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President Donald Trump’s Justice Department continued its track record of humiliation defeats, this time over a special education classroom assistant in Minnesota who was detained while protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Former attorney general Pam Bondi was quick to post on X the arrest of protestors connected to Homeland Security in January, but on Tuesday Trump's own prosecutors in Minnesota surrendered charges against Christina Rank, who Bondi accused of attacking agents. The government lawyers themselves concluded they did not have enough evidence to proceed with a prosecution.

“The United States of America, by and through its attorneys, Daniel N. Rosen, United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota, and Robert G. Tucker III, Special Assistant United States Attorney, hereby requests that the Court dismiss this case with prejudice pursuant to Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure,” the court said in its statement.

They added, “On July 9, 2026, the Court issued an order granting the Defendant's motion for a bill of particulars. Upon a further review of the evidence and affidavit in support of the complaint, the government does not believe that probable cause for assault exists. Based on a lack of probable cause and in the interest of justice, the government requests this case be dismissed with prejudice.”

At the time of Rank’s detainment, the Department of Homeland Security’s Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin claimed that “on January 12, while ICE law enforcement were parked in a parking lot in Inver Grove, MN a vehicle belonging to a U.S. citizen pulled up next to the agents, asked if they were ICE, and began honking her horn and yelling ‘you are terrorists.’”

They added, “ICE departed the parking lot and she proceed to stalk law enforcement officers and moved her vehicle dangerously getting close to them. As ICE agents attempted to turn, the individual tried to cut their vehicle off and collided with law enforcement's vehicle.Officers then attempted to get her out of the vehicle and arrest her for obstruction—a federal crime. The woman refused and disobeyed commands. ICE officers followed their training and used the minimum amount of force necessary to make the arrest.”

But this surrender is far from the first occasion when Trump’s Justice Department has let him down. Despite trying to create a $1.8 billion slush fund for his political supporters and Trump-affiliated institutions after suing his own IRS over his leaked tax returns, judges stepped in to block the disbursement of the funds on the grounds that it may have constituted illegal self-dealing.

As of December, Trump’s track record with the Justice Department was so spotty that the institution — which normally has no difficulty obtaining indictments because of its sterling reputation — was instead failing on one out of five occasions.

“A 21 percent dismissal rate,” wrote Mediaite contributing editor Sarah Rumpf. “Twenty-one percent. That means that more than one out of every five criminal cases brought by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. are getting dismissed by the courts, a truly stunning turnaround for an office long known for experienced prosecutors able to handle the most complicated of cases.”

Indeed, despite the famous expression that the Justice Department can indict a ham sandwich, in August they failed to secure an indictment against a high-profile case involving a sandwich. An indictment against Charles Sean Dunn, a former Justice Department paralegal who threw a Subway sandwich at a federal officer in Washington, fell through.

President Donald Trump is so concerned about Republicans losing control of Congress during the midterm elections that he has engaged in a number of measures to suppress votes, and he's delivered a Thursday speech justifying even further repressions.

Yet as bad as Trump might fear things will become if Republicans are defeated, a journalist and Trump expert argued on Tuesday that his humiliations will in fact be even worse.

Congress “will become an incredible noose around his neck, a burden on his shoulders,” author Michael Wolff said on his podcast Inside Trump’s Head along with his co-host from The Daily Beast, Joanna Coles. “They will do everything possible to frustrate him and to humiliate him and to make him pay for being Donald Trump. And that may be good politics or bad politics. That’s unclear because they’ve done this before and it turned out to be actually probably bad politics.”

Wolff added, “We saw JD Vance this past week go on Joe Rogan and—Godd—— , if he wasn’t basically publicly proclaiming his distance from Donald Trump.”

Wolff pointed out that during his recent "Joe Rogan Experience" appearance, Vance admitted the Trump administration was “guilty” of messing up its release of the files related to Trump’s longtime friend, the convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

By contrast, when Vice President Kamala Harris had to run for president in 2024 following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal, Harris went out of her way to make sure there was no daylight between herself and the Biden administration — even when refusing to do so was politically costly.

