The Guardian view on Trump’s wealth and power: a medieval court wreaks havoc in the 21st century | Editorial

A people’s view of America, as seen on TV

From "Atlanta" to "This Fool," these 13 comedies highlight the real America in all its glory

Supreme Court Approves Mail-In Voting, But Trump Keeps Pushing Extremist SAVE Act Ahead of Midterms

President Donald Trump has received another setback in his ongoing quest to control U.S. elections. In a 5-4 split, the Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots do not need to be received by Election Day to be counted, as long as they were postmarked by then. Although a “rare victory for voting rights,” the conservative justices’ assertion that voting by mail is prone to fraud — a disproven theory that Trump blames his loss in the 2020 election for — is “very disturbing,” says Ari Berman, the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. “My fear is that this is going to embolden Republicans to double down on their efforts to try to get rid of mail voting, including the SAVE America Act, Trump’s sweeping voter suppression bill, which he seems desperate to go to any lengths to try to pass,” says Berman, who also comments on the court’s decision to strike down a federal law limiting campaign spending.

The Supreme Court’s Slaughter Decision Is Only Half the Battle

Forcing Congress to hold the executive branch is the other half.

Ken Burns on Trump’s America 250: ‘Washington needed no monuments’

Trump makes first trip on new Air Force One

President Trump traveled to North Dakota on board a new Air Force One aircraft, which was a gift from Qatar. NBC News’ Gabe Gutierrez reports.

Trump sees bond with ‘great he-man’ Theodore Roosevelt at lavish library opening

Bizarre 250th spectacle in North Dakota sees Trump take ride on red, white and blue train – and speak with hologram of 26th presidentThe sound of YMCA by the Village People booming through the badlands of North Dakota could only mean one thing: Donald Trump’s 250th anniversary travelling circus had reached a remote corner of America more familiar with bison, wild horses and bighorn sheep.The US president visited Medora on Wednesday to dedicate a $450m library and museum honouring Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president, in the region where he roamed as a cowboy and big-game hunter in the 1880s. Continue reading...

Trump’s fans got 'trash' while Trump got rich: WSJ report

The Wall Street Journal reports that not only did President Donald Trump make a cool $1 billion off his connections to the White House, he managed to do it in a way that made his MAGA fans and supporters catch the short end of the grifting stick.Morten Christensen made a big bet on digital tokens sold by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial (WLF) last year, hoping that a surge in value might be enough to help him retire. But the WSJ reports the value of those tokens instead tanked.“While Christensen and many like him lost big, the president made a fortune, netting $800 million from that crypto project, according to a financial disclosure he filed this week. “In crypto, people say a game is a game,” said Christensen, a digital-asset entrepreneur. “He played a better game than I did.”Others were much less generous over their losses.“My investment is trash now,” one user said of their WLF tokens."People backed Trump because they believed he would fight for them and were hoodwinked into thinking he cared about the working classes who brought him into power,” said a longtime Republican activist familiar with grassroots sentiment among Trump's MAGA base. “Seeing billions tied to crypto makes some loyal supporters uncomfortable and most of them have no idea what crypto is, let alone have the resources to invest in it. They feel this isn't public service anymore."“The president raked in cash by issuing new assets — World Liberty tokens and memecoins. But those who bought them at high prices had to suffer as their value went belly up, part of a wider crash in crypto,” reports WSJ. “Political followers and crypto true believers who bought into the Trump brand were left holding the bag. A crypto summer for the president was a crypto winter for them.”All told, roughly two-thirds of investors in Trump’s memecoin are currently in the red, according to crypto data provider Nansen, which tracks 1.48 million crypto wallets that bought the token since its January 2025 launch. Many fans spent thousands of dollars on Trump coins while the biggest spenders shelled out millions for the token. Nansen’s analysis of 26,663 wallets shows a whopping 85 percent of World Liberty’s $WLFI token buyers in the secondary market are underwater. This, said WSJ, was a big step away for a president who in 2021 described bitcoin as a “scam” that threatened the U.S. dollar. Now, however, Trump leads a White House that has pledged to make America the “crypto capital of the world.”“As his administration lightened regulation of the notoriously boom-and-bust sector, the Trump family’s sprawling crypto business reached into nearly every corner of the industry, drawing conflict-of-interest concerns from ethics watchdogs,” reports WSJ. “Bitcoin prices also plunged.”The White House, meanwhile, has sworn to unleash "an unrelenting, full-scale assault on the fraudsters, scammers, and corrupt operators who have looted billions from American taxpayers," with the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud moving "at unprecedented speed and ferocity to root out the waste, abuse, and criminal exploitation ... "that have drained billions from hardworking taxpayers."

