We begin this episode with President Donald Trump’s pledge, issued in Dallas last week at the GOP midterm convention, to give adult citizen of the United States $5,000, should the Republicans keep control of the House and the Senate in November.
Our theme music this week is “Pennies from Heaven,” written by Arthur Johnston and Johnny Burke, performed by The Skyliners, and licensed from LickD.
Rendering of the interior of the new White House ballroom, distributed on X by Donald Trump
In the News:
* Mitch McConnell is back! On Monday, the Kentucky Republican and former Majority Leader showed up on the Senate Floor. Last seen on June 11, he was in a wheel chair to be sure, but he was alive. A written statement issued by the 84-year-old said that he is “not yet 100%,” is in physical therapy, and will show up for important votes. The New York Times team said that McConnell “could be heard speaking in characteristically low tones with both Democrats and Republicans who came to wish him well.” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has been asking for updates on the Senator’s health for three months, and as of Monday, had not received one. But McConnell’s absence is not unprecedented: 91-year-old West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd was away for two months in 2008 because of illness; then-Senator Joe Biden did not return to the Senate for 7 months after aneurysm surgery; South Dakota Republican Karl Mundt waited almost three years to resign after a 1969 stroke; and Virginia Democrat Carter Glass simply stopped coming to work in the spring of 1943—the seat became vacant in 1946 when Glass died.
* On Tuesday, a New York Times/Siena poll shows Democrats making gains against Republicans in a generic midterm ballot. The spread is now eight points, and in nine out of ten categories, voters trust a Democratic Congress to do a better job. Support for Trump among independents has dipped to 27%, 11 points lower than those registered with a party. Voters overwhelmingly see Republicans as more extreme, more elitist, and more corrupt than Democrats. A massive 71% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the affordability crisis.
* In a surprise move, Republican Thomas Massie, the outgoing representative in Kentucky-04, has filed two articles of impeachment against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Primarily focused on the Iran war, the articles contend that the conflict is illegal, and that Hegseth defied Congress by not withdrawing troops and murdering civilians in the March bombing of a school. The resolution also accuses Hegseth of mishandling classified information, murdering people accused of being drug traffickers, violating the Geneva Convention, and imperiling the reputation of the United States and its military. Rather than permit a vote on the resolution, Speaker Mike Johnson sent everyone home a day early, canceling all business scheduled for Thursday. After having worked for 7 days since its summer break, Congress will not convene again until November 9.
Your hosts:
Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.
Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
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Donald Trump spent nearly $1 billion on the Trump Taj Mahal Casino and Resort; a year later, it was bankrupt. Photo credit: Kevin Wong/Wikimedia Commons
News focus: Claire and Neil focus on how, under Trump, the Presidency is sloshing in gifts, taxpayer dollars, unrealized promises to the little guy, and donations from cronies.
* Last week, President Donald J. Trump promised to send every adult citizen in the United States a $5,000 check, which he is calling a “dividend,” if the Republicans win the November midterms.
* Trump has offered to give Americans free money five other times: tariff checks, DOGE dividend checks, direct health care payments, the “warrior dividend,” and Trump accounts seeded with $1,000 federal grants. Only the final two are remotely real. The payment to service members was a repurposed one-time housing allowance already budgeted by Congress, while the only babies eligible for Trump accounts are those born during Donald Trump’s second term.
* MAGA figures have a history of paying people to support them. In 2018-2019, the Trump campaign ran at least 15 promotions promising small donors that they would be entered in a contest for an all-expense included evening with the President. The Trump campaign insisted that there had been a winner for every contest, even though they could not produce one. Then, in October 2024, Elon Musk ran a legally dubious contest in which he paid small sums (between $47 and $100) to registered voters in swing states who signed a petition pledging to support the First and Second Amendments—which then entered them in a raffle for a prize of $1 million. Seventeen people won the prize and became spokespeople for Musk’s AmericaPAC. The tech oligarch tried the same thing in the Wisconsin State Supreme Court election in the spring of 2025. In both cases, officials tried to bring charges, but it was unclear what laws had been broken.
* Trump and his family have profited enormously from the Presidency. In the first term, the Trump family business took in a reported $2.4 billion over four years; in 2025 alone, Trump’s personal earnings and net worth jumped to between $2.2 and $2.4 billion. His current personal net worth is $7 billion, largely powered by crypto, but also by legal settlements, licensing fees, and global real estate ventures.
* On Monday, a team from ProPublica broke the story that Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev paid for Bettina Anderson and Donald Trump, Jr.’s May 24 destination wedding in the Bahamas. It was a three-day event, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Kremlev, head of the International Boxing Association and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin with a criminal past, were wired through Dubai. No one can explain why a person Trump Jr. describes as a friend he met only a few years ago would have a reason to pay for his wedding. It casts a new light on why Junior’s father did not attend. In response to a query from the New York Times, the President said he has no idea who Mr. Kremlev is.
* During Trump’s first term the national debt, which now clocks in at over $40 trillion (or around $116,000 per United States citizen), grew by $7.2 trillion; Trump has now added about half that in a single year, even as he has gutted the government and solicited hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations and crony billionaires for his pet projects. Many donors are then rewarded with appointments, no-bid contracts, and pardons.
* One basic problem is that the Trump administration spends money that he doesn’t have and collects money he isn’t legally entitled to collect, and then announces to taxpayers that he has generated “savings” and “profits” that are impossible because the national debt is growing rapidly. This week, we learned that the employees who were put on administrative leave by DOGE in 2025 were paid $9.5 billion to not work—a 435 percent increase over 2024. The promise was that the layoffs would save taxpayers $1 trillion, a number rounded this down (and without documentation) to $200 billion. As Senator Patty Murray pointed out, pushing out experts and paying them to stay home was “the most expensive way to make government worse.”
* Listeners may be interested in a 2019 essay by James Banner that looks at the long history of Presidential misconduct, much of which seems to be Republican. But what’s interesting is that Republicans and Democrats define corruption differently. Republican voters see government itself as the primary location for corruption, whereas Democrats are more highly focused on self-dealing, cronyism, and lying.
* To think about why Republicans understand government itself as corrupt, Claire recommends Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains:The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking, 2017).
What we want to go viral:
* Neil has been bingeing “The Bombing of Pan Am 103” (Netflix, 2026), a limited series about the terrorist attack on a US aircraft over Lockerbie, Scotland—and its consequences for victims in the air and on the ground. Neil came to understand the event as a tragedy that marked a turn towards 9/11 for the United States, but was less well understood as a national trauma for the people of Scotland.
* Claire wants you to read Helen Lewis’s “Mothers for Sale” (The Atlantic, September 9, 2026) an essay about the politics and ethics of surrogacy, why the United States is an outlier because of its almost complete lack of regulation, and what the consequences of unregulated surrogacy are for the women involved. But regulating surrogacy out of existence also has consequences—usually for the health and welfare of poor women in other countries.
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