Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut gave a stunning speech about the normalcy of corruption in the Trump White House. Senator Murphy spoke about “500 Days of Corruption,” in which he detailed numerous deals that enriched the Trump sons, Don Jr. and Eric. Typically, they invested in a company and with days or weeks, that company received a government contract.
Set aside 30 minutes and watch this speech. It is startling, infuriating, outrageous.
Just yesterday (June 29), the media reported that President Trump made $2.2 billion in 2025. $2.2 billion!
President Trump reaped a stunning windfall in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses, a new filing shows.
All told, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets. That compares to a minimum of $622 million his enterprises pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.
One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.
Mr. Trump also collected hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens.
Remember how the Republicans in Congress excoriated Hunter Biden because he was paid to serve as a board member for a company called Burisma in Ukraine? How many times did Trump and his allies speak with derision about “the Biden crime family”?
Penny-ante when compared to the shameless profiteering of the Trump family.
The President should have no problem paying his $5 million debt to E. Jean Carroll, which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn or even the $83 million judgment that Carroll won in state court but Trump is litigating to avoid paying.
Who are the big donors funding the 2026 midterm campaigns? Typically, the billionaires spend big on Presidential elections, but now they are pouring hundreds of millions into 2026 because it will determine control of Congress.
Republicans have a much bigger war chest than Democrats.
George Soros is by far the biggest giver to Democrats. That helps explain why the MAGA folks demonize him.
The conclusion I draw from this article is that our political system is warped by the influence of unlimited money. We desperately need a Congress that will limit campaign spending.
Andy Spears is an experienced journalist who writes a blog called The Education Report, where he revealed that billionaire Jeff Yass is funding a pro-voucher candidate in the race to replace Governor Bill Lee.
Lee pushed hard to enact voucher legislation, and he too benefited from Jeff Yass’s giving. Tennessee public schools are suffering as a result of Republicans’ devotion to vouchers.
Spears writes:
Thanks to Bill Lee’s leadership, Tennessee has gone from 44th in the nation in school funding when he became governor in 2018 to 51st – dead last – as Lee is on his way out this year.
In addition to leading Tennessee to the bottom – $1.9 billion below Mississippi – in school funding, Lee has also led the way to a $300 million private school voucher scheme.
Lee was helped in his voucher quest by the School Freedom Fund and its top donor, New York billionaire Jeff Yass. Yass’s group spent more than $4 million to support pro-voucher GOP legislative candidates – winning key primaries and delivering the votes to get Lee’s voucher scheme across the finish line.
Now, Yass is taking sides in the race to replace Lee. Yass is the largest single contributor in the gubernatorial race, giving $1 million to a political action committee (PAC) supporting Marsha Blackburn, according to Tennessee Lookout.
Yass is known for his investment in TikTok’s parent company and for being a major financial supporter of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.
He’s now the largest single contributor in Tennessee’s gubernatorial election after donating $1 million to Team Tennessee, a PAC that is backing U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s bid for the top job.
Blackburn is a vocal advocate for private school vouchers.
Ivanka Trump Kushner was recently interviewed about her and her husband’s plans to develop Sazan Island, off the coast of Albania, into a major resort. Five miles of private beachfront. Thousands of hotel rooms. She says she wants it to be the kind of setting that people want. It’s clear that she has no contact with most “people.”
Sazan Island is owned by the state. The Kushners intend to privatize and develop it. The president of Albania welcomes foreign investment because Albania is poor, and he wants to bolster the economy and create jobs.
Albanians are not happy. In fact, thousands of them are rioting against the deal, due to the threat to the island’s natural beauty and biodiversity. It’s possible that their riot is intensified by their views of the Trump family.
Mike DeGuire, retired Denver educator, warned Coloradans that the usual billionaires are lining up behind Mike Bennett for the Democratic nomination for Governor. Bennett is currently a Senator but previously was Superintendent of Schools in Denver, where he promoted the NCLB agenda of test-and-punish, charters schools, and corporate reform. He never was an educator so he swallowed corporate reform hook, line, and sinker.
