By Steven J. Boardman

Donald Trump challenged Canada’s sovereignty, threatened its economy and treated its independence as negotiable. In doing so, he may have helped Canadians answer a question their country has struggled with since before Confederation: What, exactly, is Canada?

This may be the strangest thank-you note I have ever written.

I should probably establish at the outset that I have received no authorization to speak for more than 40 million Canadians, much less those of us scattered around the world. There has been no referendum. No Order in Council has appointed me national gratitude secretary. So consider this an unauthorized expression of appreciation from one Canadian who has spent much of his life studying the history of the place and who has watched, with growing fascination, what has happened to it since Donald Trump decided that Canadian sovereignty was something with which an American president could play.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Not for the tariffs. Not for threatening Canadian industries and workers. Not for repeatedly suggesting that Canada should become the 51st American state, calling its prime minister a governor, or treating the independence of one of America’s oldest allies as material for a real-estate negotiation. Certainly not for the latest escalation, which has produced another round of punitive American tariffs, Canadian retaliation and a trade relationship that only a few years ago would have been almost unimaginable between these two countries.

This week Trump signed an executive order directing the United States government to call Lake Ontario “Lake America,” instructing the Interior Department and the Board on Geographic Names to replace the old name in federal usage. The order has no authority whatsoever over what Canada calls the lake, which is the detail that makes it so revealing. Its practical reach ends at the American border. Its symbolic reach does not. Whatever else the order was intended to accomplish, it turned geography into an insult.

No, the thank-you is for something I doubt he intended to give Canada at all.

Donald Trump may have reminded Canadians that they are Canadian.

Growing up and studying history in Canada is different from the way I have experienced historical education in the United States. Canadian history was never presented to me as though Canada had sprung fully formed from the earth on July 1, 1867. We learned British history because it was impossible to understand Canada without it. We learned European history and the world wars because Canada participated in them as part of a much larger story. France, Britain, empire, colonialism, Indigenous peoples, immigration, Confederation, the Commonwealth, the United States and the long evolution from colony toward independent country all crowded into the same historical landscape.

And somewhere in there, Canadian children of my generation learned a sentence so routinely that I did not understand until I moved to the United States how peculiarly Canadian it was.

Canada is a cultural mosaic. The United States is a melting pot.

I have repeated that phrase to Americans and watched faces go blank. A cultural what?

To us it was practically vocabulary.

The metaphor was imperfect, as national metaphors always are, but the idea was straightforward. The traditional American melting pot imagined different peoples arriving and gradually being incorporated into a common national culture. The Canadian mosaic imagined something different. The pieces were permitted to remain recognizable. Italian Canadian. Ukrainian Canadian. Chinese Canadian. Jamaican Canadian. Sikh Canadian. French Canadian. The adjective preceding “Canadian” did not necessarily dilute the noun following it. The country was supposedly strengthened by the fact that the pieces retained something of themselves.

Canada eventually turned that idea into policy and law. Pierre Trudeau’s government adopted multiculturalism as official federal policy in 1971. The Charter recognized multiculturalism in 1982, and Parliament followed with the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1988, which made multiculturalism part of the legislative framework through which Canada described its national identity. The mosaic, however idealized the classroom version sometimes became, was more than a slogan. Canada deliberately incorporated pluralism into its conception of itself.

There is an important qualification. Canada has never perfectly lived the story it tells about itself. No serious history of Canadian pluralism can glide past the treatment of Indigenous peoples, whose nations existed long before anyone contemplated a Canadian federation and whose relationship with Canada cannot simply be reduced to another colourful tile in somebody else’s mosaic. Nor can a country with the history of the Indian Act, residential schools, exclusionary immigration laws, anti-Asian discrimination and French-English conflict congratulate itself too enthusiastically for having discovered tolerance. The mosaic has always been partly description, partly aspiration and occasionally mythology.

But perhaps its greatest significance has been obscured by another enduring Canadian problem.

Canada has spent an extraordinary amount of its existence wondering what Canada is.

That uncertainty reaches almost to the beginning. Confederation itself emerged from political and economic pressures intertwined with anxiety about the enormous republic to the south. American expansionism, the Civil War, border incursions, the end of the Reciprocity Treaty and Britain’s desire to reduce its colonial obligations all contributed to the circumstances in which British North American colonies chose federation. Canada was born partly because the people north of the border understood that remaining something other than American would require political architecture strong enough to survive beside America.

And even after 1867, there was no clean moment when everyone woke up beneath the maple leaf as fully formed modern Canadians. The country remained deeply connected to Britain. The Statute of Westminster did not formally recognize Canada’s legislative autonomy until 1931, and even then Canada retained British involvement in constitutional amendment because Canadians could not agree upon their own formula. Newfoundland did not join Canada until 1949, following referendums and a remarkably close decision. Canada did not adopt its present flag until 1965 after an argument that was itself fundamentally about what symbols could represent a country divided by history, language and attachment to Britain. The Constitution did not finally come home from Westminster until 1982.

And then there was Quebec.

Twice Quebecers voted in referendums over proposals that placed Quebec’s continued place within Canada directly in question. In 1995, the country came within 54,288 votes of losing a province central to its history, language and identity. The No side survived with 50.58 percent of the vote. Nearly half of Quebec had answered Canada’s existential question by saying they could imagine a sovereign future outside the federation.

Perhaps a country that spent so much time negotiating its own existence was always going to struggle with the simple question Americans answer so effortlessly: What makes you Canadian?

For a long time, the easiest response was comparative.

We are not Americans.

That has never been enough. A national identity constructed primarily as the negative image of another country is a fragile thing. Canadians could point to parliamentary government instead of presidential government, universal health care, bilingualism, the Charter, different attitudes toward guns, the monarchy, a somewhat different social contract and a reputation for moderation that Canadians themselves occasionally enjoyed far too much. Yet the United States remained so enormous, so culturally dominant and so economically intertwined with Canada that Canadian identity sometimes seemed to exist in America’s shadow.

Then Donald Trump came along and began pointing directly at the shadow.

When Trump repeatedly suggested that Canada should become the 51st state, many Americans heard provocation, humour or Trump being Trump. Canadians heard something different. The joke landed on a country that has been negotiating its relationship with American power since before there was a Canada. When tariffs followed, when sovereignty entered trade negotiations, when Canadian independence was discussed as though it were economically inefficient, the old historical nerve was exposed.

