One Leaked Through

Isabella Gonzales was 19. Tyler Feehan was 25.

This is "What I'm Hearing" — a somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.

Trump’s War: 17 Dead, 430 Wounded

Pvt. Isabella Gonzales of Carrollton, Texas, was 19 years old. 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, was 25. The Pentagon identified them Monday as the soldiers killed in Iran’s missile and drone attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. A third soldier at the base is still missing; unidentified remains have been recovered. A fourth service member died in Iraq Sunday during a controlled detonation of a downed Iranian drone. That brings the toll to at least 17 American service members killed and more than 430 wounded since Trump’s war began.

Marco Rubio’s explanation for the deaths: “We shot down almost all the missiles. One leaked through, hit the wrong place, and tragically, and it’s heartbreaking.” One leaked through. There have been four Iranian attacks in five days aimed at U.S. forces, including two direct hits on the Jordan base, and video shows personnel scrambling for shelters with little or no warning, raising the question of whether our missile defenses failed to intercept the attacks or failed to see them coming. The New York Times reports that the military may have withheld information about three earlier strikes in Jordan that wounded dozens, and the Pentagon hasn’t held a press briefing since May 5th.

Trump’s war is entering its sixth month and has racked up quite the bill. An estimated $113 billion has been spent, gas prices have gone up from roughly $3 to $4 a gallon, Iran has formally withdrawn from the ceasefire, there have been nine consecutive nights of U.S. strikes, and Brent crude has passed $90 as Tehran vows “not a single drop” of oil transits the Strait. A U.S. official told the Washington Post: “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that.” The military is telling reporters it’s running out of ammunition, and its assessment is that the White House doesn’t know.

Even the MAGA media wall is cracking. Fox’s Maria Bartiromo asked on air how a supposedly “obliterated” Iran keeps hitting American bases. Fox contributor Joey Jones, a Marine veteran, challenged the strategy outright after the Jordan deaths.

Read more: CBS News, The Bulwark, Iran Cost Tracker.

Trump is Selling His Truth Social Messages

Dan Pfeiffer calls it “the most corrupt thing Trump has done since returning to office.” And incredibly, I think he is right.

Trump Media announced “Truth API” — a paid data feed, launching August 1, that delivers posts from Truth Social’s top ten accounts to paying clients “in milliseconds.” The top account is the President of the United States, who announces tariffs, war escalations, and market-moving policy on the platform. Customers have already signed up, including high-frequency trading firms. Trump owns roughly 41% of Trump Media through a revocable trust. Follow the chain: the president makes policy, announces it on his own platform, and his company charges Wall Street for the fastest access to the announcement, who can then sell stocks and assets impacted by the announcements. The profits flow to him. It’s legal only because the president is exempt from federal conflict-of-interest rules. “This is no different than Trump giving a heads-up on a market-moving announcement in exchange for a bribe,” Pfeiffer writes. “It’s pay to play.”

And there’s a second shoe. CNN compared Trump’s financial disclosures against his posting history and found at least 44 stock purchases involving 21 companies — Nvidia, Tesla, Boeing, RTX, Northrop Grumman — made within a week before Trump posted about those companies, their executives, or their products. So it's possible Trump has already been doing this; “Truth API” just puts the corruption on steroids.

Democrats need to jump on this because corruption is becoming a kitchen-table issue. Echelon polling, via Puck’s Peter Hamby, shows “political corruption” climbing from 8% of voters’ top-issue picks in December 2024 to 17% now. Second only to cost of living.

The message is simple: While you’re paying $4 a gallon for his war, Wall Street is paying him for the head start.

Read more: The Message Box, Time, Quartz, Puck

His Documents Confirmed the “Hoax,” and His Bill Is Dying

This weekend resulted in a plethora of fact checks on Trump’s bogus attempts to discredit our election system.

“China carried out the largest compromise of election data in history.” The intelligence says China was “analyzing” state voter rolls — data that is largely public. Your name, address, and party registration are available in most states to anyone, including data brokers who sell them. Calling that “the largest compromise in history” is like accusing someone of stealing the phone book. The National Intelligence Council’s actual assessment: China “did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts” in 2020, and the national intelligence officer for cyber issues said flatly there was “no information suggesting China tried to interfere with election processes.”

“Voting machines are easily compromised,” and Venezuela proves it. The document Trump cited for Venezuela describes a vulnerability in a voting system used in Venezuela, not the United States. Trump’s own declassified document on U.S. systems says they “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.” CISA, U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, called 2020 “the most secure in American history,” and Georgia and Pennsylvania both audited 2024 and confirmed the results.

“Hundreds of thousands of noncitizens and dead people are active on the voter rolls.” DHS Secretary Mullin claims 250,000 noncitizens are registered in four states, without saying how the data was matched or whether a single one of them voted. The Brennan Center’s Sean Morales-Doyle calls the methodology “garbage in, garbage out.” The actual numbers: Reuters found 129 federal noncitizen-voting prosecutions since 1996. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s own fraud database shows fewer than 100 noncitizen voting convictions since 1982. As UCLA election law expert Rick Hasen explained: “If his government had actual evidence of noncitizen voting, there would be indictments; Trump has been hounding US attorneys to bring such cases, and the fact that he hasn’t shows that these claims likely have no legs.”

Zeteo’s Prem Thakker went through the declassified trove and found a National Intelligence Council document stating that “President Putin and senior Russian officials are overseeing efforts by proxies… to spread claims about former Vice President Biden.” Hunting for evidence against China, the administration declassified official confirmation of the Russian interference Trump spent eight years calling a hoax.

David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research summed up the whole enterprise: “This administration has been in total control of the federal government for 18 months. They’ve redirected untold taxpayer resources to try to uncover evidence of massive voter fraud. And at the end of that 18 months, all we got is more rehashed, debunked conspiracy theories.”

The legislative arm is stalling along with the narrative. Sen. Lisa Murkowski says she won’t support the SAVE Act, citing the burden on rural and Alaska Native voters, and per Democracy Docket, the bill now lacks the votes to pass. House Republicans are trying to salvage it by stapling SAVE language onto other bills.

Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy rely on his ability to raise doubts about the security of our elections. It’s important that we show how false those claims are. Memorize these fact checks and use them to debunk these claims anytime you hear them.

The fact remains our elections are safe and secure; nothing Trump says can change that.

Read more: FactCheck.org, CBS News, US News, Zeteo, Robert Hubbell

That's your Monday. Trump’s war cost more American lives. Wall Street is buying his posts before you see them. And his own declassified documents prove his lies about our elections.