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 […]
On Wednesday, an anchor at what the Daily Beast calls President Donald Trump’s “most hated network” exposed the hypocrisy of his second-term grift by showing a montage of the many times he’s attacked his rivals for profiting off their positions. “The insiders wrote the rules of the game to keep themselves in power, and in the money,” declared then-candidate Trump at a New York event in July 2016. “Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit, and even theft,” he said, attacking his main Democratic opponent at the time. The montage showed many other wide-ranging instances of Trump accusing “corrupt politicians” of enriching themselves by “bleeding America dry,” suggesting they “ran for office promising to protect American workers” only to “line their pockets with special-interest cash.” According to Trump, only he could “dethrone the failed political class” and “drain the Washington swamp,” once asserting, “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government, while the people have borne the cost.”After playing the montage, CNN anchor Laura Coates noted the hypocrisy, saying, “For nearly a decade, that has been his case against Washington. Now, his own financial disclosure — is it Exhibit A against him?” Disclosures of Trump’s finances filed earlier in the week highlighted the parallels between the president’s policy decisions and his investments. As the Daily Beast explains, “His accounts snapped up 327 stocks valued at up to $12.8 million last April, just one day before he hit pause on his global tariffs, sending the S&P 500 stock market index up almost 10 percent, according to an analysis of the 927-page document by Sludge. The April haul was not the only buy with lucky timing. One of his accounts picked up Intel stock worth between $250,000 and $500,000 on Aug. 18. Four days later, he revealed that Washington would take a nearly 10 percent stake in the chipmaker, worth roughly $8.9 billion, prompting its shares to climb 6 percent. Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan had sat down with Trump at the White House only a week ahead of the purchase.”He bought up large quantities of Palantir stock as his administration expanded the data company’s government contracts, including controversial contracts with ICE. Trump also bought shares of the private prison company GEO Group as it ramped up its detention capacity to accommodate deportation arrests. What’s more, according to the Daily Beast, “The disclosure clocks more than $1.4 billion flowing to Trump from crypto holdings in 2025. His $TRUMP memecoin, widely derided as a scam, raised $635 million, while World Liberty Financial, the digital asset venture founded by his sons, brought in north of $500 million. The president has spent the same period rolling back regulations across the sector.”All of this comes amid revelations that Trump’s sons are poised to profit off a billion-dollar mining deal struck by their father. This has prompted even ostensible Trump allies to criticize the president’s corruption. For example, conservative commentator Megyn Kelly admitted earlier this week that “the Trump family is grifty.”
Conservative justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett clashed on Monday in a Supreme Court ruling involving mail-in voting, which was considered a rejection of the Republican Party's attack on mail-in ballots.Coney Barrett wrote the opinion in the 5-4 ruling in Watson v. Republican National Committee that upheld a Mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots to arrive after Election Day. And in a scathing dissent, Alito used her own words to argue against the decision. Fellow conservative justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas joined the dissent."To say that this is not the most likely explanation of States' thought processes would be 'a delicately put understatement,'" Alito wrote.The court ruling was deemed a defeat for Trump and Republicans, who have argued that the method should not be used before the midterm elections in November, according to CNN. Trump has asserted that there is widespread fraud involving mail-in ballots, despite no evidence of these claims.Alito argued that "today’s decision leaves open opportunities for voter fraud that may further undermine Americans’ faith in the integrity of this country’s elections.""It is undeniable that a prohibition on counting late-arriving ballots would provide an additional hurdle for bad actors seeking to stuff ballot boxes when early election results suggest a tight race. The majority incorrectly removes this safeguard from federal law," Alito wrote.
President Donald Trump unleashed a lengthy attack on journalist Maggie Haberman at midnight Saturday over a new book about him, dismissing the work as fiction and hurling insults at the New York Times reporter who has covered him for years.In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he had been briefed on the book and was unimpressed, deriding both the project and its author — whose name he mangled throughout the post."Based on a very quick and boring briefing concerning the Magot Hagerman book about me, it is mostly made up, Fake News, largely fiction, as have been most of the things she has written about me for so many years," Trump wrote.He went on to belittle Haberman personally while taking credit for her career."She is a third rate writer and intellect, who has made a first rate income because of your favorite President, ME," Trump wrote.The president then ran through a familiar list of grievances, claiming Haberman had been "wrong about me on the Elections," wrong about "the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax," and "wrong about me on just about everything else." He complained that she "continues to spew out garbage, and people continue to buy it."Trump also disputed a specific element of the reporting, insisting that the book's authors lack evidence they have suggested they possess."And they don't have the audio tapes that they imply they have," he wrote. "Just another Margot Con Job!"He closed the post by restating his 2020-and-beyond election claims in all caps — asserting he won "ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, THE POPULAR VOTE, 86% of the Counties" — before pivoting abruptly to a foreign policy declaration amid the ongoing strikes on Iran: "And Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon!!!"Haberman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent and longtime chronicler of Trump, has been a frequent target of the president's ire, a dynamic that has persisted across his time in and out of office.
How quickly things change. At the outset of the war in Iran and in the aftermath of the U.S. military incursion into Venezuela, various pundits and partisans played a version of Where’s Waldo? involving Vice President JD Vance while observing that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was virtually ubiquitous. “Vance finally emerges from hiding,” read […]