“During the 2024 race...everybody was saying she has got to get some more—put distance between herself and Joe Biden. And she really didn’t,” Wolff said. “But in this case, JD Vance was clearly putting distance between himself and Donald Trump. So, I think we will see that across the spectrum of 2028 contenders.”

Wolff added that because Trump’s approval rating is at 37 percent and voters are widely dissatisfied with his handling of the economy and his waging of a war against Iran, Republicans will have all the more reason to distance themselves from his unpopular policies.

The White House has previously launched personal attacks against Wolff’s credibility in response to his observations about the president.

“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s—— and has been proven to be a fraud,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung previously told The Daily Beast. “He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”

Zeteo reports sources in the White House have revealed exactly what led President Donald Trump to re-escalate the Iran war to even more dangerous and expensive levels than before. These new risks also threaten to further nail Trump’s Republican Party in November as they fight for their political lives to hang onto the House and Senate in November.

Zeteo reports the reason behind the president’s headlong dive back into a career-killing war in the Middle East is just as “simplistic and crude” as suspected.

“Trump desperately wanted out of his self-made war. After all, he’s a warmonger, but he’s also a “lazy warmonger,” reports Zeteo writers Prem Thakker and Asawin Suebsaeng. “As we reported mid-June, Trump really was furious at the Israelis, screeching privately to advisers about how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheming to pull him back into a full-scale war that Trump knew threatened to tear his administration apart.”

“But as we noted, the real risk was, and is, that Trump is stupid enough to pull himself back in,” they added.

And in recent days, that’s exactly what has happened,” they said.

“Several administration officials and others close to the White House tell us Trump’s desire to move on from this war has been for the moment quashed by his bloodlust and bruised ego,” report Thakker and Suebsaeng. “The president, the sources say, spent too much time consuming media reports and internal government briefings about how the Iranians weren’t taking his latest apocalyptic-sounding threats seriously, and that Tehran believed it had beaten Trump and had all the leverage. The president grew livid at the idea that his bluster was being brushed off, here and abroad, as, well … bluster. So, he decided, he needed to blow s—— up again.”

“They p—— him off,” a senior Trump official told Zeteo. “So here we go again.”

“That sounds simplistic and crude, but it’s where the world is at: to soothe his hurt feelings, Trump is forcing yet more Iranians and Americans to pay with their lives, in a war with no clear mission and no end in sight,” said Thakker and Suebsaeng. “But at least the American commander-in-chief got to celebrate at a soccer game.”

Meanwhile, Iran is showing little interest as long as Trump keeps throwing around threats to commit war crimes. But to make matters worse, Zeteo reports the Houthis are moving to close the Bab-al-Mandeb Strait to Saudi tankers — an additional blockade that could knock an additional 7 percent off the global oil supply, potentially doubling the oil currently reduced by Trump’s self-created Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. And thanks to Trump’s buddy invading Ukraine, Ukraine has been forced to dismantle Russia’s refinery capacity.

“All to say, the likelihood of global oil shortages has spiked,” said Zeteo.

At least 17 U.S. soldiers have been killed and hundreds injured, reported Zeteo, which contacted Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn (R-Texas) — whose state saw one soldier killed this weekend. They also contacted and Sens. Thom Tillis and Ted Budd (R-N.C.), where another soldier was stationed at Fort Bragg, to ask what their message “might be to Trump, or to the victims’ families, or to the broader U.S. public, as the war’s unpopularity continues to soar.”

None responded, said Thakker and Suebsaeng.

A conservative columnist who has accused President Donald Trump of being surrounded by sycophants, appointing trolls and guiding foreign policy by his own narcissism has a new accusation — namely, that the president is being tripped up by the same elites he vowed as an ostensible populist to defeat.

Describing the recent death of “overpopulation doom-monger” biologist Paul Ehrlich, New York Times right-winger Ross Douthat cited how his fellow right-wing pundit Richard Hanania condemned Ehrlich’s legacy.

“He ‘was not some guy in his room putting out diatribes,’ Hanania wrote,” per Douthat. “‘He was a professor at Stanford, a highly decorated scientist and one of the most prominent public intellectuals of his generation.’”