The response has become measurable.

In February 2025, days after the first tariff order and the thirty-day delay that followed it, Angus Reid found the share of Canadians describing themselves as “very proud” of their country had jumped ten points in two months, from 34 percent to 44 percent. Deep emotional attachment to the country rose by the same margin, from 49 percent to 59 percent. Trump had managed, however unintentionally, to reverse at least part of a long decline in Canadian national attachment.

This month, with the trade confrontation escalating again, 76 percent of Canadians surveyed said Ottawa was right to walk away from negotiations rather than accept the terms on offer. Thirteen percent said it was wrong. Support reached at least two-thirds in almost every province, bottoming out at 65 percent in Saskatchewan and 67 percent in Alberta. More telling still, 53 percent of Canadians who voted Conservative in the 2025 federal election agreed that walking away was the right call, which is not a number one often sees when a Liberal prime minister is the one who walked.

Two days later, 69 percent said their provinces should take a “Team Canada” approach and place the country’s interests ahead of their own province’s interests as the trade war continued. Majorities agreed in every province.

Those numbers are important because Canada has not suddenly become a harmonious maple-scented commune. Alberta still has profound grievances with Ottawa. Quebec nationalism has not disappeared. Canadians remain divided by region, politics, class, language and ideology. A Conservative voter in rural Saskatchewan and a Liberal voter in downtown Toronto have not discovered that they secretly agree about everything. Nor should they.

A caution is owed here, and it belongs to me rather than to the pollsters. None of those surveys measured pluralism. They measured resolve. Nobody asked Canadians whether they had made peace with the mosaic. They were asked whether Ottawa should have accepted a bad deal and whether the country came before the province. What the data demonstrate is consolidation. Everything that follows about what Canadians consolidated around is my judgment, and it should be read as judgment rather than as a finding.

But consolidation has to gather around something, and this is where the Canadian case becomes strange. There is no Canadian blood. There is no single founding language. There is no origin myth robust enough to command national assent, and the closest thing to one, Confederation, was a negotiated arrangement among colonies rather than a revolution or a war of liberation. When Canadians rallied, they had almost nothing available to rally toward except the arrangement itself.

Maybe Canadians have spent 159 years searching for a national identity because they were looking for the wrong kind of identity.

The conventional nation-state story usually reaches backward toward sameness. One people. One language. One ancestry. One mythology. Canada has never fit comfortably inside that template. It began with French and English political communities negotiating coexistence on lands belonging to Indigenous peoples whose political societies preceded both. It expanded across a continent. It absorbed successive migrations from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and everywhere else. It incorporated provinces that remain fiercely jealous of their autonomy. It made room, often badly and after enormous struggle, for two official languages and hundreds of others spoken around Canadian kitchen tables.

Perhaps the inability to melt completely was never Canada’s defect.

Perhaps the mosaic was the identity all along.

That old classroom phrase suddenly looks much more profound than it did when I first learned it. A mosaic does not work because its pieces become indistinguishable. Destroy their differences and you destroy the mosaic. It works because distinct pieces occupy the same space and, taken together, form something none could form alone.

The metaphor breaks at one seam, and the break is worth examining rather than smoothing over. A tile is a decorative element placed within a design by whoever is making the design. That is precisely what an Indigenous nation holding treaty rights is not. A treaty is an agreement between nations. It presumes a party that existed before the design, that did not receive its standing from the design, and that does not forfeit that standing because a federation later grew up around it. If the mosaic can accommodate Indigenous peoples only by converting them into pieces of a picture Canada is arranging, then the metaphor reproduces in gentler language the assumption it claims to have abandoned.

So the honest version of the idea has to be harder and less decorative. Canada is not one picture assembled out of many pieces by a single arranging hand. It is a set of political communities, some of which preceded it and did not consent to it, that have arrived at terms of coexistence and continue to renegotiate those terms, sometimes in legislatures, sometimes in courtrooms, sometimes badly, sometimes only after a century of refusal. That is a less charming image than the classroom version. It is also considerably more durable, because it does not require anyone to pretend the arrangement was ever finished.

There is a nationalism available in that idea that need not become ugly.

Nationalism has deservedly acquired an unpleasant reputation because history has demonstrated what happens when love of country becomes worship of blood, ancestry or superiority. It can decide that some citizens are more authentic than others. It can turn patriotism into an entrance examination and dissent into treason. Canadians are no more immune to that disease than anyone else, and the objection writes itself: rally-round-the-flag sentiment has historically been the enemy of pluralism rather than its expression. External threat has a long record of producing internment camps, loyalty tests and suspicion of the neighbour with the wrong surname. Canada has that record too.

The objection is serious. But the alternative form of nationalism presents Canada with an immediate contradiction. A country that defines belonging through ancestry must eventually decide which ancestry counts. British? French? What then becomes of the Indigenous nations whose presence predates both, or the millions of Canadians whose families arrived from somewhere else?

An exclusionary Canadian nationalism could certainly be constructed. History offers no reason to assume any country is immune to that temptation. But constructing it would require elevating one version of Canada above the others and calling that version authentic. It would attempt to manufacture unity by repudiating the pluralism that has allowed the country to remain together.

The more coherent alternative asks less about where your grandparents came from and more about what you are prepared to share with your neighbour. It rests upon citizenship, institutions, democratic habits, mutual obligations and stewardship of a political community inherited from previous generations and held temporarily for the next.

Under that understanding, a Sikh family in Brampton and a francophone family in Trois-Rivières need not become culturally identical. An Indigenous community in northern Manitoba does not surrender its nationhood because Canada exists around it. An oil worker in Alberta need not agree with a public servant in Ottawa. A first-generation Canadian in Vancouver need not possess a Mayflower-style pedigree proving belonging.

They do not have to become the same to decide that the country belongs to all of them.

And suddenly Donald Trump’s great political theme becomes wonderfully ironic.

Trump has spent years telling Americans that nations matter. Borders matter. Sovereignty matters. Industrial capacity matters. Economic dependence creates vulnerability. Countries should protect their own interests rather than assume that a globalized system will protect them.

Canada appears to have listened.

Just perhaps not in the way he intended.

America First inevitably invites a question north of the border.

