Trump, 80, Falls Asleep After Mocking Lindsey Graham at His Funeral

https://newrepublic.com/post/213641/trump-falls-asleep-lindsey-graham-funeral

July 28, 2026/4:16 p.m. ET

Trump, 80, Falls Asleep After Mocking Lindsey Graham at His Funeral

President Trump dozed off almost immediately after delivering his eulogy.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent look on during the funeral service for late Senator Lindsey Graham at the Washington National Cathedral, on July 28.

President Trump couldn’t stay awake at Lindsey Graham’s funeral Tuesday.

As several well-wishers eulogized the former senator at the Washington National Cathedral, Trump could barely hold his face up and keep his eyes open. It didn’t take long for him to start dozing off, occasionally blinking to try and hide his drowsiness.

At certain points, Trump even started tilting his head as he was falling asleep.

All of this took place shortly after Trump delivered his own eulogy, in which he went off-script and made fun of Graham a little, with all of his friends and family present, and reminded the audience about the time he publicly shared Graham’s cell phone number. All of that was probably much too tiring for the 80-year-old Trump, and he decided to take a little rest.

Trump’s America Losing Billions Thanks to Canadians’ Boycott

Trump’s constant attacks on Canada are hurting the American economy in more ways than one.

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President Donald Trump has made a habit of insulting our northern neighbors, and it’s coming back to bite him.

Canadians are boycotting travel to the United States in record numbers, costing the U.S. economy upward of $3.3 billion, the Canadian government reports. Tourism is at an all-time low this July, dropping more than 30 percent in year-over-year declines for the first time since 9/11.

“Following the change in the U.S. administration in early 2025 and the implementation of America First policies, Canadian travel sentiment shifted abruptly,” the report states.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, the number of Canadians willing to describe the U.S. as a “reliable partner” has dropped from 83 percent in 2022 to only 35 percent today.

No mystery here: Since the start of Trump’s second term, he has levied massive tariffs on Canadian goods, threatened Canadian sovereignty, and repeatedly insulted the Canadian people. Just last week, Canada rescinded its invitations to U.S. officials for the grand opening of the Michigan–Ontario Gordie Howe Bridge, days after Trump imposed new 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of Canadian goods and blamed the country for wildfire smoke drifting across America’s northern border. Trump’s threats to turn Canada into the “51st state” and references to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney as a “governor” only add insult to injury.

But actions have consequences. As Canadians sour on the prospect of visiting the U.S., the American people are losing tourist dollars to the tune of $3.3 billion.

“In response to these measures and threats to Canadian sovereignty, provinces, territories, and Canadians from coast to coast to coast have stood together, taking the necessary actions to support our economy and defend our workers, farmers, businesses, and families,” Prime Minister Carney wrote in a statement following the latest round of tariffs. “In all circumstances, Canada will work relentlessly and take any measures necessary to build our strength at home and to support Canadian workers, farmers, businesses, and families.”

If only President Trump could say the same.

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July 28, 2026/3:56 p.m. ET

Top DHS Official Quits in Protest Over Trump’s “War on Immigrants”

The executive director of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics is out.

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A longtime Department of Homeland Security official has resigned, citing the Trump administration’s “brazen corruption” and the “war on immigrants.”

Over the weekend, Marc Rosenblum, who serves as executive director for the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, announced he would end his decade of service at the DHS, Wired reported Monday.

“I’m sad to suspend my career in public service and leave my amazing team,” Rosenblum wrote in a LinkedIn post. “But it will come as no surprise that I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration.

“Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change,” Rosenblum wrote.

Rosenblum spent years working to improve transparency at DHS, and spearheaded efforts to publish information on immigration arrests and deportations for the first time. But after the Trump administration launched its sweeping deportation efforts, DHS stopped publishing data on ICE detentions, Customs and Border Protection encounters, and deportations—gutting the department’s transparency and undermining accountability. Rosenblum told Wired that he and his co-workers had faced “a challenging and often hostile work environment.”

In his LinkedIn post, Rosenblum said he was taking a month off, but looking forward to taking up a new role that would “actually align with my values and those of most other Americans.”

Trump Veers From Script to Mock Lindsey Graham at His Own Funeral

Donald Trump couldn’t even stick to a script for a somber moment.

Alex Brandon/Getty Images

The president couldn’t resist taking issue with his speechwriters again Tuesday—even as he was in the midst of delivering a eulogy for late South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.

Graham’s funeral drew TV personalities, top lawmakers, and foreign heads of state, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Yet Donald Trump didn’t hesitate to veer wildly off course from his pre-written remarks while recalling Graham’s life before the elite crowd, pushing back on one critical detail: Graham’s popularity.

