Yes, Putin should make a deal.
As the 60-day deal with Iran reaches the two-week point, President Trump is pushing for oil prices to drop faster. “Just as I promised, Oil Prices are plummeting FAST, and Gas Prices at the pump are dropping too, but not as fast as they should be,” he posted to Truth Social on Wednesday night. Brent…
Top House Democrat on committee that issued report says president ‘tries to steal the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary and turn it into something that’s all about Trump’Full report: Trump hijacked US’s 250 anniversary to serve ‘political ideology and pet projects’Sign up for the Breaking News US emailMy colleague, Gaya Gupta, notes that the latest jobs numbers make it all the more likely that the US Federal Reserve will continue to focus on inflation at its next meeting in late July.Last month, the Fed’s new chair, Kevin Warsh, emphasized “price stability” in his first press conference since taking office and said the central bank will continue to pursue its longstanding goal of a 2% inflation rate. But this week, he told a conference of central bankers that “inflation risks have come down”. Continue reading...
With the 2026 midterms a little over four months away and President Donald Trump continuing to suffer from weak approval ratings in poll after poll, Democratic strategists are feeling cautiously optimistic about their ability to recapture the U.S. House of Representatives — and they believe the U.S. Senate is in play for them as well. But according to the New York Times, Trump has a variety of schemes designed to shield Republicans from major losses in November.Trump, journalists Karen Yourish, Nick Corasaniti and Charlie Smart report in the Times, "is trying to use the levers of the federal government, along with personal influence over state and local lawmakers, to reshape the rules governing the 2026 midterms and future elections in extraordinary ways.""Many of these efforts have been blocked by courts, stymied by the Constitution or stopped in Congress," the reporters explain. "But the relentless assault by the president on the electoral process — both administratively and rhetorically — is likely to sow doubt and lay groundwork for extensive challenges to election results. Agencies and officials across the federal government have, at the direction of Mr. Trump, undertaken dozens of actions grounded in novel strategies and aimed at insulating Republicans from potential losses in November. Those actions fall into six major categories, and some fall into more than one."Those six categories, according to Yourish, Corasaniti and Smart, are: (1) "taking steps to nationalize elections," (2) "trying to tighten voting restrictions," (3) "pushing for mid-decade redistricting," (4) "cutting election security," (5) "undermining faith in the electoral system by questioning previous results," and (6) "punishing those who have worked against election denialism." Trump, the Times reporters note, has "installed" a long list of "election deniers" in the federal government — including Jeanine Pirro, Harmeet K. Dhillon and FBI Director Kash Patel at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Patrick Weaver at the Defense Department, and Heather Honey and Secretary Markwayne Mullin at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)."While Mr. Trump's attempts to use executive orders to change elections have been largely blocked by courts," Yourish, Corasaniti and Smart explain, "the president and his allies have found other avenues to add new restrictions to voting that are designed to help them win at the ballot box. Soon after Mr. Trump took office, the Justice Department dropped or halted all of its open voting rights lawsuits that preceded Mr. Trump's inauguration, easing the path for partisan gerrymanders and voting laws to withstand legal scrutiny. That included dropping a lawsuit against a voting law in Georgia. The number of lawyers working in the voting-rights arm of the Justice Department, one of the government's critical bulwarks against civil rights abuses in voting and elections, has dwindled from about 30 at the end of the Biden administration to the single digits after resignations, cuts and reassignments."
The FBI is pressing investigations into connected to Georgia's 2020 election, MS NOW reported Thursday. The FBI, along with former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, seized the original Fulton County ballots from the 2020 election earlier this year.According to reporter Ken Dilanian, the FBI is now directing hundreds of staff to dig up private information on people involved in the election. Dilanian said that expanding the operation "suggests the review is part of a broader federal push tied to Trump-era election-fraud allegations, with investigators examining election materials and personnel linked to the case."It also suggests that after one year and six months, the Trump administration still hasn't found any evidence that he won the 2020 election. Still, looking directly at individuals is an escalation from seizing the ballots. Dilanian explained in the report that many of the claims have already been raised in public and courts, resulting in investigations by county and state officials. It's all happening under the politically charged midterm elections in which Trump is desperately trying to prove a need to pass his Safeguard American Voter Eligibility America Act (SAVE America Act). Locally, Republicans have pressed to put even tighter restrictions on voting rights and access. Trump famously called officials in Georgia, demanding they find 11,780 Trump votes, saying, "frankly we did win this election." That case was eventually dismissed.
