Trump 'anti-weaponisation' fund indefinitely blocked as judge wants guarantee it's abandoned
Center
The proposed "anti-weaponisation" fund was announced to settle a lawsuit by Trump against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns.
Paramount Skydance's greenlight to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery will lead to a major shakeup at CNN, warned a political strategist.The upheaval coming for CNN will make recent events at CBS look like peanuts, political strategist Chai Komanduri said on MS NOW. While Paramount awaited approval from the Trump administration for the Warner Bros. deal, CBS ended "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" and ousted a slew of "60 Minutes" anchors and producers."Now, if you can replicate that on CNN, and you can diminish and downsize the voices in opposition to Trump or the criticism of moves of the administration, that gives Trump a lot more power," Komanduri said. "The stories that we have heard out of CBS News will be peanuts compared to the stories that will probably come out from CNN."He warned Kaitlan Collins, the CNN correspondent who has been the target of Trump attacks, and said the Trump administration is "very much interested in who gets to be the CNN White House correspondent."The Trump Department of Justice gave Paramount CEO and MAGA ally David Ellison the thumbs-up to acquire Warner Bros. for $110 billion. One of the most notable Warner Bros. properties is CNN, along with streaming services like HBO Max and Paramount+, and the Warner Bros. movie studio, MS NOW anchor Ari Melber noted.Komanduri added, "One thing Trump wanted was control of CNN," and "that was his entire interest in the deal. Donald Trump and the DOJ weren't interested in who was going to be the next Batman."
The Kennedy Center board filed an emergency appeal to block a judge's order requiring Trump's name to be removed from the building's signage and materials.
The Trump Department of Justice approved a major deal that's expected to shake up the entertainment industry, according to reporting by NBC News.Paramount Skydance now has a clearer path to acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery for $110 billion, a person familiar with the deal told NBC News. A formal announcement is expected soon, NBC added. The Trump administration had leverage over Paramount Skydance CEO and MAGA ally David Ellison, who sought to clear the deal through the DOJ. While the deal dangled in uncertainty, Paramount's networks like CBS and CBS News made controversial moves to end The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and fire "60 Minutes" correspondents like Sharyn Alfonsi and Scott Pelley. Paramount+ will also be exclusively streaming the upcoming UFC match on the White House South Lawn.
A UFC fighter on President Donald Trump's White House birthday card once allegedly called his Black opponent a "human gorilla" — and he's far from the only fighter on the bill with baggage.Trump requested veteran heavyweight Derrick Lewis for the card after watching Josh Hokit, 28, battle Lewis' future opponent at UFC 327 in April. Hokit was matched against Lewis for the event — a seven-fight card costing upwards of $60 million — and has since become one of its most talked-about fighters, for dubious reasons.Josh HokitHokit allegedly called Curtis Blaydes, who is Black, a "human gorilla" in the lead-up to their UFC 327 bout — the fight Trump watched before requesting Lewis for the White House card. Hokit is also no stranger to the N-word, has said he wished he could report his own Mexican mother to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and has repeatedly accused high-profile women of being men — including former first lady Michelle Obama and WNBA star Brittney Griner."'And P.S., Brittney Griner is a man,'" Hokit recited in a post-fight poem after his UFC debut in January. He has described himself as "100% transphobic." UFC CEO Dana White, asked about Hokit's post-fight octagon speech, said he hadn't seen it and offered only tepid pushback: "I don't love it."Sean O'MalleyThe card's bantamweight bout features former champion Sean O'Malley, who argued on a 2023 podcast that cheating on his wife was acceptable because self-described misogynist Andrew Tate — charged with rape and human trafficking in Romania — said so."'I'm a king, I pay for everything,'" O'Malley said. "'If I get a little puss on the side, what does that have to do with anything? Andrew Tate explains it well.'" More recently, O'Malley wore a surgical face mask during a face-off with Chinese fighter Song Yadong — a gesture Yadong called "totally racist." O'Malley later apologized, saying it was "a little silly joke."Ilia TopuriaIn the main event, lightweight champion Ilia Topuria returns for the first time since his ex-wife filed a domestic abuse complaint against him in December 2025. The two reached an out-of-court settlement in February; she withdrew the complaint."'These allegations are entirely unfounded,'" Topuria said in a December Instagram post, adding that he had submitted evidence to authorities to pursue legal action for "attempted extortion."White was himself filmed slapping his wife at a nightclub on New Year's Eve 2022.
