Trump’s Birthright Play Dares the Left to Defend Fraud
Plus: El-Sayed’s $115K from CAIR board members, and the Senate mails Fauci’s contempt straight to DOJ.
It’s Friday!
My cat dropped a gift for me on the cowhide in my living room this morning. A tiny garden snake. Not exactly what I wanted to encounter before my coffee.
Last night my husband and I went to see The Odyssey at one of only 25 IMAX theaters in the world that project in 70mm, the format Christopher Nolan shot it in. To my surprise, one of them is a short drive from us. I have thoughts, good and bad, that I’m pocketing for a post in The Bookie. But I’ll say this much: it was worth it for the visuals, but there was a lot to overlook.
Let’s get into the news.
In Today’s Read.
Trump signed two birthright citizenship orders. Read the fine print: the whole thing is built on fraud.
Michigan’s new Democratic Senate nominee took six figures from a Hamas-linked network. The best rebuttal the left has is “Islamophobia.”
A Senate committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt, skipped the floor, and sent it straight to DOJ. His government phone is now in Ron Johnson’s hands.
Rundown: the economy shed jobs, Trump gathered the mining bosses, and Bernie found a socialist even he won’t touch.
Trump Didn’t Give Up on Birthright Citizenship. He Built the Case on Fraud.
The Story.
On Wednesday, August 6, Trump signed two executive orders on birthright citizenship and birth tourism. This is not the January 2025 order the Supreme Court shot down. In Trump v. Barbara on June 30, the Court held that citizenship extends to children born to parents in the U.S. “for whom no extraterritorial fiction applie[s],” and left a set of historical exceptions in place. The new orders is based on those exceptions. The first order “non-exhaustively identifies certain categories of children of aliens who are not entitled to birthright citizenship” under the carve-outs Barbara recognized. The second hands authority to the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security and tells them to shut down birth tourism.
Read the White House fact sheet, and the foundation is right there in plain text. The target is people who “work with malign syndicates to evade immigration laws” and “plan to exploit their temporary admission to obtain American citizenship.” Same document points to a denaturalization surge already running, with claims filed against 88 people the administration says got citizenship they were never eligible for. The word doing the work in all of it is fraud.
The right’s read. Closing a loophole. NBC and the White House run it as ending birth tourism and protecting the value of citizenship, with the narrowness pitched as smart lawyering: hit the fraud and the paid-citizenship edge cases the June ruling left open, instead of relitigating the whole 14th Amendment.
The left’s read. Round two of a fight Trump already lost. CNN frames it as Trump “again” trying to curb birthright citizenship, stresses the 14th Amendment, and counts down to the court blocks. Al Jazeera and ABC treat the birth-tourism and “terrorist” language as pretext for the broad assault the Court rejected in June.
What both sides skip. The size of the target. Most coverage collapses “birthright citizenship” into one endless fight and skips that this order is deliberately smaller than January’s. The left flattens the distinction so it can replay a win. The right mostly skips that hanging a lifelong status like citizenship on the word “alleged,” as in “alleged terrorists,” is a real due-process problem for someone who has already been granted citizenship.
In January, Trump swung big to eliminate birthright citizenship for the children of anyone here illegally or temporarily. The Court said no in Barbara. This is not that. This order goes after a much smaller group: people who lied, paid, or gamed their way into a temporary presence and then used it to manufacture a citizen. The pitch isn’t “the 14th Amendment doesn’t mean what it says.” It’s “the 14th Amendment doesn’t cover fraud.” That’s a different, and much harder to kill, argument.
Here’s the question the left has to answer, and I would genuinely like to hear them try. If someone breaks immigration law to get into the country, and the entire point of the trip was to produce a U.S. passport, should the fraud pay off? Put it plainer. Should committing a crime be a valid path to citizenship for your child? It will be interesting to watch the left do the “razzle-dazzle” on that argument.
I’ve spent two pieces documenting exactly the machine this order is aimed at. Xu Bo, a Chinese billionaire who commissioned more than 100 U.S.-born children through American surrogates without setting foot here, boys preferred, because in his words they are “superior to girls.” The CEO of IVF USA saying the quiet part out loud: his clients want babies “brought back to China, as U.S. citizens instead of Chinese citizens,” so they “fall outside the country’s penalty system.” One fertility executive called the American legal setup “regulatory arbitrage,” her words, a $22-billion-a-year pipeline for buying a citizen and shipping it home. That is how one “purchases” citizenship. That’s a business model making millions risking our national security.
