The News You Need, Monday, July 20, 2026
Trump's election obsessions, Nigel Farage's secret funders, Pete Hegseth is SO gay, and more.
Trump’s Election Conspiracies
The New York Times
Charles: Last week’s fact-free speech by the president about the 2020 election didn’t get much traction: not even Sean Hannity could muster much enthusiasm for it in his instant analysis on Thursday night.
Times reporters Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Nick Corasaniti and Dustin Volz did a fine job of focussing on the most disturbing aspect of the president’s address. It proved that he has so thoroughly corrupted the Federal government that its major intelligence and law enforcement components are now happy to sign on to the wildest conspiracy theories imaginable:
Major agencies such as the Justice Department, the F.B.I., the Homeland Security Department and the U.S. Postal Service have taken steps to revive his false claims about the 2020 election and try to assert federal control over state-run elections.
Things only got worse the next day when Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened to send local election officials to jail if they refused to comply with the Trump administration’s wholly unconstitutional efforts to change election policies “while reiterating many of President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about the security of American elections.”
The Times added:
The secretary’s remarks follow an increasingly vocal effort by the Trump administration to use the power and pulpit of government to bolster the president’s long-held false claims about elections. Mr. Trump’s speech on Thursday, coupled with Mr. Mullin’s pledge to continue pressing those false claims, was a significant escalation of such rhetoric and risked creating additional chaos and doubt for election administrators and voters alike as the midterms draw near.
Times White House correspondent Peter Baker wrote what at first looked like a promising piece of analysis, quoting a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission high up in his story who compared Trump to Captain Ahab in Moby Dick.
But then, as he so often does, Baker succumbed to the fool’s errand of treating an insane president as someone who might actually have a rational reason for peddling his absurd conspiracy theory.. The only way Baker could do that was to quote the head of an almost entirely fact-free news network:
“The president passionately believes he was wronged in the 2020 election,” said Christopher Ruddy, his friend and chief executive of Newsmax Media, “and I think he is motivated for two reasons, to get vindication and to prevent future election irregularities.”
The fastest way to get to the heart of the matter was to read the always sensible Michael Tomasky in The New Republic. The president’s speech was
just an embarrassing moment for the United States of America. When has a president ever done anything like that—commandeered the bully pulpit to spread poisonous half-truths and lies? Presidents often lie about this or that particular thing. But no one has ever pressed an obviously bogus case like that. Even the throwaway lines were poisonous lies (“We had transgender for everybody” before he returned to the White House). So it’s unlikely that most Americans are taking it very seriously.
Tomasky guessed that the speech was more about the 2020 election than it was about this fall’s midterms. But he still recognized its dangers for the future:
Plenty of dangers lurk for the republic, despite his motivation being mainly retroactive, by the way. The sycophant he wants to install as attorney general, who referred to himself as Trump’s lawyer at his nomination hearing this week, has proven himself more than capable of filing charges against anyone Trump wants him to indict. And the sycophant he wants to install as director of national intelligence, who at his hearing this week couldn’t bring himself to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, will presumably gather intel on anyone Trump tells him to look into. So we have every reason on earth to fear that if Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton are confirmed in their respective positions, they’ll take a torch to the Constitution in an attempt to give Trump his vindication...
In sum: Trump’s motivation may be retroactive, but for the Republican Party and the right-wing media machine, the speech’s greatest utility is proactive. Either way, we’re left with the grim reality that a steaming pile of lies that nearly everyone knows to be lies could end up exerting a chilling influence over the administration of justice in this country and our electoral process.
The Apotheosis of Nigel Farage
The Sunday Times
The Nerve
Scott: It’s been a terrible week for Nigel Farage. He was caught in an apoplectic meltdown, screaming obscenities at an editor of The Times, after that newspaper, the bastion of the Tory right which until recently had always treated him with kid gloves, ran another series of disclosures about Farage’s sugar daddy and his penchant for crime. Polling shows Farage at his lowest level in two decades. And oddsmakers suddenly speculate that Count Binface has a nontrivial chance of ousting him from his Clacton constituency in the coming by-election. What’s a pouty demagogue to do? The Times reports that there was a pattern in his funding through ‘Posh George’ Cottrell, elite money laundering advisor to drug lords, that involved money coming from an unknown source and then being cycled through a couple of accounts before landing with Reform UK.
The convicted criminal who funded Nigel Farage opened an account with an obscure overseas payments company days before it was used to channel an “unexplained” £500,000 donation to Reform UK.
George Cottrell became a client of Oneify, a little-known Australian firm that moves crypto and traditional currency across borders, in late May 2024.
Within a fortnight, Oneify was used as a conduit for donations whose ultimate source could not be traced by the National Crime Agency (NCA).
