Let me walk you through both.

Everything I’m about to tell you comes from CNN’s own reporting, or from Trump’s own federal financial disclosures, or the president’s own posts. You can check every word of it yourself.

Story One

On April 15, 2025, Donald Trump went on Truth Social to share what he called “big and exciting news.” NVIDIA, the chip company, was going to build AI supercomputers here in the United States, and the president promised his followers that all necessary permits would be, in his words, “expedited and quickly delivered.” Nine million people followed that account. What none of them knew when they read that post was that just days earlier, Trump had purchased between $200,000 and $500,000 of Nvidia’s stock.

Now, if that were a one-time thing, you might call it a coincidence. But it is not a one-time thing.

CNN did something clever. They took the president’s 2025 financial disclosure, which lists more than 21,000 financial transactions over the course of a single year, and they compared that list of trades against a database of everything Trump posted on Truth Social. They used artificial intelligence to flag the overlaps, and then reporters went back and manually reviewed hundreds of those posts by hand to confirm each one. We took a look at the president’s stock trades and all of his posts on Truth Social from last year. We found dozens of examples where the president’s money managers would purchase stock for him, and then within seven days, the president would post a complimentary Truth Social message about the company, its executives, or its products. Sometimes he even announced government actions or policy changes that could benefit these companies.

Here’s what they found: at least 44 stock purchases across 21 different companies, each one made within a week before Trump posted something flattering about that company, its executives, or its products. Let me give you the names, because these are not small companies: Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, Boeing, Eli Lilly, GE Aerospace, American Eagle, Dell.

Now let’s talk about Dell for a second, because the Dell example is something else.

On February 10th, according to his own disclosures, Trump bought between $1 million and $5 million of Dell stock. Just over a week later, standing on a stage in Georgia, the President of the United States told a crowd of Americans to go out and buy a Dell computer. And then in late May, Dell was awarded a five-year Pentagon contract worth nearly $10 billion.

Buy the stock, promote the company from the most powerful bully pulpit on Earth, then point federal contracts and federal policy at that same company—that’s the pattern.

And with Tesla, it’s the same story. Trump bought Tesla stock in March of 2025, and days later posted videos of himself admiring Tesla vehicles parked at the White House, talking up the company’s American production.

Now, the White House, of course, has a response, and I want to give it to you fairly, because I want you to trust that I’m not hiding anything.

The Trump Organization says the president does not direct his own trades. They say his assets are managed by an independent third party, that he and his family get no advance notice of the trades and provide no input, and they point out correctly that most of his 21,000 trades were not followed by any related posts.

So let me tell you why that defense does not hold up. First, when the President of the United States is buying and selling individual stocks in the tens of thousands, then using his official platform to move those very companies, no American should have to sit home and wonder whether a presidential decision was made for the public good or for the president’s own portfolio.

That doubt—that erosion of trust—is itself the damage.

Second—and this is the part that ties it all together—Trump has said he supports banning members of Congress from trading stocks: “Let’s also ensure that members of Congress cannot corruptly profit from using insider information. Pass the Stop Insider Trading Act without delay.” I agree with him on that. I don’t trade individual stocks, and I’ve long supported that ban. But when a bipartisan bill came forward last year—one that would ban stock trading for Congress and the president—Trump opposed extending that ban to himself and the executive branch. When a Republican senator joined Democrats to support it, Trump attacked him on Truth Social.

So the president’s position is simple: the rules should apply to everyone except the president. That’s not a principle; that’s a loophole that he’s fighting to keep open for himself.

Story Two

Trump owns roughly 41% of Trump Media, the company that owns Truth Social. He is by far its largest shareholder, and Truth Social has become the place where this president announces policy. His posts on tariffs, on oil, and on the war between the U.S. and Iran move global markets in a matter of seconds. That’s not my characterization—the company itself says it proudly.

So here’s what they announced: starting August 1st, Trump Media will sell Wall Street firms the fastest possible access to those posts. They’re calling it “Truth API.” It delivers posts from the top 10 accounts on the platform, including the president’s, to paying customers in milliseconds. It’s built specifically, in the company’s own words, “for the firms most impacted by the cost of a delay in information.” That means high-frequency trading firms—the ones that buy and sell in fractions of a second.

