Raw Story

North Carolina Senate leader Phil Berger, one of the state's most powerful Republicans, faces a historic political collapse after trailing Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page by just two votes in Tuesday's primary. Berger held enormous advantages: Trump's endorsement, millions in campaign funding, and establishment Republican backing. He has served as Senate president pro tempore since 2011. Page, raising only $45,000, ran as an anti-establishment outsider, arguing Berger had become too comfortable in Raleigh and too insulated from constituents while serving the donor class. The razor-thin margin virtually guarantees legal challenges. In a year when political establishments face voter backlash, Page's populist message resonated. The winner of this Republican primary in the right-leaning district is expected to win November's general election.

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The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, or MRFF, has received over 110 complaints from service members across all military branches regarding commanders promoting apocalyptic Christian theology surrounding the Iran war. Complaints came from more than 40 units at 30+ military installations between Saturday and Monday. One commander told non-commissioned officers the war was "part of God's divine plan," citing the Book of Revelation and claiming President Trump was "anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon." MRFF President Mikey Weinstein noted commanders expressed "unrestricted euphoria" about the conflict fulfilling fundamentalist Christian End Times prophecy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has elevated Christian nationalism theology within the military and attends White House Bible studies led by pastor Ralph Drollinger, who teaches that supporting Israel is biblically mandated.

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President Donald Trump was reportedly so hell-bent on trying to stop lawmakers from revealing the relationship he had with Jeffrey Epstein that he tried to poach a Republican enemy's staff.

Trump apparently wanted to stop Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and his team. Massie was pushing legislation to prompt the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files and the trove of documents connected to the late financier and convicted child sex offender, according to The Daily Beast.

The president reportedly aimed to disrupt Massie, who had co-sponsored the legislation with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA).

"As the House moved toward a vote on releasing the Epstein files last summer and fall, the White House and top Trump allies launched an effort to forestall it that lawmakers told me was unprecedented in its intensity and scope," according to The Atlantic.

"Massie called it a '360-pressure campaign,' one felt not just by him and his staff but anyone associated with him," The Atlantic reported. "One tactic he had not experienced before: Some of his key staff members were suddenly offered more prestigious jobs in the Trump administration or more lucrative jobs in the private sector—the idea being that if Massie no longer had a full staff, he couldn’t pursue ambitious legislation."

Massie revealed several situations that caused him to pause.

"Massie recalled asking an employee who, a few weeks before the vote, had received an employment offer that would double his salary: 'Did it ever occur to you that they might be offering you this job to basically make me less effective?' He said the young man sheepishly replied: 'That’s what my mom said.' He turned down the offer and finished writing the bill," according to The Atlantic.

The Republican lawmaker has also signaled that he has felt unsafe during the process to release the files.

"I’ve p---ed off enough billionaires who are clearly amoral people that I might have shortened my expected lifespan,” he told The Atlantic.

President Donald Trump appeared to excommunicate two MAGA heavyweights on Monday night during an exclusive interview with reporter Rachael Bade.

In the interview, Trump hit back at Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, two of his most staunch media allies, over their criticisms of his decision to strike Iran alongside Israel over the weekend. The president's comments came at a time when his supporting coalition appears deeply fractured over the strikes.

"I think that MAGA is Trump — MAGA’s not the other two,” Trump told Bade, referring to Kelly and Carlson. “MAGA wants to see our country thrive and be safe. And MAGA loves what I’m doing — every aspect of it … This is a detour that we have to take in order to keep our country safe and keep other countries safe, frankly.”

Early Saturday morning, U.S. and Israeli forces bombed several sites around Iran. Israel struck places where Iran's military and political leadership were located, which killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the brutal dictator who had ruled the country since 1989. The U.S. struck multiple Iranian ballistic and nuclear missile sites, according to reports.

The Trump administration has offered up several reasons for conducting the strikes, but some lawmakers on both sides of the aisle remain unconvinced that the strikes were necessary, even though they celebrated the death of Khamenei.