He added, “This analysis is correct and indeed could be taken further: Ehrlich wasn’t just prominent; his ideas were also profoundly influential, shaping population control policies that in the short term yielded horrifying human rights abuses in countries like India and China, and in the longer run pushed East Asia down a path to potentially catastrophic population decline.”

At this point, Douthat compared the scholarly Ehrlich with a very different figure — conservative podcaster Joe Rogan.

“Consider, by way of example, the difference between Paul Ehrlich and Joe Rogan,” Douthat observed. “Hanania is hard on Rogan, treating him as the embodiment of populist anti-intellectualism, contemptuously listing all the ideas given a respectful hearing on his show — from ancient cities below the pyramids to anti-vaccine theories to 9/11 trutherism to psychic phenomena — that “are rejected by virtually all academics and experts in the relevant fields.”

He added, “This is fair enough. But it’s also fair to say that Rogan and much of his audience seem to hold this range of wacky and paranoid ideas together in a jumble, considering them as theories and possibilities, without building a rigorous or zealous system around their precepts.” By contrast, Ehrlich was able to take his single idea and “persuade individuals, institutions and governments to conflate his misanthropy with science, reason and progress — which only a clueless populist or a religious fanatic could possibly oppose.” In this sense, he compared Ehrlich to people like those promulgated by Democrats during the COVID-19 pandemic which were later harmful. (Douthat did not go into specifics on that point.)

From there, he explained how similar elite-based thinking has hamstrung the Trump administration.

“For instance, the struggles of the Department of Government Efficiency partially reflect a populist unwillingness to listen to credentialed experts about the sheer difficulty of budget cutting,” Douthat wrote. “But the belief that a group of high-I.Q. outsiders can come in and remake a complex system is itself a characteristic elite temptation, a right-wing version of the progressive faith in ivory-tower experts. It’s too simple to say that Elon Musk struggled in Washington because he embraced populist paranoia; he also struggled because he thought that his own forms of truth-seeking, so successful in business, were adequate to dealing with a very different world.”

He also observed that the Iran war was the product “of the pre-Trump G.O.P. elite and think-tankers who had been making the case for intervention for years. The voices raised in opposition often belonged to the populist wing, including some of its most paranoid factions. And while he quickly soured on the conflict, one of the initially pro-war voices was Richard Hanania, overcome with temporary optimism about the ability of the American military to remake the world.”

He concluded, “The takeaway from this experience is not that populist governance is desirable; it clearly fails in many of the ways that Hanania describes. But recognizing those failures shouldn’t make us suddenly naïve about elite failure, which persists even under populist conditions, and retains its distinctive power to dress hubris in the garments of wisdom and tempt smart people into folly.”

Describing MAGA’s revolt over goofy culture war issues like non-white people playing roles in historical dramas and Christopher Nolan’s the Odessey, former GOP lawmaker and conservative MS NOW host Joe Scarborough said President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement are destined to misunderstand the true nature of America.

“The Odyssey, it was an extraordinary movie, and there's nothing I love reading more than MAGA Tears,” Scarborough told Bulwark editor Sam Stein.

“Have you been reading all of it? It's unbelievable,” said Stein, describing MAGA outcry at the movie for depicting Helen of Troy as a Black woman and hiring trans man actor Elliot Page to play the Greek soldier Sinon.

“Oh, my God, it is unbelievable,” confirmed Scarborough. “You have Ben Shapiro and other people, they're saying, ‘no, this is a great movie.’ And people are like, ‘you're a traitor to the cause out there. How dare you?’ Which goes back, … to where we began with Pat Buchanan. You know, Pat looked at America, I think, as a white America and an America of the 1950s. You can even say the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was first elected, I think 86 percent of Americans were white. It was still a pretty big number. And what I always thought Pat didn't get, and I told him this, what Donald Trump has never gotten, what [Trump advisor] Stephen Miller will never get, is America is not about blood and soil. America is not about race. America is about a creed: America at its best.”

“My family's lived in this country across the Deep South for about 400 years,” Scarborough continued. “We go back a long, long way, from being poor in Georgia to being poor in South Carolina. What I love about this country is that my family's been here for 400 years, and yet today, somewhere in America, somebody will raise their hand, they will take that oath, they will agree with that creed, and they will become every bit as much of an American as me and members of my family. I think that is something not only to celebrate, but to thank God for, that we live in that country.”

