… At the Trump-centric Republican midterm convention last night in Dallas, Republicans offered up fear, paranoia, lies, false promises, and a hefty bribe to voters.
… NYT: “The photos plastered in the hallways were all of Trump. Jackets were bedazzled with his name. And the red hats dotting the audience on the floor of the convention hall were embroidered with MAGA, his indelible political slogan. And yet, the president and his Republican allies spent more time whipping up fears about the specter of socialism, communism and even anarchy than they did trumpeting the successes of his admin.”
… “As they took the stage at the party’s unusual midterm gathering in Dallas, amid growing Republican anxiety about the midterm elections, speaker after speaker focused on what they characterized as an urgent threat to American life: a Democratic Party they claimed had veered beyond its traditional liberal principles into a dangerous, un-American ideology.”
… “Democrats running for Congress were ‘evil.’ They were ‘communists and anarchists.’ And they wanted to turn the country into ‘a socialist hellscape.’ Trump has long been a master of the politics of fear, regularly stoking anxiety about immigration and crime. Now, as his party faces its most difficult political environment in years, the president and his supporters are attempting - once more - to channel fear into electoral victory.”
… Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to the crowd: “The radical left is relentless in their pursuit to remake America in the image of every socialist hellscape of the last century - to import the misery of failed workers’ paradises like the Soviet bloc, Caracas and Havana.”
… By the time Trump took the stage, at the end of the evening, the narrative of Democratic extremism had been woven into nearly every aspect of the 6-hour program. Trump:
“They want to take away health care for veterans. They want to steal your money for reparations. Our country doesn’t have that kind of money. They have the money for $5000 but they don’t have that kind of money. They want to punish you for crimes that happened a hundred years ago. They want to give it to the people who hate our country.”
"If the Republicans win the House and Senate, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the US for $5,000. We're making a fortune. So if the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000. It will be called the Trump Dividend. Congratulations."
"You have a neighboring state - New Mexico. We think it should be called New America. New America! The people love the idea."
"I think we should call the Hormuz Strait the Trump Strait. I should get something out of it. The Trump Strait."
"Oil will be going down as soon as we win the war with Iran."
"Canada very much wants to make a deal. They're dying to make a deal. But it's gonna be called Lake America."
“Whether it's wine, champagne, cars - everybody's got a weak spot. I won't tell you what my weak spot is.”
“Do I get credit for building a ballroom with my money? I’m the only one. I’m building the ballroom with no tax money. Zero tax dollars for the ballroom. But I get criticized. I’m giving you a ballroom free of charge.”
"We'll pass the Great Healthcare Plan to stop all govt payments to the big insurance companies and give the money directly to the people for you to go out and buy your own healthcare. You'll get much better healthcare and have money left over for yourselves.”
"Vote Republican and we will leave the world in our dust for generations to come."
… The part of the speech that got the most attention was his promise to hand out checks for $5,000 to every American, but only if Republicans win. I posted this on X this morning, which went viral:
“Last year, Trump promised $5,000 stimulus checks from DOGE cuts. You got 0. Trump promised $2,000 stimulus checks from tariffs. You got 0. Trump promised $1,000 checks from Obamacare cuts. You got 0. Trump promised $1.98 gas. You got $4+ gas. But now Trump now has more false promises.”
… Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) replied to my post: “‘Mexico will pay for the wall!’ Mexico paid nothing.”
… Axios: “It’s not the first time the president has suggested some sort of rebate for Americans from his admin’s policy actions. In July 2025 and again in Oct 2025, he proposed the possibility of tariff rebate checks of up to $2,000. Before that, in Feb 2025, Elon Musk floated the idea of $5,000 dividend checks from DOGE savings, an idea Trump later backed. None of those were ever issued.”
… “There are about 245 million adult US citizens. Giving each of them $5,000 would cost $1.2 trillion.”
… Former House Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good: “Sadly, most ‘conservatives’ don’t even know (or care) that the president doesn’t have the constitutional authority to spend money, or send out ‘dividend’ checks without Congress. But he said last night ‘only I can do it.’ Will post-conservative Republicans also try to defend Trump’s $5K ‘dividend’ socialist vote-buying scheme that would cost $1 trillion?”
… Palantir co-founder and Republican mega-donor Joe Lonsdale, who hosted a party with Don Jr. after the convention: “For the record, I am hugely in favor of winning the midterms, and love much about this admin, but am strongly against bread and circus bribes.”
… Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) was asked if he supported the scheme: “I would like to know how they would plan to pay for it - well over $1 trillion.”