So spare me “here we go again.” This is a clever shift; Trump stops arguing the amendment and starts arguing the fraud. The left wants to keep the debate on the 14th Amendment, because on the 14th Amendment they won in June. They do not want to stand up and say a foreign national who evaded the law to buy a passport should keep the prize. Watch them try to avoid that sentence for the next month.
Yes, it’s an executive order. Yes, it gets challenged, probably within the week, and a judge somewhere blocks it by Friday. This is not a done deal. But an EO the courts pause is still a signal, and the signal is loud. This is a long road, likely to end up back before the Supreme Court. The administration has not dropped the birthright question; it’s taking a different strategy that is harder to defend politically.
Worth watching. Watch which district court enjoins first and whether the opinion engages the fraud theory or just recycles the January ruling as if nothing changed. Watch whether a single elected Democrat will say, on record, that fraud-obtained citizenship should stand. And watch the surrogacy industry, the one with no federal law, no registry, and no cap, because this is the first federal action that treats their “purchase” language as a legal problem instead of a press release.
Related:
He Won Tuesday. By Thursday It Was $115K From CAIR Board Members.
The Story.
Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary last week. Five days later, a Fox News review of FEC records found his campaign took more than $115,000 from at least 41 donors tied to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The names are not random members. CAIR national board chair Manal Fakhoury. National treasurer Eyas Abdeen. National vice chair Emad Sabbah. Executive director Nihad Awad, filed under “Nehad Hammad.” And CAIR-Michigan board member Jukaku Tayeb, who happens to be El-Sayed’s father-in-law and separately bankrolled a pro-El-Sayed super PAC.
So what is CAIR, for readers who don’t live in this stuff? It calls itself the country’s largest Muslim civil-rights group, and it flatly denies any tie to terrorism, pointing reporters to its “Dispelling Rumors About CAIR” page. Here’s what’s not on the brochure. CAIR was founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad, two officials of the Islamic Association for Palestine, a group federal prosecutors described as the U.S. propaganda arm of Hamas. It came out of a 1993 Philadelphia meeting of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, secretly recorded by the FBI, where members discussed standing up a “neutral”-sounding group to swing American opinion toward Hamas. Within months, CAIR took a $5,000 check from the Holy Land Foundation, the charity later convicted of funneling money to Hamas in what the government called the largest terrorism-financing case in U.S. history. CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in that case. The FBI cut formal ties with the group in 2008, with Director Robert Mueller later testifying the bureau had “no formal relationship with CAIR because of concerns with regard to the national leadership.” In 2014 the United Arab Emirates, a Muslim country, added CAIR to its list of designated terrorist organizations. Awad, still running CAIR today, said back in 1994 that he was “in support of the Hamas movement.” In 2023 he said he was “happy” to see Hamas break out of Gaza on October 7.
The right’s read. The donor list, name by name. The Post Millennial and Frontpage lead on the 2007 unindicted-co-conspirator label and Awad’s October 7 quote, and make the father-in-law tie the center of gravity: not incidental money, family money from a network with a designation.
The left’s read. One word: Islamophobia. Truthout has El-Sayed clapping back at “the GOP’s Islamophobic attacks” with “That’s the best you got?” The instant the story dropped, the dismissal was already loaded.
What both sides skip. The hypocrisy sitting right next to the terror ties. The right is essentially the only side covering this, and it’s leading with the CAIR-Hamas record when there’s an even cleaner story underneath: El-Sayed ran on getting money out of politics and against AIPAC’s spending, then quietly banked six figures from CAIR’s board. The left skips the whole thing, or reaches for “Islamophobia” and moves on, and won’t say the documented part out loud: CAIR’s founders came out of Hamas’s U.S. propaganda arm, prosecutors tied the group to Hamas financing, and its executive director cheered October 7 before writing in. One question settles it. Does El-Sayed give the money back?
Crying islamophobia is a predictive deflection. These are real donors, with real titles, on a real disclosure form, and calling the reporting bigoted doesn’t make it not true. But, “you’re a racist for asking.”
Fine, nobody’s shown El-Sayed personally runs Hamas’s errands. But he loves them checks, and here’s what the check does show. He built his campaign on getting money out of politics and hammering AIPAC, then turned around and banked six figures from CAIR’s board. The outsider who rails against wealthy donors has a super PAC that's basically two rich guys, one of them his father-in-law at $200,000. That's the money he says he's against, wearing a keffiyeh instead of a suit.
And spare me the “it’s the same as AIPAC” deflection. You can have real problems with AIPAC. But AIPAC lobbies for a U.S. ally and works inside the system. CAIR’s founders came out of Hamas’s orbit, and the group’s projects are directly in opposition to American interests, not toward them. Campaigning against one while quietly pocketing the other is a clear tell about where his allegiances sit.
