“Trump takes a further step. To him, not only is the private public, but the public is also very personal. He sees himself as the CEO of the department store that is the United States of America—a metaphor that, notably, does not make any distinction between the government and the rest of the country. He’ll decide what deals are in everyone’s best interest, no matter what consenting individuals engaged in peaceful, private commerce might want to do. If he’s unhappy about something in Brazil, it will be your problem. And if he’s pleased with gifts and tributes, then all is well.
Do you run a foreign company trying to make a huge investment in American steel manufacturing? You’d better be prepared to cut Trump a piece of the action. Are you unhappy about Medicaid cuts that reduce the reimbursements your company receives from the government? That’s nothing a $5 million donation and dinner at Mar-a-Lago can’t fix. There’s a good reason why lobbying firms with direct access to the White House are reportedly keeping very, very busy these days.”
I thought the Tea Party was motivated by deficits and sweet deals by special interests. Where’s the Tea Party!?
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“Those who can afford to make a direct appeal to the president might get a tariff exemption. Everyone else is screwed. In effect, Trump has turned the administrative state into his private machine.
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there seem to be three basic explanations for why Republicans have ignored Trump’s open grift and self-dealing: “Either they just don’t see the problem, or it’s the price for participating in a two-party system where this particular politician is enduringly potent, or they never really meant that stuff about virtue anyway,” he wrote.
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Special treatment is available to anyone willing and able to pay the price, and the White House is open for business.”
“M.A.R. is just one of “hundreds of thousands of noncitizens…paroled into the United States in recent years after inspection at a port of entry and who now face the threat of removal under highly truncated procedures that have rarely, if ever, been applied at any scale to parolees””
“Nvidia, which makes up 92 percent of the global GPU market, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which has the remaining 8 percent, have reached a deal with the Trump administration. They’ll get export licenses for the sale of certain chips to China in exchange for 15 percent of the revenues generated by the sales, reports the Financial Times.
“No US company has ever agreed to pay a portion of their revenues to obtain export licences,” the paper notes.
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The new agreement is not only unusual—it could be illegal, too. The Constitution states in no uncertain terms, “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.” Yet this is what the Trump administration is effectively doing by conditioning permission to export these products on the forfeiture of 15 percent of sales revenue. Padilla appears to agree, telling the Post that “this arrangement seems like bribery or blackmail, or both.
Even if the deal brokered between the chipmakers and the federal government were legal, it would still be uneconomical. The revenue—hundreds of millions of dollars—will be directed to a Treasury Department slush fund that will allocate it arbitrarily. Nvidia and AMD have a stronger incentive, more information, and a better track record with investing dollars in a manner that yields a high return on investment.
U.S. export controls have not stopped China from developing AI, but they have denied American GPU firms access to much-needed revenue. Imposing this constitutionally dubious 15 percent tax is yet another example of unnecessary interference with the private sector.”
“The poorest 10% of households will lose an average of about $1,200 in resources per year, amounting to a 3.1% cut in their income, according to the analysis released Monday of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Households in the highest 10% of incomes will see about a $13,600 boost in resources on average, amounting to a 2.7% increase in their incomes.
Earners in the middle of the distribution will see their annual resources grow by about $800 to $1,200 on average, according to the analysis.”
“The Republican Party’s big bill of tax breaks and spending cuts that Trump signed into law July 4 included what’s arguably the biggest boost of funds yet to the Department of Homeland Security — nearly $170 billion, almost double its annual budget.
The staggering sum is powering the nation’s sweeping new Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, delivering gripping scenes of people being pulled off city streets and from job sites across the nation — the cornerstone of Trump’s promise for the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. Homeland Security confirmed over the weekend ICE is working to set up detention sites at certain military bases.
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The crush of new money is setting off alarms in Congress and beyond, raising questions from lawmakers in both major political parties who are expected to provide oversight. The bill text provided general funding categories — almost $30 billion for ICE officers, $45 billion for detention facilities, $10 billion for the office of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — but few policy details or directives. Homeland Security recently announced $50,000 ICE hiring bonuses.
