The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Donald Trump showed up at an unused Baltimore shipyard to announce a $6.6bn submarine factory that doesn’t exist yet, can’t build submarines until 2030, and will be run by a company that has never built a crewed submarine in its life. The lucky winner of the taxpayer jackpot is Anduril Industries, founded by Palmer Luckey, a guy who just happens to be a mega GOP donor, Trump fundraiser, and now a Pentagon adviser on the future of warfare. Truly, what are the odds.

The numbers are as subtle as a campaign rally in a war zone: $2.9bn from the US Navy, $3.7bn in private cash, and Trump claiming taxpayers will get a mysterious “40% stake” in the shipyard that no one can explain. But don’t worry, the acting Navy secretary Hung Cao says this sweetheart deal “breaks through bureaucratic red tape” — which is one way to describe bypassing experience, accountability, and basic procurement sanity to shovel money at a politically wired surveillance-to-weapons startup.

To complete the tableau, sailors from the USS Billings were literally diverted from going home after deployment so they could serve as campaign-prop backdrop for the announcement of a plant that won’t make parts for four more years. Cao then hyped Trump’s rebranded AI as “super intelligence” and issued a cartoonishly authoritarian threat that the US would sneak into other countries and kidnap people and their spouses in their beds. So yes, your tax dollars are buying a donor’s fantasy shipyard, an untested role in nuclear sub production, and a side of open-air fascist fanfic.

Jared Kushner, America’s least-qualified Nobel Peace Prize applicant, is very upset that people keep noticing his giant pile of money sitting directly on top of the wars he’s supposedly trying to end. CNN dug into Affinity Partners, his private equity fund, and found it quietly doubled its stake to 7.4% in Phoenix Financial right before Donald Trump returned to office. Phoenix is not "a defense company," Jared protests — it merely helps bankroll nine different weapons contractors, including Elbit Systems, whose drones and bombs help turn Gaza into rubble. A simple misunderstanding: he’s not selling weapons, he’s just investing in the people selling the weapons while he runs Trump’s Gaza "Board of Peace." Totally different.

The same guy pitching a $2.4 billion Gaza "recovery plan" to transform a bombed-out strip into a tourist playground is profiting from the companies arming the planes and drones that keep bombing it, long after a supposed ceasefire. Meanwhile, Forbes crowned him a billionaire in 2025, noting his fortune jumped about $100 million in a year, but Jared insists there’s no conflict of interest unless he literally hits the cash-out button during a signing ceremony on live TV. As he helpfully explained, what the rest of us call conflicts of interest, he and fellow “special envoy” Steve Witkoff call "experience."

And Gaza is just one stop on the Kushner Enrichment World Tour. While "negotiating" with Iran, he was simultaneously seeking investments from Gulf monarchies with a direct stake in the outcome. He was also put in charge of helping end Russia’s war on Ukraine, even as the New York Times now reports that the administration’s Russia talks feature a multibillion-dollar oil deal poised to benefit Middle Eastern business partners tied to Kushner and Witkoff. US diplomacy has been replaced with a family office: every peace process is also a pitch deck, every ceasefire a term sheet, every war an exciting growth market.

Pressed by 60 Minutes on whether "billions and billions" in Gulf deals might be a conflict of interest, Kushner replied that he’s just "here to do good" and that these are "impossible tasks" — which is true, if the task is pretending this isn’t raw, shameless self-dealing. The State Department used to do foreign policy; under Trump, it’s basically Jared’s LinkedIn Premium account with nuclear overtones.

Iowa Republicans just discovered a bold new interpretation of "America First": hand $1.36 billion in tax breaks to a foreign-owned steel company with a bankruptcy habit and rumored Russian state-bank funding, less than two weeks before early voting in one of the tightest House races in the country. Lawmakers were hauled into a one-day special session, given barely any time to read the details, and told the "deal is done" — not by Iowa officials, but by Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick from the White House. State Senator Kevin Alons called it "political extortion" and then, in a moving display of spine removal, voted for it anyway.

The math is its own punchline: about $777,000 in tax credits per permanent job over 10 years, for a company whose last big U.S. steel dream in Minnesota ended in bankruptcy, abandoned promises, and a name change. Supporters insist critics are ignoring 6,000 temporary construction jobs, because nothing screams "sound economic planning" like counting short-term hard-hat gigs to justify a decade-long corporate subsidy. Meanwhile, Iowa farmers are getting crushed by Trump’s trade wars, but the state is forking over more than a billion dollars to an India-based conglomerate in a district where Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks won her last race by 798 votes.

So to recap: Trump announces the "largest steel plant in U.S. history" in a swing district, the White House declares the deal finished before Iowa legislators even see it, a rushed special session converts taxpayer money into election-year talking points, and everyone’s supposed to pretend this is economic development and not a giant, publicly funded campaign ad. Foxconn Wisconsin walked so Mesabi Metallics Iowa could trip over the same rake — this time with bonus geopolitics.

Republicans just discovered that Donald Trump’s magic endorsement doesn’t cover insufficient funds. The Senate Leadership Fund — the big-money PAC tied to John Thune — has yanked its ad buy for Trump-blessed North Carolina Senate candidate Michael Whatley, choosing to funnel millions elsewhere now that polls show him getting calmly walked off the field by former Democratic governor Roy Cooper.

The breakup is especially poetic given how the SLF spent its cash: trying to tie Cooper to the murder of a Ukrainian refugee that happened when he wasn’t even in office, and pumping out a steady stream of crime-porn spots. One ad featured Ronald Hayes, whose son was murdered, and who later said he’d been “swindled” by GOP operatives into thinking he was doing an anti-gun-violence PSA, not starring in a partisan hit job. So yes, the party of “law and order” is once again using victims’ grief as a prop and then ghosting the state when the numbers don’t cooperate.

Now that Cooper is leading by double digits and has never trailed in a single poll, the PAC is cutting its losses and shipping the remaining $30m to Kansas to help Roger Marshall hang on. Republicans hold a 53–47 majority with JD Vance as the tiebreaker cosplay vice-president, and they can only afford to lose three seats — which explains the sudden fiscal discipline after months of lighting money on fire in North Carolina. Turns out even right-wing megadonors eventually notice when their “tough on crime” spending spree is just subsidizing Trump’s ego and a bunch of deeply misleading attack ads that aren’t moving anyone except fact-checkers and ethics lawyers.

The Kennedy Center Honors are being kicked out of the actual Kennedy Center and shoved into Capital One Arena this year, because the building is "closed" for Trump-branded safety assessments and a renovation that somehow hinges on whether the courts will let Donald slap his name on the facade and a plaza. Congress already coughed up over $250 million in taxpayer money for renovations, and yet the president and his personally curated board are hinting that the whole thing might stall if the judiciary doesn’t greenlight the Trump Towering Ego signage package.

So a memorial to John F. Kennedy’s legacy in the arts is now being treated like another struggling golf course that needs a rebrand to survive. The message from Trump and his board of loyalists is crystal clear: your national cultural institution is a bargaining chip in one man’s ongoing branding exercise. The Kennedy Center Honors will soldier on in a hockey arena, because in this administration, the arts get the penalty box while the president’s name gets center ice.

Meanwhile, CBS, which has broadcast the Honors since 1978, might not even carry the 2026 show, because nothing says "stable democracy" like turning a long-running cultural tradition into a venue-and-broadcast hostage drama over whether Dear Leader gets his name in lights. The Kennedy Center was supposed to honor American artistic achievement; under Trump, it’s being repurposed as a very expensive billboard.