Their own interim CEO said the quiet part out loud. His statement was—and I’m quoting him directly: “Markets already move on Truth Social posts.” He described it as a way to “monetize the platform’s most market-moving truths.”

Let’s be clear: the reason this product has any value at all is that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to make announcements that move billions of dollars. The company selling early access to those announcements is one that Trump owns nearly half of. So the more the president moves the markets, the more valuable this product becomes, and the more the money flows back to a business he controls. This is a machine for converting the market-moving power of the presidency into private profit.

Ordinary Americans—the retiree with a 401(k), the family with a modest brokerage account—they will always be a step behind. The hedge funds who can pay for the millisecond head start will be first, and the president personally benefits from selling them that head start. The presidency is not a subscription service; public office is not a product to be sold to the highest bidder on Wall Street.

Now let me bring these two stories together, because they’re really the same story.

In the first, the president uses his official platform to move companies he’s personally invested in. In the second, he sells Wall Street the fastest access to that very platform. One is Trump profiting from what he posts; the other is Trump profiting from selling access to what he posts. Both run through Truth Social. Both convert public power into private gain.

There’s a law on the books called the STOCK Act. It affirms that federal officials owe a duty of trust to the American people and that they may not use non-public information or the power of their position for private financial benefit. The whole spirit of that law is that public office is a public trust, not a personal business opportunity.

We must stop this—whether through legislation in Congress that finally bans presidential stock trading once and for all, through the courts enforcing the laws already on the books, or through both at once. That’s why I helped launch the End Corruption Caucus alongside Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Congressman Jason Crow, because this cannot be a partisan question. Every American, whatever party, should want a president whose decisions are made for the country and not for his portfolio.

Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.

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Everything I’m about to tell you comes from documented sources—from the president’s own federal financial disclosure filed with the Office of Government Ethics, from reporting by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

You can check every number yourself.

Let’s start with the $2 million payment.

Last year, President Trump’s holding company received $2 million from a South Korean company called Base Group. Base Group is the parent of an aluminum manufacturer called Korea Aluminium. Now, here’s why that matters: at the very same time, Korea Aluminium was fighting a trade case before Donald Trump’s own Commerce Department.

The Commerce Department had accused the company of dodging U.S. tariffs by routing Chinese-made aluminum through South Korea and then shipping it here. And the Commerce Department issued a preliminary finding that would slap Korea Aluminium’s exports with a tax of about 105%—nearly four times the previous rate.

That kind of penalty can destroy a company’s access to the American market.

So, put the timeline together.

A foreign company has a case pending before the president’s administration. That case could cost them enormously. And during that same window, the investor behind that company pays the president $2 million.

And how was that $2 million described on the official disclosure form? It was listed as a “non-refundable development fee tied to a letter of intent.”

That’s it.

No further explanation.

Both the Trump Organization and Base Group say the money relates to a golf course project in South Korea that has not been announced and does not yet exist.

I want to be fair and precise here. There’s no signed public document that says this payment bought a favorable trade ruling. The Trump side says it’s about a golf course.

Fine. But ask yourself the common sense question: would that South Korean investor have wired $2 million to a private Trump business if Donald Trump were not the president of the United States, sitting atop the very department deciding his company’s fate?

The value of access to this president is the entire story.

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This is exactly the kind of arrangement that our ethics laws exist to prevent. A president is supposed to serve the public interest, not collect private checks from parties who have business before his own government.

Here’s the part you need to understand: this is not one bad payment. This is the business model.

When the president’s 2025 financial disclosure was released last month, it revealed that he brought in at least $2.2 billion from his various businesses in a single year. That’s a haul with no precedent in the history of the American presidency, and a huge share of that money came from foreign sources—from exactly the kind of governments and investors this president negotiates with, regulates, and makes national security decisions about.

Let me give you the specifics, because the specifics are what make this irrefutable.

The Wall Street Journal reported that businesses tied to Trump received roughly $300 million from Middle Eastern entities in 2025 alone. His disclosure showed about $13 million in fees from an 80-story tower The Trump Organization is building in Dubai, $10 million from a licensing deal in Abu Dhabi, $9.2 million from a deal in Saudi Arabia where he has luxury projects under construction, $8.5 million in licensing income from four projects in India, $5.25 million from a coming golf club in Doha, Qatar, $5 million from a Trump Tower project in Bucharest, Romania, and $5 million from a resort.

