Trump has insisted it should be Congress’s top priority, refusing to sign any bill and derailing Cabinet confirmations until Capitol Hill bends to his will. So far, that stalemate has gummed up efforts to fund the Department of Homeland Security, stalled attempts to pass the National Defense Authorization Act, and upended a planned photo op of Trump signing a landmark housing bill.
The original iteration of the SAVE America Act sparked nationwide backlash for proposing numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, perhaps chief among them a requirement that voters bring either a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Critics argued that the mandate would unduly restrict millions of Americans from voting, pointing out that half of the country’s population lacks a passport and furthermore that the legislation as written would make it difficult for anyone who changed their name—including married women—to register.
The bill would also require voters to present photo identification when casting a ballot, and a total ban on mail-in voting. Trump has described the latter procedure as “crooked” and “corrupt,” despite the fact that he himself has cast several mail-in ballots.
The continuing resolution would temporarily extend current funding levels for the government while Congress continues negotiating appropriation bills for the coming year. It is expected to be put to a floor vote next week.
This story has been updated.
Trump Caused Millions in Damage After Freedom 250 Oil Spill
The National Park Service had to pay $2 million for an emergency cleanup.
The government shelled out almost $2 million in a no-bid emergency contract to clean up a diesel spill that occurred under the watch of Freedom 250, the shadowy organization through which President Donald Trump is administering semiquincentennial celebrations.
In May, Freedom 250 and a Trump-tied event management company, Event Strategies Inc., installed temporary lighting while setting up the Great American State Fair on the National Mall. Then, on May 20, fuel lines on the lighting equipment spilled at least 30 gallons of fuel onto the mall. The fuel seeped underground, contaminating rainwater repositories used to irrigate the mall. And another spill of an unknown quantity came soon after.
The government awarded a “rushed, no-bid contract” of $1.8 million for the cleanup, reported Anna Kramer of NOTUS Friday. It took two months for the contract, which was awarded to Maryland-based business Custom Lawn Service Inc, to be posted publicly. Officials told Kramer that was due to the “emergency nature of the situation.”
Government records reported in May by The New York Times suggest the spill was due to negligence, originating “from event-related equipment that lacked required secondary and tertiary containment measures.” But the Trump administration has described hiccups in its 250th celebrations as the fault of left-wing saboteurs, and this time was no different: The administration alleged that vandals slashed the fuel lines.
The government does not ordinarily foot the bill for such cleanup jobs. Permit holders are typically held “liable for the environmental mitigation after a spill of such magnitude,” NBC News reported last month. Accordingly, hundreds of concerned citizens petitioned for Freedom 250, not the taxpayer, to be made financially responsible, but their calls apparently fell on deaf ears.
The $1.8 million price tag is also markedly higher than initially estimated. According to the Times, the National Park Service in May was seeking a contractor for $1.1 million, and an interior department spokesperson said the cleanup “could end up costing far less.”
DHS Sec. Threatens to Jail State Officials Who Defy Trump’s Demands
Secretary Markwayne Mullin also threatened to defund states that don’t “scrub” their voter rolls.
The Trump administration has promised to stonewall federal grants unless states “scrub” their voter rolls and to imprison state officials who refuse to comply.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced during a press conference in Washington Friday that state officials who refuse Washington’s new election demands could be jailed for their disobedience.
“If the states choose not to participate with the state program, and they choose not to participate in securing the elections, we will make sure that we make those states a priority to look at who voted in their states, and hold them—the election officials—accountable,” Mullin said. “If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections, and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even—depending on how far it goes—prison time.”
The pledge came hours after Donald Trump delivered a national address that not only included numerous factual inaccuracies and vast exaggerations about how he lost to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, but also weaponized those conspiracies in an attempt to undermine American trust in future elections.
“Working with [Commerce] Secretary [Howard] Lutnick, we are going to make our security enhancements mandatory. Meaning that if these states want a grant, and they want to be reimbursed to run federal elections, they are going to have to implement security issues,” Mullin said. “Just security issues. We’re not trying to get into anything else, but we’re saying that the machines have to be secured and that your voter registration lists need to be scrubbed.”
“We need to make sure that individuals legally able to vote are voting.”
