The disclosure that Donald Trump made billions of dollars (largely in crypto) last year, is giving the Democrats an increasingly clear campaign message for the midterms: Trump is corrupt and stealing your money and doesn't care a whit that you can barely afford food. The two parts, his corruption and your financial stress, fit together well. People are going to connect the dots and assume that if Trump weren't so corrupt, they wouldn't be feeling so much pain. That is not strictly true in the sense that even if Trump were not in the crypto business, food prices wouldn't be lower. But it is also true that Trump's entire focus is on raking it in for himself instead of devoting ever last hour to working on getting prices down. He could do things to help lower prices—for example, making it easier to import cheap food from Mexico, but he is not interested. When pressed for details, Democrats could point this out.
Connecting Trump's corruption to people's pain is a good story for the midterms. But if Democrats capture either or both chambers of Congress in November, it will be a free-for-all next year. His 927-page financial disclosure (PDF) is a roadmap for Democrats to follow. It itemizes every financial venture Trump was engaged in during 2025. The suboenas will fly if Democrats get the power to issue them. Private and public depositions will abound. The biggest targets are the people around Trump, including family and cronies. They have no immunity from being called to testify. They can plead the Fifth Amendment, but in court of public opinion, that makes someone look guilty. If a representative asks someone: "Did you ever discuss a business deal with the leader of the U.A.E., Qatar, or any other country in the Middle East?" an answer of "Fifth" is a much weaker answer than "No."
World Liberty Financial, a project of the Trump and Witkoff families, has been a magnet for foreign investors. It probably has an accountant who could be asked under oath about who the investors and clients are and whether there are any potential conflicts of interest.
An investigation by the NYT has turned up the tidbit that Trump's sons and those of Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick have ties to at least 14 companies seeking almost $9 billion in government funding for deals supposedly involving rare earth minerals. Talk about conflict of interest. The sons aren't going to get immunity (unless one is prepared to rat on the others), but them saying "Fifth Amendment" a few hundred times during a hearing is not going to look great. Democrats will be able to use footage of that in 2028 to show how corrupt the Republicans are. [snip]
Another area the Democrats are going to be interested in is the 21,000 securities trades Trump made while in office, some of them with curious timing. Could there be a pattern in which stock was bought, then some official announcement was made driving a stock just bought skyward, then a sale? Were there many purchases and sales in close proximity where the sale made a big profit just a few hours later? Computers are pretty good at detecting this kind of stuff. By way of contrast, Joe Biden made 13 trades during his entire presidency.
In short, the disclosure form is a veritable gold mine of areas for the House Oversight Committee to pursue if ranking member Robert Garcia (D-CA) becomes chairman in January. Garcia is very aggressive and detests Trump. It could be quite a show. If Garcia is smart, he is already prepping for future investigations. His Long Beach-based district is D+18, so he doesn't have to spend a lot of time campaigning. Besides, his staff can start digging and planning now.
A theme for 2026, indictments for 2028. Sounds good to us.
... What do the study’s participants talk about? Their central concern is their own so-called "moral foundations." For them, any democracy is valid only insofar as it vigorously upholds "faith, family, freedom and place," as indicated in the study’s title. Since they believe their values are under relentless attack by the institutions of democracy, then democracy must be sacrificed. In this mindset, political opponents are not acting in good faith but are outright demonic. The study describes Maria from Michigan this way: "Her verdict on the Democratic Party as having dedicated its playbook to Satan and chosen the ‘platform of death’ does not leave room for normal civic constraints to apply.'"
It should be emphasized that these values mean their faith, not a non-Christian religion or no religion; their family (forcible family separation of immigrants or gay marriage don’t count); their freedom (getting vaccinated as a civic responsibility to protect the frail and immune-deficient is incomprehensible to them) and their place (typically small-town and rural, cities being dens of iniquity). [snip]
Part of their rejection of democracy is the fact that they know they would be outvoted in a straight-up, ungerrymandered system: "Kyle (mid 20s, WY), a delivery driver, extends the logic: 'Every single small town would be outvoted by every single city. We wouldn’t be able to feed people cows. We’d all be eating seaweed.'"
The participants are similar to the authoritarian personalities that Canadian psychologist Robert Altemeyer studied for his 2008 book "The Authoritarians'': "They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times and are often hypocrites.”...
This is from an analysis of an opinion study (“Faith, Freedom, Family, Place: An Ethnographic Study of Conservative Americans’ Relationships to Democracy” by the Johns Hopkins Agora Institute and ReD Associates) of three Republican counties -- in Michigan, South Carolina, and Wyoming. The views the subjects expressed represent a not-insignificant part of the electorate that is hostile to democracy, hostile to diversity, hostile to Americans other than those in their homogeneous groups -- i.e., hostile to modern America. We have to understand that while they inhabit the same country, they're hostile to its basic principles and un-reachable. They're core MAGA and cannot be reasoned or bargained with. They can only be defeated over and over and over again.
U.S. President Donald Trump intervened on behalf of American star forward Folarin Balogun, whose suspension was lifted in a decision that allows him to play in a World Cup match against Belgium on Monday.
Balogun, the American leader with three goals, received a red card for stepping awkwardly on the right ankle of Tarik Muharemović of Bosnia and Herzegovina in a 2-0 round of 32 win on Wednesday. A red card triggers an automatic one-game suspension.
FIFA announced Sunday that the suspension had been lifted, triggering praise from Trump and outrage from Belgium’s team.
Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino after the game asking FIFA review the red card, according to a person familiar with the call who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
“Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice!” Trump said in a statement on social media.
The Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) said it was “astonished” and Belgium coach Rudi Garcia mocked FIFA’s action.
“I didn’t know that in the offices of FIFA the 5th of July was the 1st of April in Europe,” Garcia said through a translator in an April Fools’ Day comparison. “The Belgian federation does not defend itself, it does not protect the national team, She defends football in general, she defends her integrity, her ethics. I think it’s the first time in the history of the World Cup that there is this kind of decision.”
Garcia wouldn’t respond when asked about a possible appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport or whether he thought Trump impacted FIFA’s action.
“In order to safeguard the legitimate rights of all participating teams and to protect the fundamental principles of fair play in our sport, both at this FIFA World Cup and at future editions of the tournament, the RBFA is investigating all potential options,” the Belgian federation said in a statement..."
Irony alert: Balogun is an American citizen whose parents come from one of the MF's "shithole countries" (Nigeria) that the MF wants to stop immigration from. Regardless of your allegiance to our national team, and the foul that caused the red card, this smells to high heaven. Belgium and every every competing country now has to wonder how much the MF's influence over the corrupt Infantino and his corrupt FIFA organization will tilt other matches. (UPDATE: Belgium is taking legal action against FIFA.) Having a host country, with its infamously corrupt leader cutting a deal with the head of FIFA (who notoriously gave the MF a "Peace Prize"!), is already raising hackles around the world. Also, when the MF gets involved in anything, the ETTD syndrome kicks in, so ...
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