And then there is crypto, which is its own universe.

Trump made roughly $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses last year, and foreign money runs straight through it. An investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial. And then four months later, the UAE struck a deal with the Trump administration—over the objection of some of the national security officials—to export advanced American AI chips.

Think about the sequence. A foreign government’s money flows into the president’s private company, and then that same foreign government gets something valuable out of the president’s administration over the objection of his own national security experts.

So, let’s name the through-line, because these are not separate scandals. They are one scandal. A South Korean firm with a trade case pays $2 million to Trump’s company. A UAE-linked fund buys into Trump’s crypto business and then wins a chip export deal. Governments across the Middle East send hundreds of millions toward Trump-branded projects while those same governments seek favors, weapons, and diplomatic cover from his White House.

In every single case, the pattern is identical. Foreign money goes in one door, into the president’s personal pocket, and decisions that affect those same foreign interests come out another door, from the president’s government.

Unlike every modern president before him, Donald Trump refused to place his businesses in a blind trust. A blind trust is the mechanism that has protected the public for decades. It exists precisely so that a president cannot know who’s paying him and cannot tailor his decisions to reward them. Trump threw that protection away. He kept his businesses. He kept the ability to see exactly who’s writing the checks.

And the White House’s answer to all this is one sentence. They say the president and his family “have never engaged and will never engage in conflicts of interest.”

But you cannot receive $2 billion from industries you regulate and governments you negotiate with while refusing the blind trust that would prevent it, and then simply declare that no conflict exists.

That is not a defense; that’s a description of the problem.

The Constitution itself speaks to this. The Foreign Emoluments Clause was written by the Founders for one specific fear: that a person holding federal office could be bought quietly by foreign money. They had just fought a war to be free of foreign kings. The last thing they wanted was American officials on a foreign payroll. What we are watching now is the very thing that that clause was designed to forbid, happening in the open, disclosed on a government form, and defended as if it were normal. It is not normal, and it must not be allowed to become normal.

So what do we do? We must stop this, whether through legislation in Congress that finally bars a president from taking payments from foreign entities.

That’s why I helped launch the End Corruption Caucus alongside Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Congressman Jason Crow. Because whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent, you should be able to trust that when your president makes a decision about a foreign country, he’s thinking about your security and your interests, not about who just wired money into his business.

A $2 million payment from a company begging for mercy from his Commerce Department? That’s where we started. And it turns out it’s just one drop in a $2 billion bucket.

Either we’ll end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.

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So let me start with a single deal, and then I’m going to show you it’s not one deal at all—it’s actually 14.

Begin with a company called USA Rare Earth.

The federal government committed up to $1.6 billion to it through Commerce Department loans and federal incentives in exchange for a government stake. I want to be fair about that upfront. But here’s the issue: the private fundraising attached to that U.S. deal was led by a firm called Cantor Fitzgerald.

And Cantor Fitzgerald was run for more than 30 years by a man that you know named Howard Lutnick. Howard Lutnick, of course, is now Trump’s Secretary of Commerce—the very department steering this money.

Lutnick handed his old firm to one of his sons, Brandon Lutnick, who’s the chairman, and the other sons are involved as well. So let’s piece this together for a second: you have the Commerce Secretary that shapes a multi-billion dollar government deal, and the firm that his own family owns collects a role and fee.

Now look, if that were the whole story, it would be bad enough. But it’s not the whole story.

Let’s move to Kazakhstan, of all places. Late September of last year, Howard Lutnick sits down with the President of Kazakhstan at the St. Regis Hotel in New York.

President Trump joins by phone, and according to the executive running the project, Trump personally handled the final negotiation.

The prize is one of the largest untapped tungsten deposits on Earth. Tungsten hardens the tip of a missile. It matters.

And here’s the sequence—and what I really think is important here is the calendar.

On October 31, investors working through a firm called Dominari Securities—which I might add is housed inside Trump Tower and partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump—they took a 20% stake. So the President’s sons bought in six days before their father’s administration took office. Six days after, the President personally closed the deal. The President helped raise the money. And on that same Kazakh deal, you guessed it: Cantor Fitzgerald, the Lutnick sons’ firm.