The homeland security chief confidently announced the plot while standing in front of several American flags, despite the fact that the entire scheme is most likely illegal and that he is acting far outside the limitations of his office and even the executive branch. Homeland Security lacks the necessary authority to either withhold federal grants or force states to purge voter rolls. Only Congress has the power to do that.
Beyond that, voter fraud is a statistical nonissue in American elections. For instance, a 2024 statewide audit out of Georgia—the epicenter of one of Trump’s baseless 2020 theories—revealed that 20 non-citizens out of 8.2 million residents existed on the state’s voter roll, just 0.00024 percent of the state’s voting population. Out of those 20, only nine participated in elections many years ago, before ID was required as a part of the voter verification process. The other 11 individuals were registered but never actually voted, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
This story has been updated.
Trump’s Favorite News Show Totally Ignores His Election Fraud Speech
Even Fox News didn’t want to cover Trump’s prime-time address to the nation.
President Trump’s rant to the nation about election fraud Thursday night was full of inaccuracies, previously known information, and claims unsupported by evidence. On the biggest conservative TV network, Fox News, which Trump watches regularly, no one is giving it much attention Friday morning.
Matthew Gertz of Media Matters, a nonprofit that monitors right-wing media, wrote that Fox News’s Friday morning programming prioritized several other stories over Trump’s speech. Among the stories covered were Caitlin Clark’s WNBA game Thursday night, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s policies toward landlords, Fox’s World Cup coverage for Sunday’s final, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s antifa summit Thursday. Fox & Friends didn’t even mention the speech.
It’s a continuation of how the network treated the speech last night. Laura Ingraham didn’t even discuss the speech, even though Trump was scheduled to speak just two hours later. Jesse Watters gave it a passing mention at the end of his show, prioritizing one of his correspondents interviewing people in bathing suits at Central Park. Sean Hannity gave the speech a small amount of discussion and said his show would look into it in the coming days.
The most attention Fox gave to the speech was on Special Report, with Hugh Hewitt saying in advance of the speech that he hoped Trump would focus on renewed hostilities in the Iran war, as it was “vital that the president keep that in mind that American servicemen and women are in harm’s way when he is on the air.”
The network’s reluctance to give Trump’s speech heavy coverage may have something to do with the hefty settlement Fox News was forced to pay in 2023 to get rid of a lawsuit over how it covered election denial conspiracies from the 2020 presidential election pushed by Trump and his allies. Or it also could be due to the fact that Trump was just repeating old, tired claims of election fraud, and making up new claims of foreign interference without evidence. Maybe Fox sees that Trump is desperately trying in vain to forestall a big defeat this November.
DOGE Gutted the Office Researching the Explosive Diarrhea Parasite
The team in charge of responding to cyclospora was cut from 11 people to just three.
Donald Trump promised federal cuts under the Elon Musk–led Department of Government Efficiency would “drive out the massive waste.”
Indeed, waste is now being expelled on an incredible scale, across the country: A diarrhea-causing parasite, cyclosporiasis, has sickened thousands of people in more than two-thirds of U.S. states. And the outbreak’s severity—evidence increasingly shows—can be attributed at least partly to DOGE.
According to a Friday report by WIRED, DOGE cuts significantly reduced the size of the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responsible for responding to cyclospora outbreaks. The lab was “downsized from 11 people to just three” last year, parasitologist Joel Barratt, who formerly led that operation, told the publication.
“Based on simple math, these outbreak responses—which require rapid, timely responses—are going to be greatly diminished,” Barratt told WIRED. “Cyclospora is just one piece. It’s making the news right now, but there are other, more dangerous pathogens than cyclospora.”
That’s not the only way Trump’s cuts have hamstrung the response. In an analysis at The American Prospect, for example, Ryan Cooper details how the administration devastated American food safety and public health infrastructure in ways relevant to the outbreak.
Additionally, in July 2025, the CDC under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. quietly changed the monitoring of cyclospora from mandatory to optional in Foodnet, its pathogen-tracking partnership with 10 state health departments, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Food and Drug Administration.
With WIRED’s report, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s claim Thursday that the administration’s funding cuts did not impact the response to the outbreak “at all” sounds more dubious than it already did.