Flip the script. Picture a Republican who ran on getting money out of politics, spent all summer bashing AIPAC, and then showed up with $115,000 from a far-right Christian nationalist outfit with its own paper trail to a designated far-right militant group. You already know the headline. Wall-to-wall on cable, “extremist ties” in every chyron, calls to drop out by Friday. El-Sayed does the mirror image and gets “Islamophobia” and a news blackout.
The money isn’t the only receipt. It's a pattern. Back in 2022, El-Sayed took a reported $5,000 to keynote a CAIR banquet in Oklahoma, where he lined up the state's voters, the ones who passed a ballot measure keeping Islamic law out of their courts, next to the Trail of Tears, the 1921 Tulsa massacre, and "white supremacy." His words: "You can't understand a Sharia ban without understanding the Trail of Tears." He looked at people who didn't want Sharia in an American courtroom and filed them alongside ethnic cleansing.
It's not a one-off. He was vice president of the Muslim Students Association, and in 2012 he signed a statement defending Mohamed Morsi's power grab in Egypt as "necessary." Stack that next to the CAIR board money and the father-in-law who ran CAIR-Michigan. Any one of these alone, you could wave off. All of them, in the same man, running for the Senate, point the same direction.
This was never about “Islamophobia.” It’s about the hypocrisy, the allegiances the money reveals, and a press that would torch a right-wing candidate over the same disclosure form it’s ignoring. “That’s the best you got?” plays great at a rally. It's a deflection, and he knows it.
Worth watching. Watch whether a single legacy outlet prints the donor names instead of the word "Islamophobia." Watch whether El-Sayed returns Awad's money or dares a reporter to ask him about October 7 to his face.
Related:
ICYMI:
Thou Mayest
*No plot spoilers. One idea from the middle of the book gets explained because the review doesn't work without it.
The Committee Voted Contempt on Fauci, Straight to DOJ.
The Story.
On Thursday, August 6, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 8 to 5, along party lines, to hold Anthony Fauci in criminal contempt of Congress. He'd invoked the Fifth 111 times at his late-July hearing and kept refusing even after Rand Paul ruled the privilege didn't apply. Paul is skipping a full Senate floor vote and sending the resolution straight to the Justice Department; an aide confirmed the referral went out.
Two more things landed the same week. Ron Johnson's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations obtained a copy of the government iPhone Fauci used at NIAID, handed over by HHS. And the attorneys general of Florida, West Virginia, and Louisiana issued their own subpoena over his COVID guidance and financial dealings. Fauci's lawyer called the vote "a crude political stunt" and "a personal vendetta."
The right’s read. The substance. Fox, Epoch Times, and ZeroHedge lead on the 111 invocations of the Fifth, the HHS-transferred phone, three states subpoenaing him at once, and Paul’s theory that the Biden pardon is exactly what strips the Fifth Amendment cover.
The left’s read. The fight, not the file. NPR and CNN foreground the party-line split, the “crude political stunt” line, and the doubt about whether DOJ does anything with a referral.
What both sides skip. What’s actually on the phone. The left argues motive and skips the substance question entirely. The right skips that a party-line committee referral to a DOJ run by the same administration is not a conviction and may never become one. Nobody’s telling you what investigators think they’ll find.
A reminder. Biden handed Fauci a full, unconditional pardon for any federal crime back to 2014, and the Supreme Court held in 1896, in Brown v. Walker, that once you're pardoned you can't plead the Fifth for those acts, because there's nothing left to charge. That's Paul's argument: the pardon meant to protect Fauci is what took his right to stay silent. His lawyers have one card. A pardon only reaches federal crimes, and under Murphy v. Waterfront Commission (1964) the Fifth still shields you from a state prosecutor, so the three Republican AGs who just subpoenaed him are the argument. But the Fifth is claimed question by question against real jeopardy, not draped over 111 answers in a row. Paul ruled it didn't apply, ordered him to answer, and treated the refusal as contempt. So that is where we stand.
Seriously, a “vendetta?” It’s a deflection, and a well-worn one. Rand Paul spent 2020 and 2021 getting called a kook and a conspiracy theorist for saying the virus might have come from the Wuhan lab and that Fauci’s own institute helped fund the research. Fauci sat across from him on live TV and told him he didn’t know what he was talking about. The media ran the cover. Now the diary and the record say Paul was pointed the right way the whole time, and suddenly the story isn’t “Paul was right,” it’s “Paul has a vendetta.” Funny how that works.