“Virtually everyone—Republican or Democrat—liked Lindsey,” said Trump before jumping from his script. “Well, not everybody. But it sounds good. Not everybody. He was a tough cookie, OK? I have to be—I have to veer from this for a second.

“He was a tough cookie, Darline, but he was beautiful,” Trump added, addressing Graham’s younger sister and temporary legislative successor, Darline Graham Nordone.

Graham passed away on July 11 after what his office described as a “brief and sudden illness.” The next morning, a preliminary medical report found that Graham had died from a tear in his aorta due to the hardening of his arteries.

During his brief remarks before the mourning crowd, Trump acknowledged that he and Graham had become close friends during his time in politics, fondly recounting the time he publicized Graham’s cell phone number during a heated debate during the 2016 presidential election.

“He said, ‘I had that number for 20 years.’ His phone totally—I don’t know what he did with it. But it exploded. That was the beginning of friendship in a way,” Trump said. “But it was Lindsey who had the last laugh, because while I blew up his phone for one day, we became great friends and Lindsey did not stop calling me for the next 10 years.”

He also reminisced about Graham’s warmongering, sharing with the assembly that Graham “never saw a war he didn’t like.”

“He felt in his bones that our destiny is to win, and that his job was to do everything he could to ensure our enemies would lose,” Trump said.

Trump Gets Major Legal Victory on Mail-In Voting Restrictions—for Now

An appeals court is letting Trump move forward with his executive order that would change voting as we know it.

Marcin Golba/NurPhoto/Getty Images

In a blow to voters everywhere, a federal appeals court just made it easier for President Donald Trump to suppress mail-in voting. The midterms are three months away.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed a lower court’s decision Tuesday, arguing that a Democratic lawsuit challenging Trump’s mail-in voting executive order was premature. This result could have disastrous implications for the upcoming midterm elections: Not only does Trump’s executive order direct the Department of Homeland Security to create a national citizenship registry list, but it also orders the U.S. Postal Service to withhold mail-in ballots from states that don’t share voter registration data with the federal government.

“Cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It’s horrible, what’s gone on,” Trump said while signing the order in March. “Democrats want to use it for cheating.… I think this will help a lot with elections.”

In reality, mail-in voting is proven to be a secure and reliable method used by hundreds of thousands of voters across the political spectrum. The president himself has voted by mail in recent elections—but it’s OK when he does it, he says, “because I’m president.”

This new ruling from the D.C. Circuit comes only one day after Trump’s Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue, calling the Democratic legal challenge “premature” and “hypothetical” because Trump’s executive order hasn’t yet been entirely implemented into DHS or USPS policy.

The administration’s language is reflected in Tuesday’s D.C. Circuit court ruling, which argues that the Democratic plaintiffs are concerned with “the lawfulness of proposed actions if implemented on the threshold of the upcoming federal election,” rather than actions that have already happened. In other words, Trump’s executive order might be breaking the law, but the court isn’t comfortable saying so until it’s too late.

“If the defendant agencies take steps to implement the Executive Order in a manner that violates federal law or the Constitution, Plaintiffs can promptly seek relief,” the decision says.

Trump’s attack on mail-in voting goes hand in hand with the SAVE Act, a massive voter suppression bill Trump is trying to ram through the Senate this week. These increasingly desperate attempts to stop Americans from voting underscore the fact that the midterms aren’t looking so good for Republicans—and Trump likely knows he can’t win without cheating.

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July 28, 2026/2:06 p.m. ET

One of Trump’s Declassified Documents Raises Major Red Flags

Experts question whether the document was made expressly to help prove Donald Trump’s claims about the 2020 election.

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Former intelligence officials have singled out a recently declassified memo in Donald Trump’s recent 2020 election-related document dump as warranting a deeper investigation.

The Steady State, a group of former national security and intelligence officials, has called for an independent probe into a three-page CIA note on China titled “Sensitive PRC Reporting from 2018-2020.” The document’s date and author are redacted, and it’s not clear where the memo came from within the folds of the CIA.

An analysis by the group found that it “departs in both style and format” from CIA drafting culture, and does not include the tell-tale signs of a CIA review.

Yet Trump directly quoted the file during his national prime-time address on July 16, ignoring its dubious origin.

“In mid-2018 the Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the U.S. president in an effort to reduce the U.S. president’s votes and make him resign or prevent his re-election,” Trump read from the document. “Isn’t that nice?”

Over the span of his 25-minute speech, Trump repeated thoroughly debunked claims that there was interference in the 2020 presidential election, and that the intelligence community had intentionally withheld information from him during his first term about China’s attempts to undermine U.S. election integrity.

