The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

President Trump is heading to Ireland to do the people’s business — and by “the people,” we of course mean the Trump Organization’s balance sheet. The White House is packaging the trip to his Doonbeg golf club as a charming blend of international diplomacy and live golf spectating, because why separate statecraft from self-enrichment when you can just bill taxpayers for both at once?

So the president will plant himself at his own resort, bask in the free advertising that comes with a presidential motorcade, and call it foreign policy. State visits now double as loyalty points in the Trump hotel rewards program, and U.S. diplomacy has been downgraded to a cross between a tourism brochure and a club membership drive. American soft power, brought to you by the pro shop.

Indivisible paid grown-up pollsters to confirm the shocking news that Americans do not, in fact, enjoy being shaken down by a corrupt regime while eggs cost a mortgage payment. Their research finds that voters are furious about politicians rigging the system for themselves and about corruption bleeding taxpayers dry, and that they want candidates who can walk and chew gum: lower costs and go after the crooks doing the rigging.

Wildly, the data suggests that when people believe the system is fixed against them, bland promises to "make life more affordable" sound like every other empty campaign slogan they’ve heard since dial-up internet. Tie it directly to Trump-world self-dealing and corporate looting, however, and suddenly affordability talk sounds less like a Hallmark card and more like an indictment. Voters overwhelmingly prefer candidates who both hammer corruption and tackle prices, rather than pretending those are unrelated problems.

The authors gently note that Republicans currently control the House, Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court, which makes their "we’re fighting the corrupt establishment" routine about as convincing as Trump calling himself a humble public servant. If Democrats actually run on holding this crowd accountable, win, and then follow through with real oversight and crackdowns on corporate profiteers, they might start to rebuild some trust. If they don’t, they just become the next managers of the same broken casino Trump and friends have been looting in broad daylight.

Donald Trump’s former labor secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer apparently thought "labor" meant making her staff labor for her closet. According to a 38-page inspector general report, she turned the Department of Labor into a booze-soaked, strip-club-adjacent sorority hazing operation with federal funding. We’ve got drinking on the job, a bottle collection on federal property, and a staffer strong-armed into making it rain on a partially nude dancer while on a "personal" trip. Truly the blue-collar champion Trump promised.

The report lays out the rest of the greatest hits: an "inappropriate relationship" with a bodyguard, undisclosed gifts, at least thirteen taxpayer-funded family-and-vacation trips plus five Vegas jaunts, and luxury hotel stays blowing past reimbursement rates. Staff were ordered to do personal errands like organizing her bedroom closet during work hours, because why hire a personal assistant when you have the United States government?

It gets even more wholesome. Her top aides allegedly ran ritual "beatdowns" where employees were verbally shredded for sport, evaluated job applicants partly on looks and weight, and moved a worker’s desk because they didn’t want a "fat person" in the front office. One aide reportedly warned an employee not to cut her hair short so she wouldn’t "turn into a lesbian," and discouraged use of the DOL daycare because the staff were the wrong race for the children. Chavez-DeRemer, naturally, said nothing — because silence is complicity, and also the management style of this administration.

Her lawyer insists this all proves she "did not break any laws," which is a fascinating defense of a cabinet secretary accused of abusing staff, misusing funds, and retaliating against suspected leakers. Under Trump, that’s not disqualifying behavior; that’s basically the job description.

America is celebrating 250 years of supposedly not having a king by… putting the sitting president’s scowling face on a coin, because the man simply cannot see a flat surface without wondering how his head would look on it. The new $1 Trump coin, which historians and economists delicately describe as "probably illegal," is now legal tender anyway, because laws in this administration are more like suggestions. The Mint insists this zinc-and-manganese participation trophy will "honor 250 years of great American heritage" — mainly the part where powerful men ignore rules and put their own faces on the money.

There’s a 150-year-old tradition of not doing this monarch stuff, backed by an 1866 ban on living people on currency and reinforced by later laws about which presidents can appear on coins. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent’s airtight legal argument? Calvin Coolidge got away with it once for the 150th, so Trump gets a turn for the 250th. That’s it. That’s the precedent. A retired attorney tried to block the coin, but a judge shrugged and said he couldn’t prove he’d be personally harmed by the government turning the dollar into a commemorative ego token — while pointedly not saying the coin was actually legal.

The best part: this "one-dollar" coin costs $61 for a roll of 25. So for just $2.44 you too can own a single, questionably legal Trump dollar that spends for exactly $1, assuming anyone is willing to touch it. It looks gold but isn’t, is "legal" but maybe isn’t, and supposedly honors American democracy while starring the guy working overtime to turn it into a personality cult. If you’re wondering who dreamed up this bargain-bin imperial cosplay, just look at the coin. He made sure you can’t miss him.

The Pentagon’s top guy for making sure killer robots are used ethically, Emil Michael, has been very busy ensuring at least one thing is optimized: his own portfolio. After already cashing out up to $24 million from Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year with a gain of up to 4,800% — yes, four thousand eight hundred percent, not a typo, just American ethics — he’s now sold between $5m and $25m worth of stock in Perplexity, an AI search company that just so happens to be chasing a $30bn valuation and already has a U.S. government contract.

