The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Doug Burgum, Trump’s Secretary of Interior and part-time fossil fuel concierge, tried to require that every wind and solar project on federal lands and waters get his personal royal blessing before moving forward. A coalition of clean energy groups pointed out that this wasn’t "oversight" so much as a slow-motion execution, accusing Burgum of deliberately rewiring agency processes to shove renewables into "second-class status" while rolling out the red carpet for coal, oil, and gas.

Chief Judge Denise J Casper took one look at this little sabotage project and slapped it with a preliminary injunction, finding the plaintiffs were likely to win because the administration’s scheme appears to, minor detail, violate federal law and cause irreparable harm. Translation: you can’t just declare that all future wind and solar must pass through Doug’s Anti-Sunshine Veto Machine so they miss their tax credits and die quietly on a shelf.

The Interior Department, bravely refusing to comment on the lawsuit it is currently losing, instead issued a boilerplate brag that America does energy "cleaner, safer, and more reliably" than anyone else—while Trump’s second-term energy plan is to gut renewable tax credits, shovel federal support to fossil fuels, and sneer at "the Green New Scam" in executive orders. Courts keep telling them this is illegal; the administration keeps responding, "What if we tried the same thing, slightly dumber?"

Clean energy groups say this ruling is just the first step toward getting stalled projects back on track so people can have fast, cheap, low-carbon power. The White House, meanwhile, is still hard at work making sure your electricity bills stay high and your grid stays fragile—just so oil and gas donors don’t have to downgrade their third yacht to a second yacht.

The Trump family’s latest innovation in public service: a sitting US president co-founding a crypto firm that’s now being sued by one of its own billionaire superfans for alleged extortion. Justin Sun – who once thought buying $100 million of Trump meme coins was a good use of money and oxygen – now claims the Trump-backed World Liberty outfit illegally froze his WLFI tokens, stripped his voting rights, and is threatening to literally burn his coins. So the project is called “World Liberty,” and the first order of business is disenfranchising your biggest mark. On brand.

Sun says he backed the whole thing because of the Trump name and their shared love of unregulated digital monopoly money, only to discover that co-founder Chase Herro and friends were using that name as a "golden opportunity" to profit through fraud. Meanwhile, WLFI has cratered from 31 cents to under 8 cents, the firm is reportedly borrowing against its own junk token like a discount FTX tribute act, and Trump’s other great tech triumph, Truth Social, just fired Devin Nunes as CEO after the stock lost almost two-thirds of its value. The Trump presidency continues to be less a government and more a sprawling, publicly traded yard sale where every grift eventually sues every other grift.

Donald Trump looked at a nursing home owner who diverted $39 million in employee payroll taxes while residents were neglected, injured, and dying, and thought: now there’s a guy who deserves mercy. Joseph Schwartz, whose empire allegedly left families like Doris Coulson’s with dead relatives and unpaid judgments, got a Trump pardon after admitting to the federal tax crime. The White House helpfully explained that Schwartz was the victim of “over prosecution” and that prison would be hard for a rich older man, which is apparently now a constitutional defense.

The families who sued Schwartz? They got a nearly $19 million wrongful death judgment that he never bothered to pay while he allegedly kept tens of millions in assets tucked safely out of his own name. Workers at his collapsing homes bought food for residents with their own money and discovered their health insurance premiums were taken but never funded, while Schwartz quietly spent over $1 million on lobbyists to secure his golden ticket from Trump — who, the White House assures us, definitely does not issue pardons at the request of lobbyists. Totally unrelated coincidence that the guy with seven figures for influence-peddling got “grace” and the people with dead parents got paperwork.

Even after the federal pardon, Arkansas squeezed out a nine-month sentence for Schwartz over Medicaid fraud, which turned out to be less of a punishment and more of a brief layover. A reporter tried to reach him in prison; the Coulson family’s lawyer tried to serve a subpoena to finally track his assets. Then, like clockwork, another lobbyist appeared, the parole board sprang him in under three weeks, and the reporter’s letter bounced back as undeliverable. The system moved with cheetah speed to shorten his punishment, but when it came to helping the people he allegedly damaged, the machinery suddenly remembered how to be very, very tired.

Donald Trump is in "talks" with the IRS to resolve his $10 billion lawsuit over leaked tax records, because of course the man who paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 now wants a life-changing lotto payout from the same taxpayers he barely contributed to. The suit claims the leak caused him "reputational and financial harm" and "public embarrassment," which is a bold way of saying: people found out what he actually pays and didn’t clap.

Trump, his two adult failsons Donald Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization are all listed as plaintiffs, because if there’s a pot of public money on the table, the whole family crime syndicate has to get in line. The leak came from an IRS contractor, Charles Littlejohn, who already pleaded guilty and got five years in prison for stealing the tax records of Trump and thousands of other rich guys, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. The IRS called his actions “unacceptable,” but not nearly as unacceptable as the part where the president now wants taxpayers to cut him a check for having his own numbers exposed.