MAGA, however, appears happy to demonize the movie, even though a growing sector of social media appears to be reluctantly admitting Nolan’s blockbuster is actually good and features great pacing and solid acting and story.

“Just saw The Odyssey. Despite what you may have heard, literally all of the criticisms by conservatives were entirely correct,” ranted right-wing political podcaster and anti-democracy pundit Martt Walsh on X. The movie is just as woke as you fear, if not more so. The DEI casting is atrocious. Completely takes you out of the story right from the beginning.

Critics, however, blasted Walsh and others for “dying” on a dumb hill -- as well as encouraging movie viewership by adopting a public stance in the first place.

“Every ‘conservative’ is sharing their lengthy dissents … after giving their money to see it,” said one critic on X under Walsh’s post. “This is why we lose.”

President Donald Trump’s new tariffs against Canada are “madness” and will hurt his supporters according to an editorial by a prominent right-leaning newspaper.

“The White House on Monday exhumed Section 338 of the 1930 Tariff Act to impose 50 [percent] tariffs on hundreds of Canadian goods, including hockey sticks, honey, beer, down feathers, fishing rods and golf clubs,” The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board wrote on Tuesday. “The tariffs are set to take effect in 30 days, which means he’s using tariffs as leverage to win concessions from Canada.”

They added, “He may also enjoy showing off his new tariff bazooka. Section 338 lets the President impose tariffs up to 50 [percent] on countries that discriminate against “commerce of the United States, directly or indirectly” in relation to foreign countries. No previous President has used this power, which hails from the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Act.”

The Editorial Board went on to describe how Trump’s policies have increased prices and disrupted industries when it comes to products like automobile parts, alcohol and cheese. In addition to hindering the transfer of goods across the US-Canada border, it has done likewise with the passage of people.

“Many hospitality businesses have also been harmed by a decline in Canadian tourism,” the Editorial Board wrote. “A study in March found that the tourist dropoff has cost between 14,000 and 42,000 jobs in the U.S. markets most exposed to Canadian tourism. Northern border areas have also suffered from a decline in cross-border trade.”

They added, “That may be why Mr. Trump is justifying his tariffs as retribution for Canada’s treatment of U.S. autos and dairy, which are key industries in the Midwest. But Canada is the second largest U.S. trade partner after Mexico, and Mr. Trump’s tariffs are complicating cross-border supply chains, raising costs and creating uncertainty for business.”

The Editorial Board concluded, “The more Mr. Trump keeps swinging recklessly, the more Americans are likely to think there’s only madness in his tariff methods.”

While Trump’s tariffs have not yet shaken his base of supporters, many conservative thought leaders like those at the Wall Street Journal have been quite outspoken against them. Writing for the same publication earlier this month, American Institute for Economic Research senior research fellow David Hebert pointed out that Trump’s tariffs have destabilized the American business community by making economic conditions uncertain.

“The main value of a trade agreement isn’t that it lowers tariffs but that it eliminates doubt,” Hebert wrote. “USMCA’s greatest achievement was never a slate of tariff rates, exceptions and rules. It was the confidence that the rules would stay stable long enough for companies to make plans and act on them. A parts supplier in Michigan could sign a 10-year lease and order supplies because the terms governing what crossed the border were set.”

Dr. Robert Shapiro, undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs in the administration of President Bill Clinton and principal economic adviser to Clinton's 1992 campaign, told AlterNet at the time that Trump’s policies will create tremendous uncertainty.

“It's about uncertainty,” Shapiro explained to AlterNet. “Every investment is based on an assessment of the likely future demand for whatever you're investing in, and how much it's going to cost to produce it. So there are assumptions about labor costs, material costs and other input costs — and again, about demand. If you have a set of arrangements that give you some confidence about the price of your inputs coming from Mexico or Canada, or about demand for goods in Canada — and don't forget, we have virtually no trade deficit with Canada; we have enormous trade, and it goes in both directions — so it's certainly right, and it's not just about investments based on these probabilities that the trade agreement can help reduce uncertainty about.”

