Wall Street Journal: Trump family ‘cashing in on the presidency in big and sketchy ways’

Revealed: How Republicans are plotting how to halt Democratic probes into Trump

Democrats are expected to take back Congress in the midterm elections and Republicans are already plotting a preemptive strike ahead of that takeover to protect the White House.President Donald Trump's scandals are stacking up, from the files related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, the push for a $1.8 billion slush fund, the bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House, the funding for the East Wing of the White House, the Kennedy Center debacle and a slew of other money-making schemes. Semafor reported Thursday that one way Republicans could hit back is by conducting their own parallel investigations. "Doing so would amount to an unusual assertion of power from the House minority, which historically has almost no ability to enforce any of its own investigative requests," reporter Nicholas Wu conceded. James Mandolfo, a law firm partner who handled the GOP's investigation of then-President Joe Biden's family said, “If the Democrats take the House in November, the Republican minority will be among the strongest in history because they likely will have the Trump administration backing them on core issues that they remain aligned on." Normally, the committees would have no power to enforce subpoenas or make demands to cooperate with a private GOP investigation. Mandolfo suggested Trump get his Justice Department involved and use the power of the federal government to go after anyone who refuses to do what he wants. "The Trump administration could take action against those companies/institutions that don’t comply with any requests from the minority," said Mandolfo. It's unclear what would happen if such individuals fought back in court.Semafor explained that such a plan doesn't solve a problem Republicans could continue to face: division within their own party. "There was friction between some Oversight Committee Republicans and the Justice Department earlier this Congress, after the GOP-controlled panel voted to subpoena then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation," the report said. The Democratic investigations will likely be conducted within each congressional committee, but there could also be special investigative committees, similar to the Jan. 6 committee.

Top MAGA defector says Trump's US 'not a democracy'

According to conservative commentator Tucker Carlson — who used to be among President Donald Trump’s closest allies — the U.S. is “not a democracy,” and he’s now working to “help build a third party” that will uphold the “America first” values he says Trump has betrayed. Carlson made these assertions via an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, which he gave following his announcement that he had left the Republican Party. While he says that he was a “consistent defender” of the party for 35 years, he now argues he can no longer support the way it has changed under Trump. Central to his criticism of both president and party was the war in the Middle East. While Carlson was instrumental to Trump’s success during the 2016 and 2024 campaigns, explains the New York Times, “he broke sharply with the president after the United States started the war with Iran in late February, declaring Mr. Trump was violating a core campaign promise to avoid foreign conflicts. By April, Mr. Carlson said he was ‘tormented’ by his past support for the president. He told the Columbia Journalism Review that he had not spoken to Mr. Trump since the start of the war.”“I’m not interested in talking to him,” said Carlson.While Carlson has in the past attempted to maintain a public perception of alliance with Trump, texts revealed in 2023 during a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems showed his true feelings. “I hate him passionately,” texted Carlson in 2020, just two days before Trump spurred on the January 6 insurrection. A few days later, he texted that the president was “a demonic force, a destroyer.” Trump regained Carlson’s loyalty — or at least his willingness to fake it — in time for the 2024 election, but then over the course of the following year, growing daylight could be seen between their policy positions. Then Trump launched conflict with Iran, which Carlson said betrayed the “America first” ethos as well as blatant promises to start “no new foreign wars.” Speaking with the Columbia Journalism Review, Carlson said that there was no longer any contrast between “war and finance.”“That’s not a democracy,” asserted Carlson. “That’s a one-party state posing as a democracy, and it needs to be broken, and there’s going to be a third party, and I’m going to do everything I can to bring that about.” While some have suggested that he may be preparing for a presidential run himself, Carlson has rejected this idea, saying, “I’m not a politician, that’s for sure. I’m not a rival to Trump for power. I have no power. I’m someone who knows Trump, and I know him well, and I’ve known him for a long time.” Carlson isn’t the only prominent figure from the MAGA movement to lose faith in Trump. Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene had her own dramatic falling out with the president, and on Wednesday announced plans to create a new political party specifically to oppose the MAGA agenda.

Megyn Kelly criticizes Trump’s family as ‘grifty’

Conservative pundit Megyn Kelly took a shot at President Trump’s family for what she characterized as benefiting personally from his presidency. “I don’t feel great about our leaders. I’m not going to lie,” Kelly said on an episode of her podcast and YouTube show this week. “I’m like, I’m disappointed with some aspects of the…

Court throws wrench into Trump effort to rein in student loan bailout program

The Trump administration’s attempt to clean up student loan programs took a hit on Tuesday. Two Biden-appointed federal judges blocked the Trump administration from enforcing new restrictions […]

Trump Made Hundreds of Stock Trades One Day Before Pausing Tariffs

President Trump bought hundreds of stocks the day before he paused tariffs and caused the stock market to rally. Trump filed his latest financial disclosure on Monday, and it shows that he made 327 individual stock purchases worth as much as $12.8 million on April 8, 2025, from companies including Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), according to an analysis from investigative outlet Sludge. The next day, Trump announced that he was pausing his sweeping tariffs for 90 days, and the S&P 500 went up by nearly 10 percent, one of its largest one-day increases ever.The timing of these trades suggests he planned to cash in, realizing that markets would rally after his announcement. Those weren’t the only suspicious stock trades he made last year, either. On August 18, Trump’s accounts bought between $250,000 and $500,000 of stock in chipmaker Intel, four days before the president announced that the federal government would take a nearly $9 billion equity stake in the company. Intel’s stock price went up 6 percent after that announcement.Trump also bought stock in defense contractor Palantir Technologies throughout the year, publicly praising the company while increasing its federal contracts, particularly those with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One of his top advisers, White House deputy chief of staff and anti-immigration hawk Stephen Miller, also owns between $100,001 and $250,000 of Palantir stock. This year, Trump singled out Palantir on Truth Social in April and sent its stock price soaring.By law, Trump and other executive branch officials are supposed to publicly disclose securities transfers, including stock purchases, over $1,000 within 45 days. Not only did Trump wait more than a year to disclose the April stock purchases, he didn’t disclose any other of the thousands of stock trades he made in 2025.In all, Trump reported $2.2 billion in income in 2025, from crypto, stock trades, foreign real estate, suing news organizations, and other grifts. His administration is openly engaging in market manipulation and insider trading without any fear of consequences.