Colorado’s Democratic primary for governor between Attorney General Phil Weiser and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet is heating up. TV ads are everywhere, and social media is abuzz with supporters extolling their favorite candidate’s strengths or the opponent’s weaknesses. Colorado has elected only one Republican governor in 50 years, so many pundits believe whoever wins the Democratic primary will likely win the November election.
Money is becoming a big factor in this campaign. Bennet has a distinct advantage thus far, primarily due to one group of funders: billionaires. More than half of Bennet’s super PAC donations are from billionaires, individuals and groups affiliated with organizations run by billionaires, and from a “dark money” group. Research shows that billionaires “are swaying elections all across America.”
As of the May 18 filing deadline, Bennet had over $11.5 million in total donations compared to Weiser’s $7 million. Over $7 million of Bennet’s money is from his super PAC, Rocky Mountain Way, which includes over $1 million from an independent expenditure dark money organization called Brighter Future for Colorado. Weiser has $1.1 million from his super PAC, Fighting for Colorado, and just over $6 million from individual donations.
Michael Bloomberg is the 18th richest man in the world with a net worth of over $109 billion, and he is the largest individual donor to Bennet’s super PAC, giving $2.5 million thus far. But he is not the only billionaire donor in Bennet’s camp. These billionaires also contributed to Bennet’s super PAC: Steve Mandel and his wife ($175,000,); Tench Coxe and his wife ($100,000); Edythe Broad ($3,000); Marc Heising ($75,000); Eric Mindich ($25,000); Deborah Simon ($25,000); and Robert Fanch ($25,938).
In addition to the billionaires’ money, over a dozen hedge fund managers and venture capitalists contributed between $10,000 and $100,000 each to Bennet’s super PAC. The ultra-wealthy use their donations to gain loyalty from candidates who will enact policies that align with their values and protect their wealth through tax breaks, financial incentives and limited regulations on their corporations. They also use nonprofit foundations to fund organizations they support philosophically.
Tax filings published by ProPublica for the years 2022-24 show that billionaires Reed Hastings and John Arnold used their nonprofit, City Fund, to give money to Denver Families for Public Schools, which contributed $45,000 to Bennet. The former CEO of City Fund, Neerav Kingsland, donated $2,000. The Bloomberg Family Foundation donated millions to the Charter School Growth Fund. That nonprofit also funds the Colorado League of Charter Schools which, along with 50Can and Stand for Children, gave $470,000 to Bennet’s super PAC. Bloomberg’s dark money group, the American Opportunity Action, gave $45,000. The total investment from Bloomberg and other billionaire-funded nonprofits surpasses $3 million.
Bloomberg’s support for Bennet’s candidacy reflects a relationship and shared philosophy on education reform that stretches back nearly two decades. Before Bennet entered the U.S. Senate, he served as Denver’ school superintendent from 2005 to 2009, the same time that Bloomberg was serving as New York mayor, where he had control of the city’s schools. Like Bennet, Bloomberg promoted corporate education reforms, oversaw the expansion of charter schools, test-based accountability systems, and market-oriented policies.
Both Bennet and Bloomberg ran for president in 2020. Bloomberg spent over $37 million of his own money on his unsuccessful campaign. Bennet received money for his candidacy from over 32 billionaires who were hedging their bets on who would eventually win the party’s nomination. Several billionaires supporting Bennet for president included some of the richest people in Colorado: the Ergen family, Pat Stryker and Ken Tuchman.
While Bloomberg often wins when he donates money to candidates, there are exceptions. Last year, Bloomberg joined with 26 other billionaires to support former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York mayoral race, donating $13 million to his campaign. New Yorkers resoundingly said no to the billionaire money and elected Zohran Mamdani.