Read the entire interview by clicking here.

Recently, Steve Bannon told an audience:

“And I will tell you right now, as God is my witness, if we lose the midterms … some in this room are going to prison — myself included.”

Now, it looks like Donald Trump and the people around him are seriously considering declaring an emergency to let them seize control of this November’s elections, according to reporting in the Washington Post:

“Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”

Trump and the lickspittles and criminals he’s surrounded himself with are in a panic. If Democrats take the House and/or Senate in this November’s elections, they’ll have the power of subpoena so the regime’s crimes and corruption will be laid out for everybody to see. Some could even go to prison, including Trump himself.

He’s been basically screaming, “Do something!!!” at Republicans for the past year. It started publicly with his demanding that Texas and then other red states further gerrymander their elections to reduce the number of Democrats in the House.

In red states they’re purging voters in Blue cities from the rolls like there’s no tomorrow, and the GOP is trying to recruit “election observers” to challenge signatures on mail-in ballots on an industrial level. As reporter Greg Palast pointed out, this is how Trump took the White House in 2024; if it hadn’t been for over 4 million (mostly Black) fully qualified US citizens being purged or having their ballots rejected after technical challenges, Kamala Harris would be our president today.

But given how badly Trump’s doing in the polls today, even all these efforts don’t look like they’ll be enough to keep the House and Senate in Republican hands.

So now Trump toadies like Jerome Corsi (the creator of the Birther movement and the Swift Boat slurs, who’s been a guest on my program multiple times) have an idea: just imitate what Putin, Orbán, Hitler, and other dictators have done to hang onto power when they get unpopular: declare an emergency and use it to rig the election.

Yesterday, the Post detailed how MAGA-aligned activists are now openly discussing manufacturing or exaggerating a national emergency to justify Trump’s agents in the federal government to interfere in this November’s elections.

These aren’t fringe anonymous trolls on some obscure message board; they’re people operating in proximity to the president of the United States. Corsi arguably destroyed John Kerry’s chances in 2004 and lit the Birther fuse that catapulted Trump into political fame.

And they’re floating the idea that if normal democratic processes don’t produce the “right” outcome, they could help create a fake crisis to seize control of the election nationally.

If you’ve studied history — and you know I have — that’s the moment when the hair on the back of your neck should stand up.

Because this isn’t new, creative, or even uniquely American: it’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

In 1933, Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, went up in flames at the hands of a mentally ill Dutch communist who was probably maneuvered into the act by the Nazis. Adolf Hitler declared it “proof” of an existential communist threat. Civil liberties were suspended overnight. Gone in the blink of an eye were freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble as Hitler’s goons began to round up his political opponents and throw them into his new concentration camp at Dachau.

Elections were technically still held, but under conditions so distorted they no longer qualified as free or fair in any meaningful sense, and the so-called “temporary” emergency became Hitler’s legal bridge to a permanent dictatorship.

Similarly, in Turkey in 2016, elements of the military tried to pull off a coup against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan while he was out of town. Erdoğan declared a national state of emergency and then kept it in place permanently. Tens of thousands of protesters were arrested. Judges and teachers were purged from their jobs, and media outlets were closed down for being “fake news.”

While emergency rule was in effect, Turkey held an election that transformed its parliamentary democracy into a hyper-presidential system tailored to give virtually all federal power to Erdoğan himself. It was the end of democracy in Turkey.

Vladimir Putin’s rise offers another variation. In 1999, a series of apartment bombings killed hundreds of Russians and the Kremlin blamed Chechen terrorists. The attacks propelled Putin, then a relatively unknown prime minister, into the presidency on a wave of fear and fury.

Putin then declared a state of emergency that expanded his police powers, gave him tighter media control, and let him seize control of the elections process. In the years since then, elections in Russia have become ritual rather than reality. The ballots are printed every few years, and the votes are counted, but the outcome is never in doubt.

