Stephen Miller Scrambles to Blame Looming GOP Losses on Someone Else

Donald Trump told Republicans to vote as if he were on the November ballot. But Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, doesn’t want the whiff of that directive lingering as the party heads toward a likely brutal November upset.

“If the Republicans lose the midterms it’ll be because [Senate Majority Leader] John Thune didn’t get the SAVE America Act passed,” Miller wrote on X Tuesday, adding that the predicted loss coming for the conservative caucus “rests solely on John Thune’s shoulders.”

It’s easy to see why Trump’s deportation chief would uplift the SAVE America Act as an election cycle Hail Mary.

The original iteration of the SAVE America Act proposed numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, chief among them a requirement that voters bring either a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Critics argued that the mandate would have unduly restricted millions of Americans from voting, pointing out that half of the country’s population lacks a passport and, furthermore, that the legislation would have made it difficult for anyone who changed their name—including married women—to register at all.

Nonetheless, the White House heralded the voter restriction bill as a critical component to ensuring America’s election integrity and voter security. Trump went so far as to predicate his support for any other legislative efforts on the SAVE Act’s passage, repeatedly insisting that it should be Congress’s top priority for the year.

But the whole initiative came to a standstill over the summer when, after many failed efforts to pass the bill on its own, House Republicans tied it to the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act. That, in turn, has stalled the typically uncontroversial defense bill in the upper chamber.

Now the SAVE America Act is just one of 650 bills awaiting Senate action.

Meanwhile, Republicans are expecting some sorry losses during the midterms. Attention has recently shifted toward Alaska and Ohio—states that have historically been reliably red—and away from purple regions such as North Carolina, which Politico reported Tuesday has been perceived as a “money sink for Dems.”

President Donald Trump is personally making tens of millions off of the AI industry. 

In financial disclosures filed Tuesday, Trump revealed that he’d made a total of 1,156 securities transactions in the month of July, CNBC reported. The president purchased at least $43.6 million worth of shares and sold at least $35.6 million.  

The largest transactions were sales of Microsoft and Amazon shares on July 20, which totaled between $5 million and $25 million each. A few days later, Trump reported buying between $100,001 and $250,000 of Microsoft and between $1,001 and $15,000 of Amazon. 

It’s particularly disturbing considering that the president has emerged as a champion for artificial intelligence and data centers—an industry that Microsoft and Amazon have invested billions of dollars in. At the same time, these companies are paying straight into the president’s pockets for his various vanity projects. 

Also concerning: The filing revealed that the president sold between $250,001 and $500,000 of Northrop Grumman, an aerospace and defense company, on the same day he signed an executive order that would tighten supply chain requirements for defense contractors. 

The president’s trades totaled between $79 million and $270 million—down just slightly from June, when he traded shares worth between $78.1 million and $263.1 million. Trump has long maintained that trading is done by independent advisers on his behalf and that his portfolio is managed without his input. 

I guess we’ll just have to take his word for it, as Trump continues to get richer and richer. The president’s 2025 financial disclosure showed that he made more than $2 billion during his first year back in the White House, thanks to cryptocurrency, foreign real estate, stock trading, and more. In 2025, the president bought or sold stocks 21,000 times with companies he talks about publicly, but his initial self-reporting of his trading last year showed only 800 transactions—way less than what he actually did.

President Trump couldn’t stop raving about his planned White House ballroom while taking questions from reporters alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy Tuesday at the United Nations. 

Trump was bragging about “one of the papers reporting” that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to the White House later this week was “the hottest ticket that they’ve seen in a long time.”

“Almost as hot as when Zelenskiy comes into town,” Trump said to laughs, to which Zelenskiy quipped, “I’m glad,” as Trump chuckled and playfully patted the Ukrainian president’s knee.  

Trump lamented the fact that his White House ballroom was not ready yet, otherwise he could have hosted 2,000 people for the occasion. When a reporter asked if Trump would bring Zelenskiy to the ballroom for a future visit, Trump replied, “Well, we might have that, yes.… It’s under budget and ahead of schedule.” 

