The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Trump administration has bravely taken a stand against one of the greatest threats facing Washington: someone else checking for corruption. The US is withdrawing from Greco, the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption monitoring body, because, according to the State Department, paying a few million to be held to shared standards "no longer serves US interests". When the president and vice-president are conveniently exempt from most conflict-of-interest rules, you can see how outside scrutiny might feel a bit… tangible.

Instead of participating in a multilateral system where 48 countries review each other’s integrity, the administration says it will just handle things solo with "higher-impact tools" like visa bans and sanctions – you know, the stuff that can be selectively weaponized against foreign enemies while leaving domestic grift blissfully untouched. Greco’s last report on the US noted strong laws overall but highlighted that the president and VP sit in a lovely ethics free zone and recommended an overarching anti-corruption strategy. The US response: withdraw from the watchdog entirely. Problem solved, recommendation compliance rate: 100%, because you can’t fail a test you’ve set on fire.

Greco, whose terrifying powers are limited to issuing reports and recommendations, called the US a "valuable contributor" and politely left the door open for a future return – joining the prestigious club of countries that have walked away, currently featuring Russia and Belarus. The Trump team, meanwhile, is proudly ending the alleged era of "blank checks to international bureaucracies" by saving a rounding error in the federal budget while opening up a much larger account: the one where public office and private interest no longer even have to pretend they’re separate.

David Flippo, a freshly imported Vegas Republican now running for Congress in northern Nevada, has supposedly loaned his campaign nearly $2.5 million over two cycles while somehow also needing to finance his flooring. Yes, the man dropping seven figures on politics is taking out home improvement loans collateralized by his house’s floors, because nothing screams "independently wealthy" like borrowing against your laminate.

There’s a tiny problem: Flippo has simply never filed the personal financial disclosures that federal law requires. Not once. So voters have no idea where this cash avalanche is coming from, what conflicts of interest he’s lugging around, or whether these loans exist anywhere outside his imagination and an FEC spreadsheet. Helping him navigate this ethical obstacle course is treasurer Thomas Datwyler, also known for his work with Andy Ogles and his alleged role in the George Santos magical loan universe—where campaigns are rich, donors are imaginary, and the numbers are basically fan fiction.

Flippo’s politics are exactly what you’d expect from a Trump-endorsed, Proud Boys-adjacent carpetbagger: an A+ rating for Trump’s second term, a promise that his first bill will target Islamic religious law (sure, that’s Nevada’s top issue), and a support network that includes Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Joe Arpaio, and other walking red flags. Even the retiring Republican incumbent, Mark Amodei, won’t touch him—calling his primary campaign "absolutely scurrilous" and refusing to endorse him. When you’ve lost the guy who thought serving in the Trump-era House was fine, you’ve really achieved something.

Election analysts have already nudged the race from "Safe Republican" to "Likely Republican," because it turns out that a Trump-backed extremist with mystery millions, missing disclosures, and a Santos-adjacent treasurer might not be the juggernaut his FEC fiction suggests. But hey, American democracy is thriving so hard that we now treat "candidate might be laundering reality through his campaign finance reports" as just another quirky subplot in the midterms.

USMNT coach Mauricio Pochettino is now gently admitting what everyone with a functioning brain stem noticed at the time: having the President of the United States personally call FIFA president Gianni Infantino to get Folarin Balogun’s red card overturned might not have been the shining moment of sporting integrity the Trump White House thought it was. Trump bragged that he picked up the phone to lobby FIFA, FIFA swears their disciplinary committee just coincidentally came to the exact same conclusion after the call, and the rest of the world added this to the ever-growing file labeled: "Ah, so the rules only count when they help you."

Pochettino now says he wishes he’d been "more involved" in the decision, which is a polite way of saying, "maybe we shouldn't have turned a disciplinary ruling into a presidential favor from the world’s loudest man-child." The whole circus dumped a giant cloud of bad energy over the U.S. team, gave Belgium extra motivation, and ended with a 4–1 humiliation where tactics didn’t matter because the emotional and political fallout had already torched the locker room. Balogun himself later said he felt uncomfortable with the spotlight, which is what happens when your suspension becomes a joint production of U.S. Soccer, FIFA, and the Oval Office Casting Couch.

Pochettino’s big takeaway? Decisions like this should be handled by a "much more limited structure" and be "strictly sporting and common sense" — so, for example, not decided by a president chasing a Fox News highlight reel and a FIFA president allergic to the concept of independent governance. American democracy, FIFA governance, and now international soccer discipline: all quietly agreeing that under Trump, the rules are just suggestions until a powerful guy picks up the phone.

The president is once again cosplaying as a Robinhood day trader, buying up to $50,000 and selling up to $15,000 in SpaceX stock in July — a company that just happens to be a massive U.S. military contractor run by his former adviser, Elon Musk. Totally normal stuff for the guy who helps decide how many billions in federal contracts and regulatory favors the company gets.

Trump’s people insist that some mysterious “third-party financial institutions” are independently managing his portfolio to mirror broad indexes like the Schwab 1000, which is a very convenient way of saying, “don’t ask questions about why the commander in chief is trading a key Pentagon contractor while in office.” The disclosure shows more than 1,000 trades in July alone, because if there’s one thing this administration hates, it’s the appearance that governing might take precedence over personal portfolio performance.

