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Recent headlines from The National Memo include: "Employment Report: Beneath July's Mixed Numbers, Job Market Shows Fragility"; "Michigan Delivers A Hard Lesson For AIPAC, But Will They Ever Learn?"; "CNN Data Expert: Trump's Non-College Base Is Deserting Him And Republicans"; "Not Joking! GOP Senator Praises Trump's Compliance With 'Ethics Standard'"; "Comical Feud Erupts Between Pirro And Burgum Over Reflecting Pool Fiasco". We track 32 articles from this source.

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Employment Report: Beneath July's Mixed Numbers, Job Market Shows Fragility

Employment Report: Beneath July's Mixed Numbers, Job Market Shows Fragility

The nation’s payrolls surprisingly fell last month, down 23,000, driven by large losses in government jobs (and not federal, as you might expect, but local education). Revisions to payroll jobs were also negative, down 103,000 cumulatively for May and June, taking the average monthly job gains over the last three months down to a flimsy 20,000 jobs per month. That’s well below most estimates of the “breakeven” rate—the number of jobs needed to keep the jobless rate from rising.And yet the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1 percent. Whassup with that? First, this is a noisy indicator, and the breakeven mechanics requires averaging over numerous months to pull signal from noise. But re the monthly tick down, it happened for the wrong reasons: in the survey which tracks unemployment, both jobs and the labor force contracted in July. So that tenth-of-a-point tick down is not a sign of a tighter labor market.My main message, however, is do not panic! Especially regarding the negative payroll number, the fact that it was partially driven by a 50,000 decline in local government education jobs, in a summer month, makes me wonder if there’s a seasonal adjustment problem here.On the other hand—I haven’t used up my hands yet, have I?—as a long-time job-market-data whisperer, I’m not dismissing this report. It adds a data point to some longer-term trends that reveal fragility under the surface of what looks like a fairly tight labor market.First, taking out the government sector and looking only at private-sector, three-month averages show flat job gains for about year, interrupted by a few better months earlier this year. Second, labor force participation, which as noted, ticked down last month, is down by 0.8 percent over the past year. Yes, that series includes aging boomers and much weaker immigration, but it also reflects weaker underlying labor demand. If we shift to prime-age workers (25-54), this labor force indicator along with the employment rate looks better, but there was a big dip in June that only slightly reversed in July. Third, wage growth has decelerated. These monthly jobs report contain hundreds of statistics from two different surveys. As noted, trends in the key, high-level stats, like jobs added and movements in the unemployment rate, give one a decent sense of the tightness or slack the job market.But nominal wage growth is also a helpful indicator in that regard. It’s by no means fully a function of labor market conditions—it reflects underlying productivity growth, employer versus worker bargaining clout, discrimination by race, gender, age, etc., minimum wages, tax policy, non-wage benefits, and more. But it definitely has a cyclical component as well, wherein less slack tends to correlate with faster nominal growth.In July, private wages were flat on a monthly basis and up 3.2 percent, year over year. That’s the lowest yearly growth rate since the pandemic. Here’s both all private hourly wages and mid/low-wage. So as not to be overly dependent on one survey, I also like to gaze at this wage tracker from Goldman Sachs Research, a mash-up of many different wage series (this doesn’t include today’s data). The deceleration is clear here as well, , as well as the above-noted cyclicality. Perhaps most importantly from the perspective of consumers, these wage rates are not reliably outpacing inflation, which has been jumping around a lot due to energy prices and the war, but continue to growth at yearly rates well north of 3.Bottom line, 4.1 percent unemployment is low unemployment, any way you cut it, and that’s good. But the job market is more fragile than is usually the case at such an unemployment rate. As best we can tell, employment growth is not great—low-hire, low-fire prevails. Labor force participation looks a bit saggy, and wage growth shows little of the pressure I’d expect if things were all that solid in this space.Sorry to be the many-handed economist, but it’s a somewhat foggy picture.Jared Bernstein is a former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Joe Biden. He is a senior fellow at the Council on Budget and Policy Priorities. Please subscribe to his Substack, from which this is reprinted with permission.

2 days ago
Michigan Delivers A Hard Lesson For AIPAC, But Will They Ever Learn?

