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Tuesday, August 25

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Good morning.

Donald Trump is once again telling people there is something wrong with the way Americans vote, especially by mail, and before anybody starts changing the rules this close to an election, remember who is making the argument.

Trump votes by mail himself. He spent years saying the 2020 election was stolen from him. More than 60 court cases went nowhere. Recounts did not save him. Republican election officials in states he lost told him the numbers were right. His own Justice Department found no fraud on a scale that could have changed the outcome. He lost, and instead of accepting that, he kept telling people the election had been taken from them.

Then there was Georgia. Trump called Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to “find 11,780 votes,” exactly one more than he needed to erase Biden’s margin. And we know where all of those stolen-election lies led. January 6 did not come out of nowhere.

Now, less than 100 days before the midterms, Trump is back trying to change mail-voting rules. The Supreme Court has given part of that effort room to move forward, not because it decided his plan is legal, but because the states challenging it came to court too early.

And what problem are we fixing? Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal and extraordinarily rare. Widespread voter fraud has not been shown to be some national crisis. So if you are going to make it harder for millions of Americans to vote, you should probably have better evidence than Donald Trump saying the system is broken.

We tried that once already.

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TWO WEEKS IN THE DARK

It has now been two weeks since the August 11 storm tore through northwest Indiana, and people in Gary are still waiting for normal life to come back. NIPSCO, The Northern Indiana Public Service Company, says full restoration should finally happen today after prolonged outages shut schools, spoiled food and left families scrambling for ice, water and somewhere to charge a phone. Mayor Eddie Melton joined me yesterday and made clear just how frustrated people are after watching neighboring communities recover faster.

DON’S TAKE: Two weeks without electricity in modern America is embarrassing. And I still have a hard time believing a wealthy suburb would have been allowed to sit in the dark this long without the whole country hearing about it.

KAREN ATTIAH GETS HER JOB BACK

Karen Attiah fought The Washington Post and won. An arbitrator ordered the paper to reinstate the opinion columnist with full back pay after finding management did not prove the “gross misconduct” it claimed when firing her over social media posts following Charlie Kirk’s killing.

DON’S TAKE: You hire an opinion writer because you want sharp opinions. You cannot suddenly decide that is unacceptable when the opinion makes the bosses uncomfortable.

ANOTHER BLACK MAN FOUND HANGING

Police in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, are investigating the death of 38-year-old Demetrius Fleming, who was found hanging from a tree Friday morning. The police chief has called it an “equivocal” death investigation, meaning authorities have not ruled it suicide or homicide while they wait for forensic results. It comes days after another Black man was found hanging in Raleigh.

DON’S TAKE: A Black man hanging from a tree in the South carries a history that police cannot ignore. Nobody should jump to a conclusion, but this deserves a painstaking investigation and clear answers.

DARLINE’S BIG TEST

South Carolina Republicans head to the polls today to decide whether interim Senator Darline Graham keeps the seat once held by her late brother Lindsey Graham. She faces Congressman Ralph Norman after neither candidate cleared 50% in the first round. Trump has gone all in for Graham, even after a debate where she admitted she was “not that informed on national security.”

DON’S TAKE: Trump can endorse you, campaign for you and tell people you are ready. Today South Carolina voters decide whether they actually believe it.

DORIS MILLER OUT. TRUMP IN?

The Navy is considering taking the name of World War II hero Doris Miller off a future aircraft carrier and replacing it with Donald Trump’s. Miller, a Black Navy cook, carried wounded sailors to safety at Pearl Harbor and then grabbed an anti-aircraft gun he had never been trained to use and fired at Japanese planes. The ship was set to become the first aircraft carrier named for a Black American and an enlisted sailor.

DON’S TAKE: Doris Miller actually stood under enemy fire and fought back. Taking his name off that ship to put a sitting president’s name there would tell you plenty about what this administration values.

TARGET PULLS THE COSTUME

Target has pulled a children’s Halloween clown costume after customers said the black face, exaggerated red mouth and other features looked disturbingly close to racist minstrel imagery. The company apologized to Black customers and employees and says it is investigating how the costume ever made it through the approval process.

DON’S TAKE: Somebody designed it. Somebody approved it. Somebody put it online. That is a lot of people who apparently looked at this costume and saw nothing wrong. Target was right to pull it.

LUCKY SLICES

Former Illinois sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson has died from advanced colon cancer while serving a 20-year sentence for killing Sonya Massey. His request for medical release had been denied last month.

Alisa Goods, a 63-year-old grandmother from New York who disappeared while visiting Las Vegas, was found dead near the airport. Surveillance video shows her falling down an embankment and collapsing. Her family had received strange messages asking for Bitcoin after she vanished.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta canceled settlement talks with Paramount over its proposed Warner Bros. Discovery deal, accusing the company of leaking and misrepresenting private negotiations.

The Trump administration is trying again to impose a six-figure fee on many new H-1B visa applications after a judge blocked an earlier version of the plan.

Pumpkin Spice Latte season starts today at Starbucks. It is the drink’s 23rd year, Martha Stewart is helping with the rollout and apparently August 25 is autumn now.

HuffPost staffers demanded answers after another round of layoffs cut deeply into the newsroom, including shrinking the national desk as parent company BuzzFeed tries to reduce losses.

TODAY ON THE DON LEMON SHOW

I’ll be live for Hot Topics at 10 a.m. ET on YouTube. We are getting into Trump’s latest move on mail voting, what is happening in South Carolina, the Target costume controversy and what happens next in Gary after two weeks of outages.

Then I’ll be back for Lemon Live at 5 p.m. ET with whatever develops during the day.

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