Describing the wreckage left in DOGE’s wake, one GOP senator recently coined the phrase “DOGE shit.” The department’s increasingly apparent role in exacerbating this outbreak suggests there’s more mileage in that pun—a couple social media wordsmiths have already seized on it, nicknaming cyclospora “the DOGE shits.”
Kentucky Governor Warns He Got Calls “Suggesting” Mitch McConnell Died
McConnell has posted a photo of himself holding that day’s newspaper, but he has not provided further details about his condition.
Despite recent evidence to the contrary, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear isn’t so sure that Senator Mitch McConnell is actually alive.
Speaking with journalist Katie Couric in an interview published on YouTube July 15, Beshear explained why he had requested a formal update from McConnell’s office earlier this month. In his explanation, Beshear revealed that he had received information from multiple officials indicating that the 84-year-old Republican had passed away.
“It had been a month before anything had been put out, not even an official statement from Senator McConnell,” Beshear recalled. “In fact, I’d gotten two calls from different agencies—not state agencies—suggesting he’s passed.”
The Kentucky senator went missing for nearly a month after he was found unconscious in his Washington residence and rushed to the hospital on June 14. For weeks, McConnell’s office refused to explain his extended hospitalization or elaborate on his eventual return to Capitol Hill.
But the media blackout finally ended on Sunday, when the senator’s office shared a photo of McConnell sitting upright in a chair beside his wife, holding a copy of The Washington Post’s Sunday sports section in his lap.
Far-right influencers immediately jumped on McConnell’s statement, baselessly claiming that the picture had been AI-generated while demanding that McConnell release a video statement to address public concern. (Forensic analysis teams concluded that McConnell’s “proof of life” image was very much real and not AI-generated.)
McConnell’s team has not provided any further explanation or evidence supporting McConnell’s improving health condition since Sunday.
Earlier this week, Beshear held a press conference in which he acknowledged that while the July 12 update was a “step in the right direction,” McConnell ultimately needed to provide a more comprehensive update in order to cut through the resulting conspiratorial noise.
“We hope that there is a speedy recovery,” Beshear said on Tuesday. “But with all the speculation—and there’s been a ton—the fastest way to end all of it is calling into a news station if you’re otherwise taking calls, putting out a video or two, which all of us do in office.”
ICE Agent in Fatal Maine Shooting Has History of Terrifying Violence
The ICE agent who killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero abused and threatening the women in his life, his relatives say.
New details are emerging about the ICE agent who shot and killed 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on Monday.
David Brouillette has a history of violent and abusive behavior, his relatives told the Associated Press, including attacks on the women and girls in his life. His first ex-wife, Ashley Brouillette, said that she divorced him after he became violent with her while she was pregnant with their daughter.
In one instance, she told the AP, he threw boiling water at her while she was holding their daughter, which her mother, Avis Collins, also confirmed. In court records, another of Brouillette’s ex-wives also alleged years of physical and verbal abuse against her and her daughters. The AP did not identify her because she fears retaliation.
Brouillette’s second ex-wife said he stalked and harassed her, and engaged in physical and verbal abuse against his daughter, forcing them to seek temporary protection orders. Brouillette allegedly tackled his teenage daughter, smashed spaghetti in her hair, and one in instance, dragged her around the house while she was crying.
“Dave needs counseling or something for his PTSD & depression,” the ex-wife wrote while applying for a temporary protective order on behalf of Brouillette’s teenage daughter, which a judge granted in 2021.
Brouillette’s oldest daughter, Madison, also told the AP about her father’s mental health issues.
“I saw my dad struggle with a lot of things,” she said, recalling one instance where she came home from school and he told her that he had sat on a tree stump holding a gun to his head. “If you don’t really, truly take care of yourself, there’s no way you can protect other people. And with my dad, he never wanted to get help.”
One relative anonymously told the AP that Brouillette was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and severe bipolar disorder as a kid, which Ashley Brouillette confirmed. That relative said that David Brouillette was “extremely mentally ill,” attempting suicide when he was 12 years old and having to go to the hospital. His ex-wife Ashley shared a three-minute voicemail with the AP from last winter where he told her that he thought someone should slit her throat.
