A conservative writer scolded Democrats on Thursday for not focusing on President Donald Trump’s unprecedented corruption in the months leading up to the November mid-terms.“For all intents and purposes, nobody cares,” The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio wrote. He described Trump’s blatant profiteering from being in office, which is without any analogous example in modern American history. Agreeing with a source in the Senate who said that the indifference to Trump’s corruption means “we’re just screwed,” he argued that “any explanation of why we’re screwed begins with the promiscuous civic delinquency of the American right, but we’ve been over that many times and don’t need to belabor it here.”He denounced Republicans who give Trump a pass on his grift by saying that “depending upon what sort of Republican you are, you’re either an enthusiastic member of a fascist personality cult, a brain-damaged hyperpartisan willing to excuse anything to keep the left out of power, or so embarrassed by where Trumpism has led that it’s easier psychologically to pretend its abuses aren’t happening than to confront them.”Yet in addition to Trump’s own party, Catoggio criticized Democrats — especially those on the left — since “few on the left seem to care very much about the president’s corruption either.” Instead they seem more interested in opposing Israel and trying to purge the party of its centrist leaders.He adds that this is a great missed political opportunity.“If ever there were a moment when you might expect anger at Trump’s financial corruption to break big among voters, this is it,” Catoggio said. “In the middle of an affordability crisis, with huge numbers of Americans exasperated by the cost of living, evidence that the president is profiting lasciviously from his office is everywhere you look.” His financial disclosure forms reveal that he earned $2.2 billion in 2025, almost quadrupling his income from 2024, of which roughly $1.4 billion “came from businesses related to cryptocurrency, an industry his administration regulates (sort of?) and for which he’s a key policymaker.”He added, “Trump did suspiciously well in 2025 with conventional securities, too. At least three times last year, he purchased shares of Nvidia shortly before major announcements that boosted the company’s value. He also made hundreds of stock purchases the day before announcing that he was ‘pausing’ his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, which sent markets soaring. All told, according to the Financial Times, he engaged in more than 22,000 stock transactions during his first 11 months back in office. Over four years as president, Joe Biden engaged in 13.”Refraining from discussing Trump’s conflicts of interest, “petty graft like kickbacks” and selling pardons, “we’d be here all day.” The bottom line is that, as presidential historian Douglas Brinkely told NBC News, “What strikes me as remarkable is how many pies Trump has his fingers in. There is no precedent to compare it with. No president in the 20th or 21st century has had something that’s vaguely comparable.”Instead of exploiting this opportunity to win elections on a populist theme, Catoggio suggested that left-wing populists are relatively indifferent to those issues compared with others that rile up their base. By doing this, though, they are normalizing Trump’s unprecedented corruption and making it easier for both him and future perpetrators to get away with it.Indeed, Catoggio said Democrats’ failure to adequately bring up and emphasize Trump’s corruption has made it easier for Republicans to obscure that what Trump is doing far and away exceeds the actions of any of his predecessors.“Someone should run a poll asking whether corruption was worse under the last two Democratic administrations or under the criminal syndicate that runs the government now,” Catoggio said. “I’ll be surprised if opinion deviates wildly from the usual party lines. That’s the sort of ignorance and moronic tribalism that a Democratic strategist looking to galvanize voters this fall would be banging his or head against by flogging the issue of Trump’s unethical behavior.”If this attitude continues into the 2028 election, it could be disastrous — and Catoggio suspects that is exactly what will happen.“Some left-wing strategists will ask themselves this: If attempting a coup wasn’t corrupt enough to stop Americans from reelecting Trump himself in 2024, why would the president’s insider trading and crypto scams dissuade them from reelecting some entirely different Republican in 2028?” Catoggio wrote. “If voters were willing once before to lay aside all ethical considerations about national leadership in order to vote their wallets, why wouldn’t they do so again?”He concluded, “‘We’re just screwed’ is anathema to anyone who cares about politics, an endeavor based on the devout conviction that we’re not screwed as long as the faction one supports gets to be in charge.
President Trump responded to new ethics questions on two fronts - the use of a luxury Boeing Jet, gifted by the Qatari government as a temporary Air Force One, and his newly disclosed billion-dollar crypto fortune. Nancy Cordes has more.