Shapiro continued, “It's also about how much you're going to produce today, apart from investment, because you've got thousands of companies selling goods or services into Canada. And so there's uncertainty about whether this will lead to more conflict with Canada, which would hurt Canadian demand for US goods, or whether Canada will impose a new tariff in retaliation for ours that makes my goods less competitive there. Of course it's bad — it's bad for American workers, it's bad for American investment.”

President Donald Trump likes to pick winners, not losers. And when he picks a ‘loser’ in a primary or general election he tends to get irritated. And nobody wants to be Trump’s advisor when he’s irritated, said Intelligencer political columnist Ed Kilgore.

That’s why advisors may be getting anxious about Trump’s endorsement in South Carolina’s Republican primary.

“One of the crosses Donald Trump has had to bear recently is a less-than-perfect record in endorsing Republican primary candidates,” said Kilgore on Tuesday. “His choices in high-profile gubernatorial nominating contests in Iowa and Georgia both lost to rivals who claimed to adore the 47th president despite their manifest willingness to rebel against his wishes. Trump’s fury at his advisers for steering him wrong peaked in South Carolina, where his gubernatorial endorsee, Pamela Evette, was struggling in a GOP runoff against yet another more-MAGA-than-thou rival, Alan Wilson, leading Trump in a panic to endorse Wilson as well, guaranteeing Evette’s demise.”

Now Trump is having fresh endorsement-obedience problems in the Palmetto State,” said Kilgore, where “absolutely every Republican pledges allegiance to him incessantly.”

When Lindsey Graham died without warning on July 11, the president and ally Gov. Henry McMaster quickly agreed to appoint Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, to the seat for the remainder of the late senator’s current term. At first, no one expected her to run for the coveted full term, but when Trump endorsed her for the GOP nomination in the special primary, she announced she was in the race for real.

“But it turned out her Trump-blessed march to nearly seven years in the U.S. Senate (pretty good for someone who had never run for office) wasn’t a cakewalk after all,” said Kilgore.

Lame duck lame-duck S.C. congressman Ralph Norman hopped into the race before Trump’s endorsement — but he didn’t jump out after Trump’s endorsement. And then Norman’s colleague Russell Fry announced his own run.

Fry is no lame duck, and he may be endangering a potentially tiny 2017 GOP House majority because he would have to resign his House seat in January to assume the Senate spot if he wins.

“But more to the point, Fry is disrespecting President Trump right now,” said Kilgore. “His more-MAGA-than-the-official-MAGA-candidate posture isn’t unprecedented; it’s exactly what Iowa gubernatorial nominee Zach Lahn and Georgia gubernatorial nominee Rick Jackson have claimed. But neither of those worthies was challenging a Trump endorsement so soon after it was issued.”

Worse, other Republicans are also defying Trump and already in the race including far-right candidate Mark Lynch. Now that Norman and Fry have broken the seal, Kilgore said other GOP contenders might jump in as well.

“Polls will soon start popping up, and you have to wonder if Trump will again hedge his Palmetto State bets, particularly if his old buddy Fry is doing well against his new favorite, Darline Graham,” said Kilgore. “The contest could easily extend to an August 25 runoff if nobody wins a majority on August 11.”

“The days and weeks ahead may be painful for White House political advisers, whose lives could take a turn for the worse if Trump flubs another endorsement and looks like a loser,” Kilgore added.

When American voters complain about the gerontocracy that runs this country, they are not upset specifically about advanced age, but what that advanced age represents — at least, according to one conservative polling expert.

“Partly this is because voters tend to view older politicians as part of the same sclerotic, desiccated establishment that partisans of the left and right have both turned against,” wrote The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell on Tuesday. “The thinking goes that if you've been around Washington for decades, you're probably more responsive to donor demands, and not looking out for your constituents.”

Longwell proceeded to quote various voters whose comments reinforced her observation. One voter, Carlos, told her that "I don't know how many 80-year-olds have very fresh, new, innovative, we're-gonna-make-the-world-a-better-place ideas.” Similarly Cyndi, a Floridian who voted for Trump in 2024, said that "I am so tired of having people to pick from that are my parents' age. I have this theory that when you can draw Social Security, you shouldn't be able to run for office anymore.”

