trump turns federal regulators into his personal casino pit bosses
Utah state senator Brady Brammer, seen here realizing the federal government is now basically a Trump-branded sportsbook with nuclear weapons.
Utah Republicans have discovered a line even they won’t cross: letting Donald Trump’s federal regulators turn the entire country into a glorified Trump Taj Mahal sportsbook. While Governor Spencer Cox calls prediction markets "gambling – pure and simple" and vows they have "no place in Utah", Trump’s Washington is busy rebranding them as financial innovation, because apparently if you route the bets through the commodities code, it’s not a casino, it’s freedom.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which under Biden tried to clamp down on election and political betting and even saw the FBI raid Polymarket’s founder, has under Trump abruptly decided these platforms are just regular old derivatives exchanges. Totally unrelated, of course, to the fact that Donald Trump Jr now serves as an adviser to both Kalshi and Polymarket, while the Trump Media & Technology Group is sniffing around launching its own prediction product. The guy who ran casinos now has a son helping steer the regulators’ favorite "not-gambling" casinos, and the federal government is fighting states over who gets to regulate the family’s new side hustle. State sovereignty, meet the House always winning.
#forever-grifting#corruption
trump turns lincoln reflecting pool into 13 million dollar slip-n-slide
Aerial view of Trump’s $13 million "American flag blue" ego pond, where worker safety, procurement rules, and basic taste all went to die.
The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool – where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered "I Have a Dream" – is now the backdrop for a very different American story: no-bid contracts, worker risk, and a $13.1m patriotic paint job. Trump’s Interior Department quietly handed a non-competitive federal contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a small Virginia firm whose big qualifying credential, according to Trump himself, was working on the pool at his Sterling golf club. He then ordered the historic pool repainted "American flag blue," because nothing honors civil rights history like turning it into the world’s saddest resort amenity.
The numbers, naturally, don’t add up. Trump told reporters the project would cost $1.8m; documents show the real tab is $13.1m. Interior staff are already complaining about bubbles, holes, and mismatched shades of blue, like a Home Depot clearance aisle stretched 2,000 feet. Union observers say the job skipped the usual competitive bidding process and may be putting workers at risk as they rush to hit a May 22 deadline with hazardous chemicals and zero transparency. When the grift hit the fan, Trump suddenly developed amnesia, denying he’d ever used the company and insisting he had nothing to do with the award. The reflecting pool may end up blue, but the workers and taxpayers are the ones getting hosed.
Bonus democracy insult: the federal government is only allowed to skip competition when it would cause "serious injury" to the government. Under Trump, "serious injury" apparently includes the horrific prospect that a union shop might get the job instead of a firm tied to his golf course.
#forever-grifting#corruption
making america gouged again: trump donor turns tariffs into a monopoly machine
Cambria CEO Marty Davis proudly surveys the site where American jobs will be saved by making everyone else’s countertops more expensive, one well-lobbied tariff at a time.
Marty Davis, the self-styled plain-spoken Midwestern farmboy who just happens to run a $500 million quartz-countertop empire and belong to a billionaire dynasty, has discovered the magic of Trump-era industrial policy: why compete in a market when you can have the government kneecap your rivals for you? As CEO of Cambria and a Trump donor, Davis has been repeatedly and successfully lobbying the U.S. government to slap tariffs on imported quartz, all while wrapping himself in the language of "Main Street," "free and fair trade," and protecting the "healthy middle class." Translation: he gets protection, everyone else gets the bill.
Cambria's competitors – many of them smaller businesses that actually look like the "Main Street" Davis keeps cosplaying – say his tariff crusade is blowing up their costs, forcing layoffs, and hiking prices for homeowners who just wanted a countertop, not a lesson in oligarchic trade policy. They rely more on imported materials, so when Davis convinces the government to tax those imports, their margins evaporate while his made-in-Minnesota quartz gets a nice little artificial advantage. The result: fewer jobs at rival firms, higher prices for consumers, and one very happy Trump donor who can boast that his political investments are paying excellent returns.
