Trump Team Blocked Effort to Convince Alleged Abuser to Quit Midterms

President Donald Trump reportedly shut down attempts to get Representative Max Miller, who is accused of abusing his daughter and ex-wife, to end his reelection campaign.

Politico reports that Trump’s team asked Ohio Republicans last week not to publicly pressure Miller to drop out of the race, because the White House believed he would refuse to do so. Before the president got involved, other Republicans and some White House officials were urging Miller to leave the race.

“They basically told us to back off,” one Ohio Republican told Politico, “and let the voters decide.”

White House officials told GOP leaders and other Ohio Republicans that Miller’s determination to continue his reelection campaign would nullify efforts to get him to drop out, and then those leaders would have to defend Miller and his campaign against Democratic attacks from his challenger Brian Poindexter.

The deadline for Miller to drop out was Monday at 4 p.m. State Republican Party leaders would have to have held a meeting two days before that to discuss his replacement. Republicans reportedly considered holding such a meeting in order to pressure Miller to drop out, but after hearing from the White House, they abandoned that effort.

Now they are stuck defending Miller, whose seat is supposed to be solidly Republican. His former father-in-law is Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, who has backed up his daughter’s abuse allegations and said Miller is unfit to serve. Ohio’s other senator, Republican Jon Husted, has called for Miller to resign and end his reelection bid. Miller has defiantly refused.

Miller is accused of beating and burning his ex-wife Emily Moreno, fracturing his young daughter’s collarbone, holding her beloved stuffed bunny hostage, and sharing an inappropriate photo of her, among other numerous allegations. Meanwhile, Poindexter, a union ironworker, is seeing a surge of interest in his campaign to oust Miller from a seat once considered out of reach for Democrats.

This video of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may just be the grossest thing you see all day.

Hegseth just took the criticism that he acts like a little kid “playing army” to a whole new level.

At the renaming ceremony for the Joint Base Lindsey Graham Monday, Hegseth was caught on camera wiping his nose and then running that same hand through his hair.

This clip hits different considering that in 2019, Hegseth laughed on air about not washing his hands for 10 years, saying, “Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them, therefore, they are not real.”

The humiliating moment comes at a tough time for the secretary, politically.

Harry Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, reported Sunday that Hegseth’s approval rating had hit the “lowest of the low” among his floundering administration colleagues.

“Twenty-two points underwater, and this has been something that’s been going on throughout the entire administration. He has been underwater in every single poll that I could find. That is his job disapproval rating being above his job approval rating, and Iran has not helped,” Enten said.

Enten pointed out that Hegseth’s negative-22-point approval rating was significantly lower than former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s seven-point approval rating in August 2006, shortly before the midterm elections that year.

Rumsfeld was forced to resign after Democrats swept control of the House. Now it seems that our snotty secretary could be headed for a similar fate.

President Donald Trump dozed off during the signing ceremony for his executive order changing the childhood vaccine schedule Monday.

The ceremony started off like many others in the Oval Office: Trump making some wild claims flanked by other White House officials and a guest. In this case, Trump was rambling about vaccines alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, right-wing podcaster and influencer Jayme Franklin, and White House adviser and deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

“I saw this early on and I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a, a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s, uh, body. And bad things happen in many, too many cases,” Trump said.

But shortly after that, Trump began to drift off, even as speakers such as Kennedy and Bhattacharya directly looked at and addressed him. While the NIH director was speaking, Trump appeared to fully fall asleep, his head leaning down on his right side, before catching himself.

A few minutes later, when taking questions from the press, Trump answered a question about escalation in the Iran war while sounding hoarse and fatigued.

The executive order itself is fully based on right-wing conspiracies and misinformation about vaccinating children, drawing from disproven claims about a link between vaccines and autism (which Kennedy is famous for pushing) and the supposed harm caused by combining certain vaccines into fewer shots, which the government’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says is completely safe as of this writing. Meanwhile, the U.S. is experiencing a 35-year record high for measles, with more cases of the disease in the last 18 months than in the previous 25 years combined.