Federal prosecutors to focus on issue despite court backing constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. Plus: Greek priest whose metal music has become cult smashGood morning.The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, has said federal prosecutors and law enforcement officers will focus on combating so-called “birth tourism” – which involves tourists, temporary visitors, or undocumented immigrants traveling to the US primarily to give birth and and secure birthright citizenship for their children.What did Blanche say? “There’s other things … the federal government can do in the visa process, and the application process, to try to minimize or limit the opportunity of folks coming here not to visit, and not to do what they’re saying they’re doing on the tourist visa, but just to have a baby that can then be a US citizen. What we have to do as Department of Justice is make sure our agents … and the FBI are focused on stopping that.” Continue reading...
President Donald Trump’s corruption — from awarding no bid contracts to cronies to having his sons make tungsten mining deals with Kazakhstan — is so brazen that “he’s making everybody chumps,” according to a panel of experts.“I think it’s so unprecedented that our laws don't really contemplate a level of corruption at the presidential level like this,” Brendan Ballou, the former Special Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, told MS NOW anchor Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday. “So we really have to develop laws around unjust enrichment, civil RICO, and so forth, in order to be able to attack some of this stuff.”Ballou added that Trump’s corruption, in addition to occurring in plain sight, has had important consequences in terms of US policy.“You think about the picture of the new Qatari-gifted jet that he received — it's now Air Force One,” Ballou said. “Well, shortly after he received that gift, he made a unilateral security guarantee to Qatar. So it's entirely possible that American soldiers might fight and die in defense of a country that has gotten an enormous benefit shortly after giving a private jet to the President.”He added, “Similarly, you know, the UAE — so much of this money coming from crypto, they invested 500 million dollars in Trump's crypto business, a business that, as far as I can tell, provides no value whatsoever. But after investing half a billion dollars, Donald Trump approved the sale of 35,000 extremely rare, extremely expensive AI chips. So if you're wondering why the cost of technology, microchips, and computers in the United States is going up, in part you can potentially thank this investment from the UAE and what the President saw. So it's so unprecedented, to such an extent, that our legal infrastructure didn't even contemplate that this could occur.”Wallace then discussed a recent Wall Street Journal report that Trump earned $263 million connected to the sale of equity in his cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial. After the deal was signed, the UAE was granted access to tightly guarded American AI chips.“The challenge you've got here is: Donald Trump is presumably going to pardon himself on his last day in office, and we have a Supreme Court that is extraordinarily solicitous to this President,” Ballou told Wallace. “So we need to be figuring out — okay, how can we get justice, and how can we stop this stuff from happening while he's still in office? What we really need to be thinking about is: who are the people harmed by these extraordinary instances of corruption?”He continued, “If you are, for instance, an AI researcher who is now paying more for your chips because of the UAE's potential investment in World Liberty Financial, you need to be bringing a lawsuit to try to enjoin this, so that these people are not getting the fruits of their corrupt actions. And if we can stop people from getting the benefits of corruption, they're going to have fewer incentives to be corrupt in the first place — not Donald Trump, but the people trying to influence him.”Wallace then pointed out that, whereas Trump had scandals during his first term, during his second the scandals are bigger because they inflict economic pain on all Americans, including his own voters. She added that Trump’s indifference is evident by referring to a bipartisan affordable housing bill on Tuesday as a “yawn.”“The mechanisms of accountability — the Republican Party, the larger media apparatus, in this case Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber — his media apparatus, they're protection rackets,” Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a nonprofit media watchdog, told Wallace. “They've basically said, ‘We're not going to just turn a blind eye here — we're going to actively make sure you don't face any accountability for this.’ The Republicans who have spent years complaining about Hunter Biden have said nothing. They don't talk about this. We know what it looks like when they're making noise about things that even whiff of corruption when it's in their political interest. But in this case, he is doing something so brazen, so explicit, so transactional, so corrupt that we can't even really paint a picture — we can't even come up with an evocative response to it, because it's on such an industrial scale. It's like thinking about the universe — it's hard to imagine because of how big it is — so we can't even get the right response out of people. And part of the mechanisms of accountability said, ‘You know, we're going to be a protection racket.’”Carusone added, “He is making everybody chumps. He's not just doing the corruption — he's doing it in such a brazen and explicit way, and he's not even sharing the wealth. A lot of people who do this at least share it with a couple of people close to them — the people participating in it.
