day one peace deal now in year four, please clap
State-of-the-art Trump diplomacy: two guys who couldn’t pass a basic ethics briefing explaining war crimes to a chandelier in Abu Dhabi.
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.
#forever-grifting#national-security#killing-democracy
trump suddenly discovers due process (for other rich people)
Donald Trump, newly appointed Defender of Elite Civil Liberties, bravely shielding the Clintons from the horrors of being asked questions under oath.
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.
#forever-grifting#lawlessness
uae buys half a trump coin, gets whole presidency free
Artist’s rendering of U.S. foreign policy: a Trump-branded crypto coin being quietly slipped into a UAE briefcase labeled ‘national security adviser.’
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.
#forever-grifting#corruption
treasury launches new trumpcoin, now with bonus nicki minaj cosplay
Nicki Minaj at the Treasury Department, proudly endorsing a savings account that mainly invests in Donald Trump’s ego.
The Trump administration has apparently merged Treasury policy with a fan convention, rolling out "Trump accounts" — government-branded investment accounts "courtesy of President Donald J. Trump" — and flying in Nicki Minaj to sell them like it's QVC for creeping authoritarianism. As a bonus prize for performing MAGA court jester duties, Minaj brags she's "finalizing" her citizenship paperwork thanks to her "wonderful, gracious, charming President," complete with a shiny Trump "gold card". Good to know immigration is still a nightmare for ordinary people, but very efficient for celebrities willing to kiss the ring.
Meanwhile, a fandom that’s heavily Black, queer, and not-rich is online defending her pivot to the same Trump machine that has spent years targeting Black, queer, immigrant, and poor communities. The Barbz are now doing unpaid comms work for a regime that wants them politically invisible, insisting that supporting Minaj is about "seeing the human in one another" while she helps launder the image of a man who built his career on dehumanizing them. That’s not just bad politics, it’s a masterclass in how celebrity worship turns people into enthusiastic volunteers for their own oppression.
So the state hands out branded financial products and immigration favors to friendly stars, the star hands out vibes and access to her stans, and the stans hand out free propaganda for the guy in the Oval Office. It’s a neat little triangle: Trump gets cultural cover for his policies, Minaj gets status and paperwork, and her fans get the privilege of cheering on the very system grinding them down. American soft fascism has discovered the crossover episode: Treasury Department x Stan Twitter.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
trump launches discount drug website, hopes no one asks why insulin is still $400
Trump announces that the solution to America’s drug pricing crisis is, essentially, RetailMeNot.gov.
Trump has unveiled a new government-branded discount prescription drug website, because when you don't want to actually regulate Big Pharma, you build a coupon portal and call it "historic reform." Rather than using the federal government's enormous purchasing power to cap prices, negotiate directly, or stop patent games, the White House solution is basically: "Have you tried Googling harder for a promo code, grandma?"
The administration is pitching this as a major win for seniors, who are apparently meant to navigate a Trump-era website for life-saving meds like it's Black Friday on Overstock.com. No talk of cracking down on price-gouging, no threat to the pharma profit machine that bankrolls half of Washington—just a shiny URL and a podium speech. Structural change is hard; building a glorified affiliate hub is easy.
Behind the photo-op, the math is the same: drug companies keep their monopoly pricing power, insurers keep their Byzantine billing labyrinth, and the government keeps pretending it's the helpful middleman instead of the only player with enough leverage to actually force prices down. It's healthcare policy by coupon, brought to you by the guy who once promised "cheaper, better, for everyone" and delivered a landing page.
#forever-grifting#healthcare#money
crypto king midas discovers everything he touches still turns to trash
Trump pumps his Bitcoin sponsors with one hand while the other quietly signs away federal crypto enforcement. Multi-tasking!
Bitcoin just hit its lowest level since Trump returned to office, which is impressive given that the sitting president has basically turned the federal government into a personal marketing department for magic internet money. After hyping crypto to the moon, promising to make the US the "crypto capital of the planet," and riding the price all the way up to $122,200, the market has now shed two trillion dollars in value since October. Truly, we are winning so much.