Michigan Delivers A Hard Lesson For AIPAC, But Will They Ever Learn?

There are plenty of explanations for what happened in the Michigan Senate Democratic primary, where Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive, was declared the victor over Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate, by a razor-thin margin of one percent.For starters, he was the outsider, a former public health official talking about the fundamental economic issues, while she was Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's second choice (after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer) for the seat. He was, according to observers, the better communicator, the better orator, connecting on issues of affordability while she was expounding on her love for Michigan. He worked harder. He started campaigning well over a year ago and did some 500 public events against a candidate who stayed mostly out of the public eye and dodged tough questions.And the polls were wrong, as usual. The polls were projecting a double-digit El-Sayed victory. That didn't happen. It turned into a cliffhanger, and El-Sayed only won by a razor-thin margin. So in that sense, as is always true of very close races, anything could have made the difference.But there are certain facts coming out of Michigan that cannot be denied. Rep. Stevens was supported by some 60 million in outside money, including more than 30 million from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. That's AIPAC, for short, the pro-Israel lobby that used to wield enormous clout in Washington and in national politics. Her extraordinary support from AIPAC became an issue in the campaign, as did her opponent's stance on Israel.Dr. El-Sayed is the sort of candidate that AIPAC exists to defeat. He believes that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. He has pledged to cut U.S. military aid to Israel. And, according to The New York Times, he has said he does not believe Israel should exist as an explicitly Jewish state. Throughout the campaign, El-Sayed attacked Stevens for her pro-Israel position, and said he hoped to go to Washington to influence policy on Israel, especially among the party's 2028 hopefuls.AIPAC spent more money, according to the Times, trying to beat El-Sayed than any outside group has in a primary this year. They put 30-plus million on the scale and became a much-debated issue in the campaign for doing so. The message to other candidates is clear: AIPAC money comes with a price. Did it hurt Stevens more than it helped her? While apologists for AIPAC may spin that even with prevailing winds against them, they almost pulled it off, the fact of the matter is that they didn't pull it off. They lost.A few years ago, there would have been no place in the Democratic Party for a candidate like El-Sayed. His views on Palestine would have been unacceptable. He would not have been given a speaking role at a national convention. As I write this, the party is unifying behind him to give him a speaking and voting role in the U.S. Senate.As the polls have measured, accurately, public opinion on Israel has shifted dramatically, and negatively. Some of us continue, albeit with difficulty, to draw a line between our support for Israel and our opposition to its current government, but most people don't. They don't view Israel through the Holocaust-tinged glasses of my generation. We know this. AIPAC has to know this. The lesson of Michigan cannot be that they just needed a little more money. The message is not working.Susan Estrich is a celebrated feminist legal scholar, the first female president of the Harvard Law Review, and the first woman to run a U.S. presidential campaign. She has written eight books.

2 days ago
CNN Data Expert: Trump's Non-College Base Is Deserting Him And Republicans

CNN Data Expert: Trump's Non-College Base Is Deserting Him And Republicans

President Donald Trump is in a huge spiral with his own supporters, CNN data analyst Harry Enten explained on Friday.Speaking to CNN anchor John Berman, Enten explained that non-college voters were a key constituency for Trump in all of his elections. That's not the case anymore. Now it appears the president is losing support.In October 2024, Trump was up with non-college voters in the MAGA movement by eight points. Now, Trump is 22 points underwater, a Marquette Law School survey revealed. It's a 28-point swing.So the bottom line is this: The group in which the Trump movement was built upon — they are shifting away and saying, we don't like MAGA anymore, Enten said.Over the past several months, as Trump has lost support among non-MAGA Republicans and Independents, he was still able to maintain support among his MAGA loyalists. That's no longer true.In the 2024 election, he won them by 13 points. Right? Enten said about non-college voters. That was the reason he won. He won among non-college voters a very strong performance amongst them. And that, of course, was the reason he was able to win because college voters were against him. But look at this now, minus 19 points! Minus 19 points! We're talking about an even bigger shift here.He calculated it's a 32-point shift away from Trump in his key core political group.According to Enten, This is why he's in so much trouble. It's not just that college voters are against Trump. Now, it turns out that non-college voters, the ones that he built his presidential bid on, have waved adios, goodbye. See you later, Mr. Trump. We don't like you anymore.Well, if you're a congressional Republican, you wish they didn't like Democrats, Enten said. I have bad, bad news for you, because it turns out that the non-college voters are turning on you, too. And it may, in fact, turn you out of power in the congressional elections coming up in the midterms.Republicans are down by 13 points with non-college voters while Democrats are up by one.It's just a point, but you know what? When it comes to a point and given how well the Democrats are doing among college voters, these are the types of numbers on which blue waves are built, said Enten. And therefore, we can say that the key group that put Donald Trump in the White House, the key group that he built the MAGA movement upon, is leaving him. And it's leaving congressional Republicans too.Reprinted with permission from AlterNet