President Donald Trump’s sweeping mass deportation scheme is completely crushing the U.S. court system—and that’s by design, Politico reported Sunday.

On July 8, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement published a two-page memo expanding its policy on mandatory detention without bond to apply not only to immigrants who were caught illegally crossing the U.S. border, but to any undocumented immigrant.

Under the new policy, every undocumented immigrant is treated as someone “seeking” to enter the U.S., even if they have lived here for years, have families, hold jobs, and are in the process of seeking citizenship. Previous administrations have never applied this rule to immigrants already in the United States.

The result was an unprecedented surge on the legal system, as judges scrambled to hear thousands of detainees’ cases before ICE could whisk them away to other states.

Judge Fred Biery in the Western District of Texas told Politico that his courthouse typically sees 1,500 lawsuits every year—but as of May, they’d already hit 4,000 cases. “We’ve never seen anything like this in my career,” he told Politico.

Since ICE’s new policy on mandatory detention without bond was implemented, 469 judges have ruled that it is unlawful, while just 54 have sided with the Trump administration. Judges have ruled against detentions without bond more than 16,000 times in the last year.

“The third branch of government is saying no. We’re not going to do it this way,” Biery said.

Judge Troy Nunley, the chief judge in the Eastern District of California, told Politico that the strain has been felt by judges and court staff alike. “All of our judges, we were up in the wee hours of the morning doing these cases because we had never seen these before. It was all hands on deck,” he said.

In 2021, Nunley’s court saw just four immigration habeas cases. In May alone, his court saw 675. The judge has had to pull in other jurists from Hawaii and California to help shoulder the burden.

All over the country, the courts are pushing back, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz told Politico. Until July 1, Schiltz was the chief of Minnesota’s federal district court. “The judiciary is the glue that’s holding the country together,” he said. “I do believe that’s true right now.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has moved to fast-track hundreds of thousands of asylum applicants directly into deportation proceedings without interviewing them. The government has also rapidly expedited the removal of immigrant children.

President Donald Trump’s repeated attempts to punish former Olympian David Hearn on the made-up vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool may backfire.

The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, was forced to drop the felony charges against Hearn on July 31 due to a lack of evidence, faulting Trump’s handpicked contractor for a shoddy renovation instead. But on Sunday, Trump was still pushing his false claim that Hearn actively vandalized the pool’s lining, claiming on Truth Social that a National Park Service career employee, “a highly credible witness,” watched Hearn “‘violently’ ripping and tugging at the Pool’s somewhat delicate coating.”

Hearn’s lawyers—Norm Eisen of Democracy Defenders Fund, Mary Dohrmann of Washington Litigation Group, and Steve Levin of Steptoe LLP—said in a statement Monday that they aren’t going to take “continued harassment” from the president.

“The government is continuing to attack an innocent man. Our first filing in the case on July 10 included photographic evidence from before Mr. Hearn touched the Reflecting Pool proving that he caused no damage,” the lawyers told Mediaite. “Our other filings provided even more proof. Finally, the U.S. Attorney’s own motion on July 31 admitted the damage was caused by a ‘botched installation and not vandalism.’ We are reviewing all legal remedies, including for this continued harassment. It is outrageous.”

This means that Hearn could sue Trump and the Department of Justice over the false claims, which the DOJ have already disavowed in court. There are a lot of unanswered questions over how Pirro’s office secured an indictment against Hearn in the first place with such faulty evidence. She later blamed Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for deliberately misleading her office about Hearn’s actions.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent reports that Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are looking to open an investigation into how Hearn was charged and demand documents from the Justice and Interior Departments relating to that decision. Hearn’s lawyers are also seeking access to transcripts of the federal grand jury proceedings. Trump’s tantrum over the failed Reflecting Pool renovations may soon turn into a big legal headache for him and his administration.