Trump, who has conveniently amassed more than $11 billion in crypto holdings and pocketed $800 million in personal income from crypto transactions since taking office, also launched his own branded coin where the bulk of profits go straight into his companies. At the same time, he signed a law to support federal backing of crypto, dissolved the DOJ’s crypto enforcement team, and watched as the SEC politely stopped doing crypto investigations. Regulatory capture usually tries to be subtle; this is just forever-grifting on loudspeaker.
Analysts say the latest plunge was "triggered" by Trump’s nomination of Kevin Warsh as Fed chair, while traditional investors slowly back away from the flaming wreckage of an industry that thought putting the world’s most notorious bankruptcy enthusiast in charge of its political future was a good idea. Bitcoin is now drifting back toward pre-Trump levels, as banks gently explain that the asset needs to "find its specific role"—which, under this administration, appears to be "vehicle for presidential self-enrichment and mass bag-holding."
#forever-grifting#corruption
tiktok 'patriotism' successfully converted to billable hours
Stock footage of TikTok on a phone, brought to you by the bipartisan coalition of people who discovered national security threats are extremely monetizable.
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.
#forever-grifting#corruption
project vault: state capitalism for fun and profit
JD Vance and Marco Rubio bravely preparing to save free markets with tariffs, subsidies, and a giant government slush pile named after a bank vault.
The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in "free markets": tariffs to keep prices high and a government firehose of "hundreds of billions" in capital to hand out to whichever mining executives can say "national security" with a straight face. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted the first "Critical Minerals Ministerial," carefully avoiding the word "China" while describing a problem that is, somehow, definitely not about China. Instead, it's about "foreign supply" and the urgent need to make sure investors don't have to suffer the indignity of low prices.
Project Vault, Trump's shiny new $12bn critical mineral reserve, is being sold as a patriotic shield against Beijing's leverage, but it looks suspiciously like a taxpayer-funded prize pool for companies like MP Materials and Lithium Americas. Special assistant David Copley cheerfully promises the US will "deploy hundreds of billions of capital into the mining sector"—a phrase that, in Trumpworld, usually translates to someone's friends are getting very rich very fast. Meanwhile, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer is cooking up "coordinated trade policies" with Japan and the EU, which sounds less like multilateralism and more like an oligarchs' club for carving up the periodic table.
China, for its part, is gently reminding everyone about "market economy" principles while it tightens and loosens export controls whenever it wants something in trade talks. The US response? Build a state-run mineral hoard, rig prices with tariffs, and pray nobody notices that the same crowd that screams about socialism is now running a centrally planned resource strategy with all the transparency of a locked safe. The rarest earth of all remains accountability.
#forever-grifting#money#oligarchy
trump heroically recuses himself from the deal he quietly invested in
Business reporter explains, with a straight face, that the president buying bonds tied to a merger he publicly weighed in on is totally fine because the White House pinky-swore there’s no conflict.
Donald Trump has magnanimously decided to "stay out of" the Netflix–Paramount Skydance cage match over Warner Bros. Discovery, which is very generous of him considering he quietly bought up to $2 million in Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery bonds right after the deal was announced. He once bragged he'd "be involved in that decision" because of antitrust concerns, but now says he'll let the Justice Department handle it. When you’ve already placed your bets, you can really afford to respect institutional independence.
Adding a little extra seasoning of sleaze, one of the bidders is run by David Ellison, son of Trump megadonor Larry Ellison, who just happens to control Paramount. So we’ve got: a sitting president with a close relationship to one bidder’s billionaire backer, personal financial exposure to the other bidder and the target company, and a public history of attacking the media entities involved. The White House, with a straight face, insists there are no conflicts of interest here, which is technically true if you define "conflict" as "something we admit exists."
Meanwhile, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos goes to the Senate to swear the merger will be great for competition, workers, and democracy, while Republicans yell about "woke" content and Democrats pretend antitrust law still functions. Somewhere in the middle of this corporate Thunderdome, the president’s portfolio is just quietly waiting to see which way the DOJ — that he constantly pressures — will rule. Truly, the free market at work.