The money involved so far in this year’s gubernatorial Democratic primary pales in comparison to the $34 million spent in the last contested Colorado Democratic primary, in 2018.Many observers believe that Gov. Jared Polis basically bought the governor’s seat by contributingmore than $22 million of his own money to defeat three other candidates. Bloomberg was also involved in the 2018 gubernatorial race, donating $2 million to Mike Johnston who came in third to Polis. Five years later, Bloomberg helped Johnston win his 2023 race for Denver mayor when he and another billionaire, Reid Hoffman, donated nearly $2 million to Johnston’s election.
Ballots drop June 8 for the June 30 Democratic primary. Will the independent and Democratic voters buck the trend of billionaires swaying elections and elect Weiser, or will this billionaire investment pay off for Bennet?
Paul Waldman was a top journalist at The Washington Post who left after Post publisher Jeff Bezos changed the newspaper’s political orientation and initiated staff cuts. Waldman now writes a blog called “The Cross Section,” where this post appeared.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is not just an incredibly rich guy, with a net worth standing at a tidy $43.6 billion. He also fancies himself a thought leader, eager to share his insights on the critical challenges of our age. In particular, he worries about the negative effects of Americans’ skepticism about artificial intelligence. As he wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed, “It’s paramount that more people outside Silicon Valley feel the beneficial impact of A.I. on their lives.”
So when he was invited to give the commencement address at the University of Arizona this year, he probably thought this was a great opportunity to explain to young people how important it is for them to be ready to navigate this brave new world, in which nothing they do will be untouched by the technological revolution that has already begun. “That really made me think,” they’d say to each other afterward. “I will take Eric Schmidt’s wise words with me as I embark on my career.”
But that’s not what happened. Instead, the students greeted his rather banal comments on AI with a round of lusty jeers. The same thing happened at other universities when commencement speakers from the business world delivered similar messages about how we’re embarking on “the next Industrial Revolution” and the kids had better adapt whether they like it or not:
I want to congratulate the students at these universities for showing what they actually think about this message, and it’s not because the business titans are completely wrong. There will be dramatic changes because of AI, and people working in a wide variety of industries will have to adapt. But sometimes, when you find yourself in the company of extremely rich and powerful people, there’s a great deal of value in taking a big breath, cupping your hands around your mouth, and shouting “YOU SUCK!”
One thing social media is good for
While social media is a virus that spread across the globe and made our entire existence worse in a remarkably short amount of time, it also allows ordinary people to tell those with great power that they suck. Unfortunately, doing so often has the effect of cooking the brains of those powerful people to an even greater degree than their isolated existences already do.
Take Mark Andreessen, one of the most important figures in Silicon Valley and leader of the firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. A year ago, Andreessen shared with podcaster Lex Fridman why dinner parties and text chats among Valley power brokers are so liberating:
“At least in the last decade, those are like the happiest moments of everybody’s lives,” Andreessen said. “Everybody’s just ecstatic, because they’re just like, ‘I don’t have to worry about getting yelled at and shamed for every third sentence that comes out of my mouth.’”
Who precisely is yelling at Marc Andreessen? Someone on his household staff? His employees at a16z? The aspiring tech bros desperate for him to fund their startups? A server at the Michelin-starred restaurant where he ate dinner last night?
The answer is that there is no one in Andreessen’s actual life who would dare treat him with anything but obsequious deference. No, it’s online where Andreessen is hounded and oppressed.
Under the totalitarian regime that prevailed before Elon Musk bought Twitter, Andreessen explained, group chats were “the equivalent of samizdat,” where for a brief fleeting moment, billionaires could whisper to one another in hushed tones. True, the punishment for being caught uttering forbidden truths in more public forums was not execution or banishment to the gulag, but having a bunch of peasants on social media call you an asshole. Isn’t that just as bad, though? Surely if one of those poor dissidents starving in a Siberian prison camp in 1952 could have looked into the future, they would have said, “My suffering is great, but at least I don’t have to endure getting ratioed on Twitter.”