It raised $210 million in new capital for one of the lead investors—the kind of work that nets a firm millions in fees.

On this one deal, you have both families: the President’s sons and the Lutnick sons collecting, and the two fathers negotiating the government’s end of it. It’s outrageous.

So that’s two deals. Deal number three, this one we’ve talked about before: a North Carolina company called Vulcan Elements, a rare earth magnet startup. It goes back to August of last year, when a venture fund called 1789 Capital took a stake in Vulcan. Donald Trump Jr. is a partner at 1789 Capital. And three months later, the Pentagon committed a huge $620 million loan to Vulcan. It’s one of the largest in the history of the Pentagon office that made it. And Vulcan’s valuation overnight went from around $200 million to nearly $2 billion—tenfold, underwritten by your tax dollars.

And according to ProPublica, the loan was pushed at the request of a White House advisor named Peter Navarro, going around the normal process.

Peter Navarro and Don Jr. are close.

In fact, on Don Jr.’s own streaming show, they called each other “brother.”

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, the one that got the record-breaking loan was the one tied to the President’s son.

So, three deals, the same problem every single time.

You have a government that makes decisions creating the value, and then the people who made the decision, or their sons, or the family’s firms are standing there to collect.

The New York Times went through all the federal filings and they found that the Trump family, or Cantor Fitzgerald, or both, have financial ties to at least 14 companies actively working with the federal government on critical minerals deals.

Those companies have received or are being considered for more than $8.9 BILLION in federal support. Every one of them tied to the President’s family or Howard Lutnick’s family.

So you might be asking: where in the hell are Republicans in Congress? And the answer has two names: Mike Johnson and John Thune.

Between them, Johnson and Thune control every committee in Congress.

They control every gavel.

They have the full power to do something about this—subpoena power to put all 14 of these deals under scrutiny, to pull the records, to have the disclosure timelines out there right next to the federal decisions.

Settle all this in the daylight.

That power is sitting in their hands right now, but they refuse to use it. Not because there’s no evidence—it’s there in black and white in The New York Times, ProPublica, others like The Wall Street Journal, and federal filings. These Republicans refuse because the trail leads to their own President, and they’ve decided that their loyalty to him outranks their duty to the rest of us.

Let me say this as plainly as I know: cowardice, complete and total cowardice.

Mike Johnson and John Thune took an oath to the Constitution, not to Donald Trump. Oversight of the executive branch is not a favor that Congress does when it’s convenient—it is the job. It’s the entire reason the branch exists. In the face of the most obvious self-enrichment scheme that we’ve seen in our lifetimes, Johnson and Thune have gone silent and are hiding under their desks.

So look, when the corruption is this brazen, and the people with the power to stop it choose to look away—or even worse, maybe some are even enabling it—they become part of it. It’s not neutral. Every day they refuse to act, they are protecting it. And we cannot allow that to happen any longer. Every one of these 14 deals deserves a full congressional investigation.

The White House communications team claimS the only interest guiding these decisions is the best interest of the American people. If that’s the case, then open the book. Show us. Because right now, the American people funded $8.9 billion in these deals, and they’re being asked to simply trust that the President, Lutnick, and their kids, are just coincidentally involved 14 times.

I’m not buying it. And I imagine many of you are not buying it either.

We have a right to know.

I’m Mike Levin, and as always: either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.

Qatar handed Donald Trump a $400 million luxury jet. He toured it, fell in love, and decided it was going to be his new Air Force One.

Then he demanded the new Qatar Force One be ready for America’s 250th birthday, no matter the cost.

The Founders saw this danger coming.

That’s why they wrote the Foreign Emoluments Clause into the Constitution. A president is not supposed to accept lavish gifts from a foreign government without Congress’s consent. The entire purpose is to prevent foreign governments from gaining influence over the President of the United States.

We were already paying for two brand-new Air Force One jets. That Boeing program has ballooned to roughly $5.7 billion and is years behind schedule. Instead of waiting, taxpayers spent about another $400 million retrofitting Qatar’s aircraft, with hundreds of millions more for training, support aircraft, and logistics. Even worse, the Pentagon financed much of that work through classified accounts, making it far harder for Congressional appropriators like me to follow the money and exercise the oversight the Constitution requires.