Second Amendment Wins Big: A Conversation With the NRA

Republicans have a 'dirty little secret' that will make Trump furious

As President Donald Trump rages over his party’s inability to pass his much-demanded SAVE America Act, Politico reports that congressional Republicans have a “dirty little secret”: many of them don’t want to pass it at all. According to insiders, the “inconvenient truth” is that “it can’t even pass the House — at least not the version Trump is pushing.”According to Politico, “Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged as much this week, appearing to concede he does not have the votes to move forward with a drastic crackdown on mailed ballots that Trump has repeatedly demanded this year.” Instead, GOP House leaders are reverting to an older version of the bill that focuses on proof of citizenship while otherwise letting states more or less run elections as they please. “We all do” want to give Trump what he wants, said Johnson, but a ban on mail-in ballots “is a very difficult thing to regulate at the federal level, because different states do it differently.” “I’m going to do everything I can with the vote tallies that we have,” he added.Hardline conservatives have pushed for an expanded version of the bill, which in addition to the mailed ballot ban would include Trump’s demand for provisions banning transgender people from playing women’s sports, as well as a prohibition on gender-affirming surgery for minors. But Johnson has continued to press a narrower version he thinks is more likely to pass.As Politico explains, “The lack of widespread GOP support for upending the voting systems in states like Arizona, Florida and Alaska is an open secret on Capitol Hill, where many Republicans credit mailed ballots with helping them win tight races.”“Listen, absentee ballots are not a bad thing historically as long as you put some kind of structure on it,” said Representative Mark Amodei (R-NV). “Just have some commonsensical safeguards for when it has to be postmarked by.” Last week, after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s attempt to limit mail-in ballots via executive order, Amodei said he was happy with the outcome, asserting, “It says mail-in voting in and of itself is not evil. There ought to be some mechanism for you to do that.”Outspoken SAVE Act supporter Representative Julie Fedorchak (R-ND) wants the bill to pass in some form, but worries how a ban on mail-in ballots would affect states with limited polling places, saying, “We’re a rural state. I understand the concerns about mail-in voting… but I think the solution that I’m in favor of is restricting it and creating these commonsense reforms for it.” Johnson seconded her concerns about rural voters, admitting that in some states it can be “very difficult to get to a ballot box, and so they use mail-in ballots very effectively, and I think securely, and that’s something that has to be contended with.”Unsurprisingly, he tailored his criticism of mail-in ballots to target a few states in particular, claiming, “There are other states that do it well, and without a problem. Our concerns are with the handful, five or six blue states, who abuse this, and California is the avatar for this, because it is so ridiculous.”Critics of the president’s attacks on mail-in voting and his demands for other electoral restrictions argue that the SAVE Act will disenfranchise millions of voters. What’s more, as a number of GOP insiders have pointed out, the bill could backfire for Republicans, as conservative voters are less likely to have the appropriate ID and more likely to depend on mail-in ballots.

Trump's 'well unified' party isn't so unified —and it's costing the GOP everything

President Donald Trump likes to boast that he has a “well unified” Republican Party, and even that he is so influential he rather than Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) is the true Speaker of the House of Representatives. Yet according to a respected political analyst, the evidence is that neither Trump nor Johnson can keep the 218 Republicans in sufficient line to get anything done against the 212 Democrats who oppose them.“GOP leaders intended to focus this week on advancing an annual must-pass defense policy bill, called the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, and a key spending bill that funds the State Department, among other things,” reported MS NOW’s Steve Benen on Wednesday. “More than a dozen House Republicans, however, decided they didn’t care for that plan, with some arguing the chamber should do nothing but focus on Trump’s voter-suppression proposal, which the White House has labeled the SAVE America Act, as others pointed to party leaders’ promise of a vote on an anti-immigration bill before the July 4 recess.”He added, “The House speaker tried to legislate anyway, hoping enough of his members would stick together and follow his lead. That didn’t go well: 13 GOP members revolted and voted with Democrats on a key procedural vote, making Johnson look weak and leaving him with little choice but to start the chamber’s holiday break early.”Johnson has gone out of his way to support Trump whenever possible, from vowing to keep Republicans in control of the House so Trump will not face investigations from Democrats to soothing his rage at losing in the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship case by suggesting a Constitutional amendment to get around that problem. Yet he was unable to actually accomplish anything in the lead-up to the July 4th holiday season.“For his part, Trump has made at least tacit efforts to curb these GOP rebellions, declaring by way of his social media platform last week, ‘House Republicans should unify, and stop voting down ‘Rules’ or, threatening to do so. … No more grandstanding, please!’” Benen reported. “The trouble is, the far-right members ignoring the speaker’s wishes (and the president’s rhetorical sops) are doing so in order to do the president’s bidding and champion his legislative priority.”He concluded, “But the underlying problem is the unavoidable fact that Johnson is simply too weak to legislate with such a small majority. Bipartisan majorities have already gone around him with more successful discharge petitions than anyone has seen in generations, and the Louisiana Republican’s latest failures this week reinforce perceptions that he just isn’t in control of the House floor he ostensibly leads.”