Surging membership and pro-Palestinian activism reshape debate on how campaigning movement governs in officeInside a Brooklyn industrial garage turned underground event venue, local leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America urged hundreds of mostly young people last month to avoid complacency. Sure, New York City had a socialist representative in the US Congress, and just elected a socialist mayor. But they had so much more to do.“If we only elect Zohran, we only elect AOC, our project will have been a failure,” Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the city’s DSA chapter, told the assembled crowd. “Our ambitions are so much higher than just a position in government. We want to transform the world.” Continue reading...
President Donald Trump's new appointee is raising alarm among staff inside the Department of Homeland Security and many are willing to quit over the appointment. The Daily Beast reported on Monday that Trump has tapped an obscure state trooper from Oklahoma to run U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), citing a piece from PunchUp. Senior officials say that they were shocked deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was not appointed to the role.Richard “Lance” Schroyer is a former highway patrol officer and Marine, his biography says. Officials inside of DHS think that the real puppetmaster of ICE has been Miller, and they thought he was the likely nominee along with border chief Tom Homan. The Beast noted that the Senate hasn't confirmed a head of ICE since the Obama administration. However, they did approve DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. According to insiders, Schroyer's announcement sent shockwaves through DHS. “He’s Markwayne’s guy,” one senior official told PunchUp.“Everyone was blindsided by the selection [of Schroyer], including Homan and Miller,” one source said. There is a concern that it could be a signal that Miller's power over immigration and deportations is being whittled away. “He may be getting boxed out,” the source added.That said, the Homan wing isn't doing well either. It “seems Homan is losing some power,” another senior ICE official told PunchUp. He evidently wasn't "a fan" of Trump's idea to rebrand ICE as "NICE."“Everyone loves it, but I have been told by the legendary Tom Homan that the Agents do not love it as much as the other population," Trump wrote on Truth Social on June 20. “I think Homan is going to lose all power," another official said about the matter. Schroyer will take over a massive agency with a significant budget, despite having no experience leading an agency or office of any kind. Three insiders told PunchUp that the rank and file are ready to self-deport from their jobs. “Troops not happy at all. Senior leaders not happy,” said one senior ICE source. “No experience. He was a trooper. But that’s it. Never a boss. Never a leader. Never had to manage a budget. Now he has $78 billion. Now he has 32,000 employees.”Agents, the person said, are ready to walk. “Many say they will retire,” the source said. “You’re gonna see a lot of senior leaders” who “retire, leave,” they told PunchUp. “Because it’ll be a power struggle. A new person in there, no one will know what is going on, and we’re gonna look like idiots.”They think Schroyer is "nice" but that he has “no experience really with 287g ops." He's already been working quietly as a senior advisor to Mullin. Schroyer also worked previously as Mullin's residential security detail. "The pair were so close," the report said, citing a source, and noted that he was invited to have dinner with the family while working on the detail. One agency veteran said that it's part of an ongoing pattern of appointing friends with no experience to jobs. “This guy will be his ‘fish cop,’” the senior ICE official said when speaking to PunchUp. The report recalled previous Secretary Kristi Noem's deputy director of ICE, 29-year-old loyalist Madison Sheahan. She eventually left ICE and ran for Congress but lost in the primary. “Putting his person in with no experience just to have his guy on the inside. He’s going to be the new Noem," the official said.
“The pungent odor of Kristi Noem lingers in Washington.”Those are the opening words of longtime conservative columnist George Will, whose column in the Washington Post hammered the 6-3 Supreme Court majority for wrongly dismantling the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program depended upon by hundreds of thousands of immigrants.According to Will, the conservative majority deliberately ignored overwhelming evidence that Kristi Noem's actions were driven by racial "animus," and therefore "violated the pertinent law."As he pointed out, within three days of the former Department of Homeland Security head terminating TPS for Haitians and Syrians, which led to the court case that made its way to the nation's highest court, Noem publicly recommended "a full travel ban on every damn country that's been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies" who "slaughter our heroes" and "suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars."He dryly added, "She [Noem] refrained from echoing Trump’s assertion about kitten-cooking Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. This marks her as a MAGA moderate. JD Vance spread the pet-eating fiction because he said creating 'stories' (his word) makes the media notice Americans’ suffering.""Surely justices are not required to ignore such rhetoric? And although thoughtful people disagree about whether, or how much, justices should consider the downstream consequences of their rulings," he suggested.Expressing his disappointment with the conservative-majority court, he offered, "Time and freshening breezes will cleanse Washington, dissipating the legacies of appointees like Noem, and of the president who chose them. The court’s mistaken ruling she provoked will be more lasting."
