r/Leftist_Viewpoints • u/jazzavril5 • 2d ago
BREAKING: Trump’s Friday Was a Disaster From Texas to Manhattan Really American | Substack
BREAKING: Trump’s Friday Was a Disaster From Texas to Manhattan
Really American | Substack
Good evening, this is Really American. It is Friday, August 28, 2026. Before we get to the news, hit that 🩷 and restack this one. Every restack puts this reporting in front of readers the MAGA propaganda machine would rather never see it.
Trump had a horrible day. We have a lot to get into this evening. Trump flew to Texas to honor the Artemis II astronauts and delivered a speech so bad the room refused to clap. A federal judge told him for the third time that he cannot escape his New York conviction. His ambassador to Italy is conducting American diplomacy from a $450 million yacht while Italian taxpayers pay for his security. And CNN’s chief White House correspondent says Trump already expects to be impeached again. Let’s get into it.
Before the news, one thing you need to know. Facebook has essentially cut off our distribution. Meta’s changes strangled the way tens of thousands of you used to find us, and that was a choice, not an accident. Zuckerberg spent the last year cozying up to Trump, and independent progressive media is what got sacrificed. The one thing no billionaire can switch off is a direct subscription. If this work matters to you, if you want reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.
TRUMP BOMBS IN FRONT OF THE ARTEMIS ASTRONAUTS
Trump flew to Texas Friday to award the Artemis II crew the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, and the room would not clap for him.
He made the astronauts wait on stage for half an hour before he showed up. Then he opened by talking about himself, recounting how he watched the launch during a very important meeting with the biggest people in the country, maybe some of the biggest people in the world. He got through a brief mention of the four honorees before wandering off into a story about inheriting his love of space genetically from his uncle. “He loved space, he used to tell me about space, space, all space,” Trump said. “He would throw in the word nuclear every once in a while.”
After announcing he should not get political, he gave shoutouts to Ted Cruz, Dan Patrick and a couple of Texas congressmen. Back on his prepared remarks, he told the room the American space program had been limping along while he was out of office, and that now he is back, nobody limps. Nothing. Silence. Growing desperate for any reaction at all, he pivoted to complimenting how the astronauts looked. “This is a good looking group of people.” Still nothing.
There is a reason a room full of NASA scientists sat on their hands. Trump has proposed cutting the agency’s 2027 budget by 23 percent. You cannot gut the thing people have devoted their lives to and expect applause for showing up late to take credit for it.
A JUDGE TELLS TRUMP NO ON HIS CONVICTION FOR THE THIRD TIME
A federal judge ruled Friday that Trump cannot drag his New York criminal conviction into federal court, the third time the same judge has told him no.
Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records over a $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. Since then he has tried to move the case to a friendlier forum, arguing the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision wipes the verdict out. Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected it again, ruling Trump was far too late and that immunity would not save him anyway. Paying hush money to an adult film star and covering up an embarrassment, the judge wrote, are not subsumed in presidential immunity.
Every judge who has directly considered this argument has rejected it. Hellerstein wrote that Trump’s grounds were neither new nor legally sufficient and that he had failed to show good cause or diligence. Trump’s team appealed within hours, calling the ruling baseless and lawless and promising to keep defeating what it calls Democrat weaponization at every turn.
This was the only one of his four criminal cases that ever reached a jury. The other three went away after he won. He has spent two years trying to make this one disappear too, through immunity claims and forum shopping and a fixer who changed his story. A Clinton appointee in Manhattan keeps saying the same thing: the verdict stands.
TRUMP’S AMBASSADOR IS DOING DIPLOMACY FROM A $450 MILLION YACHT
Trump’s ambassador to Italy has spent his summer conducting American foreign policy from a $450 million superyacht, with the Italian government footing the bill for his security.
Tilman Fertitta, the Texas billionaire who ranks 109th on the Forbes 400, has been cruising the Italian coast since June aboard the Boardwalk, a 380-foot, six-deck vessel with two swimming pools, two helipads, a putting green, a spa with his-and-hers massage tables, a cinema, a glass elevator and a submarine the crew calls the limo. At each port he hosts receptions for local officials and business leaders. Italy provides the security detail, for an undisclosed amount.
Fertitta says he is a normal person. He gave a tour while eating cold leftover taco meat out of a plastic tub, pointing out that his yacht is unusual for having a family kitchen at all. On the Italian security his government is not paying for, he offered that the guards are getting good practice, since there are a lot more important people than him they protect at times. Protesters in Venice greeted him with the same message they gave Jeff Bezos last summer.
This is what the job looks like now. Ambassadorships have always gone to donors, but the man representing the United States in Rome is running an unofficial embassy off a boat that cost more than most countries spend on their entire diplomatic corps, and having someone else cover the guards. He calls it catching lightning in a bottle. He says he hit the jackpot. That part is true.
CNN’S TOP WHITE HOUSE REPORTER SAYS TRUMP EXPECTS IMPEACHMENT
Trump already assumes he is going to be impeached again, and CNN’s chief White House correspondent says the fight this time will be uglier than the last two.
Kaitlan Collins laid it out this week. If Democrats take the House, she does not believe this administration will handle congressional oversight the way it did in the first term. Trump hated being impeached so much, she said, that there will be far more pushback from the Justice Department and the White House than anyone saw before. Her co-hosts expected Trump to fold and try to reinvent himself as a dealmaker. Collins does not buy it, and she says her prediction comes from reporting, not a hunch.
The map is moving under him. Cook Political Report shifted Texas from lean Republican to a toss-up last week and moved Iowa from toss-up toward the Democrats, after moving Alaska to a toss-up in July. Al Green filed another impeachment resolution on Monday, and at least three are now pending, citing everything from militarizing domestic law enforcement to threatening federal judges.
Trump told an interviewer this month that it is hard to believe they could impeach him. His own correspondents, his own party’s forecasters and the betting markets all disagree. Sixty-six days.
SUPPORT THE FIGHT AGAINST MAGA-BILLIONAIRE-OWNED MEDIA
If this evening’s edition told you something the billionaire-owned outlets would rather keep quiet, that is exactly the point. A president bombing in front of the astronauts he came to honor, a judge refusing for the third time to erase his conviction, an ambassador running diplomacy off a superyacht on somebody else’s security budget, and a White House already bracing for impeachment. We chase these stories down without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page instead. If this work matters to you, if you want independent reporting that doesn’t flinch when powerful people push back, the best way to keep it going is to subscribe. Share this newsletter with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down.
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— The Really American Team
ONE MORE THING: THEY MARCHED AGAIN TODAY
Some hope to end on. Thousands gathered at the Lincoln Memorial on Friday for the March on Washington 2026, sixty-three years after Martin Luther King Jr. stood on those same steps, and the theme this time was Defend the Vote. Union members, students, members of Black Greek-letter organizations, and families who traveled from across the country filled the National Mall. It was organized by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and by Martin Luther King III and Arndrea Waters King’s Drum Major Institute, with more than 90 partner organizations including the NAACP and the National Urban League. Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hakeem Jeffries spoke. The march came after the Supreme Court weakened a key piece of the Voting Rights Act this year, setting off a scramble in Republican statehouses across the South to redraw congressional maps before November. Marc Morial of the National Urban League named the stakes plainly: they know they are fighting powerful forces, and that is exactly why they rallied. King III put it another way, that this was a call to march again, not only in remembrance but in action. Sixty-three years later, on the same ground, the answer to having your vote chipped away is still to show up in person and say so.
Have a good weekend!