2 days ago

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Not Joking! GOP Senator Praises Trump's Compliance With 'Ethics Standard'

Not Joking! GOP Senator Praises Trump's Compliance With 'Ethics Standard'

Republican patsy Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) appeared on Fox Business to push the Digital Market Asset Clarity Act—a huge crypto deregulation bill that threatens to legally enshrine the weak oversight and poor consumer protections of cryptocurrency markets. “Let’s remind ourselves President Trump has done something no other president in the history of our country said ‘yes’ to,” Scott said, “which is complying to the ethics strategy and standard for all elected officials. We’ve never had a president ever say ‘yes’ to that issue, that question, so it’s good news.”The “ethics strategy and standard for all elected officials” Scott is referring to amounts to a paper-thin bit of oversight framework that Republicans have cooked up, placing enforcement of cryptocurrency conflicts-of-interest rules under the control of the president himself. It means that oversight would ultimately fall to the same Department of Justice that Trump has weaponized to target his political enemies while extending clemency and paying off political allies doing his bidding.There are very few parts of Trump’s agenda that are not soaked in corruption. Cryptocurrency, however, has become one of the Trump family’s most lucrative ventures, generating billions of hard-to-trace dollars since jumping into the racket. The Clarity Act is set to clear the way for more money to flow into their biggest grift yet.

2 days ago
Comical Feud Erupts Between Pirro And Burgum Over Reflecting Pool Fiasco

Comical Feud Erupts Between Pirro And Burgum Over Reflecting Pool Fiasco

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, who is now feuding with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum over his role in failed prosecutions for the alleged vandalism of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, previously touted Burgum as a “straight shooter” and endorsed him to become Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate in her prior role as a Fox News host.Pirro said that Trump’s pick would come down to one of JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Burgum during a discussion of his vice presidential shortlist on the June 6, 2024, edition of Fox panel show The Five. “Trump actually got more Hispanic votes in Florida than Rubio did,” she said. “And you know, JD Vance is good but I really think it's Burgum. I do.” Noting that she had “met him several times,” she claimed that “there's something about him that he just seems like a straight shooter.”Two years later, Pirro, who was once described by her own executive producer as “nuts” and a “reckless maniac,” is no longer a Fox host — she’s a top federal prosecutor. And rather than a “straight shooter,” she now reportedly thinks Burgum is “an incompetent liar.”Pirro slammed the Interior Department in her motion to dismiss charges on Friday against David Hearn — the only person to face a felony charge over damage to the Reflecting Pool — effectively blaming Burgum’s agency for both slow-walking the production of evidence showing the damage “was the result of flawed installation by the contractor and the rush to complete the project” rather than of vandalism.Since her decision undermined Trump’s previous claims that the damage had been the work of “Deranged Vandals,” the president publicly claimed Pirro was “100” wrong, reiterated that it had been a “pure case of VANDALISM,” maligned her for having “choked,” and reportedly considered replacing her. Burgum, meanwhile, dismissed Pirro’s argument, saying on social media, “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool.”The feud came to a head on Monday during what The New York Times described as an “Oval Office showdown” attended by Trump, Pirro, and Burgum.“During the meeting on Monday, Ms. Pirro, her voice raised at times, directly confronted Mr. Burgum, accusing him of misleading the president,” the Times reported. “She made the case that Mr. Burgum had promoted a self-serving cover story to conceal his own missteps.”Curiously, Pirro’s former colleagues at Fox seem to be avoiding taking sides in the fracas. The network’s coverage is noticeably muted, with her former “opinion side” stablemates in particular ignoring it (or in the case of Laura Ingraham, mentioning it in passing only to mock unnamed commentators for “obsessing about things like Trump’s Reflecting Pool drama”).Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