Likewise Sherrecia, a Georgian who switched from supporting Joe Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024, told Longwell that "I think when you tell people that they can run unlimited amounts of time, you give them permission to stop focusing on you and start focusing on themselves.” Another Trump 2024 voter, Jacine, told Longwell that “I think all of them are out of whack because they're too old, and greed has taken over, and they have piled up a lot of money within themselves, and they're really out of touch with the American people.”

Michelle, a 2024 Trump voter, told Longwell that "I feel like so much of politics is people that are 70-plus years old and are kind of out of touch maybe with what young families are going through.”

Longwell pointed out that “a recent NPR/Marist poll back in May found that 80 percent of voters support upper age limits to run for office. Nearly 90 percent want term limits.”

Further reinforcing her insight about why voters are rebelling against the gerontocracy, Longwell pointed out that elderly politicians who are perceived as anti-establishment — regardless of whether they are on the left or the right — tend to be more popular. This includes a pair of octogenarians, Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

“The obvious counter-examples to this anti-gerontocracy phenomenon are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, both men in their 80s who are extremely popular with big chunks of their respective parties,” Longwell wrote. “However, both men built their political brands by running against the establishments of their own parties and introducing new political paradigms that can scramble traditional party alignment. And while both show visible signs of their age, they still manage to be omnipresent in the discourse.”

This is not to say that Trump’s age isn’t also a factor in terms of his health and overall fitness for office. When Trump turned 80 in June, Rahm Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s chief of staff and a top aide to President Bill Clinton, told The New York Times that “somebody at 80 years old just doesn’t have the physical stamina, the mental stamina for that office. It ages you in a way that no other stress in your life does.” Also in June independent reporter Rhian Lubin wrote that Trump is "exhibiting visible symptoms typical for an octogenarian, including bruising on his hands, swollen ankles and legs and appearing to nod off during meetings and high-profile events."

Lubin added, "Medical experts warn, though, that it's not so much these obvious symptoms and his age that Americans should be most concerned about, but the conduct and behavior on display during his second presidency.”

One of President Donald Trump’s closest allies, MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell, got slapped down in a court case by a judge Trump himself appointed.

“After Mike Lindell was held in civil contempt and hit with a $500-per-day fine for 103 days for refusing to pay sanctions he's owed Smartmatic for years, a federal judge has given the MyPillow CEO exactly one month to pay an ‘extra penalty’ for his defiance,” reported Law and Crime’s Matt Naham on Tuesday. Smartmatic is a voting machine company that Lindell falsely accused of engaging in fraud during the 2020 presidential election, which Trump continues to insist he won despite losing more than 99 percent of his court cases making that allegation.

“In late June, Smartmatic asked U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to clarify whether the voting machine conspiracy theorist would pay some of the contempt penalty to the company or if the sum was to be paid directly to the court,” Naham added. “The judge, a Donald Trump appointee, answered that question on Monday by entering a judgment in favor of Smartmatic and giving Lindell until Aug. 21 to ‘pay the total daily contempt penalty of $51,500’ to the ‘Registry of the Court.’

In his decision, Nichols pointed out that “when a sanction is designed to coerce a recalcitrant party to comply, the sanction should be payable to the court, rather than to the opposing party. [T]he Court imposed the daily civil contempt penalty to coerce compliance, not to compensate Smartmatic[.]"

Nichols began fining Lindell in April for saying he could not pay the $56,369 in sanctions even though he had spent $187,037.87 in campaign funds from his 2026 run for Minnesota governor solely to buy copies of his own book "What Are the Odds? From Crack Addict to CEO" and give them away.

Lindell’s gubernatorial campaign has also been beset with controversy. Despite being endorsed by Trump, Lindell was recently found to be registered to vote in Texas, indicating he may not be able to cast a ballot in his own campaign. What’s more, Lindell repeatedly tries to characterize himself as an outsider despite his close ties to Trump, such as when he said this to Trump’s former adviser and ongoing friend Steve Bannon.

“They’re having a big GOP endorsement where they’re having a debate and I’m not allowed to come,” Lindell told Bannon on his podcast War Room in May. “They’ve shut me out.”

