THE DRAIN PIPE

Welcome to The Drain Pipe, a normal person’s quick and dirty guide to Washington. You shouldn’t have to be a member of the White House press pool, a Polymarket insider trader, or a Chinese honey pot to understand what’s going on with the government — especially since you fork over so much money every April. What is the government doing with all that money? A lot of lobbies and NGOs depend on you never finding out.

Their strategy is twofold:

First, they make DC seem complex. In fact, tracking DC can be rote, paint-by-numbers simple. Anyone can dive deep into a congressional hearing or a court case with public resources, and we plan to demystify those as often as possible.

Second, the Beltway grifters dull your senses by making everything seem boring. The doltish reporters churning out Washington’s daybooks are all too happy to comply, writing about the seat of power of the world’s most powerful country in the stilted style of an overdue English report for a book they never read. But the debates in DC don’t just involve rival ideas. They can also turn on petty feuds, backroom deals, and eye-watering corruption. And the stakes are earth shattering.

Our newsletter will dredge up the muck of the Washington swamp more accurately. Put your hazmat suit on. Time to take a ride in The Drain Pipe.

THE EXECUTIVE

Shortly before 2 p.m., Trump will depart for a drag race and vehicle demonstration, a tour and gift ceremony before delivering remarks, according to his public schedule. The demonstration comes about a month before Trump plans to host an Indy 500 Grand Prix on the National Mall August 22 through the 23.

Bibi’s Back

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will visit the White House Tuesday for the first face-to-face sit down with Trump since the war began, according to Netanyahu’s office.

Bibi arrives with the war in a precarious lull: After 13 straight nights of strikes, U.S. forces did not attack Iran Saturday or Sunday.

Trump faces a fork in the road: Accept a diplomatic agreement or trigger a steep escalation in violence to extract concessions. Officials met to discuss next moves on Friday.

United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz appeared on Face the Nation on Sunday to give the latest brief, insisting Iran is not like “Afghanistan or Iraq, these endless wars where the policy goals, what were we doing there, started to drift so badly.”

He said that diplomatic efforts continue but that weaponry was being marshalled into the Iranian theater so that “all options are on the table.”

Reading the tea leaves, The Times of Israel predicted Bibi’s visit means a major escalation is off. The initiation of a new round of joint attacks would involve some sort of feint, not a visit between the two leaders, the paper speculates.

Trump told Axios that Israel “would join in two minutes if I ask them to,” but that there could be “consequences” from Iranian strikes.

Both Trump and Bibi say their relationship remains good. But Trump expressed public frustration after Israeli strikes on Lebanon jeopardized a June peace agreement. And New York Times reporting earlier this year revealed that Trump’s decision to go to war was informed by overly rosy Israeli intelligence indicating swift victory, an open Strait of Hormuz, and an overthrown regime – none of which materialized.

A dwindling supply of Patriot interceptor missiles with which to defend U.S. bases may be a decision-making factor, the Times reported. In the meantime, the U.S. is purchasing an older interceptor model that it has not bought in 30 years, The War Zone reported.

The Press Corps’ Follow Up:

Trump’s first White House Correspondents Dinner in April ended with a bang, literally, when would-be presidential assassin Cole Tomas Allen rushed the ballroom and fired a shot into a Secret Service officer’s ballistic vest before tripping and being detained.

Trump immediately promised to host the event again. The second go at the dinner took place Friday night.

“We’re here to show everyone that we do not yield to political violence,” Trump said Friday night at the Waldorf Astoria. “We settle our differences not with bullets but with open and vigorous debate. And no deranged loser with a gun will ever change that.”

Round Two was a smaller and more secure affair, with attendees required to show government ID. (Allen’s manifesto had noted the lax security, saying, “this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again.”)

“That night will go down in history and so will our response,” said White House Correspondents Association President Weijia Jiang, whom Trump said he had become friendly with over the April ordeal.

Trump ribbed the White House press corps about its self-adulation. The dinner involves a parade of prizes, with ​​CNN’s Kaitlin Collins receiving an award for excellence in presidential news coverage under deadline pressure for broadcast. “Don’t I get a say?” Trump joked.

Despite the animosity, no president has been more accessible to fake news press.

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Trump revealed why it seemed that every reporter in Washington could ring him up for a one-on-one interview in the earliest days of the Iran War. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was shielding the president from dealing with reporters, patching through only the most important calls, until he asked to deal with them directly.

Now there’s no filter.

“I pick up every once in a while. ‘Hello, I’m from Reno, Nevada. We are a startup we’re calling the Reno Express. Can I have your views on Iran?’ And I just hang up,” Trump shared. “I say, ‘Do you believe this?’ I’m the president of the United States.”

A mentalist was the entertainment, but Trump served as the night’s comedian. A writer had clearly prepared some one-liners. But as always the case with Trump, the best zingers were off the cuff.

Trump’s five best zingers:

1. “Just like my presidency, the second time is always better. And the third time will be better yet.”