All of this is, of course, draped in the usual Trump-world rhetoric about saving American manufacturing and standing up to unfair trade. The people actually getting hammered by the tariffs – small fabricators, installers, and middle-class homeowners – are just collateral damage in the latest episode of "regulatory capture, but make it patriotic." Free market capitalism, Trump edition: you too can weaponize federal power against your competitors, as long as your campaign checks clear.
#forever-grifting#trade-war#oligarchy
senate hall monitor tells trump to pay for his own damn ballroom
Artist’s rendering of Trump’s $400 million ‘no government funds’ ballroom, now seeking just a tiny $1 billion in taxpayer security upgrades so the donors don’t have to stand near the poors.
Republicans tried to run a classic Trump-era magic trick: turn a "no government funds" promise into a cool $1 billion in taxpayer cash, laundered through the Secret Service and stapled to ICE and Border Patrol funding. Unfortunately for the gold-plated ballroom caucus, Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough read the bill, noticed it was a walking conflict-of-interest, and politely said: this belongs in more committees and needs 60 votes. Translation: if you want to subsidize Dear Leader’s party bunker, you have to do it in public.
Instead of quietly greenlighting Trump's White House ballroom fantasy, MacDonough ruled that the project is too sprawling and jurisdictionally messy to sneak through reconciliation. That means no simple-majority shortcut; Republicans would actually have to find 60 senators willing to explain to their constituents why "border security" suddenly includes underwriting a $400 million Trump ballroom that was supposed to be privately funded. Even some Republicans, like Rand Paul and Susan Collins, are gently noting that when a billionaire says he'll pay for his own toy, maybe the Treasury shouldn't be the backup credit card.
Naturally, GOP leadership is pretending this is all just a normal part of the "Byrd process" — you know, the routine part where you keep redrafting language to see how creatively you can disguise a presidential vanity project as "security adjustments and upgrades." Democrats, led by Jeff Merkley, are vowing to challenge any rebranded version of the ballroom boondoggle, accurately describing it as a "mission of chaos and corruption." The only real question now is whether Republicans keep trying to smuggle Trump’s dance hall into must-pass legislation, or finally admit that if Comcast and other donors want to bankroll his imperial cosplay, they can do it without shaking down the U.S. taxpayer.
#corruption#forever-grifting
trump saves vaping, big tobacco writes the thank-you note
FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, moments before discovering that the real peer-reviewed evidence that matters is whatever was said over lunch with tobacco lobbyists in Jupiter, Florida.
The Trump White House has discovered a bold new frontier in "Make America Healthy Again": mango- and blueberry-flavored nicotine for adults who, coincidentally, like the exact same flavors as teenagers. After a cozy lunch in Jupiter, Florida, with tobacco executives who were sad their candy vapes weren't moving, Trump reportedly stormed off to yell at his own health officials. Shortly thereafter, the FDA magically produced a new policy letting companies sell flavored vapes while their applications are still under review. Regulatory science, now with express service.
The fallout has been impressive. Health Secretary RFK Jr.'s senior spokesperson, Richard Danker, quit rather than help sell "cotton candy lung" as harm reduction, and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary was pushed out after refusing to defend fruit-flavored vapes at a budget hearing. Meanwhile, the administration insists this is all about "Gold Standard Science" helping smokers quit, while the International Pediatric Association, longtime tobacco-control researchers, and basic common sense point out that these products are great at getting a new generation hooked on nicotine.
To give the whole thing a high-tech gloss, FDA blessed mango and blueberry vapes from Glas Inc. because they come with a phone-based age verification system that, according to HHS, adults can use but "youth and young adults were not able to bypass effectively." Yes, the same teenagers who can jailbreak anything and run circles around school firewalls are supposedly defeated by an app. As MAHA influencers nervously admit this looks a lot like special interests running the White House, big tobacco is already enjoying its early-access launch window, and America's kids are the beta testers.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
the insider trader-in-chief portfolio is performing great
Pictured: a former government watchdog trying to describe Trump’s ethics record without spontaneously combusting on live television.