Let’s be clear about ownership. Qatar supplied the plane. The American people paid hundreds of millions to rebuild it. It belongs to the American people, not Donald Trump.

And according to the administration’s own plan, after Trump leaves office, Qatar Force One is supposed to be transferred to his presidential library. That means taxpayers could spend hundreds of millions upgrading a plane from a foreign government only for it to end up under the control of Trump’s library. If that doesn’t demand congressional scrutiny, what does?

The rush to put it into service also came at a price. The aircraft entered service without some defensive systems presidential aircraft have relied on for decades, then had to be pulled back out of service for additional upgrades that should have been completed before it ever carried the President.

The American people deserve a full public accounting of every dollar spent on this aircraft.

No more hiding costs in classified budgets.

No more stonewalling Congress.

No more treating taxpayer dollars like a personal slush fund.

Can you imagine how Republicans would have reacted if Obama had done this?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/us/politics/trump-air-force-one-security.html?unlocked_article_code=1.01A.vjBx.hWl-RPgyRLeE&smid=nytcore-ios-share

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Residential electricity prices are up nationwide since last fall. More than a dozen states have seen double-digit increases. Trump’s policies are projected to cost households more than half a trillion dollars through 2040.

How did this happen?

The country is in an electricity crunch driven by AI and data centers. Demand is surging. The obvious response is to add new supply as quickly and affordably as possible. When demand rises faster than supply, prices follow.

Instead, Trump has made it harder to build much of the new generation coming online, while Republicans in Congress rolled back major clean energy tax incentives. 

Trump’s Energy Secretary called renewable energy “low value.” Yet in the first quarter of this year, solar and battery storage accounted for roughly 91% of new generating capacity added to the grid. Those technologies are doing much of the work to meet growing demand. Building less of them while demand keeps rising puts additional upward pressure on prices.

Meanwhile, the administration committed roughly $700 million to extend the lives of aging coal plants that many utilities had already planned to retire because they were no longer economical to operate.

I think if the goal were truly to help families in coal country, the priorities would look very different. Legislation signed by the same president is projected to reduce health care and nutrition assistance for many of the same communities. How about investing that money in health care, basic services, and job training instead?

Developers are now racing to finish renewable energy projects before key tax incentives expire. Many analysts expect new construction to slow after that, even as electricity demand from AI and data centers continues climbing.

In sum, Trump promised to cut your bill in half, and instead he is raising your costs, propping up the most expensive power on the grid, and cutting the safety net out from under the very families he claims to fight for.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/07/climate/trump-electricity-bills-renewables-energy-costs?cid=ios_app

Last week, at the Nixon Presidential Library, the Vice President of the United States stood up and said that if Watergate happened today, it would be a twelve hour news story. He said the idea that it took down a presidency was, in his word, crazy. The crowd applauded.

I want to sit with that for a second, because it is one of the most revealing things anyone in this administration has said out loud. Not because it is offensive, though it is. Because it tells you exactly how they think, and exactly what they are hoping you will forget.

So let me do the thing JD Vance is counting on no one doing. Let me actually tell you what Watergatewas.

In June of 1972, five men broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington. They were there to plant listening devices and photograph documents. They were not random burglars. They were tied directly to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, Richard Nixon’s own reelection operation. One of them had a White House phone number in his address book. That is where this starts. A sitting president’s campaign sent operatives to bug his political opponents.

But the break-in was never really the scandal. The break-in was the crime. The cover up was the presidency.

Because once those men were caught, Nixon did not distance himself. He did the opposite. Within days, he was in the Oval Office working out how to make the investigation disappear. We know this with certainty because Nixon, for reasons that still defy belief, taped himself. There is an audio recording, in his own voice, of the President of the United States ordering his staff to have the CIA tell the FBI to back off the investigation on phony national security grounds. That recording has a name. They call it the smoking gun tape. It is the President personally directing federal agencies to obstruct a criminal investigation into his own campaign.

That is not a gray area. That is obstruction of justice, on tape, in the president’s own voice.

And it kept going. The House Judiciary Committee eventually documented thirty six separate instances of obstruction. Thirty six. This was not one bad decision in a moment of panic. It was a sustained, months long effort to break the law and hide it.