Throughout the exchange, Zelenskiy was struggling not to roll his eyes or look annoyed. It’s completely understandable why, as the Ukrainian leader is in the midst of leading a war against Russia’s invasion of his country and needs Trump’s support. However, Trump is more concerned about his own vanity projects, focusing much of his time and speeches on his ballroom and other unnecessary construction in Washington, D.C. 

It’s a sign that Trump’s cognitive decline is getting worse, as he is increasingly “obsessed with things that reflect glory on him,” as Dr. John Gartner, a former assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, told The Daily Beast in June. And no one is stopping Trump for wasting his time (or taxpayer dollars) on these types of projects, least of all the Supreme Court. It seems that Trump is using his remaining time in office to stroke his own ego, defying any attempts to check his power. 

President Trump’s long, dramatic relationship with billionaire Elon Musk seems to be back on good terms, as the president just bought and sold tens of thousands of dollars in the tech tycoon’s SpaceX rocket company.

Financial disclosures the president signed earlier this month reveal that he purchased between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of SpaceX shares on July 10 and sold between $1,001 and $15,000 ⁠in shares on July 17. SpaceX holds multiple federal contracts and is set to make millions of dollars off of them—yet Trump is allowed to buy and sell shares because he claims that his investments are managed by an independent third party.

This also reveals that even as Trump and Musk’s personal and political relationship has been exceptionally rocky, their financial one remains strong.

The president made over 1,100 stock trades this July, totaling between $79 million and $270 million, according to a CNBC analysis. The biggest transactions were sales of up to $25 million in Amazon and Microsoft, as well as smaller sales in Oracle and Nvidia. Previous presidents would either divest or use blind trusts or diversified funds to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest. But Trump is well past that.

Even Donald Trump’s most loyal political disciples are jumping off the president’s sinking ship.

Florida Representative and Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds dropped all mentions of Trump from his campaign website Tuesday, peeling himself away from the president’s wake for the first time.

Donalds’s campaign materials were previously littered with mentions of Trump, according to recent versions of the page saved by the Internet Archive Project. Prior to the change, Donalds wore the president’s endorsement like a badge. “Chip in to Support Trump Endorsed Byron Donalds,” read the top of Donalds’s website.

“ENDORSED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP!” the page used to emphasize in a bright yellow banner. “TRUMP-ENDORSED Proven Conservative Fighter. BYRON DONALDS.”

Donalds also removed an image of himself and his wife, Erika Donalds, standing beside Trump.

Instead, Trump’s full-throated endorsement was severely downgraded, turning into just another voice in a large choir of conservative support backing Donalds. “RUN, BYRON, RUN!” the side-scrolling placard currently reads, quoting the president’s 2025 comments in which he reworked a famous line from Forrest Gump to support Donalds’s candidacy.

Donalds also refashioned his campaign priorities, shifting them away from MAGA talking points. The list previously mentioned “Enact[ing] the Trump Agenda” as Donalds’s chief priority, reported The Miami Herald. Today, that line only mentioned affordability.

Before, the second line item promised that Donalds would “Fight Illegal Immigration.” Now, Donalds pledges to “stop taxpayer handouts to illegal immigration”—though the promise’s placement has been demoted to a tangential issue under his seventh listed priority, “Law and Order.”

The three-term Floridian lawmaker had done quite a lot to curry the president’s favor. Most notably, he voted against certifying the 2020 election vote in Arizona and Pennsylvania. He has repeatedly spread the MAGA conspiracy that there was election fraud in those states, long after state officials found no evidence of fraud.

In the years since the far right’s attempted insurrection on Capitol Hill, Donalds has refused to declare whether he would have certified the 2020 results if he were in former Vice President Mike Pence’s shoes. When asked at an Axios event in 2024 how he would handle the situation if he were the vice president during a future presidential election, Donalds said he would not certify the results if he believed state officials had violated election laws.

That same year, Donalds’s ex-wife Bisa Hall spoke out publicly against him for grandstanding for the president, claiming that Donalds had always been “very opportunistic” and that Donalds’s willful participation as a “poster child” for the MAGA movement “makes some people feel better about Trump.”

If that’s true, then Donalds’s break means Trump may soon have little to convince the masses that there’s anything good about him at all.