3 days ago
'Tariffs Have Been Incredible!' Says Deluded Trump As Refunds Reach $100 Billion

'Tariffs Have Been Incredible!' Says Deluded Trump As Refunds Reach $100 Billion

President Donald Trump proclaimed that his failed tariff policies were an “incredible” success on Tuesday—the same day that his administration admitted that it had to pay back billions in illegally collected tariffs.“Tariffs have been incredible. We’ve taken in hundreds of billions of dollars. Supreme Court gave us a little shot, but we’re allowed to do it in a different manner—they said that,” Trump told Fox News. “But we are anyway, regardless if we have the law.”In a Tuesday filing with the U.S. Court of International Trade, the administration quietly admitted that it had refunded roughly 100 billion of the 166 billion that it brought in from tariffs under the policy instituted last year.Trump issued those tariffs on his highly touted “Liberation Day” last April using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. But in February, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump had overstepped his presidential powers and violated federal law. The administration was then ordered to pay back all of the tariffs that had been collected.But while the companies will be paid back, it remains unclear whether consumers—who saw increased prices to offset Trump’s tariffs—will ever receive any financial compensation.Since Trump began imposing tariffs, the public has made clear that it opposes them.While Trump has consistently claimed that tariffs are paid by other countries, they are actually passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. This has contributed to a poor economy, made worse by gas price hikes thanks to Trump’s war in Iran. Data for November and December is preliminary. All data is seasonally adjusted.Chart by Andrew Mangan/Created with Datawrapper Trump has carved out exceptions for some goods, but instead of being tied to consumer concerns, they’re for industries that bankrolled his campaigns or gave him personal gift.Republicans are currently financing campaign ads that attempt to paint Democrats as soft on China due to their opposition to Trump’s tariffs. But with data like a March survey from Harris Poll—where 72 of respondents agreed that tariffs have hurt the economy—this rhetoric seems more about stroking Trump’s ego than a potent political attack.So, sure, Trump’s tariffs have been “incredible” for the economy—an incredible burden.Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

