WHAT'S BREWING
THE MINISTRY OF UNTRUTH As our president sat across from Volodymyr Zelensky in New York last autumn, he explained to the newly elected leader that he knew all about his country because, after all, he used to own the Miss Universe pageant, and one year the winner was from Ukraine. “We got to know the country very well in a lot of different ways,” Donald Trump said. It was, unsurprisingly, completely false. A Miss Ukraine had never won the Miss Universe title in the pageant’s 66-year history, including the 20 that Trump had owned it. Equally unsurprisingly, the lie went largely unnoticed and uncared about. That begins a deep look at America's lying president and his unprincipled administration by HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte. [HuffPost]
YOUTH MINISTRY ACCUSED OF DECEIVING QUEER TEENS Elizabeth Garcia wasn’t particularly religious when she first encountered Young Life, a Colorado-based evangelical youth ministry that seeks to win young souls for Christ. Back then, she was just another nervous high school freshman trying to fit in. Young Life took her in, connected her to a Christian community that cared about her, and taught her that Jesus welcomes all kids to his table. Over a decade later, after serving as a Young Life volunteer and then a staff member, Garcia says she was forced to resign from her job after coming out as queer. Looking back, she called it a “bait and switch.” [HuffPost]
TRUMP'S PUSH TO CUT PAYROLL TAXES WOULD GUT SOCIAL SECURITY. HE HAS NO PLAN TO FIX IT. Trump’s vow to suspend the payroll tax for the rest of the year and permanently eliminate it if he is reelected in November would, absent additional action, result in disastrous revenue losses for the Social Security trust fund. The scheme is clearly designed to aid his reelection. But Trump says millions of Americans receiving Social Security benefits shouldn’t fret because the massive budget gap created by slashing payroll taxes would somehow be offset with “tremendous growth” in the economy, currently in a recession. [HuffPost]
TRUMP AND OTHER BIRTHERS GO AFTER KAMALA HARRIS A day after Joe Biden announced that Kamala Harris would be his running mate, Newsweek ran an op-ed questioning Harris’ eligibility. The argument by John Eastman, a failed GOP candidate, centers around the status of Harris’ parents. “Her father was (and is) a Jamaican national, her mother was from India, and neither was a naturalized U.S. citizen at the time of Harris’ birth in 1964,” he wrote. Harris was born in California and is therefore a U.S. citizen -- but that hasn't stopped Trump from leaning into the theories. Meanwhile, internal documents circulated to DNC delegates show why Biden picked Harris ... [HuffPost]
WHITE HOUSE, CONGRESS, FLIRT WITH DOUBLE-DIP RECESSION When the coronavirus pandemic first started spreading in the United States, Congress sprang into action, creating unprecedented relief programs for businesses and workers, sending out stimulus checks to more than 150 million people, and temporarily blocking evictions for millions of renters. But now ― with the national unemployment rate still above 10%, more than a million people losing their jobs every week, and the coronavirus still claiming a thousand lives per day ― lawmakers have left town. [HuffPost]
THE EVICTION CRISIS COULD COMPOUND VOTER SUPPRESSION Over 20 million Americans could be evicted by the end of September, with 30 to 40 million facing eviction by December. In-between, one of the most highly anticipated presidential elections in recent history will take place. That eviction crisis could make it harder for people to vote ― and, in turn, harder to hold politicians accountable for failing them in the midst of a pandemic. “It’s the compounding of all of the worst things at the same time,” said Ría Thompson-Washington, manager of the Voting Rights and Democracy Program at the Center for Popular Democracy. [HuffPost]
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