… Politico: “The payout, which would need to be approved by Congress, would dwarf the amount distributed during the Covid pandemic and likely explode the deficit. Trump did not detail how the checks would be financed - only that the money would be limited to citizens and required to be spent in the US.”
… A GOP operative expressed skepticism, calling it “a desperate attempt to change the political mood.”
… “If the president followed through on such a plan, it would likely worsen inflation by further boosting consumer spending and supporting higher prices, which are already elevated due to the war in Iran. The dividend could also exacerbate a rise in longer-term borrowing costs for the US govt, which have been going up in part on fears the federal debt is growing unsustainable.”
… Fox contributor Jessica Tarlov on the MeidasTouch podcast with Ben: "Trump did have a platform, right? That's how he used to campaign. And now he just is like, ‘I'll pay you to like me. I know I can't get you to like me for any other reason, so I'm going to put cash in your hand.’”
… Fox host Bret Baier interviewed JD Vance after the speech: Q - “$5000 for every adult citizen, that's about $1.3 trillion. The critics will say the president is bribing voters and he's bankrupting the country. Vance: Tariffs have generated a lot of revenues. The president is saying, if you keep us in power, then you will share in some of the benefit of this incredible wealth that we are creating.”
… Vance’s answer was hit with a fact-check Community Note on X: “Annual tariff revenue (under $300B) cannot fund a $1.3T payout, and distributing funds requires congressional approval. Previous cash dividend promises were also never delivered, including the 2025 DOGE dividend and proposed $2,000 tariff rebates.”
… Nandita Bose, WH correspondent for Reuters: “FACT CHECK: Trump keeps talking about the arena being full and obsessing over capacity. It isn’t. The upper decks are empty, large stretches of the side sections remain sparsely filled, and even with Trump onstage the arena is clearly not at capacity.”
… Sen. John Fetterman recorded a video that was played at the convention where he praised Trump for helping the steel industry as well as Republican Dave McCormick, who he called a “great senator.” He told the Washington Sun after that he isn’t leaving the party: "I'm a lifelong Democrat who votes overwhelmingly with my party-and should the Senate flip in November, I will still be the 51st vote that I ran on."
(NOTUS just changed their name to Washington Sun)
… Irish Star: “Grindr, the world’s largest LGBTQ+ dating app, reportedly went down as the RNC’s midterm event began on Wed. According to Downdetector, the app reported several outages just as the event kicked off in Dallas ahead of the speech of Trump. The highest number of reported outages appeared to occur in and around the Dallas area.”
… Former Republican NY Congressman George Santos called the RNC the ‘Grindr Super Bowl’ in a video posted to X. “Let me tell you something, just come out the closet, boys. Come on, it’s fun! You can be gay and conservative.”
… Democrats reacted to the convention at an event called ‘Fighting for an Affordable America’ that they held in Dallas to counter-program the RNC:
Kendal Scudder, Chair of the TX Democratic Party: “The ramblings of an old man in a half-empty auditorium changed the minds of zero people.”
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA): “Republicans are obsessed with socialism and lying to the American public. We're focused on lowering the cost of gas, the groceries, and the food. And so, anyone that wants to be a part of that coalition, jump on board.”
Garcia: “Trump is a known liar. This is the biggest liar to ever serve in govt. The dividend is not happening. He promised a dividend on the tariffs. That didn't happen. He promised a dividend on DOGE. That didn't happen. He promised some strange new dividend from Air Force One. That never happened.”
Garcia: “There’s a group of Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors that are here in Dallas, and they’ve opened the Trump Epstein reading room here, which I had a chance to visit yesterday. And the survivors are saying that they are also disgusted that Todd Blanche is out there giving speeches while refusing criminal convictions, while refusing to release the rest of the files.
Rep. Madeline Dean (D-PA): “You can take a look at the arena last night and you can see the empty seats. He is weak. His numbers are plummeting.”
Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA): We have an opportunity to win in Nov and we will have both the power of the purse and the power of the gavel, and it is so important that people see us delivering for the American people in both of these ways: holding folks accountable - dragging these thieves into our committees.”
Q: “What specific policies are you going to bring foward? Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO): “We need to end this war which is costing now hundreds of billions of dollars in direct and indirect costs. We need to stop the corruption. Ending the trade wars. Repair the damage to our healthcare system.”
Dean was asked about Fetterman’s video: “I was disappointed with that stunt. What we have seen in his service as a senator is something very different than what I got to know. We can see in his work ethic that he's just not present. He doesn't participate.”