3 days ago
How Trumpworld Turned Tates' Rape Propaganda Into A Business Model

How Trumpworld Turned Tates' Rape Propaganda Into A Business Model

Now that the Brits have charged Andrew and Tristan Tate and their long criminal history is out in the open and undeniable, Trumpworld wants to slither away from its old pals. But it can’t hide those long-standing ties to the pimp-pornographer rape cheerleaders for very long. The brothers are integral to the larger Trump Predators’ Ball: No White House in American history has been so packed with, or allied with, men accused of domestic violence, roofie rape, infidelity and pedophile protection.For years, the Trump team has cynically nurtured and profited from its connection to the Tates – to the detriment of American women’s health and safety, and with quantifiable political and economic gain.As we wrote last week, Barron Trump could and should be subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee. He is widely credited as the link that brought the Tates and their blinkered, insecure younger male followers into Trump’s orbit. Men under 30 swung toward Trump by 15 to 20 percentage points in 2024.But Barron is hardly the only Trumpworld character with Tate ties who should be hauled in. And the family’s relationship with them isn’t just political. Don Jr. – back in his weak-chinned, pre-beard days – first invited Andrew Tate to Mar-a-Lago in 2017. As Tate has described it, the bromance started online and ended up with him inside Trump Tower for four hours, meeting Big Daddy himself.“I followed [Don Jr.]. He followed me back. I DM’d him and said, ‘You guys are literally the heroes of the West.’”Tate soon began tweeting support for Trump, with his signature brand of enthusiastic profanity (the n-word).Now remember, at that point, Andrew Tate was already promoting sex trafficking online and teaching young men how to do it. He appeared on livestreams bragging about emotionally manipulating vulnerable women into sex work (much like his predecessor Epstein) and beating them to keep them in line. He was running a super creepy subscription-only “War Room” that would be exposed as a cultish sex-trafficking op.But “creator” Andrew Tate was going to be useful for far more than just fluffing the bros. He would soon be making the Trump family and its allies money.The Tate-Trumpworld connection lives inside a parallel economy that builds an audience and enriches itself – literally – off a sewer of misogynistic propaganda and trafficked women.Why would Don Jr. and the self-described “patriotic capitalists” behind 1789 Capital (including Chris Buskirk and billionaire spawn Rebekah Mercer) want rape-promoting dirtbags like the Tates in their investment portfolios?One reason, of course, is political. The Trump 2024 strategy was to juice and inflame male resentment over MeToo and DEI, redirecting their grievances (that should have been aimed at the financialized titans laughing at them all the way to the bank) toward women.In an interview with Vanity Fair last week, Tate lawyer Joseph McBride – whose ignominious client list includes NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere, Alex Bruesewitz, and a pigpen of J6 rioters – warned that “if Trump doesn’t support him, and if the next people who are going to be running for office potentially are just like, ‘Yeah, down the river he goes,’ that young cohort of people will break with the Republican Party in the next election.”But the other reason – perhaps the more important one in the long run – is cash.By 2022, Meta had banned Tate, YouTube had removed him, and TikTok was suppressing him and related content. That left millions of Tate followers with nowhere to go. Trumpworld didn’t simply hand him a microphone. It built an economy around the audience he brought with him.Junior was an early investor in the right wing media platform Rumble (like Peter Thiel and JD Vance, who had invested in 2021). He soon banked himself a 7 million multi-year contract to platform his “Triggered” podcast. In late summer 2022 (right before now-Commerce Secretary and Trump pal Howard Lutnick took it public), Rumble reportedly gave the Tates a 6 million contract (Andrew claims it was 9 million) to produce five days a week of programming after they had been deplatformed almost everywhere else.What influencer could possibly be worth that kind of money? Even Tucker Carlson, freshly booted out of Fox in 2023, couldn’t resist flying to Romania for a two-and-a-half hour interview (in a previous shorter interview on Fox, he had allowed Tate to get away with lying that he had not been criminally charged). The show was Carlson’s first post-Fox interview and has reportedly been viewed 110 million times.To put that in venture-capital terms: Tate isn’t just content – he is a customer acquisition channel.The Tates delivered millions of highly engaged viewers to Rumble after being banned or restricted on mainstream platforms. Rumble monetizes through ads, branded campaigns, “premium” subscriptions and livestream revenue, all areas where the Tates generated value. Even just a small percentage of Tate followers creating Rumble accounts and subscribing to Premium would have been lucrative.Former Bank of America banker Omeed Malik invested alongside Don Jr. in Rumble before forming 1789 Capital, a fund explicitly created to support businesses in the “anti-woke economy.” Its founders – people from the Trump political donor network – see strategic value in platforms like Rumble, Truth Social and PublicSquare as distribution networks for politically useful dirtballs like the Tates.Malik – surprise! – has had his own problems with women. An allegation of workplace harassment (which he denied) is probably the defining point of both his financial and political career.Of course, 1789 Capital has also invested big money in Tate ecosystem allies, including, a few months after his big Tate interview, Carlson’s digital media company, Last Country, Inc. The financiers also invested in Happy Dad hard seltzer, the principal consumer brand of Tate ecosystem node and Nelk Boys founder Kyle Forgeard. Forgeard is another social media meathead with ultrawhite veneers and a key cross-promoter of the Tates. He and other performative Neanderthals endlessly fluff one another through livestreams, podcasts, and exclusive clubbing at places like Executive Branch in Georgetown.Besides the Tates, the crew includes people such as Alex Bruesewitz (the media strategist behind Trump’s most racist and offensive Truth Social memes), the Full Send Podcast, and Justin Waller, a Deep South version of the Tates sometimes called their “third brother,” who is also credited with connecting Andrew to Barron Trump.Beyond Junior’s investment, Trump Media purchases cloud, video, advertising and infrastructure services from Rumble in a “wide-ranging” technology partnership.The Trump family benefits in other ways too. Andrew Tate has promoted and traded their World Liberty Financial token. He steered millions of his gullible crypto-obsessed followers toward the Trump crypto business, even though he himself lost around 67,500 while shilling for it. Later reporting calculated that his overall crypto losses were close to 1 million, much of it tied to the WLFI token.But whether Tate made or lost money is beside the point. He repeatedly directed his millions of followers toward a Trump-family financial product.Another point of affinity between Trumpists and the Tates is a sense of victimhood and shared scorn for legal norms. Trump’s own felonious history needs no recounting here, but even Chris Buskirk, aforementioned 1789 founder, has a sketchy record. According to Reuters, court records show that “between 2011 and 2015, Buskirk and his wife were sued at least 11 times over unpaid debts – by business partners, debt collection companies, their dry cleaner, and others.”Do the real victims in this sick game – American women – have any recourse? A functioning civil society would offer some route to legal retribution. Impunity for a similar large-scale propaganda movement like the Tates’ promoting violence against Black people or Jews in this country would be unthinkable.Alas, any lawsuit would be unlikely to survive a motion to dismiss, thanks largely to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the so far ironclad shield protecting everyone from Nazi-promoting Musk to rape-promoting bros from liability for content posted by “third-party users.” When Andrew Tate uploads misogynistic or violent content, Rumble can simply claim to be the platform not the speaker.But Rumble doesn’t merely host the Tates. It employs them. Investors like Don Jr. profit from that relationship. Rumble recruited Tate, negotiated a multimillion-dollar contract, paid him to produce specified amounts of content, and promoted him as a featured creator. A plaintiff could reasonably argue that Rumble wasn’t merely carrying Tate’s speech; it was financing, commissioning, marketing and amplifying it as part of its business strategy.Bottom line, although this is hardly news: There is no point too low on the anti-social behavior scale for the Trumps or their Trumpworld strategists and donors.Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcherReprinted with permission from American Freakshow

