Nobel economist aghast at 'horrifying' report on Trump's corruption: 'My God'
Far Left
A Nobel Prize-winning economist was aghast on Sunday while reacting to new reporting about President Donald Trump's corruption. Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008 for his work on trade theory, said in a new video on his Substack that the report the New York Times published on Sunday about an agreement struck between the U.S. and a mining company in Kazakhstan where his sons, Don Jr. and Eric, as well as the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stand to financially benefit was "horrifying." He also noted that it revealed how "departed" the Trump administration is from American history. "I’m not a political expert — sometimes I think nobody is — but my God, again, this corruption is so blatant," Krugman said. "And it does resonate with people. It’s really clear that corruption at the top and the sense that ordinary people are paying the price while people with power enrich themselves is an effective popular issue."Krugman added that the kind of corruption detailed in the Times' report has brought down Trump allies such as Viktor Orban, the former dictator of Hungary. He described that comparison as one of the "hopeful signs for what may happen to America.""So here we are, just to remind you that this scandal, it’s a huge thing. It’s page one in the New York Times, but in a way it’s actually kind of ordinary, since even this size of scandal is happening every few weeks these days," Krugman continued. "Do not make the mistake of treating what’s going on as in any sense normal," he added. "This is hugely abnormal, and I believe that the American people will understand that it’s abnormal even if pundits get bored of talking about the corruption. So drive it home, maybe for make benefit American people instead of the Trump family."Corruption for Make Benefit Glorious Family of Trump by Paul KrugmanThe emoluments are the messageRead on Substack
President Donald Trump has had a hard time distancing himself from the Jeffrey Epstein saga, and a new development in the case might prove to be more of a headache than he wants, according to two legal experts. Earlier this month, convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein's assistant, Lesley Groff, testified before Congress about her relationship with the disgraced financier and his crimes. The transcripts of that interview were released late last week, and some of the details Groff shared with investigators raised red flags for attorneys Brian Kabateck and Shant Karnikian, who co-host the "Civil Action" podcast on the Legal AF Network. For instance, Kabateck pointed out in a new episode on Sunday that Groff testified she began working for Epstein in 2001 and that Epstein and Trump were in contact for at least a decade. That seems to contradict Trump's previous claim that he cut off communications with Epstein in 2004 or 2005, well before Trump became president, Kabateck noted. Another issue is that those dates extend beyond Epstein's 2008 felony conviction for soliciting a minor, which is another "problematic" aspect of the timeline, Kabateck said. Karnickian said the transcript showed that Trump "has something to hide" in the case. "Early on, we talked about Epstein, and we thought this is a sideshow, and maybe Trump's deliberately putting it out there," Karnikian said. "It's become a big problem for him, and it's clear that he has something to hide here."
Fox News was roundly mocked on Sunday after one segment claimed that pictures of the sparsely attended Great American State Fair, organized by an entity linked to President Donald Trump called Freedom 250, did not tell the full story of the event. Kevin Corke, Fox News's senior national correspondent, claimed on "The Big Weekend Show" that the energy at the state fair was much greater than what pictures of the event showed. Several photos emerged online on Sunday showing that few people were at the event, held at the National Mall, due to rainstorms in the area. "Sometimes the pictures don't tell the full story because if you look behind us, a couple of hundred people back there, but when you make your way over here, and you're in this wash of people," Corke said. Onlookers mocked Corke's claims on social media. "Don't believe your lying eyes. Believe Fox," Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of MeidasTouch, posted on X. "Pictures tell the story," Fred Wellman, a Democratic political candidate in Missouri, posted on X. "Allow me to explain why you should not believe your lying eyes," Kelly Scaletta, a political commentator known as "Machine Pun Kelly" online, posted on X. "Are the people in the room with you right now?" Hemant Mehta, a writer and former "Jeopardy!" champion, posted on X. FOX: Sometimes the pictures don't tell the full story because if you look behind us, a couple hundred people back there but when you make your way over here and you're in this wash of people. pic.twitter.com/pQIiqX1CjX— Acyn (@Acyn) June 28, 2026
The Trump Pentagon has been rocked by controversy over a recent spate of firings and blocked promotions, and now, one lawmaker has accused President Donald Trump's defense chief of being motivated by a petty "grudge" as he causes significant damage to the military.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has come under significant fire over the course of his tenure for removing several respected and experienced officers and blocking others from receiving promotions. He most recently took flak for the latter after the already-approved promotions of several Naval officers, most of them being either women or people of color.Critics have put forward various theories for what could be driving this trend, including a desire to punish or remove officers who took part in past diversity initiatives, or a plot to remove non-loyalists who might stand in the way of a 2028 "auto-coup" to keep Trump in power.During a Sunday appearance on CBS News's Face the Nation, Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, put forward another theory of what is driving Hegseth: "personal" revenge for his own time in the armed services. Kaine specifically touched on the recent ouster of General Chris Donahue, a highly respected officer whose departure even caused alarm among conservatives.“Are you pushing out the truth tellers to surround yourself by yes-men? And in particular, it looks like the secretary is coming down hardest… on the Army,” Kaine told CBS host Margaret Brennan. “He served in the Army, he felt like he wasn’t treated well by the Army, that’s a grudge he’s carried that he’s described publicly."Kaine added: “And so, when you see Army officers forced out, you got to wonder, is this a personal thing, or is it really what’s best for the nation?”"Donahue, the commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, submitted his paperwork to retire earlier this week after a little over a year in his role, according to a Pentagon official," The Hill detailed in a report about Kaine's remarks. "Donahue's departure is the latest in a lengthy list of military leaders Hegseth has either removed or pushed out. That includes Gen. CQ Brown Jr., the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Navy’s chief of naval operations, Adm. Lisa Frachetti; the commandant of the Coast Guard, Adm. Linda Fagan; Gen. Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff; and Gen. James Mingus, the vice chief of staff of the Army."Donahue's ouster drew criticism from GOP lawmakers as well."Strong leaders are not threatened by accomplished commanders," Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina wrote in a social media post. "Weak ones are. [Hegseth's] paranoid micromanagement of senior military leaders and promotion lists is pure insecurity dressed up as reform."