In that message, sent around the time he joined ICE, he called her “disgusting” and said that she and other women and girls in her “bloodline” should die.
“And all of you should have your f—king throats cut,” Brouillette’s voicemail said. “Yeah, you should. Am I threatening that I’m gonna do that? Nope. Nope. But do I think that you should have your f—king throats cuts? Or should have had them cut? Yep.”
Brouillette reached out to Ashley and his daughter Madison after the shooting, telling them it was justified and that Durán Guerrero tried to run him over with a car. In those calls, he told his ex-wife to lie for him and to cover for his “character.” Based on his history, that was a lost cause.
Trump’s Delusional Election Fraud Speech Sparks 25th Amendment Calls
Democrats are furious after the president delivered a prime-time address full of lies.
Democrats across the country questioned the president’s fitness after his baseless, incendiary prime-time Thursday night speech accusing foreign agents of tampering with our last three elections—all to push his restrictive SAVE America Act.
“This is a 25th Amendment moment,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said, referring to the law that allows Congress to replace the president if deemed “unable to discharge the powers and duties” of the job. “I just watched the ramblings of a mad king, and what else can I say—the only thing missing was tinfoil. Donald Trump is trying to rig our elections, and we have to stop him. Show up and VOTE this November.”
“How can anyone deny the urgency of the 25th Amendment at this point,” echoed Representative Yassamin Ansari.
Others focused on the illegitimacy of the claims Trump made.
“Tonight I heard a failed and desperate president who as war spirals and prices rise is as always focused on his grievances, his shame, and above all his fear of the accountability that will come with defeat,” Senator Jon Ossoff wrote on X. “I also heard a president signaling his unmistakable intent to attack these elections and our voting rights, just as he tried to throw out our votes and seize the presidency in 2020. Our answer will be overwhelming.”
“Donald Trump is releasing unverified, meaningless documents to appease his own delusions about an election he lost resoundingly, all while continuing to withhold 3 million pages of the Epstein files,” wrote Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“Donald Trump is a feeble, unhinged conspiracy-peddling 80-year old failed President. The economy is a disaster under this guy and the American people know it,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffires said. “Pathetic.”
“Trump says Democrats forgot to rig the election in 2016, successfully rigged it while *he* was president in 2020, then forgot how to rig it again in 2024. So the only election Democrats supposedly stole was the one he himself controlled,” said Representative Jim McGovern. “You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe this bullshit.”
“Donald Trump just used a primetime address to relitigate an election he lost six years ago—and to demand new laws making it harder to vote,” former gubernatorial candidate turned voting rights activist Stacey Abrams wrote. “Americans see through the lies. He tried this in Georgia first: a call to ‘find 11,780 votes,’ a raid on Fulton County, and now a war on the ballot itself. That’s not democracy. That’s cowardice. America, we’ve beaten it before.”
“Tonight, the same President who once badgered Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to find 11,780 votes that didn’t exist, so he could overtake Biden’s lead in the state in 2020, put out a whole new set of lies about our elections, past and present,” Senator and Trump nemesis Adam Schiff added. “All of his claims and the selective release of any documents must be treated with the greatest skepticism given the President’s many lies and misrepresentations about our elections.”
Outgoing GOP Representative Thomas Massie had some words for the president, as well.
“This is absurd,” he wrote. “Every piece of voter data Trump mentions here, as well as which elections each voter voted in, is readily available in Kentucky for a small fee.”
Trump’s rambling speech was as inaccurate as it was disconcerting. He sounded bad, had no energy, and stuck so closely to the teleprompter it seemed like he’d never seen the speech before he read it. Not exactly a vote of confidence for the next two years.
Epstein Victims Slam “Demoralizing” Meeting With Todd Blanche
Blanche met with survivors after Republican Senator Thom Tillis appeared to condition his attorney general confirmation on his doing so.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s meeting with several Epstein survivors was a major bust.
The Thursday meeting was an obvious gambit for Senate support for Blanche’s potential promotion to permanent attorney general.
The encounter was arranged hours after Republican Senator Thom Tillis said that his vote for Blanche’s confirmation would be predicated on whether the acting attorney general met with Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.
