The selling of the presidency
Only 1,401 days to go...
After Trump advertised Elon Musk’s cars at the White House, the New York Times reported that Musk “has signaled to President Trump’s advisers in recent days that he wants to put $100 million into groups controlled by the Trump political operation.”
Welcome to the return of the Trump era, which I think can be summed up with the words:
The Selling of the Presidency
We saw it in the first Trump Administration: President Trump’s legacy of corruption, four years and 3,700 conflicts of interest later
After campaigning on the promise that he wouldn’t have time to leave the White House or play golf, President Trump visited his properties 547 times while in office, paying 145 visits to Mar-a-Lago, 328 visits to his golf courses, and 33 visits to the Trump hotel in Washington. He often brought other senior government officials along, sending a message to his administration and those who would like to curry favor with it that his properties are open to their business.
Tracking Taxpayer Spending at Trump Properties
David Fahrenthold at the Washington Post reported Trump’s properties had billed the government “at least $2.5 million.” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has tracked more than 500 visits by Trump to his properties while in office, 300 of them to his golf courses. CREW’s accounting further shows more than 2,200 visits to Trump properties by government officials — including foreign officials, members of Congress, state government officials, and members of the Trump administration. In 2019, Politico reported that Air Force crews on routine supply trips to the Middle East had stopped at Trump’s Scotland resort dozens of times since 2015.
Mapping Corruption: Donald Trump’s Executive Branch
Set aside the hate-mongering and the stream of conspiracy theories and demagogic bombast. Trump has sowed corruption of a breadth and brazenness unseen in the far-from-innocent annals of our nation’s history. In three years as president, he has transformed the executive branch into a giant favor factory, populated with the agents or willing partners of virtually every special interest. Add up all the routine, daily outrages—the quasi-bribery and quasi-extortion, the private raids on public funds, the handouts to the undeserving, the massive flow of cash, jobs, and freebies back in return—and Trump’s attempt to squeeze a little re-election help out of the fragile government of a desperate Eastern European country does not loom particularly large in the reckoning.
And who can forget Jared Kushner’s little gift: Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince.
According to personal financial disclosures released after he left office, Trump made more than $1.6 billion from the Trump Organization and other outside income during his four years as president, including millions in taxpayer money from government agencies like the Secret Service that he forced to pay his properties. This income amounted to far more than what Trump would have earned if he only made the presidential salary that he made a big show of donating last time he was in office.
The utter grifting of this family is beyond belief… I thought I’d seen it all, but I never thought I would see our beautiful, historic White House being turned into a car dealership. Trump turns the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom.
All I could think of was John Adams's blessing, which is engraved in the mantel in the State Dining Room:
When I think of John Adams and the immense personal sacrifices he made to help create our country, it sort of breaks my heart knowing that this grifter has returned to rob the US Treasury again.
Donald J. Trump is anything but honest and wise.
Thus begins:
The Selling of the Presidency - Part 2
Meta, Amazon and tech CEOs make $1 million investments in Trump's inauguration, Big Firms & Billionaires Curry Favor With Trump By Giving Millions For His Inauguration Festivities
Trump says US will sell $5 million ‘gold card’ to wealthy foreigners
“We’re going to be selling a gold card. You have a green card. This is a gold card. We’re going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million and that’s going to give you green card privileges, plus it’s going to be a route to citizenship. And wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card.”
Donald Trump’s “Golden Age” of Corruption and Cronyism
Six Weeks In, This White House Is On Its Way To Being The Most Corrupt In U.S. History
Thought for the day in honor of her birthday…
“I think the actions of the president are, in my opinion, the most vile and hateful words ever spoken by a sitting president. I am stunned and I'm horrified.”
~ Rosie O'Donnell
Must Read Article:
It May Not Be Brainwashing, but It’s Not Democracy, Either
The Trump administration has enabled a small network of high-tech oligarchs to determine a vast proportion of federal spending and regulatory policy…Marc Andreessen, a billionaire venture capitalist, cryptocurrency investor and pivotal but unofficial adviser to Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, made the case in a recent interview that the entire system of American higher education should be shuttered and abandoned…Another potential beneficiary is Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor who was a founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund, as well as the first outside investor in Facebook. Thiel has been Vice President JD Vance’s guardian angel, getting him started in venture capital, arranging an initial meeting with Donald Trump in 2021 and putting $15 million into Vance’s successful Senate campaign in Ohio.
Is this idea of the world as a place where you have striving individuals, perhaps small teams, who really are the heroes of the story? These are people with — well, they’re men, not entirely but nearly all men, with grand ambitions and grand flaws who set out to remake the world according to their values.
This gives a certain kind of mentality, a certain kind of sense to Silicon Valley people, that they are an elite following in the footsteps of other elites, like Robert Moses, the guy who made modern New York City what it is, like Teddy Roosevelt. And so you get these biographies rubbing shoulders with a biography of Elon Musk, effectively suggesting that Elon Musk is just the latest of a series of world-bestriding colossuses, these fantastically great men who really have grand ambitions, who reshape the world in their ambitions….
