Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
Trump mocked Lindsey Graham at his own funeral, then fell asleep in the pew. Elon Musk’s AI company is suing Minnesota to overturn a law banning fake nude images of real people. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has called on Mitch McConnell to publicly demonstrate that he remains capable of serving or resign. And ICE is now arresting people with expired visas at airport gates, including newlyweds married to U.S. citizens.
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Trump Mocked Lindsey Graham at His Funeral Then Fell Asleep
Donald Trump fell asleep at Lindsey Graham’s funeral Tuesday, giving the two men something in common one last time.
As mourners eulogized the former senator at the Washington National Cathedral, the 80-year-old president blinked, drooped, and eventually started tilting his head as he dozed off. This came shortly after Trump delivered his own eulogy. To put it delicately, he went off-script.
Trump began: “Virtually everyone — Republican or Democrat — liked Lindsey. Well, not everybody. But it sounds good. Not everybody. He was a tough cookie, OK? I have to be — I have to veer from this for a second.”
He called Graham “extremely hawkish” and told the mourners that Graham “never saw a war that he didn’t like.” Trump also revisited the time he shared Graham’s personal cell phone number on live television during a 2015 rally, after Graham called him a “jackass.”
“So naturally, I did something that I shouldn’t have done,” Trump said. “I shared his personal cell phone number with the millions of people that happened to be watching that particular day.” He then read the number out again: “202-228-0292 if anybody wants to give it a shot.”
When other mourners took the lectern, Trump sat down and promptly fell asleep. This is not an isolated event — Trump was also caught dozing at Charlie Kirk’s funeral in September and at the U.S. Open finals. The man has never fallen asleep at a rally about himself.
Elon Musk Is Suing for the Right to Make Fake Nudes
The world’s richest man has found a hill to die on, and it is the constitutional right to generate fake nude images of real people.
Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, filed a federal lawsuit Monday against Minnesota over a first-of-its-kind law that bans AI apps that create naked and sexualized images of people, including children. The company argues the statute violates the First Amendment by imposing an “overbroad, content-based ban on free speech.”
The law, HF 1606, was signed by Gov. Tim Walz earlier this year and set to take effect in August. It lets victims and the state attorney general go after the companies behind AI nudification.
xAI says it “does not contest Minnesota’s interest” in stopping nonconsensual nude images. It just wants to keep making the tools that do it. The company also complained the law’s definition of “intimate part” is too broad, sweeping in shirtless men and people in swimsuits.
Attorney General Keith Ellison was blunt. “There are plenty of worthy debates to have about AI policy. This is not one of them,” he said, calling nudification “appalling.” Walz was blunter. In response to the lawsuit, he tweeted, “See you in court, creep.”
A billionaire is spending his money suing a state for trying to protect people from AI-generated fake nudes. We are spending ours telling you about it without having to worry about whether that billionaire also owns us. If that sounds like a model worth keeping alive, please upgrade to a paid subscription today.
Kentucky’s Governor Wants Proof Mitch McConnell Is Alive
If you no-showed your job for six weeks and your only proof of life was a photograph, you would not have a job. Mitch McConnell has a Senate seat.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear called on Sen. Mitch McConnell to publicly prove he can serve or resign, a day after McConnell’s office said the 84-year-old was still not medically cleared to leave rehabilitation. Beshear suggested McConnell could release a short video or call a Kentucky radio station.
Instead, McConnell released a still photo of himself with his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. It was the second such photo since he was hospitalized.
“All we’re asking is just a little bit of proof,” Beshear told reporters, noting that even an attending physician’s written statement did not address whether McConnell could speak or carry out his duties.
McConnell was hospitalized after a June 14 fall that briefly left him unconscious, then supposedly contracted a mild case of pneumonia. His absence leaves Republicans one vote short in a narrow Senate majority. It also exposes an untested Kentucky law, passed in 2024, that bars the Democratic governor from appointing a temporary replacement.
Sept. 1 is the practical deadline to schedule a special election. At this rate, the jpeg will have seniority.
ICE Is Now Arresting People at Airports
The TSA checks your bags. Plainclothes ICE agents at the gate are now checking your birth country.
The Trump administration has begun arresting foreign citizens with expired U.S. visas as they travel through airports. Plainclothes agents have pulled targets from check-in counters and arrival gates at at least 15 airports in recent weeks.
The targets are who you might expect from this administration: an engineer awaiting a work-visa extension, several newlyweds married to U.S. citizens, a former au pair, a Ugandan woman in a wheelchair with sickle cell anemia, and an active asylum applicant.
These are people in a legal gray area, awaiting green cards or extensions, many holding valid work permits. Under past administrations, they were rarely detained unless they had committed crimes.
Chantal Morales Rojas, the 27-year-old former au pair, had lived in the country for three and a half years with work authorization. Agents detained her as she boarded a Southwest flight in Denver. A viral video captured by a family friend shows agents encircling her and ushering her down to the tarmac
Lawyers are now revising the advice they have given for decades. The old rule was that a valid ID got you through a domestic flight. The new rule is to avoid flying at all.
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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump’s Deadline to Revive His Birthright Citizenship Order Quietly Expired. The 25-day window for the Trump administration to ask the Supreme Court to reconsider its rejection of his birthright citizenship restrictions passed Tuesday with no filing on the docket. In June, the court’s 6-3 decision struck down his executive order, which would have denied automatic citizenship to children born in the U.S. Trump had vowed on social media to seek a rehearing “IMMEDIATELY,” but the window passed with no activity. A petition would have faced long odds anyway: the court has not agreed to rehear an argued case in more than 50 years.
Americans Support Netanyahu Arrest by 22-point margin: Survey. Nearly half of Americans (49 percent) believe the U.S. should enforce the ICC’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu over war crimes in Gaza, according to a new Economist/YouGov poll, whereas only 27 percent said no. Netanyahu is expected in New York for the UN General Assembly in September. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on a promise to arrest him, recently acknowledged he may not have the authority to do so, but doubled down on his commitment. Trump has already promised Netanyahu “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.”
Michigan Made School Meals Free for Every Public School Student. Michigan public school students will eat for free again this coming year after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed the state’s education budget. Her office says the program saves families around $1,000 per year, per child, and feeds 1.4 million children at a cost of $200 million. First launched in fall 2023, the benefit matters most for parents like Kalamazoo mom Elida Munoz, who told a reporter that sometimes there isn’t food at home. Feeding 1.4 million kids costs less than a single billionaire’s tax cut, and one state decided to just do it.
New York Opened Its Public Colleges to Students Howard University Kicked Out. After Howard University withdrew more than 500 first-year students in late July for missed tuition payments, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that affected New Yorkers can seek admission at CUNY and SUNY for the fall 2026 semester. Several SUNY campuses — including Buffalo, Albany, Binghamton, Stony Brook and New Paltz — will offer expedited late admissions review. Howard said 502 students missed the July 10 deadline despite notifications starting in March, though some students say they never received them.