The revelation of the diary is the reason the vendetta line exists, because Fauci and the people running defense for him do not want to sit with what’s in it. The committee released more than 1,100 pages, 2019 to 2022. In a February 1, 2020 entry, Fauci logged a call on the virus’s origins where, by his own notes, only two scientists backed a natural origin and “the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible.” In public he championed the natural-origin line and treated lab-leak talk as fringe. He also wrote about leaning on Bill de Blasio to close New York’s schools and doing the same through a Newsom aide. Private version, public version, and they don’t match.
Then there’s the hubris. Fauci kept this “private” diary on a government computer at NIAID. Eleven hundred pages, on a federal server, by a man who apparently never imagined anyone would come looking. RFK Jr.’s HHS found them after an eight-month search and calls them what they are: government records. And now investigators have his government phone too. Given what fell out of the diary, does anyone think the phone comes back blank? He’s pleading the Fifth 111 times for a reason, and it isn’t principle. It’s CYA.
So no, this isn’t Paul chasing a grudge. It’s the first time the man who ran America’s pandemic has sat under oath with his own words on the table, and he’d rather plead the Fifth a hundred times over than explain the gap between what he wrote and what he told you. “Vendetta” is the line his defenders reach for so they never have to answer for what the diary already shows. The silence is the confession.
Worth watching. Watch whether DOJ actually acts on a committee referral or lets it die quietly, and whether the “pardon strips the Fifth” theory gets tested in court. Watch what, if anything, comes off that phone.
The economy shed 23,000 jobs in July, and immigration is part of the story. Payrolls fell 23,000 against an expected 83,000 gain, with May and June revised down a combined 103,000 and unemployment at 4.1%. Under the topline, foreign-born employment keeps dropping while native-born employment climbs as ICE enforcement thins the foreign-born labor force, and forecasters tie the weak hiring in farming, construction, and restaurants to that shrinking supply. The administration takes the credit; economists caution the one-month nativity numbers are noisy, so don't overread a single print.
Trump gathered the mining bosses to dig the U.S. out of its dependence on China. The president convened executives from the world’s largest mining companies at the State Department Friday to lock in domestic and allied supplies of critical minerals. The driver is blunt: U.S. forces burned through precision missiles and interceptors in the five-month Iran war and need the minerals to rebuild the stockpile without going through Beijing.
Trump says the U.S. has “massive amounts” of munitions. His own Pentagon reporting says otherwise. Trump publicly denied a shortage after reports that dwindling stocks of long-range missiles and interceptors were part of why he called off further strikes on Iran. Behind closed doors he reportedly confronted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the shortfall. The “massive amounts” line is aimed at the Iranians at the table, not at you.
Bernie Sanders found a socialist even he won’t touch. Asked on Pod Save America whether he’d endorse Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin governor’s race, Sanders said “I don’t think so,” called her “very, very nice,” and pleaded unfamiliarity. Hong wants to abolish the U.S. Senate and defund the police.
Jon Favreau@jonfavsBernie on whether he’ll endorse Hong: “I don’t think so.”11:19 PM · Aug 5, 2026 · 782K Views199 Replies · 142 Reposts · 2.37K LikesThe CIA spun up a Cuba task force. The agency has stood up a dedicated Cuba unit to pressure Havana, staffed with case officers who recruit spies, analysts, and officers running cyberoperations. Task forces don’t get built to do nothing.
Trump played goal-line defense on a runaway toddler. At an August 5 stop at Red Rock Casino in Las Vegas, he brought a local family up to pitch the new "Trump Accounts" for kids, then bolted after their toddler as the boy speed-crawled for the edge of the stage, joking, "I don't want him to be Biden and fall off the stage." The kid recovered, grabbed the mic, and announced, "Thank you for my Trump Account." Best surrogate of the cycle.
Nick Sortor@nicksortorLMAO! President Trump just RAN AFTER and BLOCKED a little boy from running off the stage while his mom was speaking "I didn't want him to be like BIDEN and fall off the stage" 🤣 There'll never be another like him.
Nick Sortor @nicksortorA little boy just took the mic at President Trump's rally in Las Vegas, saying "Thank you for my Trump Account!" 🤣 Adorable. This'll be a moment this family will remember forever.10:23 PM · Aug 5, 2026 · 5.25M Views1.39K Replies · 10.7K Reposts · 89.7K Likes
That’s The Read.
See you Monday.
If The Read is doing the cross-check work for you, send it to a friend who’s still chasing the framing instead of the facts.