What’s happening now, in one sense, is that the tech titans who have secured such large swaths of power over the digital world are increasingly comfortable wielding that power, openly, in the “real” world too; the tech oligarchs are becoming the American oligarchs, period, often using leverage from their digital platforms in tandem with their war chests of old-fashioned cash.
Quote of the day:
“I have a 12-year-old son who, as he learns more about various kinds of dark chapters in American history, can get really down on this country. So I often find myself in the strange position of trying to talk up American greatness because I don’t want him to feel despair about the country that he’s growing up in. It’s occurred to me that every single thing that I have pointed out to him as a sign of American greatness or goodness, whether that be foreign aid, whether that be our support for Ukraine, our success in welcoming immigrants and refugees, or scientific pre-eminence, everything that I thought was best about America, Trump has either destroyed or tried to destroy in less than two months.”
~ Michelle Goldberg
What I’m reading today…
For years, Donald Trump’s critics have accused him of behaving like a crooked used-car salesman… he did it for real on the White House South Lawn.
Squinting in the sun with Elon Musk, Trump stood next to five Tesla vehicles, holding a piece of paper with handwritten notes about their features and costs. Trump said he would purchase a car himself at full price. Then Trump and Musk got into one of the cars. Musk explained that the electric vehicle was “like a golf cart that goes really fast.”
Conservatives’ Tesla Rescue Mission Has Its Work Cut Out
“Democrats are fleeing the brand and saying they won’t consider it in the future, so there is naturally a greater proportion of Republican and independent buyers,” Mr. Edwards said. He said Democrats first started losing interest in Tesla when Mr. Musk bought Twitter, now X, in 2022. Then, last July, when Mr. Musk publicly backed Mr. Trump, the share of Democrats who said they would “definitely consider” a Tesla fell by half. Overall, about 8 percent of car owners would now definitely consider a Tesla, according to Mr. Edwards’s surveys. That compares with 22 percent five years ago, when Tesla often topped rankings of luxury brands that buyers would consider...
Of course, most buyers don’t choose cars based on politics. But a brand’s image matters. Tesla sales slipped even as overall U.S. electric vehicle sales grew 7.3 percent in 2024, to 1.3 million. Mr. Edwards said Mr. Musk was making it too easy for people to shop elsewhere.
Protests are working; keep it up!
If you want proof that the Tesla protests are working, the US Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, appeared on Fox News and said,
If you want to learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla. It’s unbelievable that this guy’s stock is this cheap. It will never be this cheap again.
Setting aside Lutnick’s audacity, lack of ethics, and hucksterism, his promotion of Tesla’s stock reeks of desperation. The fastest way to remove the sheen from Tesla’s image is to make Tesla stock an official “buy” recommendation of the US government—right alongside US Savings Bonds.
The Trump Recession: How One Man’s “Success” is Wrecking America
Meanwhile, in places like Nepal and Colombia, China is already capitalizing on Trump’s misguided attempt to cut foreign aid. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) provides far more goodwill than it costs, yet Trump’s budget slashes are creating power vacuums that China is eager to fill. The country Trump views as America’s top rival is being welcomed wherever we retreat. It’s already happening…
So there you have it. Trump’s policies are backfiring. The economy is in shambles. The government is in chaos. China is gaining ground. The GOP is in turmoil. Ukraine is stronger, and Tesla is crashing. And yet, Trump still claims his presidency has been the most successful since George Washington’s.
Trump Says a Recession Might Be Worth the Cost. Economists Disagree.
One form of short-term pain that Mr. Trump and his aides have acknowledged is that tariffs will raise the price of imported goods. Mr. Bessent has framed that as a necessary if difficult step to wean the U.S. economy off cheap foreign goods, particularly from China. Most economists, however, reject the idea that reducing imports will leave Americans better off overall. Competition from lower-cost producers overseas has hurt some U.S. industries, they acknowledge, but made Americans richer on average — lower prices are in effect a pay increase, leaving consumers with more money to spend on goods and services.
But even if the goal is to reduce imports, economists say broad-based tariffs like the ones Mr. Trump has threatened and imposed will be ineffective. That’s because the tariffs hit not just consumer goods but the parts and materials that U.S. manufacturers use to produce their products — making them more expensive for domestic and foreign consumers alike.
Protests erupt in Turkey after Erdogan rival arrested
Protests have erupted in Turkey after authorities detained the mayor of Istanbul, just days before he was due to be selected as a presidential candidate.
Ekrem Imamoglu, from the secular Republican People's Party (CHP), is seen as one of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's strongest political rivals.
Secret policy shift could overwhelm Social Security offices with millions of people
Kathleen Romig, a Social Security policy expert at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, emphasized that freezing the EBE program would impact everyone. Diverting SSA resources to process millions of applications for people granted work authorizations means "longer hold times on the phone, longer waits for an appointment, [and] longer times to process benefits applications and changes," Romig said. "What that means is delays for people accessing their earned Social Security benefits—and some people may not be able to access their benefits at all."
What I am listening to…
What I read every day…