3 days ago
Trump's Truth Social Insider Scheme Is A $24 Billion Tax On Your 401(k)

Trump's Truth Social Insider Scheme Is A $24 Billion Tax On Your 401(k)

You may not have heard about this latest tax from Trump. That could be because he’s not going through Congress to get it. Also, this scam could get buried in the middle of his many other grifting schemes. Trump is starting a new special subscription service to his social media platform, Truth Social, where big investors will pay 100,000 a month for advance access to Trump posts that can move markets.This means that the next time Trump posts that he will blow Iran off the map and sends oil prices soaring, the people who paid Trump’s fee will have the opportunity to buy oil futures before the jump. The same story applies on the way down, as when he posts that a deal with Iran’s leaders is imminent.And the inside information goes well beyond oil prices. He may announce a big military contract with Lockheed or one of his sons’ companies, sending stock prices soaring. Or he could announce a big DEI investigation of Disney or some other Hollywood entertainment company, causing their stock to plummet.There are an infinite number of ways that Trump Truth Social announcements can move markets. This subscription service allows rich investors around the country to get in on the action.If it’s not clear how Trump’s scheme amounts to a tax on your 401(k), think more carefully. If Trump’s clients get the jump on a big rise in oil prices, that means that they get the money, not you. This is true even if, like the vast majority of small investors, you are not actively managing your funds.The person who is managing whatever fund(s) you hold will pay the higher price for oil or stock or anything else the funds might buy because Trump’s accomplices got their first. The same applies on the way down. The fund will get less money because the Trump gang already sold the stock before your fund manager had the chance to do so.At this point, we can’t know how much money is involved because we don’t know how many big investors are prepared to sign up for what is blatantly an insider trading scheme. But we can do some speculation.First, we need to calculate how much money an investor would expect to make from a service where they are paying 1.2 million a year. Since this scheme would likely lead to civil and possibly criminal charges if the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or Justice Department ever gets taken over by honest people, it seems a very big payoff would be required.Any person paying Trump for insider information would need to expect substantial legal bills, and also the possibility of being forced to leave the country or face prison time. (Ask Martha Stewart.) Let’s say the payoff has to be at least 20 to 1, which would mean they would need to earn 24 million a year for their Trump Truth Social subscription to make sense.Then we need to speculate on how many people are prepared to sign up for Trump’s racket. We know Wall Street is a cesspool, but this level of open corruption is probably too sleazy even for most of the big traders. Still, there could be a 1,000 Trump-loving sewer dwellers who don’t mind being open about their thefts.In that case, the Trump insiders would be siphoning off 24 billion a year from other investors in the market. That is not huge in the context of a 7.5 trillion budget, but it is larger than many things we have big fights over.For example, the AIDS program for Africa, which saved tens of millions of lives, and Elon Musk eagerly fed into the wood chopper, cost 6 billion a year. That’s roughly a fourth of Trump’s 401(k) tax. The cost of extending the subsidies in the ACA exchanges, which Trump and the Republicans ended, would have been a bit higher at 27 billion a year.So, 401(k) holders and other small investors are paying a considerable chunk of money through this “tax” to Trump and his enrolled insiders. As I said, this tax is not going to Congress for approval, but we can assume that all the Republicans in Congress approve of it. If not, Trump would be impeached for such a blatantly illegal scheme, but we know the Republican motto: “if Trump does, it’s good.”Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