The horror of being called an asshole pushed Andreessen to become an even more enthusiastic ally of President Trump than he was already becoming. This year, a16z is sinking more money into the midterm elections than any other organization or person, $115 million so farto support Republican candidates who will advocate minimal regulation of AI and crypto (in which the firm is heavily invested).
Even in Silicon Valley, most of the elite don’t spend their time tweeting and going on podcasts. But enough of them do that we have a good window into the culture and thinking of the wealthiest and most powerful business leaders of our day. And what comes through loud and clear is that they’re appalled that we aren’t more thankful for the technologies they are bestowing upon us. They take our money and mine our lives for data, but don’t we realize how glorious the future they’re creating for us will be? Where’s the gratitude?
What they don’t seem to appreciate is that most of the ways people are currently experiencing AI are invasive, threatening, or just stupid and frustrating. For instance, Taco Bell is experimenting with an AI-driven menu board that will “dynamically change the layout, content, and visuals on a car-by-car basis.” You thought you just wanted a menu that was easy to read and understand, but have you considered how great it would be if the AI made judgments about what kind of person you are based on the car you’re driving, then slapped a bunch of crappy graphics on the menu based on some stereotypes it picked up from trawling the internet? Awesome!
When oligarchs like Eric Schmidt tell young people that their lives are going to be shaped by AI whether they like it or not, it’s that kind of crap the young people think of, not the possibility that one day AI will devise a cure for cancer. Perhaps the utopian version of AI will come to pass, but right now that AI future is hypothetical, while the slop is our reality today.
Nobody likes being criticized, and the more highly you think of yourself the less you like it — and while Silicon Valley billionaires are not allnarcissistic sociopaths, lots of them are. We have many means of pushing back at them — electing leaders who approach technology with a healthy skepticism and are willing to regulate it to protect the public, organizing in our communities (as people are doing against data center construction), choosing not to patronize companies that try to jam AI down our throats when we don’t want it. But when you have the chance, it doesn’t hurt to shout “YOU SUCK!” at the wealthy and powerful. They’ve certainly earned it.
Rick Wilson is a never-Trumper, a former Republican operative who was a founder of The Lincoln Project. He write a popular blog, “Against All Enemies,” where he follows the actions of Trump 47.
Let’s start with a number, because the number is the whole story and the rest is just decoration.
3,700.
Between January and March of this year, three months, ninety-odd days, one fiscal quarter of a man who is supposed to be running the country, Donald Trump’s required ethics filings disclosed 3,700 stock trades worth somewhere between $220 million and three-quarters of a billiondollars.
Microsoft. Meta. Oracle. Broadcom. Bank of America. Goldman Sachs. Nvidia. Apple. An S&P 500 index fund, because even a degenerate gambler likes a hedge. Municipal bonds, for flavor.
That’s not a portfolio. That’s a casino floor. And the President of the United States is standing in the middle of it, counting cards at the table while the pit boss looks the other way, and the cameras, conveniently, are off.
You are supposed to find this normal now. You are supposed to scroll past it. That’s the entire design.
So let’s not.
.
Here is the part where I am legally and intellectually obligated to be precise, so pay attention. Precision is the enemy of this whole operation, and they are counting on you being too tired for it.
Insider trading is not “rich guy buys stock.”
Insider trading, as a federal crime, has elements: actual, legally defined moving parts a prosecutor has to bolt together. You need material, non-public information. You need a trade made on the basis of it. You need a breach of a duty of trust. And you need the thing lawyers call scienter, which is a fancy Latin way of saying the person knew exactly what they were doing. (Insider trading rabbit holes are shockingly amusing. I’ve been in one for two days.)
The rabbit hole led me to the Supreme Court last night, because of course it did. SCOTUS, over time, blessed two flavors of this in United States v. O’Hagan, the “classical” theory and the “misappropriation” theory, and federal prosecutors get to reach for the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Rule 10b-5, and the heavy artillery of 18 U.S.C. § 1348, the criminal securities-fraud statute that carries up to twenty-five years in a federal prison. I don’t understand it all, either, but it strikes me that Trump’s legal team will need to be up on these, quite soon.