Former government watchdogs are now on TV trying to explain that, no, it is actually not normal for a president to be personally trading stocks that could be affected by his own policies, intelligence briefings, and late-night tantrums. The phrase they landed on was "completely unprecedented," which is Washington-speak for "are you people out of your minds." While previous presidents tried the old-fashioned approach of blind trusts and ethics rules, Trump appears to have gone with the more efficient strategy of doing whatever he wants and daring anyone to stop him.
Ethics experts are essentially waving flares and yelling that when a president is buying and selling individual stocks, every policy decision starts to look like a market-manipulation opportunity with nuclear codes attached. Yet the political class is treating it as just another quirky subplot in the never-ending Trump reality show. Instead of a clear firewall between public power and private profit, we get a walking, talking conflict of interest whose personal portfolio may as well be another cabinet department. Welcome to the Trump economy: where the line between insider trading and national policy is mostly a vibe.
#forever-grifting#corruption
border warlord retires to spend more time with his prostitutes
Acting Border Patrol chief Mike Banks explains that the real security threat is families seeking asylum, not, say, the guy allegedly funding the global sex trade while militarizing the Rio Grande.
Mike Banks, the man who turned the southern border into a discount cosplay of the DMZ, has abruptly resigned as US border patrol chief after reports that he allegedly spent more than a decade buying sex in Colombia and Thailand and bragging about it to colleagues. He told Fox News he was just stepping down because "it’s time" and because he’d nobly transformed "the least secure, most disastrous, most chaotic border" into "the most secure" in US history—an impressive level of self-congratulation for someone fleeing the scene like a guy who just heard the phrase "multiple corroborating witnesses."
CBP insists the prostitution allegations are ancient history, "reviewed years ago" and now "closed," which is a very convenient status for an investigation that, according to reporting, mysteriously ended while Kristi Noem was running Homeland Security. Apparently the agency’s new ethics standard is: if you sit on misconduct long enough, it becomes a collectible antique and therefore harmless. No one at CBP had any comment when asked again, presumably because the "How To Pretend This Is Fine" talking points haven’t finished focus-group testing on Newsmax yet.
During his brief but wildly destructive tenure starting in 2025, Banks helped engineer the most aggressive border crackdown in recent memory: massively ramping up prosecutions for unlawful crossings, fusing Border Patrol and ICE into a roving deportation task force, and unleashing interior enforcement in cities across the country. His signature project: carving out "national defense areas" along the border, handing huge stretches of federal land to the US Army and stationing at least 7,600 troops there by mid-2025. Because nothing says "land of the free" like needing military permission to exist near an invisible line on a map.
Banks bragged last fall that agents would "go anywhere in the United States" to hunt undocumented immigrants and that Border Patrol was already helping ICE in 25 cities, with more coming. So to recap: the guy who helped turn immigration enforcement into a domestic military-lite operation, who boasted about nationwide manhunts, is now walking away under the cloud of long-whispered prostitution allegations that the government apparently tried very hard not to notice. Truly the perfect avatar of Trump’s border regime: moral panic for migrants, moral bankruptcy for the people running it.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
secretary of transportation launches great american self-promo tour
America’s infrastructure plan, apparently: one SUV, nine kids, a GoPro, and a cabinet secretary auditioning for his next show.
Sean Duffy, whose résumé already reads like a casting call (“The Real World,” Fox News, Fox Business, and somewhere in there ‘member of Congress’), is now starring in a five-part reality show as Trump’s secretary of transportation. The series, “The Great American Road Trip,” features Duffy, his wife, and their nine children tooling around the country in an SUV to “inspire” Americans to drive more during a gas-price spike. Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg called the whole thing “brutally out of touch,” which is polite Beltway-speak for are you kidding me.
The show is produced by a freshly minted “nonprofit” also called The Great American Road Trip, founded by a former travel-industry lobbyist and conveniently sponsored by Boeing and Google. Official line: they “invited the secretary and his family” to help boost visibility. Unofficial reality: a sitting cabinet official is doing a branded family travel show tied directly to his department’s mission, while ethics lawyers play whack-a-mole with the concept of ‘public service’ versus ‘personal brand management.’