#forever-grifting#corruption
coming soon: fdic-insured maga bucks
Artist’s rendering of a Trump Account statement: one line item reading 'Fees to Trump' and a remaining balance of pure patriotism.
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.
#forever-grifting#money
trump advertises fed nominee as his personal rate-cut button
Trump, explaining that the next Fed chair’s primary credential is a shared enthusiasm for cheap money and expensive consequences.
Trump helpfully announced that his nominee for Fed chair "wants to lower interest rates," turning what is supposed to be an independent central bank into a glorified loyalty test for whoever promises the cheapest money for his political needs. Monetary policy, meet Mar-a-Lago rewards program.
Instead of pretending the Federal Reserve is guided by boring things like data, inflation targets, or long-term stability, Trump is openly selling the job as "must be willing to juice the economy for me on command." The message to markets, institutions, and anyone who has read a civics textbook is clear: the Fed isn’t an independent referee, it’s a campaign prop.
This isn’t subtle pressure on the Fed; it’s a televised job posting for a compliant mascot who will trade institutional credibility for short-term political sugar highs. Independent central banking was nice while it lasted. Now we get the "Apprentice: Interest Rate Edition," where the only qualification that matters is how fast you’re willing to spin the money printer.
#forever-grifting#killing-democracy
when billionaires think your grift is tacky
Ken Griffin, pausing from lighting cigars with Treasury bills to note that the Trump family’s grift is starting to look a little gauche.
Ken Griffin, Republican megadonor and hedge fund billionaire, has looked at the Trump White House’s corruption buffet and concluded: this is a bit much. At a Wall Street Journal conference, he politely translated "the Trumps are looting the place" into CEO-speak, saying the administration has taken decisions that are "very, very enriching" to officials’ families and might not, tiny detail, serve the public interest.
The part that even Griffin can’t swallow? The White House muscling into corporate America with the subtlety of Don Jr. at a coke-sponsored NFT launch, creating what he calls a culture of favoritism where CEOs feel pressured to grovel to whichever regime is currently stapled to the Resolute Desk. Meanwhile, Trump’s sons insist there’s a "huge wall" between their businesses and Dad’s job, a statement made significantly less convincing by the fact they’re getting showered in crypto-friendly policies and "big business deals" like it’s altcoin Christmas.
Griffin, who didn’t back Trump’s re-election but still cut a $1m check to the inaugural committee, somehow manages to both condemn the grift and praise Trump’s border crackdown and Fed pick Kevin Warsh. So yes, he’s horrified by the corruption — just not horrified enough to stop funding the machine that keeps spitting out the corruption. The White House, for its part, responded through spokesperson Kush Desai with the standard line that the only special interest is "the American people", then immediately pointed to stock indexes and wage numbers, because nothing says totally not captured by the billionaire class like measuring success exclusively in asset prices.
For a final twist, Griffin floated the idea of running for office himself, because clearly what this country needs after years of open, family-style self-dealing is to cut out the middleman and just let the hedge fund guys run the government directly. At least then the corruption would come with better PowerPoints.
#forever-grifting#corruption
tariff relief now available, just show proof of sucking up to trump
Tim Cook shakes Trump's hand while silently calculating how many tariff breaks one polite smile and a few strategic meetings can buy in this very stable banana republic.
The Trump administration has apparently streamlined trade policy by cutting out all that boring "law" and "process" stuff and going straight to the important question: have you kissed the ring lately? Sens. Ron Wyden and Chris Van Hollen say the White House is running a closed-door tariff exemption racket that "appears to favor the politically connected" — which is a polite Senate way of saying the U.S. Trade Representative and Commerce Department are operating a VIP lane for CEOs who send gifts, write checks, and pose nicely for photos with Donald.
Instead of a transparent system where small businesses and family farms can seek relief, the administration built a fog machine: an opaque, ad hoc waiver process where the lucky winners tend to be the same big companies whose executives have been personally courting Trump. Think Apple’s Tim Cook, or the Rolex CEO who literally showed up with a gold-plated desk clock, as if he were paying tribute to a particularly tacky medieval warlord. Toss in tech titans bankrolling Trump’s dream of bulldozing part of the White House to build himself a ballroom, and you’ve got policy being auctioned off one glitzy donation at a time.