2. “Last month we hosted one of the most incredible sporting events in world history at the White House. UFC Freedom 250. ... Just recognize that before I came along if you wanted to see someone lose consciousness on the South Lawn of the White House, all you had to do was ask Joe Biden a question.”

3. “Some people say that Jake Tapper is a great investigative reporter in DC. And that is why after moderating our debate it only took him one year to break the story that Joe Biden might have possibly suffered from cognitive decline.”

4. “It is traditional that at least one or two presidential hopefuls attend the correspondents dinner but many of them seem to have chickened out. I was disappointed that Gavin Newsom didn’t show up. He should be here. But I heard that he recently said that we will lose our country if we don’t fight fire with fire. To be fair, there is one thing we know about Gavin and that is that Gavin does not want to fight fire with water.”

5. “Anderson Cooper … I’m not a fan of his. But for years he loved me. I did so many interviews with him and he was great. But he’s got a little different persuasion than me… in many ways.”

THE LEGISLATURE

The House of Representatives are on summer vacation back in their home districts until late August after adjourning Thursday. However, the Senate is still scheduled to meet this week. Here’s what we’ve been watching.

A Senate Funeral

Sen. Lindsey Graham will be remembered Tuesday in a memorial service in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda and a private funeral at the Washington National Cathedral featuring a tribute from President Donald Trump.

Both Netanyahu and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will attend.

Graham helped persuade Trump to initiate the war with Iran, and died shortly after returning from a whirlwind diplomatic mission to Kyiv to secure continued U.S. backing of the war and deeper sanctions and tariffs on Russian oil and gas.

Documentary footage filmed by Alex Holder, a director who spent more than 400 hours with the senator, shows Graham elated in the hours after the Iran War began, describing it as “the best thing I’ve ever done.”

The memorial service will be the first of its kind since 2013, when Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey lied in repose in the chamber. There have been 55 memorial services held in the Senate Chamber stretching back to the 1812 funeral of George Clinton, who served as vice president to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and has no apparent relation to Dr. Funkenstein.

The South Carolina senator passed away on July 11, 2026, at the age of 71 due to an aortic dissection following a sudden illness. The long-serving foreign policy hawk was first elected to the Senate in 2002.

Dear Diary

Dr. Anthony Fauci is scheduled to testify before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs this Wednesday. His long-time rival Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky will preside over the hearing.

Fauci was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 until December 2022. He was also ex-President Joe Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor from January 2021 until he resigned as NIAID director.

Sen. Paul released an over 1,100-page dossier on X on Saturday titled “Tony’s Diary.” It details Fauci’s “meticulous” personal notes he allegedly made from December 2019-2022 as Biden’s chief medical advisor.

Many of these entries appeared to contradict Fauci’s official narrative on the pandemic. For example, multiple of Fauci’s entries from January 2020 through July 2021 suggested that multiple officials were investigating the possibility that the pandemic originated as a leak from a NIAID-funded lab in Wuhan, China. Meanwhile, by April 2020, Fauci told the nation that the virus’ origins were “totally consistent” with a natural animal-to-human species jump.

Biden gave Fauci an unprecedented preemptive pardon for any federal offices connected to his advisory service right before leaving the White House in January 2025.

In light of Fauci’s history of requesting that correspondence between him and other health officials regarding the lab leak be deleted, Paul requested in August 2022 that the National Institutes of Health preserve all documents and communications relating to COVID that Fauci possessed during his tenure.

Will Congress Finally Ban Itself From Insider Trading?

Republican Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin’s Stop Insider Trading Act — which aims to ban members of Congress and their families from buying stocks — is on its way to the Senate after the House merged the bill with part of Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee’s SAVE America Act on Wednesday.

The SAVE America Act — which the House advanced in a same-day budget reconciliation package to bypass Senate Democrats’ filibuster — aims to require voters to present their ID when voting in federal elections.

Around 83% of Americans support voter ID, according to a Pew Research Center study published August 2025. Additionally, 86% support banning politicians from trading stocks, according to a University of Maryland study published July 2023.

With 56% of congressional stock trades over a 16-month reportedly overlapping with industries actively regulated by committees the traders sat on, it’s unclear whether this move will help the package’s passage.

“[President Trump’s] patience is running out. He wants to see as much of the SAVE America Act passed as possible by the August recess … He knows that’s what the American people want to see passed,” White House press secretary Karoline Levitt told Daily Caller White House Correspondent Reagan Reese Thursday.

It takes only one senator to force a roll call vote for a recess in the upper chamber. Late Saturday night, Sen. Lee announced on X that he will “object to any effort to put the Senate into recess in August—at least until such time as the Senate has passed the SAVE America Act—and hereby request a roll call vote.”

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Another Kind Of Financial Loophole

Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming released a new text on Wednesday for Republican Rep. French Hill of Arizona’s previously passed Digital Assets Clarity Act, which aims to set requirements for the “trade monitoring, recordkeeping, and the commingling” of digital assets like cryptocurrency.

Senate Majority John Thune said he plans to put it up for a vote on the Senate floor this week, Politico reported that same day.

This bill comes as foreign actors are reportedly leveraging crypto’s lack of oversight against the United States.

Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis estimated that China-linked companies made around $27 million in the first quarter of 2026 selling non-FDA-approved peptides to the U.S. through crypto, Axios reported earlier this month. That’s around 150% higher than the previous quarter.

Iran has been a big fan of crypto too — ships have been paying Iran in Chinese yuan and crypto as an alternative to the dollar for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the Wall Street Journal reported in April.

On the bright side, Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent announced in May that the U.S. seized around $1 billion in Iranian crypto assets since the White House launched Operation Economic Fury.

However, it’s going to be up to the Senate whether they’ll close the blockchain’s gaps.

JUDICIARY

The Supreme Court won’t begin hearing cases again until October 5, but 23 cases have been confirmed to be on the docket for the next term. Here are a couple of the most interesting cases:

Sending Back Ex-Asylees

Wassily vs. Blanche will present the question to the courts of whether noncitizens who were temporarily granted asylum, but whose asylum status was revoked, are eligible to be lawful permanent residents and receive green cards, according to the lawsuit.

The case involves Tamer Wassily, a citizen of Egypt who entered the United States on visa in 1993. Wassily overstayed his visit and was supposed to be placed in removal proceedings when he claimed persecution in Egypt for his beliefs and was later granted asylum in 2000, according to the lawsuit.

However, in 2004 Wassily was convicted of third-degree stalking and child endangerment. The Department of Homeland Security reopened Wassily’s removal proceedings in order to terminate his asylum status, the lawsuit says.

Wassily then appealed, claiming that his counsel before the immigration judge was ineffective for failing to request Wassily’s adjustment to lawful permanent resident status before termination of his asylum status, according to the suit.

AR-15s

SCOTUS has also agreed to hear Viramontes vs. Cook County for the fall term. The case presents the question of whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee the right to possess AR-15 platforms and similar semiautomatic rifles, according to the lawsuit.

The case challenges a Cook County law that prohibits the possession of assault weapons, including semiautomatic rifles. Plaintiffs are arguing that the ban is a violation to their Second and Fourteenth Amendment rights, according to the suit.

MISCELLANEOUS

The Issue Dividing The Conservative Movement

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” grossed over $364 million worldwide after its July 17 release, following months of backlash over his decision to cast Kenyan-Mexican woman Lupita Nyong’o as the Spartan Queen Helen of Troy and trans-identifying woman Elliot Page as the deceptive Greek soldier Sinon.

“The movie is just as woke as you fear, if not more so. The DEI casting is atrocious. Completely takes you out of the story right from the beginning,” the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh stated on X last Tuesday after watching the film. “But even worse than that is Nolan’s decision to turn Odysseus into an anachronistic whiney, solemn shell of a man plagued by ‘trauma’ and guilt … At no point in the story does Nolan ever transport the audience to the ancient world. You never feel like you’re 3,000 years in the past. You feel like you’re watching modern Americans put on a pageant, because you are.”

However, another Daily Wire host disagreed. This is clearly the most contentious problem dividing the conservative movement.

“IMHO, a lot of conservatives are missing the Biblical forest for the woke trees in Nolan’s Odyssey. Yes, the casting of Elliot Page is silly and egregious. But here’s the thing: Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ is an apologia for Christian morality poured into a Greek vase,” Ben Shapiro stated in an X post hours later. “Nolan then takes this rule and uses it as his moral glue: the idea is that Odysseus, in utilizing the Trojan Horse, violated Zeus’ law and led to full-scale slaughter. That sin has led to the unleashing of broader globalized sin (the ‘sea peoples’ who don’t respect Zeus’ law and are invading surrounding areas). This is a highly Biblical message: that sin is infectious, and that sin also affects the world at large, not just the sinner.”

The following day, serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk posted on X that “Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer” by the end of the year. That being said, considering Grok’s history of generating dehumanizing content, it’s unclear whether this’ll be a retelling of Homer’s “The Odyssey” or of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”

We’re ‘Nixonmaxxing’

Homer’s magnum opus isn’t the only thing people talked about reanimating last Tuesday.

Hype edits on the Richard Nixon Foundation’s Instagram of clips of President Richard Nixon with rap music are sweeping the internet, the Montgomery County Republican Club notes.

The writer noted that this “Nixonmaxxing” trend comes after Generation Z grew up watching Nixon — “who restructured the global order, wound down a war he inherited, and signed environmental laws Americans still live under today” — be portrayed as a boogeyman over one scandal while Democratic presidents got away with way worse.

Zoomers may appreciate Nixon for coming back after being knocked down. Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960 before returning to the White House eight years later. After being pressured to resign in 1974 over his connections to the Watergate scandal, he later became a trusted advisor to future presidents.

Generation Z grew up in the age of smart phones, political polarization, and forever wars, and now often has to compete with foreigners in the housing market while being disproportionately plagued by technology addiction. With many Zoomers disillusioned by a long line of deep state riddles — from that lab in Wuhan to that Epstein guy “who never dies” — one could argue that the Watergate break-in almost looks like a housewarming party by comparison.

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