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Good morning,

🎶 Friday Listening: Jacob Stills - Welcome to the Land of the Free

I am fairly certain this song is AI, which would make it the first good piece of AI art. Throw it on to get pumped up for Sunday's final, and make sure to watch the video.

Every day I become more and more convinced we're all living inside a simulation, or a piece of performance art, in which the ruling class is determined to see how much absurdism they can throw at the American people before we crack, with President Trump playing a sort of Andy Kaufman-type role in the whole tragi-comedy.

If you were to make the case this is all a simulation and we’re really living inside The Matrix, yesterday would be a good example to use. In the morning, we learn that the president's deputy adviser, whose job it is to load his speeches into the teleprompter, allegedly pocketed $100K betting on what would be in those speeches. (Aside: what kind of degenerate gambler has access to presidential speeches ahead of time and can only win 100 large? Rookie numbers.)

Then, in the afternoon, the president's social-media company announces it will sell priority access to his official statements, so Wall Street traders can get them before the rest of us. OK then! A few hours later, it's reported that the president pumped companies in those posts days after he had personally bought their stocks.

And then in the evening, after a hot and hazy summer day that millions of Americans across a dozen states coughed and weezed their way through, wondering if they could even let their kids play outside, the president comes on TV to address the nation. Not to lay out a climate policy that can address the increasing frequency of these wildfires and the smoke we’re all regularly inhaling now. Not to calm the American people about the explosive diarrhea outbreak his whittled-down CDC stopped tracking. Not to make mention of the war he started, which is currently in a brand-new escalation phase with no obvious way out. Just to bitch and moan for half an hour about an election he lost six years ago, by reading/shouting from a teleprompter loaded by a guy who probably just went on Kalshi to bet the over on how many times his boss would say SHY-NA.

I honestly had a hard time even following what Trump was talking about in that stemwinder last night. Putting aside whether he can get the SAVE Act passed through the senate, which seemed to be his ostensible goal, the takeaway was that we should harden our election infrastructure. OK? Pretty sure every admin has been saying that since I've been alive. The "news" from the speech, to the extent there was any, is that the White House is making public a bunch of documents suggesting future elections could be at risk of foreign influence, especially by China.

Those declassified docs do not provide evidence China, or any other foreign actor, actually manipulated past election results, which would be a huge deal if true but is NOT EVEN POSSIBLE because we use auditable paper ballots in this country and our election systems are purposely decentralized (which, btw, the SAVE Act would end). Instead, those docs lay out various schemes and worst-case scenarios that the intel community has known and spoken publicly about for years.

In attempting to make it sound like Beijing had actually hacked our voter rolls, Trump said China "illicitly" acquired 220M US voter files, which is misleading at best. Those voter files are made up of pretty basic info like name, address, party affiliation, and are maintained by states and available either for free on the internet or for purchase by political parties. It's not exactly clear what having access to that info would even do for China. Check out this guy Carlo Versano. He's a registered Democrat living in Brooklyn, NY. Wow, you got me, China. Guilty as charged.

Among the biggest whoppers we were served last night, Trump accused China of trying to rig the 2020 vote, stating: "Raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that China's activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden." Put aside, for a moment, the inconvenient facts that Trump was president back then, and that the only person who has ever "attempted to manufacture illegal ballots" in that election WAS TRUMP HIMSELF, when in his official capacity as president he told Georgia's Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes" in order to overturn that state's results. It is also TRUMP HIMSELF who is cutting election-security infrastructure at the CISA and dismantled the bipartisan EAC just last week, but whatever. 

So the theory goes here that Trump's own intelligence services, operating under a DNI (John Ratcliffe) whom he handpicked, could have publicly stated in 2020 that China was actively working to undermine the election for Biden... but they did not do so, for... reasons. Trump then re-hired the same person, Ratcliffe, who was responsible for gathering that bombshell information but failing to publicize it, and put him in charge of the CIA in his second term. A second term that has seen him get much less tough and more cozy toward China.

Trump also mentioned Venezuela, though not to the extent I predicted so I'll eat just a small helping of crow. But he said "the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela, and that's exactly what happened." I don't know what the hell that means, except that he's saying it to prime the pump for the coming plea deal with Maduro in which the deposed Venezuelan dictator "admits" he worked with China to throw the election to Biden or something. 