Wyden and Van Hollen warn this setup has "opened the door to corruption and economic harm." The door? This administration took the door off the hinges, turned it into a naming-rights sponsorship opportunity, and handed the key to whichever billionaire agreed to fund the ballroom bar. Small manufacturers and farmers get to enjoy the full weight of Trump’s tariffs, while the president’s favorite corporations glide past customs like they’re checking into Mar-a-Lago. Free market capitalism has officially been replaced with "how big was your gift basket?"
#corruption#forever-grifting#money
trump’s big beautiful plan to cut your energy bill (by raising it)
Trump gestures toward an imaginary 50% bill cut while Americans stare at their utility statements like it’s a ransom note from their gas company.
Donald Trump promised to cut energy prices by 50%, and in a stunning triumph for alternative math, electricity is up 6.7% and natural gas 10.8% over the past year. This wasn’t a surprise plot twist; it was the script. The administration declared a "national energy emergency" that somehow translated into prioritizing fossil fuel producers over actual human beings, expanding liquefied natural gas exports so your home heating bill can ride the same rollercoaster as geopolitics, freezing cheap offshore wind, and propping up expensive coal plants like they’re Civil War reenactors with a lobbyist.
Just to really drive home who matters and who doesn’t, Trump’s team tried to slash the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and the Weatherization Assistance Program — the two main federal tools that keep poor and working-class families from literally freezing. Congress, in a rare moment of "maybe let’s not create Dickensian winter death scenes," blocked the cuts, which is the only reason millions of people aren’t already in the dark. Meanwhile, energy-efficiency tax credits that actually lower bills? The administration backed killing those too, because if there’s one thing this White House hates, it’s cheap, boring competence.
The results are exactly what you’d expect when policy is written by oil executives cosplaying as patriots. Home heating costs are projected to jump 9.2% this winter — over three times the inflation rate — and utility arrears have exploded from $15.4bn in 2021 to an estimated $23bn in 2025, heading toward $28bn. Nearly one in four households now says their energy bills are unaffordable, but don’t worry, the LNG export terminals are doing great. Energy burdens are soaring for low-income households while the richest barely notice, which is a weird coincidence for an administration that keeps insisting it’s all about "forgotten Americans" while carefully remembering every fossil-fuel donor.
And the punchline? The fixes are boring and obvious: efficiency, weatherization, renewables, and targeted bill assistance — all the stuff this White House either tried to gut or kneecap. States and countries that embraced those tools have lower costs and more stable prices, which is precisely why Trump’s crew wants nothing to do with them. You can’t build a culture war around attic insulation and heat pumps, but you can build a donor list around LNG exports and zombie coal plants. Lower bills were never the point; the point was to turn your utility payment into a recurring contribution to the fossil fuel industry’s reelection fund.
#forever-grifting#money
trump discovers a $13 trillion piggy bank, calls it 'taxpayer relief'
Fannie Mae’s old headquarters, now doubling as a buffet line where Trump donors can pile their plates high with taxpayer-backed mortgage profits.
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.
#forever-grifting#corruption#money
project vault: now with 30% more billionaire
Trump, a mining billionaire, and GM’s CEO gather in the Oval Office to bravely protect America from the grave threat of insufficient subsidies for mining billionaires and GM’s CEO.
Trump has unveiled "Project Vault," a nearly $12bn critical minerals reserve that totally just happens to be announced while he’s flanked by mining billionaire Robert Friedland and GM CEO Mary Barra in the Oval Office. It’s modeled after the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, except this time the commodity is rare earths, and the vibe is more "state-directed industrial policy meets donor wish list." The money: a $10bn, 15-year government-backed loan from the Export-Import Bank plus $1.67bn in private capital, because nothing says "free market" like a federally underwritten minerals hoard.