Trump leveraged the CIA memo to implore the Justice Department to “fire those involved in the cover-up” and “file criminal charges if appropriate.”

But former intelligence officials have been wary of the document’s narrow perspective and thin context, suggesting that it could be a response to a targeted request from someone within the administration, MS NOW reported Tuesday.

Steven Cash, executive director of The Steady State and a former CIA and Department of Homeland Security official, told the digital news organization that he planned to send a letter Tuesday to top lawmakers about the note’s “anomalies.”

“It is particularly dangerous when intelligence products are presented piecemeal to the American people,” Cash wrote. “Confidence in the Intelligence Community is predicated not only on what it ultimately knows, but on the integrity of how its work is produced and presented.”

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July 28, 2026/1:56 p.m. ET

Fauci Complained About “Obnoxious Adolescent” Trump in Covid Diary

Anthony Fauci’s pandemic-era diary entries reveal just how annoyed he was by President Trump.

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Dr. Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, looks on as President Donald Trump delivers remarks about coronavirus vaccine development, on May 15, 2020.

Dr. Anthony Fauci started off with a good relationship with President Trump but eventually came to believe he was an “obnoxious adolescent,” according to excerpts of his diary released by Republican Senator Rand Paul, the head of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

The released diary entries start from December 2019, right before the Covid-19 outbreak, and continue to December 2022, when Fauci left his position as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Paul released over 1,000 pages from the diary as part of an investigation into the origins of Covid-19, which Paul claims came from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China.

The diary doesn’t have any kind of smoking gun on Covid’s origins, but it does show an inside view of different moments of the pandemic, as well as how Trump mishandled it. Fauci wrote glowingly about how he met Trump on January 29, 2020, in the White House Situation Room, and the president told him, “Anthony, you are really a famous guy. My good friend Lou Dobbs told me that you were one of the smartest, knowledgeable and outstanding persons he knows.”

“He then stayed for 20 minutes and asked most of his questions of me. I was surprised and very pleased and the deputies were clearly stunned and impressed,” Fauci wrote. He added that Trump thanked him after the meeting, telling him, “We are counting on you.”

Fauci’s entries show how Trump’s actions over the course of the pandemic quickly changed his mind. After a March 2020 press conference, Fauci complained about how Trump “wasted the opportunity to just focus on the relief package and went into his diatribe against previous administrations.”

Later, in August, Fauci wrote that he had a hard time explaining to Trump that increased testing did not increase Covid cases.

“All in all it was a manifestation that he is desperate and still does not understand the pandemic. Very interesting encounter,” Fauci wrote.

In November, Trump was angry at Fauci for a Washington Post report where Fauci said that Joe Biden’s campaign was “taking [the pandemic] seriously from a public health perspective,” while Trump was more concerned about the economy and reopening the country. Trump called Fauci and let loose.

“Tony, I really like you, and you know that, but what the f—k are you doing? You constantly drop bombs on me. Everybody wants me to fire you, but I am not going to fire you, you have too illustrious of a career, but you have to be positive,” Trump said on the call, according to Fauci.

“I like you but so many people, not only in the White House, but throughout the country hate you because of what you are doing.… And that f—ker Biden. He is so f—king stupid. You are 10 times smarter than he is. I am going to kick his f—king ass in this election. I will win by a landslide. Just wait and see.… Tony, you have to be positive. I do not want to keep you off TV, but when you are out there, you have to be positive.”

By March 2021, as vaccines became publicly available, Fauci called Trump an “obnoxious adolescent.”

Looking at these diary entries, it’s obvious that Fauci was simply trying to do his job in the face of an obstinate president, and wasn’t the devious or negligent mastermind that conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party make him out to be. They should be more concerned that Trump is back in power and can’t be trusted if a new pandemic arises.

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Edith Olmsted

July 28, 2026/1:09 p.m. ET

FIFA President Prepares to Tie World Cup Even Closer to Trump

Gianni Infantino is planning on selling shares in the tournament.

Waleed Ibrahim/NurPhoto/Getty Images

FIFA President Gianni Infantino is reportedly plotting to transform the World Cup into a moneymaking scheme—so, is it any surprise he turned to these experts in corruption?

FIFA announced Tuesday that it would create the FIFA Forward Enterprise, or FFE, a new business entity, to raise up to $4.2 million in the next year by “carefully selecting long-term investors who will purchase minority, non-controlling interests in FFE.”

Critics have decried the decision to sell stakes in the World Cup, which is managed by FIFA, a nonprofit organization. The move could potentially earn Infantino tens of millions of dollars.

To make matters worse, Infantino reportedly held investor discussions with members of the Trump administration, The Times reported Tuesday. The move comes amid mounting concerns over Infantino’s relationship with Donald Trump, after the president openly bullied FIFA into lifting a red card against a player on the U.S. men’s soccer team.