Now hold that definition in your hand like a ruler, and lay it next to the reporting.
According to the Washington Post‘s reading of these filings, Trump bought Nvidia on February 10. Days later, Nvidia announced a major deal with Meta, and the stock jumped roughly 2.5 percent. He sold Microsoft and Amazon in February, then bought millions more in March, shortly before the Pentagon announced it would put its technology into classified computer networks.
Let me say the quiet part at conversational volume: I am not telling you that is a proven crime. I am telling you that if you fed those two paragraphs to a hundred securities lawyers with no name attached, every one of them would say the same two words before their coffee got cold: “Lawyer up.”
The President of the United States sits atop the single largest pile of non-public material intelligence and information on planet Earth. He knows what the Pentagon is buying before the Pentagon’s vendors do. He knows the tariff rate before the market does, because he is the source of the tariff. Markets are always defined by information asymmetry. For him, the asymmetry isn’t a loophole. It’s the strategy. It’s the job.
A normal person who traded a defense contractor’s stock the week before a classified Pentagon contract would be explaining himself to men in windbreakers with “FBI” on the back. Trump gets a $200 fine. Twice. We’ll come back to the two hundred dollars, because the two hundred dollars is the funniest and darkest detail in the entire file.
Here is the thing that turns this from a scandal into a regime: there is functionally no one on the beat.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency whose entire reason to exist is to walk this exact crime scene, has been hollowed out with the precision of me working a Thanksgiving turkey. Since the administration took over, the SEC has shed the order of 18% of its workforce, dropping from roughly 5,000 employees to around 4,200, the bulk of them walking out the door clutching $50,000 buyout checks dangled by the same government they were supposed to police.
The Enforcement Division and the Office of the General Counsel, the cops and the lawyers, in other words, took the deepest cuts. DOGE set up shop inside the SEC headquarters, occupying actual rooms; nothing good was ever going to come of that. The Philadelphia and Los Angeles field offices were slated to go dark. Enforcement actions against public companies are down roughly thirty percent. The new chairman publicly mused that it’s “good every once in a while to have a house cleaning.” Uh huh.
You do not need a decoder ring. When the man at the top is running a quarter-billion-dollar trading book off privileged information, and the watchdog has been defunded, depopulated, and told to think of mass attrition as spring cleaning, that is not two unrelated news stories. That is one strategy with two press releases.
This is the part that should raise the hair on your neck, regardless of your party. The genius of the grift is not that it’s hidden. It’s that it’s legal-adjacent by demolition. You don’t have to break the law if you can fire the people who enforce it and starve out the ones who remain. The cop didn’t miss the robbery. The cop took the buyout, and the robber signed the check.
Fine. You want to know how this plays as an actual case. Put on the prosecutor’s jacket for a second, because the honest answer is more damning than the cartoon.
The New York Timesexplained why Trump wanted immunity from audits by the IRS. Before his first presidency, Trump appears to have had a tax liability of nearly $80 million. The IRS claimed that he used the same business failure twice to decrease his tax debt.
The new exemption from audits that he gave himself saves him what he owed, which would now be nearly $100 million. It’s not clear whether he will ever again be audited by the IRS.
The Times reported:
A tax audit that President Trump has been fighting since his peak earning days as a television celebrity was most likely wiped away in this week’s settlement with the Justice and Treasury Departments.
The agreement, part of a resolution to an unusual lawsuit that Mr. Trump and his sons filed against the Internal Revenue Service, frees the president from a potential adverse ruling that could have cost him more than $100 million, according to an analysis of his tax returns in 2020 by The New York Times.
Two years ago, Mr. Trump’s middle son, Eric Trump, acknowledged to The Times that the audit remained active. During his father’s first term in office, the matter was put on hold, records obtained by The Times showed.