Why should Canada not be first to Canadians?

The Canadian government itself now speaks openly about building domestic strength, diversifying trading relationships and accepting that the old relationship with the United States is gone. When Prime Minister Mark Carney set out his government’s objectives in the trade negotiations this month, one of them was to maintain Canada’s “flexibility, independence, and sovereignty so we can keep building the Canada we want.” He added that his government had recognized from the beginning that America had changed and that the old relationship would not return. Whatever one thinks of Carney or his policies, those sentences would have sounded unusually dramatic in the sleepy Canada-United States relationship of a decade ago. Today they barely sound controversial.

There is a danger here, and Canadians would be foolish to ignore it. “Buy Canadian” can become “real Canadians.” Economic resilience can become protectionism for its own sake. Pride can become self-satisfaction. An external antagonist can create solidarity while encouraging a society to treat internal disagreement as disloyalty. Canada should resist every temptation to imitate the most exclusionary forms of the nationalism that helped provoke this response.

It does not need them.

The more compelling Canadian answer is sitting in those classrooms many of us remember.

Maybe Canada’s identity was never waiting to be discovered in some singular ethnicity, founding myth or national creed. Maybe it was there in the difficult, messy and unfinished agreement among people who speak differently, worship differently, vote differently, remember history differently and occasionally drive one another absolutely insane, but who continue choosing the same political home.

There is something almost beautiful about the possibility that Canada’s latest confrontation with the United States has made that old idea visible again.

For generations Canadians have asked, sometimes nervously, who we are.

Perhaps the answer is simpler than we made it.

We are different. We intend to remain different. And nevertheless, this belongs to all of us.

That is not Canada’s failure to find an identity.

That may be Canada’s identity.

Which brings me back to the thank-you note.

Donald Trump wanted Americans to remember that they were a nation. In pursuing that project, he challenged Canada’s economy, belittled its sovereignty and repeatedly suggested that the country itself was somehow negotiable. The result may be one of the great unintended ironies of his presidency.

He provided a contrast sharp enough for Canadians to see themselves.

So, without authorization and on behalf of Canadians at home, Canadians scattered around the world, and perhaps a few who will object strenuously to my speaking for them at all:

Thank you, Mr. President.

You reminded Canadians that they have a country.

They seem increasingly determined to keep it.

By Steven J. Boardman

For years, Andrew Tate had a remarkably efficient answer for anyone who questioned his wisdom, his masculinity or the ridiculous grandeur of the life he claimed to have built: what color is your Bugatti? The line was juvenile because the sales pitch depended on a certain kind of adolescent simplicity. The Bugatti was never merely transportation. It was evidence. So were the watches, the women, the villas, the cigars, the yachts and the procession of supercars arranged within camera range. Tate presented himself as the physical result of his philosophy, a man who had escaped ordinary work, ordinary relationships and the humiliating compromises imposed on lesser men. Everyone else remained trapped inside what he called the Matrix because they were too weak, too feminized or too stupid to understand what he understood. If you doubted the philosophy, there was the car.

This week, in a federal courtroom in Miami, the car needed an explanation. Andrew and Tristan Tate are fighting extradition to Britain, where prosecutors have authorized 59 charges involving seven alleged victims. Both men deny wrongdoing, and their criminal liability belongs in the criminal courts. The story sitting in front of us requires no verdict because the brothers’ own defense has opened a different door. Their lawyers are arguing that the men prosecutors describe as fantastically wealthy international flight risks should be understood with considerably more context than Andrew Tate ever offered his customers. Some of the supercars associated with his public image were rented. A yacht was promotional. The presentation of enormous wealth was exaggerated. Outrageousness generated views, views generated income, and the public men millions watched were, at least in part, amplified performances built for an attention economy. The larger evidentiary record supports precisely this commercial arc: status display, provocative content and recurring revenue reinforced one another until the persona itself became part of the product.

For a man who spent years telling weaker men to stop making excuses, context has arrived in abundance. Andrew Tate did not become famous by warning young men that appearances could deceive them. He sold appearances as proof. His life authenticated the curriculum. The spectacular man standing beside the spectacular machine supposedly demonstrated that everything he taught about money, women, masculinity and power had already been tested in the laboratory of Andrew Tate. Now the laboratory has a set designer.

That might be funny if the mechanism stopped with rented cars. It does not. Follow Tate’s career backward and the same commercial instinct keeps appearing. Something real provides the foundation, whatever complicates the story is shaved away, and the surviving fact expands until it becomes authority. Tate really did fight professionally, win sanctioned bouts and collect recognized titles. He was not an imaginary fighter, and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. But “four-time world champion” means something grander to an audience unfamiliar with the fragmented geography of professional kickboxing than the underlying career can comfortably sustain. Tate never ruled K-1, never became a GLORY champion and was never one of the defining international kickboxers of his generation. The achievement was real. Marketing simply made it enormous.

That is important because Tate did not need to fabricate an accomplishment when a genuine one could be stripped of context and made to work harder. A professional fighting career became the four-time world champion, and the four-time world champion became something far more useful than a line on a sporting résumé. It became masculine certification. The young man watching from his bedroom did not need to know how sanctioning bodies, rulesets and overlapping titles worked. He needed to hear “world champion” and understand that the man speaking had earned the right to instruct him on how men should live. Tate’s genius, such as it was, consisted less in inventing credentials than in learning how much more valuable they became after qualification disappeared.

He understood that long before TikTok made him famous. An archived version of his own website introduced him as a retired world champion kickboxer and multimillionaire before arriving at another form of expertise he considered worth selling: women. Tate claimed that his webcam operation had involved more than 75 women over nearly a decade and that more than half had been his girlfriends. Then, with a candor that makes later attempts to treat his relationship rhetoric as mere internet comedy considerably harder to swallow, he explained his method in his own sales copy: “My JOB was to get women to fall in love with me.” The material went on to describe romance, sex, emotional attachment and the movement of women into webcam work, all presented as evidence that Tate possessed knowledge other men could buy. Years before Top G became a global character, Tate was already monetizing a worldview in which romantic attachment, male control, women and profit occupied the same commercial space. The later persona did not invent that mentality. It gave it distribution.