Democrats, apparently tired of watching this administration treat the U.S. Treasury like a Mar-a-Lago ATM, introduced a bill to ban presidents, vice presidents, and their families from pocketing settlement money from the government. Elizabeth Warren called it an effort to close loopholes that enable this "apparent corruption" and stop Trump and future presidents from "stealing Americans’ hard-earned money"—which is a very polite way of saying "absolutely not, you are not suing the IRS to get richer off your own presidency." Trump, ever the philanthropist on other people’s dime, says he’d donate any payout to charity. The catch: it’s still your money he’s generously giving away.

Donald Trump has discovered a bold new way to support crime victims: take their money and give it to white-collar criminals. Since returning to office, he’s issued 117 pardons and commutations that don’t just wipe convictions, but also vaporize the fines and penalties that are legally supposed to flow into the federal Crime Victims Fund. At least $113 million that should have gone to domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, child abuse treatment programs, and gun violence survivors has instead been converted into a loyalty rewards program for fraudsters and money launderers.

The crown jewel of this little experiment in upside-down justice is Trump’s corporate pardon of HDR Global Trading Limited, parent company of the BitMEX crypto exchange. The company owed a $100 million fine for ignoring anti–money laundering laws; Trump swooped in hours before the payment was due and signed a pardon that explicitly remits “any and all fines, penalties, forfeitures, and restitution.” That’s not mercy, that’s a $100 million smash-and-grab from the Crime Victims Fund, which was created under VOCA to help people pay for funerals, medical bills, and lost wages after violent crime.

The language here matters: “remission of any and all fines” is not standard pardon boilerplate. Trump barely used it in his first term; now roughly a third of his second-term pardons include this magical debt eraser for corporate criminals. Prosecutors are left wondering why they should spend years building complex white-collar cases if the president can just shred the financial penalties with a signature, while states scramble to plug the holes in victim services budgets because the guy who cosplays as the toughest man on crime keeps canceling the cash.

By comparison, Biden’s pardons interrupted less than $1 million in financial penalties, most of which had already been paid. Trump’s tally in just 14 months dwarfs that, and doesn’t even include the big fines that never got imposed because he pardoned people before trial. So the math is simple: corporations and rich defendants get their slates wiped clean; survivors of shootings and other violent crimes get shorter waitlists, fewer services, and state budgets duct-taped together to cover the federal betrayal. It’s a perfect encapsulation of Trump’s justice philosophy: protect the money, not the people who got shot.

The Trump White House has discovered a new emergency that must be addressed before the midterms: not healthcare, not climate, not democracy — crypto market structure. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House crypto whisperer Patrick Witt, and former AI/crypto czar David Sacks are all out doing PR for the CLARITY Act, a bill designed to finally decide which federal agency gets to not regulate digital snake oil.

They already rammed through the GENIUS Act last year — a stablecoin law lovingly crafted for the narrow slice of the industry that wants to pretend its casino chips are just digital dollars — but the real prize is this broader market structure bill. The administration is now leaning on Senate Republicans to "hold a markup" and hustle it to Trump’s desk, because nothing says responsible governance like rushing complex financial legislation in the final months before an election while your donor class is heavily invested in the outcome.

The Council of Economic Advisers has even produced a handy report telling the banking industry to stop whining and accept its new crypto overlords. Banks complain about systemic risk; the White House complains that the U.S. might "lose financial leadership" if it doesn’t let a bunch of venture-backed tokens cosplay as the future of money. The core dispute isn’t about protecting consumers or financial stability — it’s about which set of oligarchs gets to clip the coupons from the next bubble.

So as Trump posts AI images of himself being hugged by Jesus, his economic team is busy hugging the crypto lobby, racing to lock in a deregulatory framework that will be very convenient for industry players — and very awkward for taxpayers when it all inevitably blows up. Truly, a CLARITY Act: we’ve never been clearer on whose side this White House is on.

Hunter Biden has announced that he’s "100% in" for a cage match against Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, which is probably the most honest bipartisan jobs program we’ve seen in years. The challenge came in a promo video for YouTuber Andrew Callaghan’s "Carnival" tour, because naturally the sons of two presidents now book their public humiliation through internet creators. Somewhere, the Founders are regretting not workshopping the whole "republic" thing a bit longer.

Under the clown makeup, though, the money story is doing laps. Hunter, fresh off a federal gun conviction, tax-evasion charges, and a very controversial pardon from President Dad, is broke enough that his own lawyers are suing him for unpaid bills while describing him in court as "impecunious"—which is lawyer for "cannot afford ring-side seats to his own meltdown." The Trump spawn, on the other hand, reportedly made hundreds of millions during Daddy’s second term, including from foreign-tinged crypto ventures that raise more conflict-of-interest alarms than a Mar-a-Lago membership drive.

So on one side: the pardoned, indebted son of a president hustling appearance fees on a YouTube freak-show tour. On the other: the sons of another president, quietly cashing in on global crypto schemes while still running the family business empire that’s welded to the Oval Office. The proposed cage match is the least corrupt thing happening here; it’s the only part where everyone would have to disclose what they’re actually doing in public, under lights, with a referee.