Duffy’s project slots neatly into the Trump Cinematic Universe of self-mythologizing propaganda: Kristi Noem’s Mount Rushmore cowgirl ad while running Homeland Security, Melania’s lovingly shot documentary about curtain choices for Trump’s second inauguration, and now the DOT chief’s rolling personality infomercial. Governance has fully merged with content creation; cabinet posts are just launchpads for lifestyle franchises. The republic may be on fire, but at least it’s getting a multi-episode sizzle reel.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
drain the swamp? he built a luxury cesspool
Artist’s rendering of Trump’s Washington: a golden ballroom floating serenely atop an open sewer of donors, pardons, and defense contracts.
Trump’s second-term Washington isn’t a swamp; it’s a gold-plated septic tank with a cover charge. The self-proclaimed billionaire who “didn’t need anybody’s money” is now running a full-service influence bazaar: crypto felons get pardons that just happen to pump Trump’s own World Liberty Financial by $2bn, oil and gas donors drop $75m and magically receive gutted environmental rules plus a war on EVs and renewables. The family’s net worth is up an estimated $4bn since he clawed back the White House, proving that public service really can be lucrative—if you treat the public like an ATM.
The kids, naturally, are in on the war profiteering package. Don Jr and Eric are investors in a drone company pitching Gulf states during a U.S. war with Iran, while Eric’s side hustle as “chief strategy adviser” to a robotics startup is rewarded with a $24m Pentagon contract. Jared Kushner is supposedly brokering Middle East peace while his firm quietly tries to raise $5bn from the Saudis—at the same time Mohammed bin Salman is nudging Trump to hit Iran harder. Even a former Bush ethics lawyer is openly saying the Trump clan may be the first presidential family to get rich off a war; the White House, naturally, denies everything with the enthusiasm of a teenager denying they’ve been vaping in the bathroom.
And then there’s the ballroom. Trump wants a $400m gilded monstrosity at the White House, funded by corporations and billionaires who just coincidentally keep getting policy treats afterward. Nearly $2bn has been vacuumed up for his “pet causes,” with 346 donors dropping at least $250k each—and over half of them or their industries receiving helpful regulatory or policy love. Palantir tosses $10m at the ballroom and angles for a juicy role in Trump’s $1.2tn “Golden Dome” missile defense fantasy. Elon Musk pours in more than $270m for Trump’s 2024 run and is rewarded with control of a slash-and-burn “department of government efficiency” while SpaceX slurps down billions in federal contracts. Larry Ellison bankrolls GOP causes, helps his son grab CBS/Paramount, makes the network friendlier to Trump, then watches Oracle land a big stake in TikTok thanks to a presidential pen.
Somewhere in this shimmering muck are the long-promised “Epstein files” Trump vowed to release, only made public despite him after a bipartisan push pried them loose. So no, the swamp wasn’t drained. It was deepened, wired for crypto, surrounded with missile defense contractors, and topped off with a $400m ballroom so the oligarchs can toast each other while democracy decomposes quietly in the corner.
#forever-grifting#corruption
trump presidential library to be first built entirely out of emoluments
Artist’s rendering of the Trump Presidential Library, where the exhibits are optional but the resort fees are mandatory.
Miami residents are suing to stop President Donald Trump from turning a prime, nearly 3‑acre, $67 million slice of downtown waterfront into his own glass grift needle — marketed as a "presidential library" but described by Trump himself as a hotel project, since he "doesn’t believe in building libraries or museums." Florida officials transferred the land to the state and then to Trump’s library fund for free, which the lawsuit says is a blatant violation of the Domestic Emoluments Clause — you know, that pesky constitutional bit that says states can’t shower a sitting president with gifts in exchange for favorable treatment.
The plaintiffs argue this sweetheart land deal has effectively launched a 50‑state bidding war to see who can bribe the president hardest for better disaster relief, offshore drilling decisions, and tariff policies. Trump, Ron DeSantis, Miami Dade College, and Florida’s land trustees are all named as defendants, because it apparently takes an entire state’s political apparatus to gift-wrap a skyscraper for one man. The White House responded by bragging that Trump is "one of the most consequential and successful presidents" and promising that his library will be "one of the most magnificent buildings in the world" — which is a bold way to describe a taxpayer-adjacent monument to monetizing public office.