Hustler’s University supplied the machinery. The product itself was painfully familiar: cryptocurrency, copywriting, e-commerce, drop-shipping and assorted exits from wage slavery. Tate’s innovation was the man standing in front of the curriculum. He was not merely promising information about becoming rich. He appeared to be walking evidence that the information worked. The cars, women, watches and travel therefore had jobs to perform. They were not scenery surrounding the business. They were prestige signals that gave the business authority. Instead of asking why an unknown internet entrepreneur should be trusted to teach anyone about wealth, the prospective customer was invited to look at Tate’s life and conclude that the question had already been answered.

The affiliate system made that visual authority contagious. Members had a financial reason to recruit new customers and were encouraged to spread Tate clips online, while internal guidance recognized that controversy traveled farther than admiration. One instruction distilled the strategy perfectly: “You want arguments, you want war.” A teenage admirer circulated a clip because Tate sounded fearless. A woman circulated the same clip because he sounded disgusting. A journalist embedded it while condemning him. A teacher discussed it because boys were repeating it in class. Parents passed it among themselves in alarm. Every participant imagined a different purpose, while the platform registered the same thing: engagement. Somewhere beneath that traffic sat a subscription.

Tate had stumbled onto one of the ugliest efficiencies in modern media. Hatred of the content can distribute the content almost as effectively as admiration for it. The more outrageous Andrew Tate became, the more enemies helped carry Andrew Tate into rooms he could never have entered alone. Whether every word was sincere becomes almost beside the point. People are perfectly capable of believing ugly things and discovering that louder versions pay better. What mattered commercially was that inflammatory Tate traveled farther, his ecosystem rewarded the distribution, and that distribution could be converted into recurring revenue. Misogyny had become customer acquisition.

The business now looks less like an internet curiosity than an early specimen of a much larger male grievance economy. Recent research describes an industry built around a brutally efficient sequence: find insecurity, assign an enemy and monetize the resulting loyalty. Loneliness, sexual anxiety, economic frustration and masculine insecurity become entry points into coaching, subscriptions, supplements, financial schemes and paid communities. Looksmaxxing tells boys that their jaw, height, body fat or sexual ranking explains why life feels wrong. Crypto personalities promise financial escape. Masculinity gurus sell dominance. Political influencers provide enemies. The diagnosis changes, but the commercial grammar remains stubbornly familiar. Your life is unsatisfying because something has been done to you, and the person explaining the catastrophe just happens to have something you can buy.

Tate did not invent male loneliness. He recognized its commercial potential. More importantly, he combined the diagnosis with visible proof that he had escaped it. His money supposedly demonstrated financial mastery. Women demonstrated sexual mastery. Fighting demonstrated physical mastery. The entire man functioned as a testimonial. Then politics discovered that the same audience had another kind of value.

Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign went aggressively into the young male media environment traditional campaigns had spent years treating as cultural debris. Trump appeared with Adin Ross, Theo Von, Andrew Schulz, Patrick Bet-David and eventually Joe Rogan. Dana White provided a bridge into combat-sports culture. The Nelk Boys and other influencers became part of a media route toward men who did not consume politics through newspapers, Sunday shows or conventional campaign advertising. Joe Rogan is not Andrew Tate, and pretending that he is would only cheapen the argument. What connected these spaces was audience, tone and distribution: anti-establishment conversation, masculine performance, self-optimization, suspicion of institutions and a growing market of young men convinced that mainstream culture either ignored them or held them in contempt. Trump went where those men were. Tate had already learned how much they were worth.

Then political proximity itself entered the Tate product line. The New Yorker reported that after Tate developed contact with Donald Trump Jr. and visited Trump Tower, he created a course called Network Brilliance and told customers, “I have access to the president’s son.” This is one of the cleanest pieces of evidence in the entire story because no elaborate theory is required. Tate took political access and turned it into a sales credential. The kickboxing belt had become evidence of strength. The Bugatti had become evidence of wealth. Donald Trump Jr. became evidence of access. Trump Tower was simply another expensive object in the frame.

Then came Barron Trump.

The New York Times reported that Barron, then eighteen, was a fan of Andrew Tate and spoke with him over Zoom in 2024 through a mutual friend. Times reporter Megan Twohey later said on PBS NewsHour that Tate’s Romanian case was discussed during the call. The New Yorker separately reported that Tate associate Justin Waller, who has called himself the brothers’ “third brother,” cultivated a relationship with Barron at Mar-a-Lago and said Barron spoke with Tate during a suit fitting. At roughly the same time, Barron was helping his father navigate the media culture popular with young men, with campaign reporting describing him as an informal adviser on podcast and influencer outreach. Donald Trump later credited his son with steering him toward parts of that universe. The available evidence does not show that Barron imported Tate into the campaign or that Tate directed Trump’s strategy. It shows something more interesting: one of the young men helping Donald Trump understand the emerging male attention economy was reportedly himself an admirer of one of that economy’s most profitable and extreme entrepreneurs.

Tate, meanwhile, behaved like a man who understood political audiences as another asset class. He promoted Trump throughout the 2024 campaign, livestreamed on Election Day, urged followers to vote for him and appeared with Donald Trump Jr. in a livestream connected to a MAGA meme coin. After Trump won, Tate celebrated. After the inauguration, he announced that the Tates would be free because Trump was president. The statement did not sound like ordinary partisan enthusiasm. It sounded like confidence in an investment.

People sympathetic to Tate were also appearing inside the administration. Paul Ingrassia had worked with the legal team representing the brothers and publicly praised Tate in extravagant terms before taking roles inside Trump’s government. Alina Habba, Trump’s longtime lawyer, appeared with Tate shortly before the inauguration, greeted him as a fan, compared his persecution narrative with Trump’s and told him she had his back in America. These were not anonymous internet accounts admiring Top G from a distance. They were people moving through the political world Tate had spent years presenting to his followers as proof that he had reached the rooms where power lived.

Romania is where the story moved from culture toward state power. After Trump returned to office, Richard Grenell discussed the Tate case with Romanian Foreign Minister Emil Hurezeanu at the Munich Security Conference. Hurezeanu acknowledged that the brothers came up but said he did not regard the conversation as pressure. Grenell has denied carrying out a substantive intervention on their behalf. Days later, Romanian prosecutors modified the condition preventing the brothers from leaving the country while maintaining judicial supervision and their remaining obligations. Later investigations by the New York Times and New Yorker reported a broader lobbying and pressure campaign, including accounts that high Romanian officials believed accommodating the Tates would please the Trump administration. Grenell, the White House and Romanian officials have disputed important parts of those reports. The verified contact, the verified alteration of the travel condition and the later investigative reporting belong beside one another, without pretending that chronology alone proves an order from Washington.