Lindell continued, “The establishment doesn’t want me, Stephen. The Minnesota media—you wouldn’t even know I’m running.”

He later concluded, “I believe I am the only one that can win, and I believe I’m the only one with the solutions to our problems.”

President Donald Trump continues falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him — and voters in a key swing state are fed up with it.

“It's bull,” an Arizona woman told MS NOW correspondent Jillian Frankel in an interview that aired on Tuesday. “I think, I mean, we can count the vote, and we should allow everybody to vote and make sure everything is counted, honestly. And I don't believe in rigged [elections], but there's always corruption, right? And that's gonna be high.”

An Arizona man told Frankel that Trump’s election denier rhetoric “plays negatively with me, because it's like, come on, that's foolishness. And no, that's just a waste of time, and I don't like that.”

Another Arizona man told Frankel that “I've heard that ever since the 2020 election, and it's bogus. And it's sad that someone who doesn't win just claims that it was all a sham. But if he would have won, would he have also claimed it was a sham? Probably not.”

MS NOW anchor Katy Tur cut away from the interviews to observe that “Donald Trump did try to claim the 2016 election was a sham until he started winning, and then he stopped. So there's evidence for that.” She then asked MS NOW political reporter Shawna Thomas for her views on the subject.

“I think it's actually, in some ways, telling, because the president spoke out about the elections and what happened in 2020 last week and gave that big speech,” Thomas opined, referring to Trump’s Thursday speech repeating his debunked claims about the 2020 election. “In some ways, that's part of why we are grouping these three candidates together, and we are talking about this and then putting that question to the voters. Jillian Frankel, our reporter who's out in Arizona, she talked to voters about many things. She asked that question, one, because we were curious what they would say in Arizona. But when she just asked them the open-ended sort of ‘why are you voting, what do you care about,’ they came back to the economy, policies, the things your guest in New York was talking about — gas prices. So I think in some ways he put another focus on election denialism that maybe voters wouldn't have even been thinking about as much, at least today, on Arizona primary day, if he hadn't done that.”

Trump’s obsession with the 2020 election speaks to what some experts believe is a deeper pathology in his overall outlook. Mother Jones' national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman spoke to Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman about that exact subject in an interview last week.

“The disturbing thing here is that Georgia is just a microcosm of what they’re planning to do to interfere in the midterms,” Berman told Goodman. “The raid on Fulton County, Georgia, the taking of 700 boxes of ballots, that is a preview of the type of suppression and intimidation the Trump administration wants to do everywhere in 2026. And we’re seeing this with the primetime address the president is planning to give.”

He added, “He’s going to lie and say there was rampant fraud and foreign interference in the 2020 election, so that he can then say we have to seize voting machines, we have to stop mail voting, we have to do all the things that he tried to do in 2020 but was unsuccessful.”

Berman concluded, “And the bottom line here is they keep lying about the 2020 election so that they can justify massive interference in the 2026 election. It really is that simple. You put all the different moves of the administration together, that is the underlying goal, to build a narrative that will justify some kind of unprecedented intervention in the midterms to challenge how people vote, how votes are counted and how elections are certified.”

Speaking with this journalist for Salon days before the 2020 election, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist formerly from Yale University, predicted that the president’s displayed psychological tendencies would make it impossible for him to admit defeat.

“Just as one once settled for adulation in lieu of love, one may settle for fear when adulation no longer seems attainable,” Dr. Lee told this journalist at the time. “Rage attacks are common, for people are bound to fall short of expectation for such a needy personality—and eventually everyone falls into this category. But when there is an all-encompassing loss, such as the loss of an election, it can trigger a rampage of destruction and reign of terror in revenge against an entire nation that has failed him.”

She continued, “It is far easier for the pathological narcissist to consider destroying oneself and the world, especially its ‘laughing eyes,’ than to retreat into becoming a ‘loser’ and a ‘sucker’ — which to someone suffering from this condition will feel like psychic death.”

As conservative columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post in February, Trump repeatedly failed to prove any fraud when given a chance to do so in court.

“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will wrote. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will concluded, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.”

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