Now here is the part JD Vance really does not want you to think about, because it is the part that makes the comparison to today so dangerous.

Nixon did not stop at covering up one break-in. He turned the machinery of the federal government into a personal weapon. He had the IRS audit his enemies. He kept an actual list of political opponents to be targeted. He authorized burglaries of private citizens, including breaking into the office of a man’s psychiatrist to dig up dirt on him. He used the FBI and the intelligence agencies to surveil people he saw as threats.

Look hard at that list and notice something. Every single item on it is a president using public power to punish private people for political reasons. That is the thing the founders feared most. A leader who treats the government as an extension of himself.

And when the investigation closed in, Nixon did what cornered men do. In October of 1973, he ordered the firing of the special prosecutor who was investigating him. The Attorney General refused and resigned rather than do it. The deputy Attorney General refused and resigned too. Nixon had to go down the chain of command until he found someone willing to carry out the order. That night has a name as well. They call it the Saturday Night Massacre. A president firing the man investigating him, and burning through his own Justice Department to do it.

Think about what it takes for the country to have a name for that night. For most of American history, that was the bottom. That was the thing we pointed to and said, never again.

And then came the tapes. Nixon fought to keep them secret, claiming executive privilege, claiming a president was beyond the reach of a subpoena. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. And in July of 1974, the Court ruled against him. The vote was unanimous. Eight to nothing. Three of the justices who ruled against him were his own appointees. Even the men he put on the bench would not let a president put himself above the law.

Once those tapes came out, it was over. And here is the detail that matters most for our moment. It was not just Democrats who turned. Republican leaders went to the White House and told Nixon he had lost them. The articles of impeachment that came out of the Judiciary Committee passed with 

Republican votes. His own party, his own appointees, his own recorded voice. The system held because people inside it, from both parties, decided that the truth mattered more than the team.

Nixon resigned on August 9th, 1974. He is still the only president in American history to do so.

So when JD Vance stands in Nixon’s own library and calls all of that a twelve hour news story, understand what he is really doing. He is not making a clever observation about the modern news cycle. He is telling you that a president breaking into his opponents’ offices, weaponizing the IRS and the FBI, obstructing justice on tape, and firing the prosecutor investigating him, should be no big deal. A blip. Something you scroll past.

And I want to be fair to him, because in one narrow sense he might be right, and that should terrify you. He is not saying Watergate was not serious. He is betting that today, we would let it slide. He is betting the bar has dropped so far that a scandal that once united Republicans and Democrats, that produced a unanimous Supreme Court, that ended a presidency, would now just get absorbed into the noise and forgotten by dinner.

The question you have to ask is why. Why would a Vice President want you to believe that crimes like these no longer count.

I think the answer is simple. When you work for an administration as corrupt as this one, the only way to look clean is to convince the public that nothing is dirty anymore. If you can get people to shrug at Watergate, you can get them to shrug at anything. Lowering the bar is not a side comment. It is the whole strategy. Make the public numb, make corruption normal, and then there is no scandal left that can touch you.

That is what was happening in that room when the crowd applauded. They were applauding the idea that accountability is quaint. That the rules were for a more naive time. That a president can do what Nixon did and we will all just move on.

I do not accept that. And I do not think you should either.

Because the men and women who held the line in 1974 were not partisans looking for a scalp. They were Republicans and Democrats who reached the same conclusion, that no person, no president, is above the law. That principle did not expire. It is not old fashioned. It is the entire reason this country is a republic and not a kingdom.

Watergate mattered then. It would matter now. And the fact that a sitting Vice President wants you to believe otherwise is not a reason to relax. It is a warning.

History was not kind to the people who tried to cover up Nixon’s crimes. But here is what JD Vance should think hard about. History will be even less kind to Donald Trump, to Vance himself, and to the members of their party who did not just look the other way, but who actively empowered the corruption, who enabled it, who in too many cases got rich off of it.

The people around Nixon at least had the decency, in the end, to walk away. This crowd is doing the opposite. They are building the machine, defending it, profiting from it, and asking you to clap along.

We are not going to forget. And we are not going to look away.

And remember, either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.

I think about my own family when I read those words.

My mom’s parents came to this country from Mexico as children. They built their lives here. They worked, they raised a family, they paid into this country every single day.