Kleptocracy Is Trump’s Most Lucrative Business Venture

Being president of the United States is by far the most lucrative business venture of Donald Trump’s checkered business career. The June 30 release of his financial disclosure report makes this official. Trump has turned the American presidency into an extractive industry. In 2025, Trump mined more than $2.2 billion in income from being president, most of it from crypto, from which he extracted $1.4 billion. That’s all the more remarkable when you remember that crypto entered a slump last year and that investors in Trump’s crypto ventures who were not members of the Trump family lost $2.3 billion, according to a June 9 investigation by Tom Bergin of Reuters. It’s almost as if Trump’s ability to draw income from business ventures did not depend on those ventures being successful!A cynic might observe that Trump’s special treatment is no different from that of American chief executives in the private sector who are similarly insulated from failure. But Trump’s payday puts theirs in the shade. The only CEO whose compensation exceeded Trump’s last year was Elon Musk, who (for now) is a category of one. Musk’s $158 billion pay package from Tesla last year was more than 15 times larger than the combined pay packages of the other 391 chief executives surveyed in late June by The Wall Street Journal. If we set Musk aside, the highest-paid chief executive in the Journal’s ranking was Shankh Mitra, chief executive of Welltower, “a real estate investment trust focused on senior housing and healthcare.” Let’s leave for another day the ethics of harvesting a vast personal fortune from the physical and mental decline of one’s fellow human beings. My point here is that Mitra’s obscene pay package last year of $821 million was less than half of Trump’s $2.2 billion. Plus, I bet Mitra had to put in at least some actual work.I observed a year ago that Trump is America’s first rentier president. A rentier is someone who makes his money through the possession of assets rather than the exertion of labor. Rentiers are capitalism’s nepo babies. Prior to Trump, the main rentier occupations were real estate and finance. Trump himself was a classic rentier capitalist, a rich kid who joined the family real estate business, exaggerated his success to a credulous tabloid press, and inherited $413 million from his more successful father. Trump moved the family business from dowdy apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Queens to luxury apartments and hotels in Manhattan and beyond, but many of these went bankrupt. In 2018, The Economist concluded Trump would have made more money had he been a more conventional rentier and invested daddy’s money in index funds. The rentier presidency is a much more lucrative proposition than rentier capitalism, and one with which index funds can’t possibly compete. Crucially, there is no index fund that lets you acquire a stake without investing money or labor. During the 2024 presidential campaign the Trump family acquired a 60 percent stake in World Liberty Financial and was granted 75 percent on net revenues from token sales. (The Trump family stake in the company, the less valuable part of this deal, has since fallen to 38 percent.) Trump did not pay for these privileges, yet last year he earned more than $594 million from them. Neither is there any evidence, according to Reuters’ Bergin, that Trump ever paid for his stakes in the crypto firms ALT5 Sigma, American Bitcoin, or Celebration Coins. This last alone netted Trump more than $636 million last year. The business press often notes these days that Trump has become less a real estate investor than a crypto investor. But to call Trump a crypto investor is a misnomer because investors, um, invest. Trump doesn’t invest. He receives. Nor should we call Trump a media investor, because Trump didn’t pay one cent to acquire his majority stake in Trump Media & Technology Group. This company owns Truth Social, on which Trump posts his late-night rants, and “has engaged,” Michael Hiltzik observed last March in The Los Angeles Times, “in a number of baroque financial transactions.” It works out well for Trump that he didn’t put money into Trump Media & Technology Group because it lost $715 million last year on revenue of $3.7 million. Yet Trump’s stake in this money-losing venture somehow remains, according to his latest filing, worth more than $50 million. Nice work if you can get it.The business model for a rentier presidency might puzzle the untutored, given the extensive losses involved. Why would anyone invest with the president of the United States? Some of them are just suckers, still bedazzled by the phony business-genius image he created during 14 TV seasons of “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice.” But others derive value in other ways.