US President Donald Trump once called cryptocurrency a “scam”. It’s now a major moneymaker for him: his just-released annual financial disclosure shows he made more than US$1 billion from cryptocurrency last year.This news has raised the ire of Trump’s critics. Juliana Stratton, the Illinois lieutenant governor and a Democratic Senate candidate, accused Trump of using his public office “to make billions while American families struggle to afford their basic needs. His infinite greed is disgusting.” The White House denied Trump or his family has engaged in conflicts of interest. Deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said “all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people”. But how exactly has Trump earned so much money from cryptocurrency?How does cryptocurrency work?A cryptocurrency is simply digital money. It differs from traditional money in two ways. First, traditional currencies are issued by central banks of each country, while cryptocurrencies are issued according to rules written in computer code. The computer code behind crypto may be controlled by a company. Or the code may be predefined ahead of time (for example, in a “white paper” that sets up the algorithm behind crypto) and controlled by no one at all.Second, transactions in traditional money happen via the banking system, while transactions in cryptocurrency happen on blockchains, which are databases that store information on who owns what.Bitcoin is the oldest and best-known cryptocurrency, with a decentralised structure and no single entity controlling its issuance or making profits off it.Aside from Bitcoin, there are tens of thousands of privately issued coins, which run on public blockchains such as Ethereum or Solana. But private coins, unlike Bitcoin, are issued by private companies to make money. Transactions on a blockchain can involve transferring many different versions of private crypto assets – anything that can be written into a piece of code, regardless of whether that digital asset has any value at all. What are the Trump’s crypto businesses?Trump and his family are involved in three kinds of digital assets: the $TRUMP memecoin, a governance token called WLFI, and a stablecoin called USD1.Memecoins are coins with no real business behind them. They derive their value from investor attention – a digital equivalent of buying a kid’s scribble because it’s your kid, not because the scribble has value in the outside world. Stablecoins, by contrast, are a digital equivalent of a fiat currency like USD. For example, each unit of USD1 is designed to be worth exactly US$1. To maintain this value, stablecoins are typically backed by short-term government bonds and cash. Governance tokens are yet another type of coin, which give holders voting rights over a crypto project, but no ownership over the project itself, and no claim on its profits.The $TRUMP memecoin launched three days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. About 80% of its supply is held by Trump-affiliated companies, which also collect a fee every time the coin changes hands.WLFI and USD1 are issued by World Liberty Financial, cofounded in 2024 by the Trump family and business partners. A Trump business entity owns about 60% of the company and is entitled to 75% of net proceeds from token sales.Trump’s annual financial disclosure shows World Liberty brought him more than $500 million last year, while the memecoin business brought in more than $600 million. Forbes now estimates Trump’s net worth at $6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2024.How do you make a billion dollars from tokens?Let’s start with the stablecoin, USD1. As a stablecoin issuer, you take in dollars, hand out coins, and use the dollars to buy US Treasury bonds. Then, you earn interest on Treasury bonds. The more coins you issue, the greater the amount of money you earn interest on. So the main trick is to convince someone to use your stablecoin and hand in the dollars to you, preferably in large amounts.For USD1, that someone handing in the dollars was Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, which had pleaded guilty to US money-laundering violations in 2023. Binance reportedly wrote the computer code underpinning USD1 and promoted it on its platform. Then, in May 2025, MGX – an Abu Dhabi state fund chaired by the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan – invested $2 billion in Binance and paid in USD1. This instantly created $2 billion of interest-earning reserves for the Trump venture, worth an estimated $80 million a year. Binance today holds 87% of all USD1.The Securities and Exchange Commission dropped its lawsuit against Binance days after the exchange listed USD1, and in October 2025 Trump pardoned Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao.
Leftists leapt at the chance to portray President Donald J. Trump as mentally cooked after he said he spoke with iconic former President Teddy Roosevelt, one of […]