My grandma was a lawful permanent resident for her entire life.

My grandpa didn’t become a citizen until he was 50 years old.

And in the middle of all of it, my mom was born in the United States. An American from her first breath. The Supreme Court affirmed in 1898 that a child born here is a citizen no matter where the parents came from or what status they held. And that is what the Court reaffirmed today.

Think about what Trump’s executive order actually asked us to accept.

Under his theory, a child like my mom, born here to parents who were not yet citizens, could have been told she did not fully belong. The order he signed would have created exactly what the Constitution forbids, a permanent underclass of people born in this country and denied the country of their birth.

My grandpa waited 50 years to call himself a citizen of the country he already loved. He did everything this nation asked of him. The idea that his daughter’s place in America could have depended on his immigration status in the year she was born is not just legally wrong. It is fundamentally un-American.

The promise is older than any of us and it does not bend to one man’s politics. If you are born here, you are one of us.

That is the country my family believed in.

That is the country I’ll always defend.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/supreme-court-rejects-trumps-bid-to-curtail-birthright-citizenship-bf386c17?st=CFrDbc

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I launched the End Corruption Caucus with Rep. Jason Crow and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because Americans are tired of self-dealing in politics.

If you believe that public office should be a public service—not a tool for politicians to get rich—don’t look away.

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👉 Comment if youve had enough of Trump’s corruption.

Less than two hours before he was set to sign it into law, Trump canceled the signing ceremony. Why?

Because he wants Congress to first pass a voter suppression bill that his own party admits does not have the votes. So he is holding housing relief hostage for an impossible demand.

The housing bill was a rare bipartisan win, after months of negotiation and both chambers on board. We just passed it in the House, 358 to 32. Republicans and Democrats standing together to finally do something about the cost of a roof over your head.

And Trump walked away from it.

Once again, he torched a victory he could have claimed, all because the spotlight was not pointed where he wanted it.

This is a grown man holding us all hostage to soothe his own ego. While families scrape together rent and watch home prices climb out of reach, the President decided his grievances mattered more than their futures.

He is at war with reality. People deserve a President who shows up to do the work, not one who throws a tantrum when he doesn’t get his way.

We will keep fighting to get this done, with or without him.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/us/politics/trump-housing-bill-voting-restrictions.html?unlocked_article_code=1.slA.MDSN.Mcy5YcjOCPdJ&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Now he is celebrating a framework that does not resolve that program at all.

The nuclear question gets kicked to a future round of talks.

What this agreement mainly does is reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But the strait was open the day the war began. Iran closed it to gain leverage.

Trump went to war and the headline result is undoing a problem Iran created in response to that war.

Meanwhile the deal text is apparently a page and a half, and we are being asked to call this a victory before anyone outside the room has seen the terms.

I will keep pushing for a real classified briefing where all of our questions can be answered. The lack of information and utter disrespect from this White House to Congress is truly disgraceful.

But based on everything we know so far, we spent lives and treasure to get back to roughly where we started, with the central danger still unaddressed.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/06/memorandum-understanding-deal-might-happen/687554/?gift=1DB4SN346BQMZD_z1NnltcpbtG34n0roI-pVXIrWgEI

Todd Blanche’s central qualification for Attorney General is that he served as Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer.

That is the exact reason he should not have the job.

Some will point to Robert F. Kennedy Sr., whom President Kennedy made Attorney General despite being his brother and campaign manager. The comparison fails where it counts. RFK Sr. was unmistakably loyal to his brother, but he had never been his brother’s defense lawyer in criminal cases brought by the very department he would go on to lead. That is precisely the line Blanche crosses. He did not advise Trump on policy or run his campaign. He stood between Trump and federal prosecutors in matters of the same kind the Department of Justice pursues every day.

A lawyer owes a former client lasting duties of confidentiality and loyalty on the matters he handled. Those duties do not expire when he changes offices. They mean Blanche carries live professional obligations to Trump that can run directly against the interests of the Department he now heads. Personal loyalty can be set aside by an honest person. A binding attorney-client privilege cannot simply be willed away.

The Attorney General does not work for the president. He works for the people of the United States, and his duty is to enforce the law without fear or favor, including when the law points straight at the president or those around him. The office exists so the nation’s top law enforcement officer can say no to the White House. The man who recently defended the president against federal charges cannot be expected to do this.