Because that's what this is all actually about. Trump knows this is all horseshit, but he also knows it doesn't matter because he just needs to stir the pot enough to RAISE QUESTIONS of illegitimacy for future elections that don't go the way he wants. Americans will hear "China" and "rogue bureaucrats" and "election integrity" and tune the rest out. It'll be just enough consent-manufacturing for whatever they're cooking up for November: ICE at polling stations... National Guard deployed to count votes... declaring a national emergency around Election Day that serves as the predicate for tossing out results he doesn't like.

That's the endgame here, gang. These people are laughing at you — at all of us, but particularly MAGA — enriching themselves to the hilt while keeping the plebes going on a cocktail of Trumpian grievance-filled bullshit while the country we live in, and air we breathe, gets worse.

Have a good weekend and enjoy the game.

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Carlo Versano is Newsweek's Director of Politics and Culture. He has in-depth knowledge and experience covering a range of topics and stories over a 20-year career in the news business. Carlo joined Newsweek in 2024 after a stint at The Messenger. Before that, he was an Emmy-winning producer at NBC News. He is a graduate of the University of Richmond and the New School. You can get in touch with Carlo by emailing [email protected].

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By Micah McCartney

China has strongly rejected U.S. President Donald Trump's accusation that it carried out a massive operation to steal American voter data in the 2020 U.S. election.

The U.S. president made the accusation against China on Thursday during his speech.

Here’s China’s response.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is back from maternity leave. Her first briefing with the press was delayed by a few minutes while her team tried to fix the TVs behind the podium but ultimately failed to get them turned on.

She walked in wearing a pink jacket, which was fitting given that she recently welcomed a baby girl.

As always, the briefing room was jam-packed with reporters hoping to get their questions in.

While she didn’t take many questions, the few she did take dealt primarily with a White House employee who is currently on unpaid administrative leave over alleged insider trading after placing bets on Trump speeches while running the teleprompter for him.

She said, “I’m aware of the report, the president is too, I spoke to him about it. He believes it’s deeply unfortunately and frankly a disgrace.”

Overall, it was a pretty uneventful briefing, and she managed to handle the room as efficiently as always, a stark contrast to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was one of several officials who filled in while she was on maternity leave and failed to wrangle the White House press corps quite to her ability.

After a month of endless soccer, on Sunday the World Cup will wrap up in a game that many expected to be in Dallas, but is now happening a few miles from New York City instead. The two best teams in the world will decide who becomes champion.

I am, genuinely, completely depressed about the prospect of the World Cup ending. One of the things I will miss most is writing about it in this letter, before I go back next week to my usual topics.

Anyway, for this edition I want to push back on the idea of blaming Americans for Americanizing soccer. I think the real problem is that FIFA is run by fools, and most of the changes they make are less about pleasing a broader audience than pleasing someone at the top. Today I learned FIFA is bringing the American tradition of championship rings to the winners, and the only question that came to mind was: do we really need that?

The final will also feature a halftime show, the first in FIFA history. The lineup includes stars like Justin Bieber, Shakira, and others. Same question: do we need that?

It's become the recurring question of this tournament. The VAR interventions. The cooling breaks that, we now know, were never really about player welfare. The bloated pregame protocol, complete with a FIFA anthem nobody listens to. The cutaways to celebrities in the crowd. All of it, somehow, traces back to FIFA.

Somehow, in spite of itself, FIFA got lucky. The games this month have been genuinely great, which is more than I can say for the people running it. They spent a month handing out rings, booking pop stars, and finding new places to put a camera on a celebrity, and the whole time, completely by accident, the actual sport underneath it all was working just fine.

So here's to FIFA, congratulations on the tournament you didn't ruin. For Sunday, I'm backing my fellow South Americans. Messi, lifting his second World Cup. Enjoy the game.

“Much of what the President has said on this topic has been false. ...There is an argument that it’s irresponsible to air the President’s speech tonight. But this speech will be made. It will be news. And it’s our job to cover the news.”

— CBS News’ Tony Dokoupil explaining why the network was carrying President Trump’s speech in full, while ABC and NBC did not.

America's family farms are disappearing—and the people who grow our food are feeling the pressure.

Brian Reisinger, a fourth-generation Wisconsin dairy farmer and author of Land Rich, Cash Poor, joins The 1600 to discuss the economic realities facing farmers today. From rising costs and trade disputes to labor shortages and outdated farm policy, Reisinger explains why thousands of family farms are vanishing every year and what that means for rural America.

Watch the latest episode here. ⬅

Newsweek is part of the Trust Project, which focuses on honesty, accuracy and fairness in journalism. Read more about our best practices. To get in touch with our newsroom with suggestions on how to point out possible errors, please contact us at [email protected].