After the Republican Party’s decision to terminate subsidies that had significantly reduced healthcare costs under the Affordable Care Act for 22 million people, the White House is considering a new way to—officials claim—“help” Americans who face massive medical bills, either due to high-deductible plans that don’t cover routine costs or because of emergency expenses.The proposal, though, could just shift “who [the patients] owe the debt to,” as one doctor and researcher told The New York Times, which reported Thursday on the Trump administration’s proposal to allow people to take out loans directly from their health insurance companies when they can’t afford to pay a hospital or doctor’s office out of pocket—and then pay the insurance company back, likely with interest.“Hard to top this level of dystopia,” said one writer in response to the Times report. “Have health insurance through the ACA? The Trump administration is going to turn your health insurer into a loan shark you borrow money from if you can’t afford to pay your portion of medical procedures.”As the newspaper was reported, the provision is buried in a 1,121-page final rule issued last month regarding how the ACA will be regulated next year.The Trump administration is planning to significantly expand the number of Americans who are eligible for high-deductible “catastrophic” health insurance plans that provide no coverage for day-to-day medical expenses.“We note that multiyear and 1-year catastrophic plans may be able to offer relief from the high deductible and maximum annual limitation on cost sharing through other mechanisms,” reads the final rule. “For example, issuers of catastrophic plans could consider financing the deductible by providing enrollees a loan.”Currently, the average annual deductible for people insured under the ACA is nearly $4,000, and about 40% of enrollees this year have “Bronze” plans, which have an out-of-pocket maximum that’s over $10,000 for an individual, likely leaving many people having to pay thousands of dollars in medical expenses despite having coverage.By 2028, as Common Dreams reported earlier this year, catastrophic plans with lower premiums could have deductibles as high as $31,000 for families.The plan to shift more people onto expensive plans that provide less coverage for day-to-day medical care—and to push patients to take out loans from their insurers—comes as about one-third of Americans, even those with insurance, report skipping meals or cutting back on other expenses to afford their medical bills.The Times reported that at least one major health insurer—UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest—is already equipped to start lending patients money to cover unexpected medical bills. The company operates a bank that administers loans to doctors and offers health savings accounts.Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) said the latest proposal from the White House shows that President Donald Trump “is destroying healthcare from all sides.”The advocacy group Protect Our Care said the “suggestion” buried in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ final rule “is not only out of touch, it is cruel—accruing medical debt only adds to families’ financial burdens.”“While working families drown in the high cost of living, the Trump administration’s answer to the healthcare affordability crisis they created is to throw people an anchor made of medical debt and call it relief,” said Leslie Dach, chair of Protect Our Care. “Trump and Republicans had a simple, popular fix sitting right in front of their faces—extending the ACA tax credits—but they killed it anyway, triggering premiums to double, triple, or even quadruple for millions of working families, all to make billionaires and big corporations even richer.”“Americans are being bankrupted by crushing medical debt, and this administration isn’t lifting a finger to help—it’s busy shoveling more people into that hole,” said Dach. “Voters will remember this foolishness at the ballot box in November, just you wait.”Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, which advocates for a universal, single-payer healthcare system for New York state, suggested the proposal makes the latest case for a federal, government-funded healthcare program similar to those in other wealthy countries, which would end the healthcare profit motive by expanding the existing Medicare system to the entire US population.“Letting Americans take out loans to afford healthcare forces Americans deeper into debt and drives up profits for the health insurance industry,” said D’Arrigo. “Abolish the health insurance industry. Demand Medicare for All.”
President Donald Trump is poised to celebrate his 80th birthday this Sunday with an unprecedented Ultimate Fighting Championship bout at the White House, but according to Zeteo, the president is still musing about expanding his birthday celebrations to a national scale.“As the birthday boy gears up for his party, we feel compelled to remind you of a remarkably sad fact: Yes, President Trump really does want to make his birthday a federal holiday,” Zeteo’s Asawin Suebsaeng wrote in the outlet’s report published on Friday. “Whether he ever makes it happen, he’s got some Republican allies on Capitol Hill who would clearly like to help him pull it off.”Zeteo first reported back in March that on separate occasions throughout 2025, Trump had talked with “longtime advisers” about making his birthday a federal holiday. Those talks have apparently continued through 2026, expanded to include Republican lawmakers, and occurred with such frequency that some have coined a phrase to refer to the discussion topic.“The birthday thing,” one source familiar with the matter told Zeteo, speaking on the condition of anonymity, referring to Trump’s “casual” talks with GOP lawmakers about making his birthday a federal holiday.Suebsaeng argued the notion would have seemed "deeply weird" at the start of Trump's first term – but enacting it in 2026, he wrote, was outright "disturbing."“It would be deeply weird for a political party to fortify this kind of personality cult for a president whose approval rating hovered at the 60s, as President Barack Obama’s did when he left office and Trump took over the first time,” Suebsaeng wrote. “It is much, much more surreal and disturbing for a party to be doing this for a guy whose numbers are stuck in the low-to-mid 30s. It is more deranged than if Hollywood super-agents mounted a serious awards-season push to get ‘Freddy Got Fingered’ an Oscar. And yet here we are! Happy birthday, I guess?”