… Politico: “Senior Turning Point USA leaders were ‘livid’ when they first learned the convention was scheduled to take place on the anniversary of the killing of founder Charlie Kirk, according to two people familiar with the group. TPUSA was given no advance notice and weren’t consulted about the dates.”
… “Vance plans to call into ‘The Charlie Kirk Show’ during its live broadcast today to mark the anniversary. The call will come as many of TPUSA’s top brass skip the convention, including Kirk’s longtime right-hand man, Andrew Kolvet, who won’t be using their massive platform to amplify the convention’s message.”
… Kolvet: “I personally made the decision. I want to remember Charlie here, inside his studio and on the campus that he built. I want our influencers and our contributors to come here and be a part of remembering Charlie.”
… One Republican close to the Trump WH: “It’s a huge missed opportunity. This week we should be laser focused on two things: commemorating the run-up to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and hammering the Democrats in the run-up to 9/11 - not a half-assed convention.”
… MS NOW: “A few weeks ago, Trump announced a controversial new policy, seemingly out of nowhere: The president declared his intention to import foreign beef without imposing a tariff and below current market prices. The news was not widely applauded. The American beef industry wasn’t pleased, and neither were Republican lawmakers from Western and Midwestern states.”
… Eric Schlosser in a NYT OpEd:
“If American consumers knew where that beef was coming from, they might not want to eat it. The cuts of meat covered by Trump’s proclamation aren’t fresh sirloins, rib-eyes and filets. They’re lean beef trimmings that will be added to fattier American cuts to make ground beef.”
“They’re small chunks of frozen meat that could have been kept in cold storage overseas for years. They are the quintessence of generic industrial meat, imported here to be subsequently processed in massive grinders that combine pieces of tens of thousands of cattle from multiple countries, mainly into fast food hamburgers.”
… Trump said most of the beef is coming from Brazil. Schlosser:
“One of the worst food-safety scandals occurred in Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of beef. In 2017, the Brazilian federal police raided nearly 200 meatpacking plants after allegations that govt inspectors and politicians were being bribed to allow the sale of contaminated beef.
“Rotten meat treated with ascorbic acid and other chemicals to mask the contamination had been sold to hospitals and schools in Brazil and also exported. Executives at the Brazilian company JBS, the largest beef producer in the world, later admitted to bribing inspectors.”
… On Sept. 1, the EU announced that it was suspending meat imports from Brazil after the South American country “failed to guarantee its compliance with EU rules on the use of antimicrobial substances.”
… Me crossing beef off my shopping list …
… Axios: “The Trump admin is reshaping regulations to make data centers - and the fossil-fuel power fueling them - easier to build. The moves risk inflaming an already fierce and bipartisan backlash to data centers, the backbone of the AI boom. The EPA is considering a rule that could treat some temporary gas turbines as mobile equipment rather than stationary pollution sources, potentially making them easier to permit.”
… Natural Resources Defense Council’s John Walke, who is director of their clean air program: “We have been told by senior people at EPA that there is a pants-on-fire, hasty rulemaking proposal underway. It’s being driven squarely by concern for data centers.”
… This possible rule is on top of at least 3 others EPA has proposed or developed in the last year to ease permitting procedures or environmental regulations for AI infrastructure. The agency is proposing to:
Eliminate federal minimum requirements for public participation in permits for smaller pollution sources, leaving those decisions to state and local regulators.
Allow more construction to occur at data center sites before receiving permits.
Exempt power plants not connected to the electric grid - an increasingly common way to power data centers - from the EPA’s Acid Rain Program, a landmark program restricting sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide pollution.
After this is published, I get to suffer through another night of the Trumpalooza, this time featuring Mr. Charisma JD Vance with special guest Trump. Maybe Trump will offer to give everyone $10K tonight. I expect even more empty seats with Vance as the headliner.
RNC Chair Joe Gruters was hyping some “huge surprise guests” earlier this week on Fox. I guess that was Fetterman, whose one minute video had 14 cuts since he can’t read the script coherently that his Republican handlers wrote for him.
We had another great show yesterday on Uncovered, where we did a deep dive on Trump’s 9/11 stolen valor, Mamdani releasing evidence of Rudy’s 9/11 coverup, the moronic RNC convention disaster, Kushner and Witkoff’s disgraceful Russia trip, Canada trade war escalation, the latest Trump grifts and scams, and lots more. A link to the show is here. The last Bulletin is here.
Thank you to everyone who watches, reads, shares and subscribes!
… NYT: “Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander, 3 prominent brothers convicted of running a decades-long sex-trafficking scheme in NY earlier this year, have enlisted the lawyer Alan Dershowitz in their apparent pursuit of a pardon from Trump. They retained him
