Valentina Gomez, a Republican running for Congress in Texas, shared a video of her burning the Koran with a flamethrower as part of her effort to “end Islam,” the Daily Beast reports.
Said Gomez: “Your daughters will be raped and your sons beheaded, unless we stop Islam once and for all. America is a Christian nation, so those terrorist Muslims can fuck off to any of the 57 Muslim nations. There is only one true God, and that is the God of Israel.”
“Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook will sue over President Trump’s attempt to fire her from the central bank,” Axios reports.
“Senior Trump adviser Dan Scavino is taking over as director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office — an influential role charged with staffing the administration,” Axios reports.
“Scavino is Trump’s longest-serving aide, having worked for the president since 2015, when Trump rode down an escalator in New York’s Trump Tower and announced his first White House bid.”
Paul Krugman: “Yesterday Donald Trump said that he had fired Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors… Cook has said that she will not resign.”
“So at this point the immediate onus is on Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman. He has the right — I would say the obligation — to say, ‘Show me the legal basis for this action.’ If Trump’s officials can’t provide that basis, he should declare that as far as he is concerned, Cook is still a Fed governor.”
“If Powell caves, or the Supreme Court acts supine again and validates Trump’s illegal declaration, the implications will be profound and disastrous. The United States will be well on its way to becoming Turkey, where an authoritarian ruler imposed his crackpot economics on the central bank, sending inflation soaring to 80 percent.”
Playbook: “The dilemma for the Fed is immediate… Do they treat her as fired or not?”
Ty Cobb, one of President Trump’s first-term White House attorneys, was asked by NPR what he thought about when he heard the FBI had searched John Bolton’s home last Friday.
Said Cobb: “Well, I went down and locked my door.”
Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital fund invested in Polymarket, the world’s largest predictions market, and he’ll join the firm’s advisory board, Axios reports.
The likely motivation: “Americans aren’t allowed to use Polymarket, which claims to have hosted over $6 billion in predictions so far this year, but that may soon change.”
New York Times: “There were some gay appointees during the first Trump administration, but it wasn’t like now. Mr. Trump initially arrived in Washington as a true outsider; he had to draw from the disparate parts of the old GOP he had vanquished in order to staff his government. This time around, he has his own establishment.”
“And it turns out that the MAGA establishment has a lot more openly gay men than the Republican establishment that came before it.”
Jonathan Bernstein: “Trump’s buffoonery makes him very possible to defeat… but if enough people surrender to him, he could wind up fully destroying the republic, incompetence and all. And the history of autocracy is full of those who regretted failing to stand up and fight when they still could.”
Related for members: What Democrats Could Learn from Vladimir Putin
“I would say also that his personal attacks on me are just evidence of a guy who’s still living in fifth grade. He’s the kind of bully that throws invectives at people – because he knows that what he’s saying is actually commentary on himself.”
— Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D), quoted by The Guardian, responding to President Trump’s insults about his fitness.
New York Times: “Members of the Department of Government Efficiency uploaded a copy of a crucial Social Security database in June to a vulnerable cloud server, putting the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans at risk of being leaked or hacked, according to a whistle-blower complaint filed by the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer.”
“The database contains records of all Social Security numbers issued by the federal government. It includes individuals’ full names, addresses and birth dates, among other details that could be used to steal their identities, making it one of the nation’s most sensitive repositories of personal information.”
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is building a fundraising juggernaut that is rivaling some of the Democratic Party’s core infrastructure, prompting questions about both her future and the party’s,” CNN reports.
“Small-dollar donations – contributions of less than $200 – are the lifeblood of campaigns and a key measure of voter enthusiasm. And on ActBlue, Democrats’ largest online fundraising platform, the New York congresswoman received the third-most small-dollar donations in the first half of the year.”
“That trailed only the Democratic National Committee and the party’s Senate campaign arm, key party infrastructure. Ocasio-Cortez beat the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House campaign arm, and every other individual candidate.”
Seth Masket: “There is a standing army in the nation’s capital. The President deployed troops to Los Angeles earlier this year, and he’s now threatening to deploy some to Chicago, among other cities. People are struggling with the right way to think about this; I tend to view this as the ideological descendants of the Confederacy seeking payback against the Union.”
“It’s important to recognize how much Trump, and the modern Republican Party more generally, has adopted Confederate tropes and ideology.”
A new Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll finds Democrats leading the generic congressional ballot by a wide margin, 49% to 41%.
President Trump’s job approval is at just 41% to 56%.
The Labor Department unfurled a huge banner with President Trump’s face on the front of its office building.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the Trump administration is “thinking” about taking an equity stake in defense and munitions companies, Politico reports.
Said Lutnick: “There’s a monstrous discussion about defense. I mean, Lockheed Martin makes 97 percent of their revenue from the U.S. government. They are basically an arm of the U.S. government.”
The Atlantic says the Department of Homeland Security posted an image promoting Roosevelt’s New Deal that shows Uncle Sam standing at a crossroads which is annotated: “Which way, American man?”
“It’s a reference to the title of a canonical text for neo-Nazis and white nationalists, the 1978 book by William Gayley Simpson, Which Way Western Man?, which depicts Jews, Black people, and nonwhite immigrants as an existential threat to the United States.”
CNN: “The meeting with Indiana lawmakers comes amid a White House pressure campaign for Republican-dominated states to redraw Congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. President Donald Trump hopes to stop Democrats from winning back the House – where Republicans have a very narrow majority.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