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth just hijacked more promotions of high-ranking service members, this time blocking career professionals with exemplary records who were on track to become one-star generals and admirals. Not only is Hegseth’s behavior unusual, there is no clear legal authority for what he is doing. Congress entrusted military promotions largely to the respective promotion boards and Secretaries of the Military Departments, not the Secretary of Defense. Although 10 U.S.C. § 629 empowers the President with removal authority, a longstanding executive order limits the Secretary of Defense’s removal authority to grades below colonel or captain, not the general or admiral promotions Hegseth has blocked. The Pentagon’s own regulations restrict grounds for removing an officer from a promotions list to specific circumstances like moral, mental, or professional deficiencies, none of which were present in Hegseth’s removals.It’s obvious that a disproportionate number of Hegseth’s blocked, delayed, or demoted officers are women and people of color. However, while mainstream headlines suggest Hegseth is motivated by race and gender animus, an even worse—and more dangerous— likelihood is that he is weeding out those he deems “ideologically incompatible” with how he and Trump plan to use the military.Hegseth likes to emphasize that “every officer serves at the pleasure of the president,” arguing that Trump’s policy goals require removing commanders “tied to the culture” of previous administrations. He argues that past promotions were based on race and gender instead of qualifications, but military records dispute those claims, and there is no evidence that any promotions he blocked were attributable to anything other than merit.An unqualified hack defends his ownHegseth, a former Fox News bobble head, is notoriously unqualified to serve as Secretary of Defense, which seems to have been Trump’s point in naming him. He was a mid-level National Guard officer, had no senior leadership role in the military, and had no experience anywhere that qualified him to oversee three million personnel and an annual budget of $800 billion. More dangerous than his lack of qualifications is his bloodlust. As a media commentator, he lobbied aggressively for presidential pardons for service members convicted or accused of notorious war crimes, including Army Lt. Clint Lorance, convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians, and Maj. Matt Golsteyn, who admitted during an interview for the CIA that he and another soldier took an alleged Taliban bomb-maker off base in 2010, shot him, and buried his remains. Trump granted full pardons to both.In Iraq, Hegseth’s own unit was nicknamed “Kill Company” and he kept a ‘kill board’ that tallied kills, including dead civilians, expressing daring contempt for the military's strict rules of engagement. It’s anyone’s guess what gruesome deeds he got up to. Today, he barks a constant mantra about “war fighters” and “lethality” and sees violence and unrestrained power as a distinct virtue.Ineptitude with a platitude chaserHegseth’s tenure has been marred by a series of high-profile blunders, including the SignalGate security breach, his ‘dirty line’ Pentagon internet setup, and unforced diplomatic errors such as upbraiding NATO allies without understanding the subject matter. Just as Trump governs by spectacle over substance, Hegseth manages by platitude. His attempts to project authority through chest thumping—“Maximum lethality not tepid legality”— like his sophomoric speech to the Generals at Quantico, routinely fall flat and inspire parody. Hegseth’s embrace of violence over circumspection (“Lethality is our calling card”) while rejecting what he calls ‘stupid rules of engagement’ reveals an almost pathological immaturity. While pushing back against operational restraints, i.e., military rules of engagement, and weeding out generals who don’t suit him, he insists that, under him, there will be “No politically correct wars.” What he’s really weeding out are legal protocols in order to elevate ‘maximum lethality’ in pursuit of politically incorrect and illegal wars: Trump’s.History is clear on why the military should never be politicizedThroughout history, authoritarian regimes have tried to put professional militaries under the direct control of their own political movements. Recognizing that an independent officer corps poses an existential threat to one-party rule, in Nazi Germany, Hitler systematically dismantled the autonomy of the traditional Wehrmacht, and required all soldiers to swear a personal oath of loyalty to him rather than to the state or constitution. In the former Soviet Union, Stalin subjected the Red Army to the Communist Party's political commissar system, embedding party officials at every level of command to monitor ideological conformity.