3 days ago
Conservative National Review Urges Trump Impeachment Over Latest Grift

Conservative National Review Urges Trump Impeachment Over Latest Grift

On Wednesday, the National Review – the preeminent conservative magazine since 1955 — called it: President Donald Trump has done the “impeachable.”“There is no plausible defense of Trump's TruthSocial scheme,” declared National Review Senior Editor Charles Cooke. “It is flagrantly corrupt. It is impeachable. Congress should intervene. (It won't, I know.)” He posted this assertion over his latest article, entitled “Truth Social’s Early-Access Scheme Is Indefensible.”As he explains, over the weekend, the Trump Media Technology Group announced the creation of a “real-time feed on the Truth Social website that will give paying institutions early access to certain high-profile posts for between 60,000 and 100,000 per month.” Cooke doesn’t hold back with his assessment of the scheme, writing, “There is no credible defense of this. The only reason that anyone would want priority access to Truth Social is to gain priority access to President Trump’s pronouncements on that platform. And the only reason that anyone would want priority access to President Trump’s pronouncements on that platform is to act on them for pecuniary gain.”As Cooke elaborates, “Trump often uses Truth Social as the primary forum for his announcements — announcements that include changes to personnel, the imposition or rescission of tariffs, key foreign policy decisions, and more. These announcements are extremely useful to financial institutions, and, in the age of high-speed trading, the faster those financial institutions can obtain them, the more money those financial institutions can make. Facilitating this access is not a byproduct of Truth Social’s API offering; it is its core — perhaps its sole — purpose. Simply put: President Trump is charging Americans a fee — a fee that, in part, goes into his family’s pockets — for the privilege of receiving news about his official actions earlier than those who do not pay.”According to Cooke, it is “obvious how unequivocally corrupt this setup is. Technically speaking, the beneficiaries will not gain the information they seek directly from Trump himself, but indirectly, via an API (Application Programming Interface) whose output will be processed by a bunch of semi-autonomous servers and acted upon according to a set of predetermined parameters. But the results will be the same as if Trump had personally picked up the phone.”He continues, “Good traders do not react to the news on the fly; they have plans of action, which are to be implemented if a war starts or ends, if taxes are raised or cut, if the Federal Reserve’s next chairman is expected to be hawkish, dovish, or somewhere in between, and so on. If, instead of using Truth Social as the middleman, President Trump announced that, for a hefty annual charge, he would call a select group of brokers at the stock exchange to inform them of his important decisions, and thereby give them a head start in executing their plans, we would call that what it is: corruption. Why not here?”Here Cooke concludes in rare agreement with Democratic lawmakers, writing, “Senators Warren and Schiff have described Trump’s plan as ‘an outrageous abuse of the President’s office for his personal benefit that undermines everyday investors and the integrity of our markets, while enriching Wall Street and other wealthy insiders.’ They are correct It is certainly a grave offense against honesty, transparency, and good government. If it has any self-respect, Congress will respond to the president’s brazen provocation by passing a law that renders his model flatly illegal. And, if that fails to persuade him, it will impeach and remove him from office, the better to drain the swamp.”Reprinted with permission from Truth Social

3 days ago
Minnesota Republicans Seeking To Squash Trump Pick Lindell's Candidacy