Trump’s Truth Social promo shows a towering glass spike with TRUMP in gold, an American flag draped down the middle, a presidential plane parked inside, and plans for an adjacent hotel — all used, the lawsuit says, to reel in donors and investors. If built, it would be the first presidential library that doubles as a for‑profit hospitality venture, finally merging civic memory with room service and dynamic pricing. Meanwhile, Trump is also fighting over a billion‑dollar White House ballroom, Kennedy Center renovations, and repainting the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool "American flag blue," because if you’re going to treat the presidency as a real estate portfolio, you might as well go full timeshare brochure.
#forever-grifting#corruption
appeals court lets trump keep his wallet closed a little longer
Trump in court, presumably wondering if there’s a federal statute that says ‘the president is automatically right and also broke.’
The 2nd Circuit has graciously allowed President Donald Trump to keep his tiny hands off that $83 million check to E. Jean Carroll while he begs the Supreme Court to rescue him from the radical tyranny of consequences. The court hit pause on the payment as long as Trump posts an even bigger bond — now creeping up toward a cool $100 million — because if there’s one thing this era demands, it’s ever-larger piles of money being parked in escrow to cover the lies of a former president found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
The real magic trick here isn’t the delay; it’s Trump’s legal team trying to invoke a federal statute to swap him out for the U.S. government as the defendant. Translation: he wants you, the taxpayer, to step in as the fall guy so that the judgment evaporates, because the federal government can’t be sued for defamation. He lied, a jury believed Carroll, he lost — and now his plan is to turn the United States into his personal liability shield. The appeals court has already rejected a full hearing on that stunt, but he’s marching it up to a Supreme Court that has never met a Republican fever dream it didn’t at least wink at.
Meanwhile, Carroll’s lawyer is politely thrilled that the court conditioned the stay on Trump posting nearly nine figures in bond, which is about as close as our system gets to saying, “We know you’re going to stall forever, so at least park a mountain of cash here while you do it.” This all comes on top of the separate $5 million defamation verdict he’s already appealing, because if there’s one consistent throughline of the Trump years, it’s that the presidency was treated as a four-year audition for the role of ‘America’s Most Litigated Liar’ — with the rest of us drafted as unwilling co-defendants.
#forever-grifting#lawlessness
trump builds a $1.2 trillion participation trophy in the sky
Trump proudly unveils the "Golden Dome" poster, a $1.2 trillion vision board for defense contractors disguised as national security strategy.
The Congressional Budget Office has looked at Trump's shiny new "Golden Dome" missile defense fantasy and, after doing the math, politely informed America that it's not $175bn, it's about $1.2 trillion. Apparently when Trump said "$25bn to start, $175bn total," he was only off by roughly the GDP of Mexico. Close enough for government work, as long as you’re a defense contractor with a reserved parking spot at Raytheon.
Instead of the modest "Iron Dome for America" branding, we've upgraded to a coast-to-coast, land-sea-space techno-bubble that CBO says could still be overwhelmed by an actual full-scale attack from Russia or China. So it's less a shield and more a $1.2tn security blanket: comforting, useless, and paid for entirely by working Americans, as Senator Jeff Merkley helpfully translated. The system’s promise to intercept missiles launched "from the other side of the world, or launched from space" mostly translates to "we're launching your tax dollars directly into orbit."
A week into his second term, Trump ordered the Pentagon to sketch out this sci‑fi dome, because nothing says "serious national security" like a president commissioning a planetary forcefield while existing systems are already struggling to keep up. The White House insists aerial attacks remain "the most catastrophic threat" facing the US; climate change, pandemics, and democracy erosion will just have to wait until Lockheed figures out how to monetize them. For now, the only thing comprehensively protected is the profit margin of the military‑industrial complex.
#forever-grifting#corruption#national-security
trump admin discovers conservation is bad for business, promptly kills it
Doug Burgum proudly stands in front of America’s public lands, helpfully explaining which parts will be drilled, mined, logged, or grazed first once they’re done canceling that pesky ‘conservation’ nonsense.