The chronology nonetheless did extraordinary work for the Tate mythology. Trump returned to office. A senior Trump envoy raised the case. Romania changed the travel restriction. Andrew and Tristan Tate boarded a private plane for Florida on February 27, 2025. For followers who had spent years hearing that the Matrix persecuted strong men while Trump represented a rebellion against those same institutions, the picture practically captioned itself. Top G appeared to have beaten the system that had tried to contain him.

The performance continued in the United States. Federal authorities seized electronic devices from the brothers, and ProPublica later reported, based on records and interviews, that Ingrassia sought their return while identifying the request as coming from the White House. Ingrassia and his lawyer denied that account. Senators later sought records and an inspector-general inquiry. The Tates meanwhile moved through Trump’s America like men who believed the political investment had matured, appearing around figures such as Roger Stone and Dana White and moving through the same social ecosystem that had helped make Trump’s young-male outreach so effective. Their connections were not imaginary, which is precisely why they were useful. Tate had real access and did what he had always done when something valuable entered his possession. He displayed it.

Then Britain sought his extradition, and the relationship began looking considerably more transactional from the other direction. U.S. marshals arrested Andrew and Tristan Tate in Miami in July. Their lawyers have described the British prosecution as politically motivated and looked toward the same political world the brothers had spent years cultivating. This time the cavalry has shown considerably less enthusiasm. The administration has indicated that it intends to honor the extradition process, and the figures Tate might once have expected to treat his plight as another battle against the Matrix have become noticeably less eager to make it their fight.

Then Tate attorney Joseph McBride removed whatever ambiguity remained about how his side understood the political value of the audience. “Andrew Tate was a material participant in ensuring President Trump’s victory,” McBride told Vanity Fair, warning that Republicans risked alienating the young male constituency around Tate if the administration abandoned him. He later invoked the electoral importance of “the Manosphere and Andrew Tate.” McBride did not literally say, “we helped you win, so you owe us,” and there is no reason to put words in his mouth. His actual argument is more revealing because it speaks the language of leverage without our assistance: Tate helped deliver an audience, that audience has electoral value, and abandoning Tate could have political consequences.

After years of selling young men a philosophy organized around power, exchange, dominance and loyalty, Tate’s camp was now applying the same philosophy to the presidency of the United States. The followers were no longer merely customers or distributors. In McBride’s political telling, they had become a constituency whose allegiance could be offered as leverage. Attention produced followers. Followers produced commercial value. Commercial value produced status. Status produced political access. Political access became evidence of still greater status, and eventually the audience itself became an argument for political protection.

That is the story hiding beneath the circus.

Andrew Tate did not create Trumpism. He did not elect Donald Trump. He did not invent the manosphere, male loneliness, misogyny or the Republican Party’s pursuit of young men. Granting him that much historical importance would simply be another exercise in Tate inflation. He matters because he exposes the machinery with unusual clarity. Find a frightened or angry young man and tell him his discomfort has been deliberately imposed upon him. Give him enemies. Tell him conventional institutions cannot be trusted. Offer a hierarchy in which he can still become powerful, then place a man at the top who appears to have escaped every humiliation the customer fears. The championship says he is strong. The women say he is desired. The money says he is smart. The Bugatti says he is rich. Trump Tower says he is connected. Every visible credential authenticates the next sale.

Now the same man who spent years using spectacle as proof is asking a federal court to understand that some of the spectacle was spectacle. Some cars were rented. The yacht was promotional. Outrage generated attention. The persona was amplified because amplification made money. Fine. Believe him. For years, Andrew Tate told young men that reality was brutal and excuses were for losers. Here is the reality his own defense has placed on the table: the image was part of the business.

That does not destroy the Tate mythology from outside. It opens it from within. The performance supplied the authority that sold the product. Customers were invited to trust Tate on wealth because they could see wealth around him, to trust him on women because women surrounded him, and eventually to trust him on power because powerful people appeared within reach. He was salesman and demonstration at once, and the genius of the system was that he never needed to invent himself completely. There was always enough reality underneath to support the enlargement. He really fought. He really made money. He really built businesses. He really acquired political contacts. The deception lived in the distance between what those facts established and what the audience was invited to believe they established.

A belt became authority, authority became a course, the course became a subscription, the subscription became an audience, the audience acquired political value, political value produced access, and access eventually became an argument for leverage. The car was never really the point. The conversion was.

Andrew Tate eventually reached the world he had promised his followers existed above ordinary men: wealth, celebrity, famous allies, political access, presidential proximity and membership in a fraternity of anti-establishment power. For a while, the door opened. Now he sits in a Miami jail while the government he celebrated processes Britain’s extradition request, and his own lawyer is publicly reminding that government how politically useful Andrew Tate once was.

Tate spent years teaching young men that life is transactional. He may finally have found a lesson worth keeping.

Some of the cars were rented.

The access was temporary.

By Steven J. Boardman

There are images America should never be able to see without understanding what they mean. A Black body hanging from a tree is one of them.

On August 3, 2026, 29-year-old Tasia Fortune, a Black mother of four, was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant house in Jackson, Mississippi. Twelve days later, a 32-year-old Black man was found hanging from a tree in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina. Six days after that, police in Roanoke Rapids found 38-year-old Demetrius Eugene Fleming dead, connected to what they described as a ligature.

Three Black people died by hanging or ligature within eighteen days. Anyone familiar with the history of racial terror in the United States will understand why that sequence immediately produced suspicion, fear and anger. It is also nowhere close to enough evidence to declare that three people were lynched, and that is where this investigation has to begin.

I started looking into these deaths because I kept seeing them. Another headline. Another Black man or woman found hanging. Another official statement referring to suicide. Another family saying something did not make sense. Another wave of disbelief moving through Black communities that have very good historical reasons for refusing to encounter a hanging as though it were an ordinary image.