SpaceX, freshly minted from the biggest-ever U.S. IPO at a casual $1.77 trillion valuation, regularly needs federal approvals and contracts — the kind of decisions that flow through the same executive branch currently holding its stock. Ethics rules may be alive on paper, but in practice we’re down to the honor system with a president whose honor is indexed somewhere between penny stocks and FTX.

Donald Trump Jr has cracked the code on wedding budgeting: skip Bed Bath & Beyond and go straight to "Putin’s Friends & Family". Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev — head of the International Boxing Association, gambling guy, and convenient recent acquaintance — quietly picked up the tab for a private island and lavish fireworks for Don Jr’s wedding after-party. ProPublica reports this is an "extraordinary development": a Putin insider bankrolling the president’s son and getting cozy access to the Trump clan, which in Trumpworld is now just called "Tuesday".

Junior’s spokesperson insists Kremlev is just a personal friend, not a business partner — they simply bonded over hunting, boxing, and apparently the shared belief that U.S. anti-corruption norms are for suckers. Bettina Trump tried to put out the fire on Instagram by screaming "fake news" and then helpfully confirming that yes, the oligarch absolutely did pay for two nights of celebrations. She explained that sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift, which is a bold take when the gift-giver just flew in from accompanying Vladimir Putin to China.

Trump, naturally, claims he’s "never heard" of this close friend who was at his son’s ultra-exclusive party, then offered the legally airtight defense that Kremlev didn’t pay for the wedding, just the totally separate and definitely not suspicious "afterparty" on a private island. House Democrats, currently probing how the Trump family keeps getting mysteriously richer during his presidency, called this "the most serious allegation" yet and flagged the national security risk of a president’s informal adviser and cabinet picker taking secret, exorbitant gifts from Putin’s inner circle.

The emerging rule of thumb: if your dad is president, you advise him on national security, and a Kremlin-adjacent oligarch offers to underwrite your fireworks and island rental, maybe pay for your own napkins. Or at least don’t pretend the Kremlin just Venmoed you out of the goodness of its heart.

Donald Trump has discovered a bold new economic theory: if your approval ratings are in the sewer, your Iran war is a disaster, inflation is up, and job growth is down, just offer every adult American $5,000 if they help your party keep Congress. He’s calling it a "Trump dividend"; everyone else is calling it what it obviously is: a shameless, nationwide vote-buying scheme with a $1.2 trillion price tag and all the subtlety of a mobster handing out envelopes on election day.

The plan’s financing strategy is performance art. JD Vance says it’ll be paid for with tariff revenues, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick waves his hands about charging rich foreigners more for visas and cashing in on government "investments" in Intel, and we’re all supposed to pretend that isn’t pure fantasy budgeting. Meanwhile, debt is at the size of the entire economy, deficits are running around $2 trillion a year, inflation is 3.5%, and serious economists are out here screaming that this half-baked stunt would blow up the deficit and goose inflation even more. So naturally, the White House solution is to dump gasoline on the fire and call it prosperity.

The best part: Trump has already promised big checks from tariffs and Elon’s DOGE cuts twice before, and delivered exactly zero dollars, unless you count the extra you paid at the grocery store. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene is mocking the "$5,000 for the peasants" line, which is how you know we’ve left the realm of normal politics and entered the stage where the bread-and-circuses crowd starts booing the ringmaster. Trump is betting that Americans are gullible enough to trade their future – and their kids’ – for a one-time payoff he probably can’t even deliver.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has somehow misplaced his annual ethics disclosure, the one tiny piece of paperwork that might tell the public how much money he’s pocketed from a vaccine lawsuit against Merck — a company he now helps regulate. Totally normal stuff: sue Big Pharma for profit, then take charge of the agency that oversees them, and then blow past the deadline for the form that would show how deep the conflict runs.

Ethics watchdogs are patiently waiting to see how much vaccine-litigation cash RFK Jr. has been raking in while sitting in the big chair at HHS, where he can influence everything from drug approvals to enforcement. The rest of us are supposed to believe this is all fine because, presumably, nothing says "public servant" like personally profiting from the industry you’re regulating and then turning your ethics disclosure into a mystery box.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new legal doctrine: Article II, Section Fire Anyone Who Annoys Our Billionaire Friends. A career prosecutor in the Justice Department’s fraud section has been quietly dumped after working on — and then withdrawing from — the mysteriously vanished criminal case against Indian mega-billionaire Gautam Adani, who was charged with defrauding U.S. investors and bribing officials to snag a massive solar project.

Adani just so happened to pledge billions in U.S. investments while his lawyers floated a $10 billion proposal in a slide deck that the U.S. Attorney’s Office says it "categorically rejected." The Trump DOJ swears the case was simply "indefensible" and that all this talk of money raining down on America is unrelated, and if you can’t trust an administration that fires prosecutors via boilerplate "Article II" letters, who can you trust?

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis already torched the government’s "highly unusual" behavior in tossing Adani’s charges and is still letting some counts against co-defendants proceed because DOJ hasn’t provided anything resembling a solid reason for backing off. So to recap: politically connected billionaire sees indictment evaporate, investments are dangled then disavowed, a judge smells smoke, and the prosecutor who didn’t want their name on this bonfire of the rule of law suddenly loses their job. America’s justice system is now basically a rewards program for oligarchs with good PowerPoint skills.