Rather than, say, building out public capacity or strong environmental and labor standards, the US is "securing" supply chains by shoveling support at companies it already owns stakes in, like MP Materials, Vulcan Elements, and USA Rare Earth. China’s dominance over rare earth mining and processing is the official villain here, but somehow the solution keeps circling back to: more subsidies, more corporate stakes, and more leverage for the same set of politically connected firms. National security, but make it a portfolio.
The rollout is being treated like a geopolitical fashion show: Marco Rubio, now secretary of state, will host a ministerial on critical minerals, while Vice-President JD Vance delivers a keynote address to a room full of European, African, and Asian officials eager to sign bilateral agreements. The State Department promises "momentum for collaboration," which is a poetic way of saying "we’re building a global supply chain so our defense contractors and auto giants don’t have to worry about Chinese export controls again." Strategic resilience for them, long-term public risk for everyone else.
#forever-grifting#oligarchy
uae buys half of trump’s crypto clown car, gets ai chips in the gift bag
Donald Trump smiles next to Emirati officials, presumably discussing geopolitics, national security, and the totally unrelated half-billion-dollar stake in his family’s crypto side hustle.
Donald Trump’s second-term ethics experiment continues apace, as we learn that a senior Emirati royal – Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, national security adviser and chair of a $1.5 trillion wealth fund – quietly dropped $500 million into the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, a few days before inauguration. For that bargain price, Tahnoon’s people got a 49% stake, $187m went to Trump entities, $31m to cofounder/Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, and the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause got tossed down a storm drain behind Mar-a-Lago.
The White House insists this is all fine because Trump is "not involved" in his businesses, which are merely run by his sons, Donald Jr and Eric – those famously independent paragons of fiduciary distance. Ethics experts, who apparently still believe words mean things, are calling it "beyond unprecedented" and a "blatant, disgraceful conflict of interest". Meanwhile, Trump has been busy hosting cozy White House dinners for Tahnoon and Emirati delegations and posting about the "long-standing ties and bonds of friendship" on Truth Social, which is a very polite way of saying thank you for the half-billion and the stablecoin partnership.
Then comes the part where policy just happens to line up perfectly with the president’s balance sheet. In May, World Liberty announces that the UAE’s AI investment arm will use its Trump-linked USD1 stablecoin to shove $2bn into Binance. Two weeks later, the Trump administration overrules prior US national security concerns and lets the UAE import 500,000 Nvidia AI chips, despite fears they’ll end up helping China. The Guardian can’t prove a quid pro quo, but when a foreign government buys nearly half your crypto company and then gets a massive, strategically sensitive tech deal, it’s less "we may never know" and more we absolutely know what this looks like.
Republicans, who currently control Congress, are the only ones who can investigate this mess, so naturally they’re too busy screaming about college DEI statements to notice the president running a live demo of "how to sell foreign policy for fun and crypto." Elizabeth Warren is out here yelling "corruption, plain and simple" while Trump’s lawyers insist the Emoluments Clause doesn’t apply because these are just "mere appearances" of business deals he "has no involvement" in – other than owning the company, appointing the envoy, meeting the royal, hosting the dinners, and signing the policy. Democracy may be hanging by a thread, but at least the stablecoin has great liquidity.
#forever-grifting#corruption
trump cuts $2bn, tosses $100m band-aid, calls it recovery
Robert F Kennedy Jr announces $100m in grants while standing in the smoking crater where the Trump administration parked $2bn in SAMHSA cuts and a third of its staff.
Robert F Kennedy Jr showed up at SAMHSA’s "Prevention Day" to announce $100m in grants for a shiny new program with a tortured acronym (STREETS), aimed at helping people experiencing homelessness and addiction move from "sidewalks" to "self-sufficiency". Sounds nice, until you remember that this is being rolled out by the same Trump administration that just abruptly canceled $2bn in SAMHSA grants last month and has laid off about a third of the agency’s 900 employees. Nothing says "we care about continuity of care" like firing your staff and yanking core funding, then tossing out a pilot project like a consolation prize from a rigged carnival game.
