The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Donald Trump’s famous “I’ll end the war in Ukraine on Day One” promise is now celebrating its fourth birthday, which is a fun way of saying the administration has discovered that European land wars are slightly harder to fix than a golf course tax assessment. So naturally, the White House has deployed its elite diplomatic strike team: real-estate developer and Trump pal Steve Witkoff and permanent son‑in‑law in residence Jared Kushner, now apparently freelancing as Secretary of World Peace from a conference room in Abu Dhabi.

Witkoff is bragging on X that talks were “constructive” because each side agreed to release 157 POWs and open a new line of communication, which is the diplomatic equivalent of announcing you finally found the Zoom link to a war that’s been going on for four years. Meanwhile, Russia is busy bombing Ukraine’s power grid in sub‑freezing temperatures, an actual war crime that Trump breezes past so he can diagnose the real problem: “tremendous hatred” between Zelenskyy and his good buddy Vladimir Putin, as if this is a messy divorce and not a full‑scale invasion.

Allies like Lithuania’s foreign minister are standing on international TV yelling, “Putin doesn’t want peace, he’s committing war crimes,” while Trump’s team is out here acting like they can negotiate physics. The administration is treating a Kremlin‑driven war of aggression as a branding exercise that can be solved by Jared’s Peace, But Make It Real Estate strategy and Trump’s belief that his personal relationship with Putin is the missing ingredient. Four years in, the only thing “durable” about this peace process is the grift, the delusion, and the ever‑expanding list of Trump cronies who get to add “war whisperer” to their LinkedIn profiles.

Republicans finally muscled Bill and Hillary Clinton into agreeing to testify before Congress about their connections to convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and you’d think Donald Trump would be selling pay-per-view tickets. Instead, he’s out here calling it a ‘shame’ they have to testify, as if he’s the ACLU and not the guy who led ‘lock her up’ chants as a personality brand.

The Guardian’s podcast walks through the spectacle with former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori, who patiently explains why Trump’s sudden concern for fairness looks a lot less like principle and a lot more like the clubby reflex of a man who knows what happens when Congress starts asking rich, powerful people questions under oath — especially about Epstein. When you’ve flown in the same circles, partied with the same monsters, and built your career on weaponizing investigations, it’s amazing how quickly ‘witch hunt’ turns into ‘think of the poor Clintons’ the moment the subpoena spotlight swings a little too close to Mar-a-Lago.

While everyone was busy doomscrolling Trump’s latest all-caps meltdown, a senior UAE royal quietly wired $500 million into the Trump family’s new crypto toy, World Liberty Financial, just days before Trump took the oath of office again. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan – the UAE’s national security adviser, sovereign wealth fund boss, and all-around “spy sheikh” – secretly bought 49% of the Trump crypto venture, meaning the guy overseeing UAE foreign policy is now also a business partner of the sitting U.S. president. The Founders definitely meant that when they wrote the Emoluments Clause, right?

This is not a one-off grift; it’s an entire business model. The Trump family has turned the presidency into a global vending machine where foreign governments shove money in and policy falls out. Qatar handed over a $400 million luxury jet that’s being turned into Air Force One and then, magically, Trump says it’ll go to his “presidential library” so he can keep using it after 2029. Crypto contests at Trump’s golf club rake in $148 million from mostly foreign or anonymous buyers, including Chinese crypto mogul Justin Sun, whose SEC fraud case was conveniently put on ice after he poured tens of millions into Trump-branded coins. Totally normal sequence of events, nothing to see here.

Meanwhile, Trump’s crypto empire has become the family’s favorite laundering device for influence, pulling in $1.4 billion in a year and letting foreign officials do what campaign finance law technically frowns on: send giant bags of untraceable money to a U.S. president. Tahnoon gets White House dinners and VIP access while his country fuels a civil war in Sudan, and Washington is supposed to negotiate with a straight face as if the guy across the table isn’t also on the president’s cap table. America didn’t just reopen for business – it listed the presidency on Binance.

Sean Cooksey, the guy who helped turn TikTok from national security emergency into "lucrative American investor opportunity," is leaving JD Vance’s office for BGR Group, a lobbying and public affairs firm. So the White House’s TikTok "fixer" is now going to get paid to work the very system he just helped reshape. That’s not a conflict of interest, that’s just called career advancement in the Trump-Vance era.

Cooksey, a former FEC chair and veteran of Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley’s offices, was Vance’s legal point man on the grand project of "saving" TikTok by shoving it into a joint venture backed by U.S. investors — neatly transforming a geopolitical tech panic into a domestic profit center. Now he strolls out the door to K Street while everyone in the administration lines up to praise his heroic service to "American innovation," which apparently means designing deals that keep the app online and the donor class happy.

When he wasn’t rescuing teens’ dance videos, Cooksey was helping stand up a shiny new Justice Department Division for National Fraud Enforcement, supposedly inspired by welfare fraud investigations in Minnesota. Nothing says "we’re serious about fraud" like sending the architect of your corporate-friendly tech deals straight into the arms of a major lobbying firm. He also helped pressure the U.K. to back off demands for Apple encryption backdoors, which is admirable right up until you remember the guy now sells access for a living.

Cooksey calls this "the greatest presidential administration of my lifetime" and promises to keep supporting Trump and Vance from his new role. Of course he will. The revolving door isn’t a bug of this administration’s ethics; it’s the operating system. The TikTok panic was about security, they told us. The outcome, as usual, was about who gets paid.

NPR brings on New York Times money guy Ron Lieber to calmly walk listeners through the mechanics of the newly created "Trump Accounts" — because when you hear "Trump" and "your savings," the first word that comes to mind is obviously security. The segment promises to explain the who, what, and how, presumably skipping the why, since "to separate loyalists from their remaining disposable income" doesn’t take a whole show.

We don’t get the fine print here, but we can all guess the basic structure: slap the Trump brand on some lightly repackaged financial product, sprinkle in patriotic clip art, and let the marketing copy do the heavy lifting. While normal banks offer interest, these will likely pay out in vibes, grievance, and the warm feeling of subsidizing yet another Trump-branded revenue stream. America’s retirement plan, but make it a cult merch table.

Trump’s second-term brain trust has found a fresh way to "help" the American people: carve up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the government-controlled mortgage giants that support about 70% of U.S. home loans — and see how much "value" they can extract. Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, a Trump ally with big donor ties, is out front promising this is all for "U.S. taxpayers," which is Washington code for: the donors are about to eat first.

For the last 17 years, Fannie and Freddie have been in federal conservatorship after the 2008 crash, reliably stabilizing the $13 trillion housing finance system and keeping mortgage rates lower. Every administration since has looked at unwinding them, seen the giant radioactive risk ball labeled "could crash the housing market again," and backed away. The Trump crew’s reaction? Perfect time to partially privatize, strip out government control, and let politically connected investors cash in on assets taxpayers already saved and effectively own.

Economists are politely screaming that this could jack up mortgage costs, destabilize markets, and ultimately shove more risk back onto taxpayers while the upside flows to a handful of Trump-world shareholders. Even MIT’s Simon Johnson describes the administration’s proposals as "complete confusion" — which, to be fair, is the closest thing this White House has to a governing philosophy. But as long as big donors get their slice of Fannie and Freddie, who cares if millions of Americans get priced out of homeownership? The free market must be fed.