Trump Tries to Raise Money With Fake “Failed Application” Scam Email

President Trump’s campaign is using a misleading email to solicit donations by fooling people into thinking an application failed.

The Trump-Vance campaign’s email to supporters starts with the subject line “Respectfully, I’m sorry.” The email then tells them that their “Trump Inner Circle” application “FAILED because of technical difficulties.”

“Was this a technical error? Your application was denied!” the email reads, before directing the recipient to click a button labeled “TRY AGAIN HERE.”

The email, which was first reported on by MeidasTouch News, ends with a message that Trump is “expecting to see your name” on his “roster before the doors close at midnight tonight,” creating a sense of urgency to fix or complete the application. But there is no application. Clicking the button just redirects to a fundraising page asking for a contribution.

It looks like a typical email scam, down to the bright red color used on the “TRY AGAIN HERE” button. But the email address it’s coming from is legitimate: contact@win.donaldjtrump.com, and it’s likely to dupe a lot of Trump supporters, particularly older people who think they need to pay up. It’s not the first time Trump has done this.

In December, Trump sent out a fundraising email warning recipients that Democrats would steal their “tariff rebate checks” if they didn’t donate money to him within the hour. Republicans as a whole have often raked in cash from older people, even when they have dementia, with misleading tactics.

Trump has already raised a massive war chest, with many Republicans worrying that he’s hoarding much-needed funds. He’s not even engaging with GOP members of Congress on Capitol Hill that much. These fundraising emails appear to be yet another grift.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is begging a federal judge to let him off the hook for a $1,000-a-day fine.

This fine is Blanche’s latest setback in a series of back-and-forths surrounding a lawsuit brought against him by journalist Katie Phang, who has accused the Department of Justice of failing to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Phang sued the DOJ in April for a “brazen, shocking, and ongoing violation” of the law, which President Donald Trump reluctantly signed in November.

Despite the Justice Department’s repeated assertions that the investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and subsequent release of files has been conducted with “an unprecedented commitment to transparency,” millions of files are still either missing or redacted.

In June, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan ordered Blanche to produce previously redacted materials from the Epstein files, including FBI notes from interviews with a woman alleging that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s when she was 13 years old, as well as email exchanges with Epstein regarding a “torture video” and the identities of Epstein’s potential co-conspirators.

Sullivan gave Blanche until July 2 to produce the materials. When the acting attorney general failed to do so, Phang suggested a daily $1,000 fine until he complied.

Blanche lashed out Monday in a melodramatic brief attacking Phang’s argument as “outlandish,” “absurd,” and “hyperbolic rhetoric seeking to impose punitive sanctions” on the Department of Justice. He called her lawsuit “sensational and unsubstantiated,” despite the reality that her entire argument is based on cold, hard facts.

Phang’s ongoing lawsuit is yet another headache for Blanche, whose scheme to secure a permanent promotion to attorney general has not exactly been smooth sailing. After days of tense confirmation hearings in the Senate, an uncomfortable meeting with Epstein survivors, and hundreds of Blanche’s former colleagues opposing his nomination, $1,000 a day just might drive him over the edge.

Too bad. Let’s see the money.

Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon isn’t just running out of weapons as the war on Iran intensifies—it’s also running out of money.

The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon is facing an upcoming budget deficit caused directly by President Trump’s war on Iran, forcing it to cut training, maintenance, and military preparations. Hegseth has also not been transparent or timely about the ultimate costs of the war, leading to more confusion and disarray.

“We need to know what we’re purchasing and why we’re purchasing it,” Democratic Representative Betty McCollum, ranking member of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, told the Post, noting that other Pentagon officials were “very concerned” about the lack of information they were receiving.

The House is set to vote on a $73 billion defense package this week, more than the $67 billion the administration requested to help it out of the hole it’s dug. That request has not been well received, as most Democrats oppose any new funding for the Iran war.

This news also comes as the U.S. is dealing with a dwindling stockpile of munitions, contributing to the administration’s financial requests.

It’s absurd that the Pentagon is running out of money when its budget for this year was $1 trillion, with the Trump administration already requesting $1.5 trillion for 2027—a record-setting amount. They’re stacking up bills with your taxpayer dollars to go deeper into a war that the vast majority of the country does not support.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday overturned a lower court ruling that freed Columbia student and pro-Palestinian protester Mohsen Mahdawi from ICE custody.

A Second Circuit panel, made up of one George W. Bush judge and two Donald Trump first-term appointees, determined that Mahdawi should not have been released from ICE custody in 2025. They argued that the Vermont-based federal judge that made the initial ruling lacked jurisdiction to do so.

The panel concluded that only an immigration court could oversee Mahdawi’s detention challenge, as the case was inextricably linked to his deportation suit.

Mahdawi was arrested by masked agents in April 2025 during his scheduled citizenship interview. He later told ABC News that he felt the appointment was a “trap.”

His detention was the result of an aggressive pressure campaign fronted by State Secretary Marco Rubio to push the West Bank refugee out of the country. Rubio at one point argued that Mahdawi’s presence in the U.S. could “potentially undermine” U.S. foreign policy on the basis that his pro-Palestinian advocacy could create “adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Mahdawi grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank, where most of his family remains. He has been outspoken about his experiences growing up in the occupied region, describing the murders of his friends and loved ones by Israeli forces, and the violence he experienced when he was shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier at the age of 15.

He co-founded Columbia University’s Palestinian Student Union alongside detained (and freed) peer Mahmoud Khalil, another legal U.S. permanent resident who was shipped to an ICE center in Louisiana last year shortly after being ripped away from his pregnant wife by plainclothes ICE agents.

U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford in Vermont, who released Mahdawi after two weeks’ detention last year, ruled at the time that the 35-year-old enjoyed the same First Amendment rights as U.S. citizens. In Trump’s America, that is apparently not the case.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump is distancing himself from Capitol Hill at a time when his Congressional allies need him most.

The president seemingly does not care that Congress’s long August recess is mere days away, or that the break will force Republicans to head into midterms woefully ill equipped to impress voters.

When asked about Trump’s current engagement on the Hill, a person close to him told Politico Playbook Tuesday that it was currently at “zero.”

Trump “doesn’t care about anything beyond SAVE, Iran, and the ballroom,” another White House ally told the newsletter.

That’s left Republicans in the lurch. Without Trump’s help to ram through key legislation before midterms, incumbent conservatives will have to rely on weak ad hominem attacks to whittle down the predicted Democratic advantage.

Michigan Representative Lisa McClain, the GOP conference chair, told Politico that her party’s midterm tagline will rely on framing Democrats as crazy—as opposed to advertising Republican candidates on their own slim merits.

“We voted for capitalism,” McClain told Playbook. “We voted to lower your taxes: every Democrat voted to raise your taxes, and they are crazy. They want communism. They hate this country. They hate what this country stands for. That’s crazy.”

But Trump can’t even get behind that. When asked if the White House had bought into the agreed-upon message, McClain told Politico: “No.”

“We need to use it, and then when we think we’ve exhausted it, we need to use it some more,” McClain said.

Trump hasn’t had many wins in his year and a half back in office, either. So far through his second term, the president has failed to resurrect the economy or adequately address the cost of living crisis, inflamed long-standing U.S. alliances, repeatedly tested the rule of law, attempted to create a slush fund for his far-right allies with taxpayer funds, and started another wildly unpopular war in the Middle East—all while grifting billions of dollars in the process.

In the meantime, he’s fixated on his White House ballroom renovation and his highly controversial voter ID bill, the SAVE America Act, which even House Republicans have dropped as a lost cause.