Sunday Morning Message

Hey Meidas Mighty,

It’s Ben Meiselas here, co-founder of the MeidasTouch Network, with our Sunday morning coffee post.

As you know, this is my favorite post of the week. It’s where we get to spend some time together over a morning coffee, look back at the past week, and talk about what’s ahead.

I’m drinking a black coffee this morning, as always. I’m actually typing this while I go for a walk around the neighborhood. Out here in Los Angeles it’s about 58 to 60 degrees right now, so it’s nice and cool.

A lot of the time when I’m preparing my videos, I do my research while walking, just to get out of the house.

I think best on these walks.

Before I get into it, I want to thank all of our subscribers

here on Substack.

You’ve seen the impact the MeidasTouch Network is having, so if you’re able to, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today.

Where is Donald Trump?

Nobody has really seen Donald Trump in public since Wednesday. Other than a pre-recorded interview here or there, he has disappeared. Whether he’s hiding, whether it’s health related, whether he’s scared, who knows.

What we do know is that his presidency is in full collapse and he is clearly not handling the historic defeat in the midterms.

This past week Scott Colom was officially called the winner in Mississippi, giving Democrats 55 seats in the Senate. And here at the MeidasTouch Network, we made the call two days ago in Alaska that Mary Peltola will win her race. She’s sitting at basically 50% of the vote, more than 10,000 votes ahead, and she has more votes than both Dan Sullivans combined. We’re confident she wins this one without it even going to ranked choice. That gives Democrats 56 seats in the Senate.

Pretty historic.

He’s hiding, but he’s still posting

Trump may not be seen in public, but that hasn’t stopped him from posting about anything and everything. Ballrooms. Seizing the East Potomac Golf Course. His obsession with Governor Gavin Newsom, who he keeps calling “Newscum.” And then there were the bizarre images of himself hugging Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s son Jim, with some story about Trump personally bringing the boy’s memory back.

What he has not done is say one single word about the nationwide ground stop that started Friday until just moments ago.

America grounded, Trump silent

On Friday, the FAA halted departing flights across the entire country for nearly five hours. It was the longest nationwide halt to air travel since September 11, 2001. About 9,200 flights were canceled Friday, and roughly 12,000 flights never got completed.

Yesterday there were more than 6,400 more cancellations and more than 8,000 delays as airlines tried to dig out.

Tens of thousands of people were stranded in airports.

And Trump? Nothing. Not a word. Not even on Truth Social until moments ago when he finally chimed in to blame… Biden. Zero leadership.

Just pathetic.

Instead we got that horrific press conference Friday night with Sean Duffy and Markwayne Mullin. Duffy’s explanation was that a contractor swapping old copper lines for fiber at a remote FAA site installed a new router that started flooding the system, overloading the older communications network and bringing the whole thing down.

The Wall Street Journal then reported that investigators traced it to a newly installed router at an FAA facility in El Dorado, Arkansas, along with a radar site in Amarillo, Texas. A single router.

That’s how fragile they’ve let this system become, and Duffy himself admitted he still doesn’t know exactly what the fault was or whether it could happen again.

I’ll be honest with you. From the FAA and air traffic control folks I’ve been hearing from, a lot of them don’t believe the full story is being told.

Was it connected to the new AI system called SMART that Duffy has been pushing? Was it something else entirely? I don’t know yet.

But here’s the thing. Even if you accept their story at face value, they are admitting they were negligent and reckless.

They pushed an installation onto a critical national system without planning for what would happen. They screwed it up. By their own account.

We need to be a serious country again

That’s what I really want the American people to understand. This Trump regime is utterly incompetent. Their maliciousness is matched only by their incompetence and recklessness, and it has made our country look so foolish.

As I keep saying in my reports, we need a baseline of seriousness. We need to be a serious country. Under this regime we are unserious and dangerous, and the American people don’t want to live like that anymore.

We need serious leaders back in power. I expect that in the coming weeks Trump’s approval rating will be in the 20s, because people despise this behavior.

And look at what else they did this week.

You saw the Republican mafia protection racket in action, with

Trump’s DOJ and the White House Counsel trying to intimidate Democratic lawmakers like Congressman Robert Garcia, Congressman Jamie Raskin, and Senator Richard Blumenthal for planning oversight of Trump’s corruption in the 120th Congress.

Democratic leaders shot it down immediately and made it clear they will not be intimidated. We are going to see the most aggressive oversight imaginable.

Maybe that’s part of why Trump is hiding. He’s struggling to come to terms with the fact that the most aggressive investigations into two years of his criming are coming, and this regime of incompetent people is completely unprepared for what’s about to hit them.