I should say here what I return to at length later. My fiancée’s great-aunts, Maggie and Alma Howze, were lynched from a Mississippi bridge in 1918. I did not arrive at this subject from a neutral distance. The rules that follow exist because of that, not in spite of it.

The temptation to supply the answer from history is obvious. The American history of lynching is so specific, so grotesque and so visually recognizable that a Black body hanging from a tree can make the past feel as though it has already explained the present. I understand that reaction. I also refuse to build an investigation around it, because doing so would make the evidence secondary to the story I wanted to tell.

The same rule applies in the other direction. A police department calling a death a suicide does not establish suicide by itself. A family believing a loved one was murdered does not establish murder. A Black person found hanging does not establish lynching, and the fact that Black Americans sometimes die by suicide through hanging cannot be used as a shortcut around investigating a particular death.

So the lane here is evidence. Verified facts will be treated as facts. Official conclusions will be identified as official conclusions. Evidence authorities describe but have not released will remain evidence described by authorities, rather than something independently verified. Family testimony belongs in the record without becoming forensic proof. History explains why distrust exists, but history cannot determine who killed a person in 2026 or whether anyone did.

The hanging is the search criterion. It is not the conclusion.

Once the cases are approached that way, the story becomes considerably more complicated than the version that can travel across social media in a photograph and a sentence.

Three deaths in eighteen days

Tasia Fortune’s death is, for now, the easiest of the three recent cases to describe because the most accurate answer is also the least satisfying: we do not know what happened to her.

Fortune was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant Jackson home on August 3. Her body was sent to the Mississippi State Medical Examiner, an autopsy was performed, and police continued investigating the circumstances of her death. Her mother, Christy Spivey, has publicly rejected the possibility that her daughter killed herself. Authorities have also identified and questioned a person of interest who reportedly knew Fortune and acknowledged arguing with her shortly before her death. He was arrested on an unrelated firearms charge, and none of that establishes that he killed her. As of August 24, authorities have not publicly announced a cause or manner of death.

Her mother’s belief deserves to be reported because it tells us what someone who knew Fortune intimately believes about her state of mind and the circumstances surrounding her death. It cannot settle the forensic question. Fortune may ultimately be found to have died by suicide. She may have been murdered by someone she knew. Her death could prove to involve intimate-partner violence or another form of homicide with no racial motive whatsoever. If the evidence leads there, the fact that she was found hanging does not convert the crime into a lynching simply because the image resembles one.

For now, the honest classification is unresolved.

The Raleigh case contains considerably more information. On August 15, first responders found a 32-year-old Black man hanging from a tree at 318 South McDowell Street near downtown Raleigh. Public alarm followed almost immediately. Raleigh Police Chief Rico Boyce later presented a timeline drawn from city traffic and surveillance cameras. According to Boyce, cameras showed the man walking alone in the area, later walking toward the tree carrying an electrical cord, and additional video captured the incident without anyone else appearing to participate. The man’s mother also authorized police to disclose that he had previously struggled with mental-health problems.

He is the only person in this account I have not named. That is my decision. The evidence police have described points toward suicide, his mental-health history entered the public record through his mother rather than through him, and his name establishes nothing that the evidence does not already establish without it.

That is meaningful evidence, and it deserves more weight than a bare police statement that officers found no foul play. It is still important to describe exactly what we possess and what we do not. Police have told the public what the recordings show. The full evidentiary record, including the complete surveillance footage, has not been independently examined for this investigation, and Raleigh police have continued working with the medical examiner.

The evidence publicly described by police therefore points strongly toward suicide. That assessment may become firmer when the medical examiner completes the process or additional evidence becomes available. What we should not do is transform the police department’s description of evidence into evidence we have personally verified.

Demetrius Fleming’s death is different again. Roanoke Rapids Police Chief Lawrence Wiggins has described it as an open, equivocal death investigation. Fleming was found dead on August 21 at a home on Roanoke Avenue, connected to a ligature. Police had received a 911 call reporting an attempted suicide, but Wiggins said the caller was someone close to Fleming who was not at the scene. He declined to say what kind of ligature was involved, would not speculate about other injuries before the autopsy, and made clear that investigators were keeping every possibility open.

Wiggins put the proper standard succinctly: “The evidence will provide the conclusion.”

As of August 24, Fleming’s death remains under investigation.

What looked initially like a single cluster therefore starts separating as soon as the cases are examined. Three Black people died by hanging or ligature within eighteen days, but the evidentiary circumstances are different in each case. Raleigh currently contains substantial evidence supporting suicide. Fortune remains without a publicly announced cause or manner of death. Fleming remains an open investigation.

The visual similarity brought us here. The evidence immediately tells us that the deaths cannot simply be counted together and called the same thing.

“Black people don’t hang themselves”

There is another belief that surfaces whenever cases like these become public: Black people do not kill themselves by hanging.

I understand where that belief comes from. Hanging carries a cultural meaning for Black Americans that mortality statistics cannot capture. It is tied to one of the most recognizable forms of racial terror in the country’s history, and the image carries that inheritance whether police, medical examiners or reporters acknowledge it or not.

As a statement about how Black Americans die by suicide, however, it is wrong.

CDC mortality data show that Black Americans do die by suicide through hanging, strangulation and suffocation. In 2020, the age-adjusted suicide rate from suffocation, a category that includes hanging, was 2.0 deaths per 100,000 among non-Hispanic Black Americans, compared with 4.6 among non-Hispanic White Americans and 3.1 among Hispanic Americans. Firearms remained the leading suicide method for Black Americans, but hanging and related suffocation deaths occur often enough to appear clearly in national mortality statistics.

The 2020 comparison comes from the most recent CDC report I found that presents those three methods side by side by race and ethnicity. Newer federal mortality reporting extends the overall suffocation-suicide series through 2023, when the national rate stood at 3.6 per 100,000, but that publication does not provide the same racial breakdown.

The CDC’s X70 classification covers intentional self-harm by hanging, strangulation and suffocation. No responsible investigation can therefore reject suicide because the person who died was Black and the mechanism was hanging.

That statistical answer creates a different problem. X70 tells us remarkably little about the circumstances we are trying to understand. It does not tell us whether someone was found hanging from an outdoor tree, in a bedroom, inside a jail cell or from another fixture. It does not tell us whether the scene initially appeared suspicious, whether homicide detectives processed it before a suicide determination was reached, whether relatives challenged the conclusion, whether civil-rights authorities reviewed the case, whether an independent autopsy raised questions, or whether important physical evidence was preserved.