An initial £1 million was deposited into Britain Means Business, a UK company owned by Richard Tice, who was then leading Reform.
Tice says that Fiona Cottrell, George’s mother, made the donation. However, it is unknown whether the money originated from George Cottrell’s own newly opened Oneify account.
But what’s very clear at this point is that the actual source of the information is a connection of Cottrell’s who really doesn’t want to be known. And Farage isn’t talking about any of this.
Meanwhile at The Nerve, Carole Cadwalladr puts Farage’s predicament in broader spectrum. Since most of these scandalous facts have been humming along just beneath the surface for years, why has it taken so long for the public to learn about them? The once chummy, now toxic rapport between Farage and The Times tells the story:
Why now? That’s one of the questions I keep on being asked. Why are Nigel Farage’s finances suddenly under scrutiny with a rightwing Murdoch-owned newspaper leading the charge?
It’s a good question, and one that has many answers, but the short one is: Brexit. For years, investigating Farage was off-limits to Britain’s rightwing print media because “challenging” Brexit was off limits. That included reporting on the money behind it.
I don’t want to be the one to break this to Mr Murdoch, but this is the same story I’ve been reporting on for a decade. It’s the same cast of characters. The same dark money. The story currently across Britain’s front pages isn’t just about Farage and Reform: it’s Brexit too.
That’s not me trying to reopen a culture war; it’s simply the facts. Two weeks ago, the Sunday Times published a scoop: that Farage had failed to declare donations from George Cottrell, a convicted money launderer. In doing so, it thrust a new character on to the national stage.
Only George Cottrell isn’t a new character. He has operated at the highest levels of UK politics, in plain sight, for more than a decade. And that includes playing a central role in the Brexit campaign. During this time, he’s been completely ignored by most of the UK’s political journalism establishment.
Because this is how UK political journalism works.
There’s much more to come. The financing of Nigel Farage and Reform UK is largely in the form of crypto, almost entirely involves foreign sources, including a list of people with murky backgrounds and ties to foreign intelligence services. Many of them are involved in dodgy aviation fuel contracts, moving fuel out of Russia. And a key point in the money trails leads straight to Albuquerque, New Mexico. But more on this later.
Why Trump World Prefers Real Men and Real Women, With Reality Defined by Drugs and Cosmetic Surgery
Financial Times
Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune
Scott: Pete Hegseth, fresh from intervening to block the promotion to command positions of a slew of women, Blacks and Hispanics, has announced mandatory testosterone tests for uniformed personnel—a predicate step to dispensing testosterone supplements. The development has focused attention on MAGA’s obsession with sex and sexual identity, including its favorite question—“what defines a woman”—and its current hate theme, the idea that trans people use public restrooms (in the recent platform of the Texas GOP, this issue surpassed the economy, inflation and the war in Iran as easily the essential issue).
The Trump administration has denounced puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors as “chemical mutilation”. This week, it made clear it has no such qualms about injecting US soldiers with testosterone.
Liberal lawmakers and military veterans seized on that contradiction when defence secretary Pete Hegseth announced that US service members aged 30 and older found to have low “T” levels would be offered testosterone replacement therapy (TRT).
“Pete Hegseth comes out in favour of gender-affirming care,” Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California, wrote on X.
Hegseth’s detractors have portrayed the TRT initiative as a perfect illustration of the Maga movement’s fixation with virility and bodily optimisation, and its belief that gender expression should be firmly binary.
Cultural critics have long noted the Trump world’s penchant for muscular, ready-for-primetime men and glamorous, hyper-feminine women with unmistakable cosmetic enhancements.
They have ridiculed “Mar-a-Lago Face”, a look synonymous with fillers, Botox and ultra-white veneers. In their view, Hegseth’s championing of “high-T” warriors is the latest manifestation of the Maga aesthetic.
“It’s gender as performance,” said Juliet Williams, professor of gender studies at UCLA. “It’s completely cartoonish.”
The Trump Administration is SO Gay
The Advocate
Charles: It was an out-lesbian Congresswoman who spoke the whole truth about the real meaning of Pete Hegseth’s new policy on testosterone.
Vermont Democrat Becca Balint told MeidasTouch chief Washington correspondent Scott MacFarlane
“I think [this] is indicative of the fact that there are so many people in this administration that have some weird, intense, homoerotic feelings towards men while also being incredibly homophobic,” Balint said, adding that administration officials engage in “hate mongering” and “fear mongering” about LGBTQ+ people.
She compared Hegseth’s “rugged macho man” persona to the hypermasculine figures drawn by gay erotic artist Tom of Finland.
“I don’t think the homoeroticism is the weird part,” she said. “The weird part is that they pretend that that’s not what it’s about.”
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