Minnesota Republicans Seeking To Squash Trump Pick Lindell's Candidacy

Poor, poor Minnesota Republicans. All they want to do is install a hardliner MAGA chud like their endorsed candidate for governor, Kendall Qualls, atop a blue state that has vexed President Donald Trump mightily. But Trump himself created the problem they now face, and that problem is named Mike Lindell. Trump endorsed the hapless pillow salesman/world champion election denier for the governor gig, and Lindell has proved nothing but trouble. Hilarious trouble.Now, with Minnesota’s primary only one week out and Lindell leading in multiple polls, the state GOP has to do something. In a hilarious bit of political theater, they are now begging the Democratic Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, whom they loathe, to rescue them from Lindell.The state GOP chair wrote to Simon late last month to “request urgent guidance from your office regarding the constitutional residency standard applicable to candidates for Governor.”Wait, is this about how Lindell seems to have been registered to vote in Texas, and not registered in Minnesota, up until just a few weeks ago? Nope! This is a different Lindell problem. Per the chair, “serious questions” have been raised about Lindell’s residence eligibility and the GOP is very concerned about “the need to ensure that the standard applied is clear, uniform, and consistent with the text of the Minnesota Constitution.”LOL, come on. You know full well that if Lindell were not a walking chaos machine and stood an actual chance of winning if he got the GOP nod, the state Republicans would be howling with rage if anyone besmirched the honor of Lindell and where Lindell insists he lives. Instead, they’re performatively fretting, informing Simon that “the Lindell Campaign appears to rely on a constitutional provision that does not exist rather than dispute whether they meet the actual standard in the Minnesota Constitution.A constitutional provision that does not exist. Whew. We’re gonna have to work up to that. Let’s start where the state GOP starts instead.Minnesota’s residency requirement in the affidavit for candidacy for governor reads “I will be at least 25 years old on the first Monday of the next January and a resident of Minnesota for not less than one year on Election day.”Much as it pains us to agree with Minnesota Republicans, that seems pretty straightforward: Lindell would have to be a resident of Minnesota for not less than one year come Election Day, November 3, 2026.But Lindell’s lt. governor running mate, Phillip Parrish, has advanced a novel reading of this, saying that Lindell’s fine and only needs to have been a resident one year before the date he takes office, because of the actual text of the Minnesota Constitution, Article V, Section 3, which Parrish quotes:The governor and lieutenant governor shall be elected for a term of four years. They shall be elected on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November in the year 1958 and every four years thereafter. They shall be elected by the qualified electors of the state. To be eligible for the office of governor or lieutenant governor a person must have attained the age of 25 years and, at the time of taking office, must have been a resident of Minnesota for one year.Article V, Section 3 of the Minnesota Constitution is actually about the powers and duties of the governor and says nothing about residency requirements at all, but maybe Parrish just got his cite wrong? Urm, nope. Article V, Section 2 is about qualifications, but doesn’t say what Parrish says it does. Rather, it says this: The term of office for the governor and lieutenant governor is four years and until a successor is chosen and qualified. Each shall have attained the age of 25 years and, shall have been a bona fide resident of the state for one year next preceding his election, and shall be a citizen of the United States.Setting aside the fact that it seems like kind of a big problem that your running mate is just making up constitutional provisions, what’s the big deal about whether Lindell is required to have lived in the state for one year before Election Day in November 2026 versus one year before when he would assume office in January 2027? And you see, the state GOP is doing this for everyone, out of the goodness of their heart, stating: The Republican Party of Minnesota anticipates that the D.F.L. Party will file a complaint before the Minnesota Supreme Court challenging Mike Lindell’s residency and eligibility to hold office. The Republican Party of Minnesota does not want Minnesotans who vote for any candidate for Governor to find, after the fact, that their vote was effectively wasted because the candidate did not meet a constitutional qualification that could and should have been clarified in advance.Translation: Dear Democratic Secretary of State, please, please, please save us from ourselves and our cult leader whom we won’t stand up to and get rid of this walking nightmare on a residency technicality so we don’t have to openly defy Trump. Of course, Lindell has far more problems than this: He was uncertain whether he was registered to vote in Minnesota. He’s drowning in millions in court judgments. He’s facing a credible campaign finance complaint. He’s a real winner all around.Trump sure can pick 'em.Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

4 days ago