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[Democracy Now!] speak[s] with Brendan Ballou, CEO of the Public Integrity Project, which is part of a lawsuit against President Donald Trump over his plan to monetize access to his social media platform Truth Social, where he routinely makes market-moving announcements. Truth API went live on August 1 and already has subscribers. Truth Social is charging up to $100,000 per month for early access to the president’s posts, giving investors an edge on major news events.

“It’s profoundly corrupt,” says Ballou. “The government can’t discriminate who it gives information to based on who they are, what they believe, what they’re willing to pay the president.”

Reproductive rights activists are alarmed over a pledge by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to institute nationwide abortion restrictions. Blanche, whose confirmation for attorney general is currently before the Senate, made the remarks in a private call with anti-abortion activists that was later posted online. According to the audio recording, Blanche said the Trump administration is pursuing policies “so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state,” referring to the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended the constitutional right to abortion and left the matter to individual states.

Amy Littlefield, The Nation's abortion access correspondent, says the administration is likely to focus on limiting abortion pills delivered by mail, perhaps by invoking the 1873 Comstock Act, which banned the mailing of “lewd” and “indecent” materials through the mail. Littlefield calls it a “zombie law from the Victorian era” that reflects the frustration of the anti-abortion movement's inability to reduce abortions despite victories at the Supreme Court.
“Abortion bans do not stop abortion. What they do is they kill and harm the people who need them,” she says.

Littlefield is the author of Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights.

[Democracy Now!] speak[s] with Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil about his lawsuit against top Trump administration officials, two pro-Israel groups and a conservative think tank for conspiring to suppress his constitutional right to free speech.

Khalil, who helped lead protests at Columbia University against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, was one of several international students targeted for deportation by the Trump administration last year over pro-Palestine advocacy.

“I don’t want everything that happened to me to go in vain,” says Khalil.

The lawsuit names Secretary of State Marco Rubio and several other top administration figures; the Heritage Foundation, which launched Project Esther, a campaign to suppress pro-Palestine protests; the far-right pro-Israel group Betar; and Canary Mission, a long-running operation to identify and harass pro-Palestine activists. The lawsuit was brought under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a Reconstruction-era law to restrict government coordination with vigilante groups like the Klan.