The national mortality system can tell us how many deaths were ultimately coded as suicide by hanging, strangulation or suffocation. It cannot give us a clean answer to a much more specific question: How many Black Americans have been found hanging under circumstances initially treated as suicide, and in how many of those cases was homicide seriously investigated and excluded?

I could not find a national database capable of answering that question.

For a country with America’s history, that gap deserves attention.

Nine men in Mississippi

Mississippi is where the numbers become impossible to ignore and dangerous to misuse.

In November 2025, The Marshall Project reported that 21-year-old Delta State University student Demartravion “Trey” Reed was at least the ninth Black man found hanging from a tree in Mississippi since 2000. The eight earlier deaths had all come to be treated by authorities as suicides.

Nine is serious enough without making it ten, twenty-three or seventy through sloppy attribution.

Several different counts are now circulating and have already begun bleeding into one another. A 2021 Southern Poverty Law Center report referred to at least eight suspected lynchings of young Black men and boys in Mississippi since 2000, nearly all ruled suicides by local officials. The Marshall Project’s later figure was at least nine Black men found hanging from trees in Mississippi since 2000. Researcher Jill Collen Jefferson has produced a broader Mississippi count using different criteria. JULIAN, a civil-rights organization, released A Crimson Record this year and says it identified more than 70 suspected modern lynchings across seven Southern states between 2000 and 2025.

Three datasets cannot become one number merely because they concern the same subject.

The Marshall Project’s count is descriptive and narrow. JULIAN’s is an investigative classification created by an advocacy organization examining a much broader universe of deaths. Calling JULIAN’s 70 an established count of seventy lynchings would grant the organization’s conclusion before independently reviewing the cases. Throwing the report away because JULIAN is an advocacy organization would be just as unserious.

So the figure cannot be left where it is, floating in the middle of the record. JULIAN has not publicly itemized the deaths behind the number. Without that list, no one outside the organization can examine the cases individually, which means no one outside the organization can confirm or challenge the classification. That is not an accusation. It is a description of what is available. Until those deaths can be examined one at a time, more than 70 is a research agenda rather than an established count, and it should be cited that way by anyone who repeats it.

The cases are leads. Each one has to earn whatever classification it ultimately receives.

That process does something useful to Mississippi’s nine. It turns a frightening number back into nine individual deaths, and the evidence surrounding them is nowhere near uniform.

When the evidence points toward suicide

Seventeen-year-old Raynard Johnson was found hanging from a pecan tree in the front yard of his family’s Mississippi home in June 2000. His family rejected suicide, civil-rights advocates demanded federal scrutiny, and the Justice Department investigated. Federal authorities interviewed witnesses, reviewed physical evidence and consulted forensic experts, while state authorities conducted their own work. In 2001, the Justice Department closed its civil-rights investigation after concluding that the available evidence did not indicate Johnson’s death resulted from a criminal act.

Government investigations can be wrong. That possibility does not give us permission to pretend an investigation never occurred. Johnson cannot responsibly be presented today as a case in which authorities simply saw a Black teenager hanging from a tree, wrote “suicide” and moved on.

Otis Byrd creates a similar problem for anyone trying to turn the Mississippi count into a tally of probable lynchings. Byrd, 54, was found hanging from a tree near Port Gibson in 2015 after being reported missing. The circumstances immediately brought federal civil-rights investigators into the case, and the eventual federal conclusion was that investigators had not found evidence establishing that another person killed him.

The point is not that federal involvement sanctifies a conclusion. It is that skepticism has to remain responsive to evidence. If an investigation uncovers evidence supporting suicide, we do not get to discard it because the result is less disturbing than the hypothesis that brought us to the case.

Trey Reed may be the clearest example. When Reed was found hanging from a tree at Delta State University on September 15, 2025, claims spread almost instantly that his limbs had been broken and that his body showed obvious evidence of an assault. Officials denied those reports. The state autopsy concluded suicide and found no injuries indicating an assault. An independent autopsy was arranged for Reed’s family, but its final report was never publicly released.

Then, in July 2026, Reed’s family disclosed information the public had not previously known. His girlfriend had reportedly provided investigators with suicidal text messages Reed sent the night before his death, and members of his family said one of those messages specifically referred to hanging himself.

Those messages still require authentication and context, as any evidence does. If accurately reported and authenticated, however, they are powerful evidence supporting suicide.

An investigation that cannot change direction when the evidence changes is not an investigation. Reed’s case looks considerably more consistent with suicide today than it did during the first frantic days after his body was discovered, and saying so strengthens this inquiry rather than diminishing it. We are trying to determine what happened, not protect the suspicion that caused us to start looking.

Willie Andrew Jones Jr. does not fit neatly

Willie Andrew Jones Jr. was 21 when he was found hanging from a pecan tree outside his White girlfriend’s family home in Scott County, Mississippi, in February 2018.

The public account eventually hardened into suicide. The underlying record never became that clean.

Witnesses reportedly said Jones had argued with his girlfriend and threatened to hang himself shortly before his death. State and federal investigators reviewed the case. Those facts support the suicide explanation and belong prominently in any account of his death.

The Mississippi State Medical Examiner’s autopsy, however, recorded the cause of death as ligature strangulation and the manner of death as undetermined.

That is part of the official record, and it creates an obvious question about why the public characterization became more certain than the medical examiner’s formal finding. Later reporting found that the sheriff could not explain the discrepancy. The same reporting documented other disputed circumstances, including allegations that Jones’s girlfriend’s stepfather displayed a firearm before Jones died.

Jones’s family later obtained a multimillion-dollar default judgment in a wrongful-death lawsuit after the defendant failed to participate. That judgment does not function as a criminal verdict and cannot be offered as proof that Jones was murdered.

Years later, JULIAN obtained an independent forensic review from former New York City chief medical examiner Michael Baden, who concluded that Jones’s death was homicide. That opinion deserves serious examination, along with the underlying materials and the fact that it was produced years later for an organization investigating suspected modern lynchings.

There is enough here to reject easy certainty in either direction. Jones had circumstances that support suicide, an original medical examiner who formally recorded the manner of death as undetermined, and a later forensic expert who reached homicide.