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In the months since Trump took office, his administration has been shifting as much as $1 billion from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other accounts to pay for immigration enforcement and deportation operations, lawmakers said.
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Polling showed 79% of U.S. adults say immigration is a “good thing” for the country, having jumped substantially from 64% a year ago, according to Gallup. Only about 2 in 10 U.S. adults say immigration is a bad thing right now.”
“Noem v. Perdomo is not a normal case. Instead of disavowing the apparently unconstitutional behavior at its core, the Trump administration is openly embracing that behavior and urging the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court to do the same. It is the rare case in which both the government and its opponents agree that federal agents behaved in a specific way; the two sides only disagree about whether the specific behavior should count as good or bad.
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according to the emergency application to SCOTUS signed by Solicitor General John Sauer, “apparent ethnicity can be a factor supporting reasonable suspicion in appropriate circumstances.” Translation: If a federal agent thinks that someone “looks illegal,” the agent should be free to seize that person based only on his “apparent ethnicity” without setting off any sort of Fourth Amendment alarm bells.
Furthermore, in response to the argument that the federal government’s alleged racial profiling has resulted in an overly broad dragnet that inevitably ensnares innocent U.S. citizens, the Trump administration told the Supreme Court that “the high prevalence of illegal aliens should enable agents to stop a relatively broad range of individuals.”
Take a moment to let that sink in. The Trump administration wants the Supreme Court to give its blessing to a kind of systematic racial profiling that involves federal agents stopping a “broad range of individuals” based exclusively on factors such as the individuals’ “apparent ethnicity.” And if the rights of U.S. citizens—such as the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures regardless of your skin color—happen to get trampled along the way, the Trump administration’s message to those victimized citizens is this: tough luck.”
“To place huge new tariffs on imports from China, President Donald Trump claimed that those transactions are “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States.
It’s a threat that the White House now says it can put off addressing for another 90 days.
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This is not just a rhetorical point but a question that’s central to the legality of the tariffs. In front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit last month, the Trump administration’s lawyer told skeptical judges that the president’s tariff powers rested upon the existence of an “unusual threat” that the president was taking action to “deal with.”
The latest delay in the China tariffs, then, seems to directly undermine that claim. If Trump wants to use the threat of tariffs to negotiate a new trade deal with China, fine, but then that’s not an emergency—and, as a result, those tariffs cannot be implemented with the emergency powers the president is currently claiming.”
“Trump’s comments came in response to questions about the assault of Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old man known as “big balls” who played a prominent role in the administration’s efforts to slash government under the leadership of Elon Musk.
Coristine, who now works for the Social Security Administration though Musk has left the government and DOGE has been scaled back, told police he was attacked by a group of juveniles as part of an apparent attempted carjacking about 3 a.m Sunday in Northwest D.C.”
“Congressional Republicans really like the 2017 Trump tax cuts. It’s why the “big, beautiful bill” costs so much.
The decision to either extend those cuts or make them permanent before their year-end expiration date was the driving force behind the original, $2.4 trillion price tag of the House-passed megabill. Then the Senate GOP went even further, deepening the financial impact of the vast domestic policy package.
That exacerbated the string of intraparty fights that consumed Republicans for weeks. Even as different factions squared off over issues such as slashing Medicaid — hundreds of billions here, tens of billions there — the extension of the 2017 tax cuts had already set the table. In the end, the Senate added another $1 trillion to the price tag.
Detailed final estimates from Congress’ scorekeeper haven’t yet been released, but the overall picture is clear: The cost of President Donald Trump’s signature tax and spending legislation was inflated by the desire to extend the tax cuts from his first administration. Other political fights shifted the price tag from there, but there was not much the staunchest deficit hawks could do but chip away at the margins.”