It is unclear whether the matter was placed on hold again during the president’s current term or was resolved. If it was still pending until this week, the increased interest and penalties would have grown significantly.
Mr. Trump has always argued that he did nothing wrong in the way he filed his tax returns.
The audit dated back to a $72.9 million tax refund that Mr. Trump claimed, and received, starting in about 2010. The total reflected all the federal income tax he had paid, plus interest, for 2005 through 2008, his greatest earning years as the star of his reality show, “The Apprentice.”
Mr. Trump justified the refund claim by declaring huge business losses — a total of $1.4 billion from his core businesses for 2008 and 2009 — that tax laws had prevented him from using in prior years, The Times previously reported.
Records obtained by The Times did not itemize the business losses. But two of the largest-scale projects of Mr. Trump’s career — his long-failing casinos and his money-losing tower in Chicago — appeared to be behind the biggest numbers. In both cases, Mr. Trump made the argument that his interest in those projects met the tax code definition of worthlessness.
In 2008, with sales on his new Chicago condo-hotel tower lagging far behind projections, Mr. Trump claimed that he had so much debt on the project that he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Mr. Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, The Times and ProPublica found.
The I.R.S. has argued that he, in effect, tried to write off the same losses on the Chicago tower twice.
During his first campaign, Trump contended that it was “smart” to avoid taxes. He may be the first billionaire to skip them altogether.
Trump made a real sweetheart deal with the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department. In return for him dropping his lawsuit demanding $10 billion, which may well have been dismissed by the federal judge hearing it, Trump won an incredible exemption for himself and his family.
Remember, when he first ran for president in 2015, he promised to release his tax returns after the IRS finished auditing them. Apparently, eleven years later, the Trump returns are still under audit. When his returns were leaked by an independent contractor who got a 5-year jail sentence, we learned that Trump didn’t pay any taxes some years, and in one year, paid only $750.
But part of the $1.776 billion deal relieves him of all worries about his tax returns.
The Justice Department on Tuesday expanded the just-announced settlement of President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over the leaking of his tax returns to include a pledge that the IRS will no longer pursue any claims it may have against Trump, his family members and his companies over unpaid taxes.
The nine-page settlement agreement DOJ released Monday, setting up a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate victims of alleged weaponization of law enforcement, did not mention any resolution of disputes over Trump’s tax returns, which he has repeatedly claimed were under protracted audits by the IRS.
However, a one-page document posted on the DOJ website early Tuesday includes a sweeping release under which the IRS is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing “examinations” of Trump, “related or affiliated individuals,” and related trusts and businesses.
The waiver specifically encompasses “tax returns filed before the effective date” of the settlement, which was Monday.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed the addendum, dated Tuesday. It does not bear the signature of any representative of the IRS or any current Trump lawyers. Metadata attached to the document indicates it was prepared or scanned at 7:50 a.m. Tuesday.
Blanche did not sign the original settlement agreement, which was signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, IRS CEO Frank Bisignano and Trump attorney Daniel Epstein.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on why the waiver wasn’t included in the agreement released Monday and why it isn’t signed by the same people.
John Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner from 2013 to 2017, said the expanded settlement set a “terrible precedent” that could effectively generate a windfall for Trump.“It makes you wonder what the President has to hide in those tax returns. He’s apparently been actively trading in the stock market and, since he knows a lot more about situations than the average investor, he’s probably generated significant taxable earnings,” he said in an emailed statement. “Not auditing his returns is the same as giving him an easy way to, in effect, receive money from the government.”
Danny Werfel, the former IRS commissioner from 2023 to 2025, said he was “unaware of a single precedent where the IRS has agreed in advance to permanently forgo examination of previously filed tax returns for a specific person or business.”
Press reports in advance of the settlement indicated that a potential deal might include an agreement by the government to drop all audits of Trump-related returns and perhaps even to refrain from future audits.
Diane Ravitch's blog 