☕ Daily Brief: The Trump Decoy Plan

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WHAT WE'RE WATCHING

🎤 Karoline Leavitt is leaving the White House. President Trump announced that his press secretary will depart at the end of August to spend more time with her family. Trump praised Leavitt and said she will remain an outside advisor and influential GOP voice heading into the midterms.

⚡️ ICE agents to use gloves that deliver electric shocks. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to spend up to $20 million on specialized gloves that can deliver a brief electrical shock to subdue violent or resisting suspects. The technology, already used by some police departments, requires direct skin contact and is designed to gain compliance during physical struggles.

📱 Meta faces 29 states in massive youth social media trial. A coalition of states is taking Meta to court over allegations that Facebook and Instagram were engineered to keep children addicted. The company has warned potential damages could reach $1.4 trillion — nearly its entire market cap. Mark Zuckerberg is expected to testify during the seven-week trial in Oakland.

🚨 NYPD refuses to escort Mamdani’s wife on Middle East vacation. Despite Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D) office initially claiming police would accompany First Lady Rama Duwaji to Syria and Lebanon, NYPD confirmed it does not send officers to countries with level 4 travel advisories for personal travel. Mamdani later blamed the confusion on a staff “miscommunication.”

ASK THE EDITORS

Q: With all the fraudulent funding the administration claims to have halted, where does that money actually go? It sounds great, but they're also asking for more funding elsewhere, like defense. — Adam from South Dakota

A: If fraudulent claims get flagged and denied before disbursement, the funds simply stay in the Treasury. But if the fraud is caught after funds have been paid out, it gets passed off to law enforcement to claw back as much as they can.

In total, the Trump administration says it's uncovered around $230 billion in fraud across Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP, while Congress separately appropriated $839 billion for defense in FY2026.

Defense spending increases work through a separate process, with Congress appropriating that money through the National Defense Authorization Act, unrelated to what happens with fraud enforcement.

So yes, taxpayers are technically saving money on the fraud side, but that savings isn't offsetting the new defense spending, since the two numbers exist independently of each other.

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YOUR TAKE

Do you think Iran actually wants to kill Trump?

TODAY’S POLL

POP QUIZ

POLL RESULTS FROM YESTERDAY

Do you support the expanded use of Flock cameras?

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ✅ Approve (346)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ❌ Disapprove (806)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤔 Unsure (313)

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