The Trump Interior Department has decided that conserving public land is too radical a use of public land, so they’re canceling a Biden-era rule that dared to treat conservation as being on equal footing with drilling, mining, logging, and grazing. The 2024 rule finally let people lease land to actually restore it, the way oil companies lease it to strip it, which was apparently a bridge too far for Secretary Doug Burgum and his friends in the “turn everything into a strip mine” caucus.
Instead, the administration is returning the Bureau of Land Management to its historical mission: acting as a concierge service for fossil fuel and timber companies. Industry groups complained that letting anyone pay money to heal land was “non-use” and a betrayal of the sacred “multiple use” doctrine, which in practice has always meant one use: extract every ounce of value now and send taxpayers the cleanup bill later. Environmental advocates point out that this will mean less protection for drinking water, endangered species, and any landscape that isn’t already a moonscape — so, obviously, it had to go.
The repeal slots neatly into Trump’s broader project of turning western public lands into a corporate clearance sale: more oil and gas from taxpayer property, fewer constraints on trashing ecosystems, and even some kneecapping of renewable projects for good measure. Republicans in Congress are doing their part by shredding land management plans that limited development in Alaska, Montana, and North Dakota. The message is clear: if it’s underground and can be burned, blasted, or bulldozed for profit, the federal government is open for business — and if you wanted clean water or intact wildlife habitat, you really should’ve been born a petroleum association.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
congress contemplates billion-dollar taxpayer tip for trump’s dance floor
Concept art of Trump’s ‘East Wing Modernization Project,’ also known as: you paid for this so he can have nicer parties.
Republicans rolled out a $72 billion "law and order" bill for ICE and Border Patrol, and whoops, look at that — there’s a $1 billion line item for "security adjustments" to Trump’s brand-new East Wing vanity project, also known in English as his ballroom. The word "ballroom" never appears in the bill, because when you’re trying to get working families to underwrite the president’s party bunker, you go with something more respectable-sounding, like "East Wing Modernization Project."
Democrats, smelling political blood and stale caviar, are branding the GOP as "Ballroom Republicans" and promising Byrd Rule challenges to knock out the non-budgetary goodies. Polls already show most Americans hate the idea of bulldozing the East Wing for Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ego chamber, and that’s before you mention that taxpayers are now being drafted as unwilling event sponsors. This is especially awkward given Trump previously vowed the whole thing would be privately funded — a promise that aged about as well as every other Trump "I’ll pay for it myself" pledge.
Even some Republicans like Rick Scott, Josh Hawley, and Rand Paul are pretending to be fiscally conscious for a news cycle, questioning why the public should fund Trump’s dance palace. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader John Thune is on the floor screaming that Democrats are "defund the police" extremists for not swallowing the entire package, carefully forgetting to mention the billion-dollar ballroom rider. The sales pitch is simple: vote to shovel cash into Trump’s personal prestige project or you’re anti-cop. It’s not a border bill so much as a forever-grifting omnibus with ICE funding as camouflage and a golden conga line straight into Trump’s pocket.
#forever-grifting#corruption
commander in beef: trump turns the white house into a ufc vip lounge
Trump and Dana White scouting future federal property improvements: fewer trees, more bloodsport branding opportunities.
The South Lawn is getting a tasteful update: grass, hedges, and a giant corporate fight cage. For Trump’s 80th birthday and the kickoff of his government-funded 250th ‘patriotic’ celebration, the White House is hosting a UFC extravaganza where the tickets are “free,” but the sponsorship packages with ringside seats mysteriously go for $1 million to $1.5 million a pop. The UFC swears it’s not selling tickets, TKO’s Mark Shapiro says they’ll lose up to $30 million on this, and nobody can explain where the money from those sponsorships is actually going. But don’t worry, the president is personally handpicking who gets into the taxpayer-owned backyard. Totally normal, very constitutional, not at all a soft-money brawl on federal property.