Viktor Orbán in Hungary shows yet another model. He declared a “state of crisis” over migration by Syrian refugees in 2015 and kept renewing it long after migration levels collapsed. During the COVID pandemic, he got the parliament to give him the authority to rule by decree on an indefinite basis; it’s still in effect.

As a result, elections still happen (there’s one coming up), but the media landscape was completely taken over by Orbán-friendly billionaires (see: CBS, WaPo, LA Times, Fox “News,” Sinclair, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, and 1,500 rightwing radio stations). Orbán didn’t need to cancel Hungary’s elections; he simply reshaped the legal and political environment in which they happened.

There’s a common thread in all of this. The crisis wannabe dictators inevitably declare — real, exaggerated, or cynically manipulated — become the justification for seizing extraordinary powers. Those powers narrow dissent, intimidate opponents, and functionally rig the elections.

That’s why this shocking new reporting in the Washington Post is so alarming. When political actors like Corsi begin talking openly about declaring an emergency to override or interfere with elections, they’re not blowing smoke: they’re testing a classic dictator’s narrative.

They’re trying to figure out — and will learn from the national reaction to this Post reporting — whether they can persuade the public that normal election processes are too dangerous to trust. After all, in each of the cases I listed above, the machinery of democracy was used to hollow out democracy itself.

And they may not even have to manufacture an emergency: if Trump can sufficiently provoke Iran, they may activate their proxy network around the world and in the United States, and we could be facing a genuine crisis on the order of 9/11. This is one of the few ways to make sense of today’s massive military buildup in the Middle East.

The danger here isn’t just a fabricated catastrophe or a retaliatory strike by Iran, although those are pretty damn severe. It’s the normalization of the idea that if the electorate appears likely to choose “wrongly,” an emergency can justify changing the rules of democracy.

History shows us, over and over again, that when a nation loses its democracy to an aspiring autocrat, the language and strategy used is always the same. “The nation is under threat.” “The moment is an emergency.” “Normal rules must be suspended — just temporarily — to save the country.”

And in every case, “temporary” turned out to be the most dangerous word of all.

We’re now at that moment where influential figures are publicly contemplating that path, and the lesson from history isn’t subtle. The real emergency, in a constitutional republic, begins when leaders like Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan and Trump — and their toadies like Corsi, Bondi, Noem, and Gabbard — decide that elections themselves are the problem.

Multiple observers have noted that this plan is grossly unconstitutional. But so were Trump’s tariffs (which also used IEEPA emergency authority as their rationale), and the Supreme Court let him run with them for almost a year before stopping him.

Similarly, ICE goons kicking in people’s front doors and smashing their car windows to drag them off without a judicial warrant is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, but Trump’s agents continued to do it every day. Something being against the law or the Constitution has never stopped our convicted felon/rapist/insurrectionist president in the past.

This plot will only be stopped if it’s widely reported and an outraged public rises up in opposition. Call (202-224-3121) your elected representatives — Democratic and Republican — and let them know you’re onto this plot and won’t tolerate it. And that if they have any fidelity left to the Constitution and American values, they won’t either.

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth jumped in to defend Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine’s explanation on where the war in Iran was headed on Monday morning and then complained about the line of questioning from reporters in the room.

Having earlier complained about “fake news,” the former Fox News personality became incensed about reports the war could drag on longer than two weeks first hinted at, and now four weeks.

“I heard the question about four weeks is the typical NBC sort of gotcha type question.” he shot back at NBC's Courtney Kube. “President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it may or may not take: four weeks, two weeks, six weeks. It could move up. It could move back.”

“We're going to execute at his command the objectives we've set out to achieve,” he lectured. “And what he has shown is an ability to do that other presidents can't quite seem to have the aperture to do. Well, I mean, Joe Biden didn't even know what he was doing is to look for opportunities and off ramps and escalations for the United States that creates new opportunities to execute what we need on our own timeline.”

“So you can play games about four weeks, five weeks,” he sneered. “He has all the latitude, and I'm glad he does because there's no better communicator than our president expressing those things.”

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