The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

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.

The UN General Assembly is supposed to be where the world gathers to prevent war and uphold international law. Under Trump, it’s where indicted leaders give speeches, war sponsors cosplay as peacemakers, and the host country uses the visa system like a bouncer at a tacky nightclub. Benjamin Netanyahu strolls in as the only ICC-indicted leader to address the GA, while Jordan’s King Abdullah politely explains that Israel’s sense of impunity is now so absolute it doesn’t even bother asking, "Can we get away with this?" It already knows the answer is yes. International law is less a framework and more a prop.

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates—busy allegedly arming and funding Sudan’s RSF militia, which stands accused of genocide and ethnic cleansing—takes the mic to solemnly demand peace and civilian rule in Sudan. Luckily for them, they’ve purchased industrial-strength silence: a cool $500m parked in the Trump family’s crypto clown car and multibillion-pound deals with the UK. In return, Washington and London manage the impressive diplomatic feat of noticing that "foreign interests" are involved in Sudan but somehow forgetting the names of any actual countries. Even the US senior adviser on African and Arab affairs—conveniently Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law—refuses to say "UAE" out loud, as if the sheikh might appear in a mirror.

Because hosting the UN in New York wasn’t enough power to abuse, the Trump administration has discovered a fun new toy: turning visas into foreign policy weapons. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and 80 other Palestinian officials are denied visas—again—while the Sudanese government leader (the side fighting the UAE-backed RSF) is also blocked from attending. The message is clear: the UN is no longer a neutral forum; it’s a venue the US can selectively lock down to protect its clients and donors. If you’re on the Trump family’s cap table, you get your warlord on the speakers’ list. If you’re on the wrong side of their friends, enjoy watching your own General Assembly from home.

Amid this carnival of impunity, a few UN officials race around trying to keep the humanitarian machine from collapsing entirely, opening sea lanes and chokepoints so aid can dribble into the war zones that US allies and clients keep helpfully setting on fire. While drones and AI make wars cheaper, murkier, and harder to end, the international system that’s supposed to restrain all of this is being quietly strip-mined for cash, leverage, and family-brand crypto schemes. The 2026 UNGA wasn’t just a tragedy; it was a live demonstration that under Trump, even the idea of a rules-based order is something you can apparently buy for $500m and a photo op.