Demand is so insane that Republican officials, lobbyists, and anyone who’s ever brushed against MAGA world are reduced to begging Steven Cheung — a former UFC flack now playing White House gatekeeper with a replica championship belt in his office — to put them on the list. Dana White handed most of his allocation straight to Trump, TKO kept another chunk, and the rest are being distributed to “military, VIPs, friends, members of Congress, foreign dignitaries, and staff,” i.e., a curated audience of donors, sycophants, and useful photo-ops. Meanwhile, the UFC is building a 90-foot-tall fight arch in Pennsylvania, shipping it to D.C., and planning for 85,000 people to watch from the Ellipse while Paramount+ streams the whole state-sponsored spectacle.
Lara Trump says this may be “the event of his presidency,” which is accidentally honest: nothing captures the Trump era quite like monetizing access to the People’s House through an un-transparent sponsorship scheme while turning it into a live-action culture-war Thunderdome. It’s not policy, it’s not governance, it’s not even subtle — it’s just the presidency as pay-to-play cage match, with the grift baked directly into the undercard.
#forever-grifting#corruption#money
trump discovers urgent national emergency: pool not blue enough
Artist’s impression: the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, now available in "American-flag blue" and "unprosecuted self-dealing".
The Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool is getting a $6.9 million makeover, and in a shocking twist absolutely nobody predicted, the no-bid contract went to a company that previously worked on a swimming pool at Trump’s Virginia golf course. The administration invoked a federal exemption meant for avoiding “serious injury” to the government, apparently on the theory that the greatest threat to the republic is insufficiently Instagrammable water.
Instead of fixing the actual problem — a failing filtration system that leaks 16 million gallons a year — the White House is paying Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a firm with no prior federal contracting experience, to paint the pool “American-flag blue.” Experts note that this will not prevent the water from turning its usual algae green, but will successfully transfer several million taxpayer dollars to a Trump-linked outfit at “Trump speed,” which is now apparently an official procurement metric.
While Trump fantasizes about a Bahamas-turquoise national monument, posts AI images of himself and JD Vance lounging in a crystal-blue reflecting pool, and tears up the Rose Garden and East Wing for his mega-ballroom and a Christopher Columbus statue, ethics watchdogs point out that the whole thing has become a secretive no-scrutiny reward system for presidential friends and business associates. The only thing getting truly restored here is the golden age of tacky, barely-disguised grift.
#forever-grifting#corruption
truth social discovers gravity, loses $406m in three months
Artist’s rendering of Trump Media’s bitcoin treasury strategy, moments before impact.
Trump Media & Technology Group has heroically proven that you can run a social media platform like a meme stock subreddit. In Q1 2026, the parent company of Truth Social managed to lose almost $406 million while generating a bit over $870,000 in revenue – a business model best described as "set money on fire and call it free speech".
The magic trick comes from $3.5 billion in Bitcoin buys in 2025 for a so-called "bitcoin treasury," which is what you call it when a political cult decides to roleplay as a hedge fund. Now that crypto has dropped by about a third, the company is reporting huge "non-cash" losses on digital assets and securities. Translation: the money’s not technically gone, it’s just living on a sadder spreadsheet now.
Interim CEO Kevin McGurn insists the company has a "strong balance sheet" and "positive operating cashflow" while the actual numbers look like a financial Chernobyl. He also claims Truth Social "remains a bastion of free speech" with "innovative enhancements coming soon" – presumably more ways to monetize rage-posts from the guy who got banned from Twitter after his fans attacked the Capitol.
As a bonus subplot, the company is still trying to merge with nuclear fusion firm TAE Technologies in a $6 billion deal to "power AI datacenters," which is fitting: fusion, like Truth Social profitability, has famously never produced more energy than it consumes. But sure, keep talking about "shareholder value" while the balance sheet cosplays as a controlled demolition.
#forever-grifting#money
billionaire president shocked to discover things are expensive
President Trump, famous for gold-plated toilets, expresses deep concern that World Cup tickets might be too pricey for the common man.
The sitting president of the United States, a man who literally charges donors six figures to eat rubber chicken at his golf clubs, has discovered that World Cup tickets might cost $1,000 and bravely announced that he "wouldn't pay it either". Bold stance from the guy who turned the federal government into a Mar-a-Lago rewards program but draws the line at pricey soccer tickets.