The $2bn cut was so egregious that even this Congress noticed, produced a spine for 24 hours, and forced the administration to reinstate the money. Meanwhile, the workforce that actually runs these programs has been decimated, leaving providers in a state of uncertainty, fear, and logistical chaos—which is also a decent working title for the Trump governance model. Into that mess, the White House now inserts a complex, integrated-care homelessness initiative and pretends the underlying sabotage of the public health infrastructure never happened.
Kennedy, who’s candid about his own addiction history, gave a moving speech about how the current system "cycles" people from sidewalks to ERs to jails and shelters, and how nobody takes responsibility for "the whole person". What he did not mention is that the administration he works for has spent the last year taking a chainsaw to the very agency now tasked with fixing that cycle. But don’t worry: the Trump team has a plan — more faith-based partnerships. The administration will expand eligibility for addiction-related grants to religious organizations because, as Kennedy put it, addiction is "above all, a spiritual disease".
So after destabilizing secular, evidence-based infrastructure, the White House is now routing public money toward ideologically friendly, faith-based providers under the banner of "reconnecting people to community". It’s a neat trick: manufacture a crisis in mental health and addiction services, then step in with a smaller pot of money and a sermon, and call it the Great American Recovery. The streets stay the same; the grift just gets better branding.
#forever-grifting#healthcare
amazon spends $75m on melania fanfic, swears it’s not a bribe
Melania Trump on a giant screen, bathed in soft golden light, while Amazon executives in the front row frantically whisper, “Please don’t break us up, Mr. President.”
Amazon just blew a cool $75m on a Melania Trump documentary that critics describe as "dispiriting, deadly and unrevealing" and "expensive propaganda"—in other words, exactly the kind of content you make when you're trying to impress the guy who can make your antitrust problems disappear. The film cost $40m to make and another $35m to promote, only to open at $8m and get beaten at the box office by two horror movies, which is fitting since this is basically a horror movie about what happens when corporate America decides the First Lady is a line item in their lobbying budget.
The target audience? Older conservative women in deep-red, rural Republican counties, fed a glossy slurry of "patriotism, Christianity, and family" while Amazon, which just laid off 16,000 corporate workers, shovels millions into a feature-length campaign ad. Critics note the end credits praise Melania in such over-the-top fashion that "North Korea would blush"—because nothing says "healthy democracy" like leader-worship montages scored like a Marvel movie.
Director Brett Ratner, who'd mostly vanished from Hollywood under a cloud of sexual misconduct allegations, resurfaces here to assure everyone this definitely isn’t corruption, just a very, very expensive documentary where you’ll "see where the money went." On the same day the film opened, Ratner also appeared in newly released Justice Department "Epstein files" photos—because this administration can’t even roll out its vanity propaganda without accidentally cross-promoting the sex-crime cinematic universe. But sure, tell us again how this $75m love letter to Melania is just about "making a great movie for audiences" and totally not about currying favor with President Trump.
#forever-grifting#oligarchy
world’s cheapest taxpayer demands $10 billion refund
Donald Trump, seen here contemplating how to turn paying $750 in taxes into a $10,000,000,000 payday.
Donald Trump — the man who paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 — is now suing the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion because their security failures allowed a contractor to leak his returns to the press. In other words, the guy who spent years hiding his tax records is furious that the public found out he basically treated the U.S. tax code like a suggestion and the federal government like his personal write-off.
The lawsuit, filed "in his personal capacity" (because of course he wants the perks of the presidency without any of those annoying responsibilities), claims the disclosures caused him and his sons "reputational and financial harm" and "public embarrassment." Translation: the embarrassment came from the numbers, not the leak. This is the same tax story he loudly called "totally fake news" — which makes it extra fun that he’s now demanding billions over the real damage it did.
The leaker, former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn, already got five years in prison for stealing Trump’s and other billionaires’ tax data, so the criminal part is settled. But Trump’s move here is pure forever-grifting: try to cash in on a legitimate whistleblowing disaster, punish the agencies that hold him accountable, and signal to every future bureaucrat that crossing Dear Leader’s financial interests could come with a 10-figure price tag. Because nothing says "respect for the rule of law" like trying to bill the U.S. government ten billion dollars for the crime of accurately portraying your finances.
#forever-grifting#corruption#money