During the second day of Blanche’s committee confirmation hearing, Epstein victim Dani Bensky warned the Senate Judiciary Committee that Blanche had dodged her and other victims for months, yet showed a sudden willingness to talk shop once he needed them to advance his Senate confirmation.
By 4 p.m., the meeting was a go, as several survivors were spotted filing into the Justice Department. Two hours later, however, they reappeared outside the building, looking “distraught and emotional,” according to MS NOW. Sky Roberts, the brother of the late Virginia Giuffre, informed reporters outside the Justice Department: “I think we have a little ways to go here.”
“It had absolutely nothing to do with us, and it had everything to do with Blanche checking a box so that he can get a promotion,” Epstein victim and anti–human trafficking educator Elizabeth Stein told the network. “I don’t think that we had high expectations going into this meeting. I certainly did not. But I didn’t expect to walk out of the meeting feeling the way that we feel right now.”
“It was demoralizing, to say the very least,” she added.
Stein recalled that Blanche was completely unwilling to provide the group with anything substantial, actively dodging questions and refusing to provide assurances that his department would follow up on potential investigative leads. She noted that he could not provide a concrete explanation for Ghislaine Maxwell’s cushy prison transfer to a low-security prison camp, and wouldn’t clarify the improper redactions rampant throughout the released Epstein files.
“It just felt like more political posturing and using survivors the way that we’ve been used as political pawns,” Stein continued. “We’re victims of the crime of sex trafficking. And the fact that our Department of Justice will not take that seriously is beyond concerning, not just to us, but should be concerning to Americans all across this country.”
Epstein survivor Annie Farmer told ABC News she is “even more confident in urging senators to vote against his confirmation as the United States Attorney General” after finally meeting Blanche face to face.
“I found him abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors—a marked contrast to his public testimony during his confirmation hearing,” said Farmer, who served as a key witness for the government during Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trial.
Tillis did not feel the same way: The North Carolina senator indicated over social media Thursday evening that he was satisfied by Blanche’s efforts.
“I commend Todd Blanche for doing what all his predecessors over the last two decades never did: meet with the victims of Jeffery Epstein’s horrific crimes,” Tillis wrote. “I appreciate his willingness to directly engage and listen to them.”
Senate GOP Is Pissed JD Vance Keeps Ditching Them to Promote His Book
Vice President JD Vance has barely been in the Capitol.
Republicans in Congress are reportedly souring on Vice President JD Vance, feeling abandoned as he’s put media appearances before his duty to help resolve the intraparty strife bogging down the GOP’s agenda.
With midterms fast approaching and divisions in the ranks of a thin majority stymieing Republican legislative priorities, many in the party have hoped for Vance to step up, leveraging his position as president of the Senate to be a liaison between Congress and the White House.
Instead, “lawmakers can count on a few fingers the times … Vance has set foot in the Capitol,” Kimberley Ann Strassel writes in a reported column for The Wall Street Journal. The vice president has jilted members of Congress for podcasters and talk-show hosts, appearing on programs such as Real Time With Bill Maher and The View, in no small part to promote his new spiritual memoir.
Most recently, Vance flaked on a meeting scheduled Tuesday with House Republicans to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience.
And remarks Vance has made during his absence have only been salt in Republicans’ wounds. In his public comments, the vice president has been perceived as “bashing his own party to win praise from online influencers” and positioning himself as “scolder of the body over which he constitutionally presides, rather than showing up for the work,” Strassel writes.
In his recent media hits, for example, Vance has called those who oppose eliminating the filibuster as “married” to “weird Senate procedural bullshit,” and angered some conservatives by touting an interventionist “Christian” organization of the economy over laissez-faire economics.
One GOP senator told Strassel, “As we approach incredibly consequential midterms for this nation and this presidency, Senate Republicans are pretty confused as to why the president of the Senate is actively criticizing the GOP, while also being absent from his Senate duties.”
In the past, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has reportedly provided a line of communication between GOP lawmakers and the White House, but she’s now being treated for breast cancer. And while lawmakers reportedly “appreciate” appearances Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have made on Capitol Hill, they have only made Vance’s “lack of interest” all the more clear.
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