Selling out our allies

There’s a lot more. Ukraine is still dealing with SpaceX throttling its access to Starlink and Starshield, and when Ukraine asks what’s going on, they’re told it’s “technical issues.” No real answers.

Then you had Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff fly to Moscow and come back to brief Ukraine and Europe on what Russia wants: a reshaped European security architecture where Finland leaves NATO and NATO gets pushed back to its pre-1997 borders. It’s basically an attempt to restore the Warsaw Pact, and Europe rejected it immediately.

Russian state media even bragged that Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev gifted them Team Russia jackets, before quietly retracting the story.

I can’t wait to see Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff called before Congress.

Trump’s son-in-law and his real estate buddy have no business representing our country on the world stage, and they have enriched themselves every step of the way.

Follow the Nvidia money

We also learned that Trump’s portfolio was actively trading Nvidia in August, including a sale of up to $1 million on August 21, all while his administration controlled the rules on where Nvidia’s chips could be sold.

Nvidia has since lost more than a quarter of its value as the Jensen Huang scandal exploded.

Then there’s Howard Lutnick. His sons run Cantor Fitzgerald, which held a huge Nvidia position and has done billions of dollars of business across Nvidia’s AI world. At the same time, according to reporting, Lutnick repeatedly resisted cracking down on companies suspected of smuggling Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips to China. Even Trump’s own Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, publicly blamed Lutnick’s Commerce Department for failing to enforce the export controls and said it probably cost us years of advantage.

That was his job as Commerce Secretary.

Instead, America’s lead in semiconductors was put at risk, and

in my opinion it was about greed. They sold out our country to fatten the portfolios of Trump and the Epstein class.

I think over the coming weeks we’re going to learn a lot more, not just about Nvidia, but about this whole network of Trump oligarchs who function like a transnational racketeering ring, enriching themselves while they damage the country.

Iran is escalating

I’ll be doing a report on this later this morning, but overnight Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says it struck a U.S. radar at a base in Bahrain with six drones, its second claimed strike there in three days, in retaliation for U.S. strikes.

Bahrain put out its first nationwide threat alerts since September. Iran is also claiming it’s shooting down more American drones. Iran is losing patience with Trump’s on-again, off-again strikes, and I think we’ll see them keep escalating.

And now there are all these reports acting surprised that oil coming out of the Strait of Hormuz is way down.

Of course it is.

I’ve been saying this all along, and we need real facts here, not fake numbers. Before the war it was around 20 million barrels a day. Now it’s around 8 million barrels a day sneaking out, including ship-to-ship transfers.

Meanwhile we keep draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the salt caverns are being badly damaged.

So to recap: Trump is missing in action while our airports can’t function and the Middle East heats up.

The arsonists want a bigger budget

And now the arsonists who burned down our institutions are begging for money.

Duffy wants $50 billion. They already got $25 billion for airports from Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. They got $12.5 billion for air traffic control in Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill.”

Stop pouring tens of billions into ICE and use it here. Abolish ICE!

And by the way, didn’t Donald Trump claim he brought in $22 trillion? If we’re really in a golden age with $22 trillion pouring in, then take that money and fix the FAA.

Most importantly, the first dollar should go to air traffic controllers.

Pay them what they deserve, starting with the raise Congress already funded for them.

That money should be in their paychecks, not dangled over their heads while they work in terrible conditions. Take care of our air traffic controllers.

Like a cornered rat

At this point the Trump regime has zero credibility. They really are in collapse. But like a cornered rat, they are still dangerous, and you’re going to see them lash out. That’s why we need to keep up the pressure now more than ever.

It’s also why what we’re building at the MeidasTouch Network has to keep growing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: right now is the most important time for our growth.

Right before an election, people get buried under political text messages, nasty ads, bad faith actors, and endless distortion. It becomes a cacophony of political junk.

What matters now is that we fortify our minds against that ahead of time.

We build the foundations before election season ever starts, so that we lead with our values and our principles. Then when the election comes, it’s easy to know who to vote for and how to think about it, because we aren’t caught up in the popularity contest or in who can dump the most money into a race.

That’s what we’re going to keep doing here at the MeidasTouch Network.

We’re building the foundation for generational change.

You’ve seen how MeidasTouch interviewed candidates from all across the country before anyone knew their names.

So many of them credit this network for giving them attention when nobody else believed in their campaigns or believed Democrats could win in their states.

What we’re building here matters.

So I’m finishing up my coffee and heading back to make some videos.

We hope you’ll subscribe, and if you can, become a paid subscriber. Spread the word about the MeidasTouch Network.

We are so grateful for all of your support.

Let’s keep building together, and let’s keep growing, everybody.

Ben