In addition, FIFA reportedly stated that once the approval was granted, the investor group would be led by Thrive Eternal, a venture capital firm run by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared who is under investigation for alleged corruption.

FIFA said that it planned to expand football development funding to more than $10 billion, “subject to approval by FIFA Member Associations.”

The UEFA Europa League immediately released a statement outright rejecting the proposal.

“This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” the statement said. “UEFA takes it extremely seriously. So should every National Football Association. So should every stakeholder: leagues, clubs, players, supporters, governments and everyone who cares about the future of the game. The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade—especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially.

“None of us are the owners of football. It is not FIFA’s to sell,” the statement said.

Missouri Couple Found Tied Up and Shot Dead After ICE Deportation

The couple’s 14-month-old daughter was found crying near their bodies.

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Masked ICE agents guide a handcuffed man.

A Guatemalan couple’s attempt to reunite following an ICE deportation ended with the two being shot to death in a sugarcane field in the country.

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and his wife, Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, were found gagged with their hands and feet bound, showing signs of physical trauma, St. Louis Public Radio reports. Their 14-month-old daughter, Giovanni, was found crying next to her mother, with signs of dehydration. She’s now recovering in a medical center.

“I felt that they took the thing I wanted most,” Rolando Pérez Paz, Pérez Paz’s brother, told STLPR. “I felt a huge pain because it was my brother, my sister-in-law—people that wanted to work, to fight.”

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Ronaldo were driving to their roofing jobs in April 2025 near their home in Overland, Missouri, when they were stopped by ICE agents, who emerged from an unmarked car and pulled them out of their white work van. The agents told them that there wasn’t a warrant for their arrests but that they were being detained for lacking legal status.

González de la Cruz initially stayed in Overland, giving birth to their daughter last year and working two manual labor jobs to support the couple’s three children. But financial pressures mounted, and she was afraid she would be detained and separated from her children despite an active asylum case, organizers with St. Louis immigrant rights group Fuerza, which she was working with, told STLPR. So she decided to self-deport to Guatemala with her children to join her husband.

The couple was reported missing in Guatemala on July 20 after attempting to register a motorcycle in a nearby town, Rolando Pérez Paz told the radio outlet. In the last few months, the family struggled with money and had trouble with violence and the federal government—issues that had led them to seek asylum in the U.S. in the first place.

An ICE spokesperson told the radio outlet that Nixon Pérez Paz had two convictions for drunk driving, but STLPR did not find any court records to confirm that account. The spokesperson also said that Nixon Pérez Paz had an open container charge in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2010, but prosecutors had dropped that.

“If immigration hadn’t picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive, and the children wouldn’t be going through this sorrow,” Ronaldo told the radio outlet. He’s now caring for his three young nieces but doesn’t know how to explain their parents’ deaths to them.

“Unfortunately, immigration—the [U.S.] government—doesn’t see that. It makes no difference to them.”

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Fox News Grills Trump on Who Exactly He’s Talking to in Iran

Trump can’t explain the most basic detail in his latest claim on the Iran war.

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Even Fox News is confused as to who exactly President Trump has been negotiating with in Iran.

President Trump claimed this week that he’s talking to Iran “right now,” but Iran’s foreign ministry has fervently denied that claim, saying it’s not interested in direct negotiations. When asked about the contradiction on Fox News Tuesday, Trump struggled to explain.

“We hear that you’re talking right now with leaders on Iran,” Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade said. “But Iran has come out publicly and said, ‘We’re not talking to the U.S.”

“Well, they just came out and said ‘We are talking’ a little while ago,” Trump interrupted.

“So could you tell me who you’re talking to, Mr. President?”

“For some reason, we can be in the midst of a beautiful discussion, and they’ll come out and say, ‘We’re not talking’ or ‘We didn’t discuss nuclear.’ Well, that’s all we discussed, because they’ll never have a nuclear weapon, they understand that,” Trump said, avoiding answering the direct question. “We’ve had some very good talks.”

He then went on to change the subject entirely, instead discussing recently deceased Senator Lindsey Graham’s insistence upon an Iran deal—surprising, if true, given the late senator’s violent, hawkish approach to foreign policy.

“He was very much a hawk … [even] he was somebody that said it was a good time to make a deal.… Lindsey liked war, to be honest with you.”

It does not inspire confidence when the president can’t confidently say who he has been in contact with while supposedly trying to negotiate an end to his increasingly unpopular and expensive war. This conversation came after a recent pause in violence in the region, and ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Tuesday—in which he most likely lobbied Trump to start bombing Iran again.

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