Fifa is openly running a cash vacuum: dynamic pricing for group games, a resale platform that jacks prices up even more, and a 30% skim on every ticket – 15% from buyer, 15% from seller. Trump’s contribution to this corporate shakedown? Saying he’d be "disappointed" if the good people of Queens and Brooklyn – specifically "the people that love Donald Trump" – can’t afford to go, while still calling the whole thing an "amazing success". Nothing says "populist champion" like admiring the grift while your own voters are priced out of the event your country is co-hosting.
He doesn’t promise to regulate it, pressure Fifa, or use the bully pulpit for anything beyond a wistful "I’d like my voters to go". Just vibes, branding, and a casual shrug at a global sports cartel monetizing patriotism. The message is clear: if you can’t afford $1,000 to watch USA–Paraguay, maybe you should’ve invested in a few more condos and a family political dynasty.
#forever-grifting#money
trump asks taxpayers to pick up his $83 million tab
Trump, pondering which constitutional principle to hollow out next so he doesn’t have to write E. Jean Carroll a very large check.
Donald Trump is back in court, asking the 2nd Circuit to please hit pause on that pesky $83 million defamation judgment E. Jean Carroll won, so he can go beg the Supreme Court to declare that calling your alleged sexual assault victim a liar is an official presidential duty. Because when the framers wrote Article II, they clearly had "publicly smearing women who accuse you of rape" at the top of the job description.
The legal magic trick here is the Westfall Act: Trump wants his name swapped out for "The United States" as the defendant, which would make the case disappear since the government can’t be sued for defamation. Carroll’s jury award would go poof, and the message would be clear: if the president defames you while in office, congratulations, it’s now just a quirky feature of your democracy. Trump’s lawyers warn of "irreparable harm" to him if she’s allowed to collect, which is a poetic way of saying: he really does not want to pay this bill.
Carroll’s team, being far more practical than the former leader of the free world, says they’re fine with a pause as long as Trump posts an extra $7.46 million to cover interest while he tries to get the Supreme Court to turn presidential immunity into a full-service personal liability shield. And just to really drive home how warped this has gotten, the Justice Department—yes, your Justice Department—filed its own brief saying it sees "good cause" to ask the Supreme Court to help Trump offload his legal problems onto the American public. Apparently the new standard is: when a jury finds a president liable for defamation after an alleged sexual assault, the U.S. government’s role is to see if it can pick up the check.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
trump turns dc golf course into his own toxic waste bunker
East Potomac Golf Links, now featuring Trump’s signature course hazards: sand traps, water hazards, and trace amounts of lead and chromium.
The Trump administration has apparently decided that if it’s going to poison democracy, it might as well poison the fairways too. Rubble from Trump’s $400m White House East Wing demolition — the one he bulldozed to build a mega-ballroom for himself — was dumped at DC’s public East Potomac golf course and, shockingly, tests show it’s laced with lead, chromium, and other toxic metals. So the East Wing was so contaminated it had to be destroyed…but the debris is somehow safe enough to sprinkle over a municipal course where kids play. Very normal government decision-making here.
A federal judge, Ana Reyes, compared the whole mess to an episode of Parks and Recreation, except this is the version where Leslie Knope is replaced by a guy who terminates a 50-year lease with a nonprofit steward of public courses so he can "dramatically remake" the waterfront into an exclusive championship course and a "national garden of American heroes" slash donor magnet. The National Park Service is insisting there’s no big renovation imminent, while simultaneously doing “safety assessments” and watching fundraising documents go out with glossy renderings and cash-begging copy. The judge politely noted that when you’re already sending out pledge packets, you’re a bit past the "we’re just thinking about it" stage.
Meanwhile, preservation advocates are pointing out the obvious: the administration first claimed the East Wing had to be demolished because it was full of contaminants, and now the line is that the contaminated debris they trucked to a public course isn’t a problem. The course is supposed to be open and accessible to everyone; instead, it’s becoming a toxic billboard for Trump’s ongoing effort to privatize public space into luxury playgrounds for his friends — with the added bonus of possibly poisoning the locals. It’s infrastructure week, but make it radioactive.
#forever-grifting#corruption