President Donald Trump's administration has become mired in embarrassment over his latest botched remodeling project, but according to a new analysis from MS NOW, the threats he has made in response to the affair reveal him as both "comical" and "ominous."As part of his ongoing campaign to remodel iconic fixtures of Washington, D.C., to his own liking, Trump made a big deal out of his plan to have the Lincoln Memorial's Reflecting Pool painted a color he called "American Flag Blue." Once the project — handed off to a GOP donor through a swift no-bid contract — was completed, it promptly blew up in his face, as the pool became overrun with green algae, which numerous experts have said was actively made worse by the change in color.Despite the administration's efforts, the algae have remained, threatening to stick around as a highly visible embarrassment for Trump during the country's 250th birthday celebrations. In response to this predicament, Trump has tried to save face by claiming that the algae bloom was caused by vandals, with a former Olympian getting arrested and charged by the U.S. Park Police after touching a piece of peeling paint in the Reflecting Pool. Multiple other people near the pool, whom Trump accused of being "vandals," have also been arrested, though there have been no charges leveled against them.Writing for MS NOW on Saturday, political strategist Symone Sanders-Townsend argued that "the ongoing debacle of the Reflecting Pool has been a helpful distillation of [Trump's] approach" to governance: "Make a big promise, use it to reward your allies, blame setbacks on your opponents, criminalize dissent and then attack the press.""The first three steps are fairly common in politics, especially among populists with little experience in government," she explained. "But it’s the last two that turn Trump into something more than just a run-of-the-mill incompetent politician. Authoritarianism often begins with the habit of treating ordinary problems as criminal conspiracies. A court strikes down his policy, and he calls the judge 'crooked' or 'corrupt.' A protest escalates, and he calls the protesters 'paid agitators.'”She added: "If an authoritarian government cannot accept criticism, then it has to label critics enemies. If it cannot admit a mistake, then it has to blame sabotage. And if it cannot accept failure, then it has to find someone to punish."Sanders-Townsend further argued that while it may be "comical" to see Trump deploy this predictable authoritarian playbook over something like the Reflecting Pool debacle, it is also "ominous" and must be taken seriously. This sort of impulse, she explained, is exactly why the nation's founders "built a system designed to restrain power rather than indulge it.""The Reflecting Pool is simply the latest reminder that, in Trump’s Washington, the line between politics and criminality is growing dangerously thin," she continued. "That’s because the common thread is not just inflammatory rhetoric. It is the growing weaponization of government against ordinary political activity and the ordinary people who engage in it. When a president begins treating ordinary politics as criminality, it does not stay rhetorical for long. Eventually, someone gets investigated. Someone gets detained. Someone gets arrested."
President Donald Trump’s sons are profiting off of their father’s connections, including in a previously-undisclosed deal over a lucrative metal.“Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history,” wrote The New York Times’ Paul Sonne and Eric Lipton on Sunday. The report covered how Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump availed themselves of a meeting between Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in September to grant a little-known American company called Kaz Resources access to their tungsten mines.Prior to that meeting, the Trump administration approved preliminary applications for up to $1.6 billion in federal financing for Kaz Resources to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan. Dominari Securities, which is partly owned by the Trump sons, agreed to take a 20 percent stake in the tungsten projects.“Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Mr. Lutnick’s family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity,” Sonne and Lipton wrote. “Such rounds of fund-raising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.”They added, “The Kazakh deal was ultimately signed on Nov. 6, six days after the investment involving the Trump sons and their partners, which was not publicly disclosed at the time. The arrangement is hardly an outlier. One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project, according to federal filings examined by The New York Times.”This is not the only occasion when the Trump family has come under scrutiny for profiting from the White House, as has Trump himself. Earlier this month the American Economic Liberties Project and Groundwork Collaborative released a joint report called “The Price of Corruption: How Trump’s Pay-to-Play Administration is Driving Up Costs for Working Families,” which described how the Trumps’ alleged corruption has literally cost ordinary Americans a lot of money.“When Trump rolled out TrumpRX earlier this year, the administration claimed it was a way for Americans to access more affordable prescription drugs,” the report pointed out. “Instead, the platform fails to disclose information about less expensive generic alternatives and, in some instances, charges consumers more for products that are available for less elsewhere.”It added that TrumpRx “serves as free advertisement for Big Pharma and may be lining the pockets of the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is on the board of prescription drug platform BlinkRX, which stands to benefit from the administration’s promotion of direct-to-patient medicine sales.”It also observed that Trump’s tariffs have raised the cost of imported goods for consumers while also enriching Trump himself, citing as one example when he reduced Swiss tariffs “just a few days after Swiss business leaders presented him with a personalized gold bar worth more than $130,000 and a Rolex desk clock.” Conversely, when Trump’s fellow right-winger, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, faced legal consequences for plotting a coup to illegally stay in power after losing an election to current President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, Trump used tariffs to retaliate.“Americans paid the price for Trump’s international allies breaking the law,” the report pointed out, “as coffee imported from Brazil surged to a 40% increase in price.”
Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine (R) on Sunday called on the Trump administration to reconsider pushing for the elimination of temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitian migrants following the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the program. The high court ruled 6-3 that the Trump administration can remove thousands of Haitians and Syrians who currently have TPS,…