A president is entitled to a cabinet that shares his agenda. He is not entitled to erase the line between his own legal jeopardy and the interests of the country.

So the question before the Senate is not whether Blanche is loyal to Trump. The question is whether a man who built much of his career defending Trump in court can turn around and hold Trump accountable under the law, while still bound by the duties he owes a former client. The burden is on the nominee to prove he can. Blanche has spent his time in office signaling the opposite.

When the Attorney General is seen as the president’s lawyer rather than the nation’s, faith in equal justice breaks entirely. A senator can fully respect the president’s right to choose his cabinet and still refuse to confirm Blanche.

The Senate should wholeheartedly reject this nomination. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/08/us/politics/trump-todd-blanche-attorney-general.html?unlocked_article_code=1.o1A.eBDZ.qVg9fO4xh9V2&smid=nytcore-ios-share

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Getting harmful additives out of our food, taking chronic disease seriously, rethinking how we teach nutrition in medical schools, these are good and overdue. But what is happening at HHS right now is negligence, and it is dangerous.

There is an Ebola outbreak abroad.

Americans have already been exposed.

And  RFK Jr. has said almost nothing, taken few briefings from CDC scientists, and handed the response to a health economist with no public health experience.

There is no surgeon general.

Around half of the 27 institutes and centers at NIH are run by acting directors.

The CDC has no permanent director.

The nation’s top drug regulator was fired.

By multiple accounts, Kennedy shows up to leadership meetings once a month, scrolls his phone, and is described by his own colleagues as checked out.

When measles killed two children in Texas, the official leading the response says he asked again and again to brief Kennedy and was turned away.

You cannot protect 340 million Americans part time. You cannot run the agency that covers 40% of the country’s health care while treating the job as a side project. A crisis does not wait for someone to get engaged.

Kennedy should never have been confirmed. He should resign. If he will not, the Senate that confirmed him owes the country honest oversight before the next outbreak reaches our shores.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/07/us/politics/ebola-vaccines-kennedy-health-department.html?unlocked_article_code=1.olA.2Pj2.Sn3s1VnVc5VZ&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Read the full story here with my gift link.

He just blocked nine Navy officers from promotions they earned. A board of senior admirals picked them on merit.

Three are women.

Two are Black men.

The result is a 22-person admiral list with zero women, in a Navy that’s 21% women and 38% sailors of color.

Pentagon rules are clear. A Secretary can only pull an officer for serious failings of character, conduct, or competence. These officers had none. Their crime?

Attending a diversity event years ago. One was flagged for recruitment outreach she did TWENTY YEARS AGO.

Nearly 60% of the senior officers Hegseth has fired are women or Black.

He purged a chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

He pushed out the first woman ever to lead the Navy.

And he won’t explain himself. Not to Democrats. Not even to Republicans.

Then he reportedly tried to muscle his own aide onto the list. A guy who didn’t even qualify.

So let’s be honest about what this is.

He isn’t raising the bar. He’s rigging it.

He isn’t picking the best. He’s picking his own. Every officer who serves with honor now has to wonder if merit even matters anymore.

This man should never have been confirmed. He should not be Secretary of anything. He is gutting the finest military on earth to fight a culture war. Our service members will pay for it. So will our security.

He should resign in disgrace.

Start with the basic structure, because once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns. The judge signaled the case could not move forward, because a president cannot sue the government he runs.

So Trump dropped it.

The judge in her dismissal order noted there was no settlement of record at all.

Then his own Justice Department, run by his former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, conjured one anyway.

They created a $1.776 billion fund Trump controls, to pay people who claim they were targeted by the government. That includes pardoned January 6 rioters who attacked police officers.

Here is the part that should end the debate. In an addendum to the deal, Blanche barred the IRS from auditing Trump or affiliated individuals. Forbes calculated that immunity could save the Trumps more than $600 million. The man under investigation wrote himself a release from the investigation.

This is the abuse of public office for private gain. It is the very definition of corruption. And as the author warns, the courts may never touch it, because the only people harmed are the American people, and they may lack standing to sue.

Which means it falls to Congress to act.

And we must.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5895817-trump-settlement-corruption-analysis/