Minor details: Perplexity previously gave him a personal loan of up to half a million dollars, he sat on their advisory board, and he literally promised in his ethics agreement not to profit from some of his unvested stock. The disclosures don’t make clear what he actually sold, but don’t worry, the Pentagon swears its “rigorous, multi-layered ethics framework” has everything under control — presumably the same framework that concluded "sure, this is fine" while the guy running AI policy owns chunks of AI firms and cashes them out mid-job.

Because one jackpot isn’t enough, Michael also quietly turned his stake in Brex — a Peter Thiel–backed financial software firm — from a disclosed maximum of $750,000 in early 2025 into at least $5m by April 2026, a gain that could be as high as $24m. He’d consulted for Brex, appeared on a podcast episode sponsored by Brex while still invested, and functioned as the Pentagon’s public attack dog against rival AI company Anthropic. But according to Pentagon spokespeople, everything is perfectly legal and in “full compliance,” which is less comforting and more a confession that the system is built to let officials moonlight as venture capitalists while steering defense policy.

Former Bush ethics lawyer Richard Painter gently noted that in a normal administration you’d just tell the guy, "sell everything before you start the job." In the Trump era, apparently the move is: put him in charge of military AI, let him trade around the sector like it’s a meme stock subreddit, and then call it a day because technically the paperwork has the right boxes checked. The robots aren’t the scary part of AI policy; it’s the humans running it like a get-rich-quicker scheme.

Donald Trump has discovered a bold new frontier for economic policy: whatever Jon Voight thinks would be neat. The president hopped on Truth Social to demand bipartisan federal tax incentives for the TV and movie industry, a sector he and Republicans have spent years denouncing as a woke coastal menace. Now that Hollywood profits are at stake, however, it’s apparently time for a red-blue unity summit in the Church of Content.

Trump bragged that meetings are being set up with leaders of both parties to "save" the entertainment business, conveniently concentrated in those terrible, crime-infested, Democrat-run blue states he never shuts up about. The policy brain behind this? Jon Voight, whom Trump has anointed his “Hollywood ambassador,” because nothing screams sound fiscal planning like handing national tax policy to the guy from National Treasure. This follows Trump’s earlier brainstorm: slapping tariffs on foreign films, because of course the solution to everything is tariffs.

Democrats like Adam Schiff and Rep. Laura Friedman rushed to praise the idea, thrilled that Trump has finally found a form of socialism he can get behind: corporate welfare for studios and streamers. The Motion Picture Association is also delighted, having discovered that the path to federal goodies is simply flattering Trump’s love of TV. No numbers, no pay-fors, just Trump promising that the money spent on these tax breaks will come back to the Treasury "tenfold"—the same airtight accounting logic that gave us casinos, Trump Steaks, and a small army of bankruptcy lawyers.

So yes, the bipartisan project of our time is here: rewriting the tax code to subsidize Hollywood, guided by a president who mainly cares that people keep putting him on screen, and an industry more than happy to cash the checks. The American worker may get crumbs, but the American content mill? That’s getting a federal stimulus package with a side of ego massage.

The Supreme Court, in a tight 5-4 "emergency" decision, has decided that Donald Trump can keep turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago-on-the-Potomac, greenlighting his new East Wing ballroom while lawsuits over its legality grind on somewhere far beneath the sound of jackhammers. The National Trust for Historic Preservation argued that, no, the president does not get unilateral authority to slap a giant party barn onto a historic federal building, but the court's conservative majority helpfully discovered that the Trust probably doesn’t even have standing to complain. Whether Trump actually has the legal authority to do this? The justices politely declined to say. Very reassuring.

It takes a special era of constitutional decay for John Roberts to be the one writing, "That construction is likely unlawful," while his four colleagues in the majority shrug and say the harm here is basically just someone being "offended." Meanwhile, the administration boasts that the project is 65% done, with a 250-person crew working 20 hours a day like they’re speedrunning a Bond villain lair. The White House insists the $400 million tab is covered by private donations — an assertion that has been widely laughed out of reality — while Secret Service funds are already being siphoned off to cover "security enhancements" for the ballroom. The underground complex of secure locations and medical facilities is pitched as national security; the giant glitzy ballroom on top is pitched as, apparently, nobody’s business but Trump’s.

A federal judge and the D.C. Circuit had at least tried to put the aboveground monument to ego on hold while the boring question of legality got sorted out, allowing only the underground component to continue. But the Supreme Court’s shadow-docket fairy godmothers waved their wands and told the bulldozers to keep going, because the real emergency in American law is that a historic preservationist walking past the White House might suffer an "aesthetic" injury. The message from the Court’s majority is clear: as long as you wrap your self-dealing in the language of "security" and "improvements," and fund it with a murky mix of "private" money and redirected public cash, the guardrails of democracy will be happy to look the other way — preferably from a VIP table under a crystal chandelier.