His case remains contested.

Dennoriss Richardson and the danger of choosing the facts we like

Dennoriss Richardson’s death occurred in Alabama, not Mississippi, and he was not found hanging from a tree. He was found in September 2024 in the carport of an abandoned house in rural Colbert County, roughly half an hour from his home in Sheffield.

The Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences determined suicide. Richardson’s family commissioned another autopsy, and the resulting disagreement is often described less precisely than it should be.

The private pathologist did not determine that Richardson was murdered. Both examinations were consistent with death caused by neck compression associated with hanging. The private examiner’s concern was whether the materials available to him allowed the manner of death to be determined confidently. He reported that he had not received crime-scene photographs or the rope and that the hyoid bone was absent when Richardson’s body reached him, restricting what could be assessed during the second examination.

An examiner declining to determine suicide or homicide does not give us evidence that homicide occurred. It tells us that this examiner believed the available material was insufficient for him to choose between them.

Richardson’s circumstances add another layer. Seven months before his death, he filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit accusing Sheffield police officers of excessive force and other constitutional violations. A civil-rights plaintiff later found hanging in an abandoned property presents an obvious retaliation question that investigators should test.

The lawsuit cannot answer that question by itself.

Richardson also faced a methamphetamine trafficking charge during the same period. That fact creates an entirely different set of potential pressures, relationships and conflicts that may have nothing to do with his lawsuit, police or race. It belongs in the record for exactly the same reason the civil-rights suit does.

We do not get to choose only the facts that make our preferred theory easier.

Colbert County Sheriff Eric Balentine later requested an FBI investigation into Richardson’s death. That fact also needs context. Balentine requested federal involvement amid public concern while continuing to stand behind the suicide finding. FBI involvement therefore cannot be presented as evidence that local authorities themselves believed Richardson was murdered.

Richardson remains worth investigating because several legitimate questions survive. We do not need to manufacture additional ones.

The bridge

There is a reason these deaths are received differently inside Black families, and I know that reason personally through someone I love.

My fiancée Ranasha’s family is connected to a place in Mississippi known as the Hanging Bridge. Her great-aunts, Maggie and Alma Howze, were among four Black people taken from the Shubuta jail in December 1918 and hanged from a bridge over the Chickasawhay River.

This is documented American history, not family folklore polished by generations of retelling. Maggie and Alma Howze were lynched. More than two decades later, two Black teenagers, Ernest Green and Charlie Lang, were lynched at the same bridge. Six Black people were killed there in two episodes separated by twenty-four years.

For Ranasha, that history is not an archival photograph encountered in a museum exhibit. It has names, relationships and descendants. When she sees another headline saying a Black person has been found hanging, she encounters it with the knowledge that women in her own family were killed that way.

That history cannot establish how Tasia Fortune died. It cannot identify an unknown assailant in Raleigh where police say the available evidence instead points toward suicide. It cannot tell us what happened to Demetrius Fleming before an investigation has answered the question.

It does explain why an official statement containing the word suicide may not produce immediate trust.

That distrust has an historical foundation. American authorities did more than occasionally fail to stop racial terror. Sheriffs, deputies, jailers, prosecutors, coroners, judges and political establishments sometimes participated in lynchings, handed prisoners to mobs, protected perpetrators or helped make prosecution impossible. For generations of Black Americans, the state was not always the institution standing between them and the mob.

A contemporary hanging therefore presents authorities with two responsibilities. They must determine how a person died, and they must show enough of their work to make the conclusion credible to communities whose distrust was earned through history.

The second responsibility does not change the forensic evidence.

It changes the burden of transparency.

What lynching means now

Congress did not make lynching a specific federal hate-crime conspiracy offense until 2022, when President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.

Even then, federal law did not create a statistical bucket labeled “lynching” into which every suspicious hanging can simply be placed. The law operates through the federal hate-crimes framework and addresses conspiracies involving specified bias-motivated offenses when death, serious bodily injury or other qualifying circumstances result.

A person found hanging may eventually appear in mortality records as suicide, homicide, undetermined death or another classification. A racially motivated killing may appear in hate-crime reporting if the bias element is identified and reported. Federal civil-rights investigators may maintain still another record when they examine whether a crime occurred.

Those systems were built to answer different questions, and none appears capable of answering ours comprehensively.

How many Black Americans have been found hanging under suspicious circumstances? How quickly were those deaths classified as suicide? How many scenes were processed as possible homicides before investigators settled on suicide? How many families sought independent examinations? How frequently did those examinations raise questions about the original finding? How often did federal civil-rights investigators become involved? How many classifications later changed? How many remain undetermined?

Individual cases can sometimes answer pieces of those questions. There is no national dataset that gives us the whole answer.

That leaves a remarkable blind spot in a country where hanging once served as one of the defining instruments of racial terror.

What the evidence does not show

The evidence has taken several possibilities off the table, at least for now.

I cannot demonstrate that the three recent deaths represent a statistically abnormal cluster. National mortality data do not provide the situational detail necessary to calculate how often Black Americans are found hanging from outdoor trees over comparable periods.

I cannot demonstrate that Mississippi’s nine Black men found hanging from trees since 2000 were nine lynching victims. Several cases contain significant evidence supporting suicide, including cases that received substantial federal scrutiny.

I cannot demonstrate that Dennoriss Richardson was murdered because he sued police. His lawsuit exists. His death exists. Evidence connecting the two has not been established publicly.

I cannot call Tasia Fortune’s death a lynching. I cannot call Demetrius Fleming’s death a lynching. Their investigations have not produced evidence that allows me to make either claim.

I also will not turn missing proof into evidence of a cover-up. If we cannot establish it, we do not get to pretend we did.

Those limitations do not make the investigation less important. They tell us where the evidence stops.

What the evidence does show

The evidence leaves us with plenty.

At least nine Black men have been found hanging from trees in Mississippi since 2000, and the cases are not uniform. Some contain substantial evidence supporting suicide. Willie Andrew Jones Jr.‘s case is harder to place because evidence supporting suicide exists, yet his own state medical examiner formally recorded the manner of death as undetermined while the public account settled on suicide anyway. Dennoriss Richardson’s independent examiner did not believe the material available to him justified determining either suicide or homicide, even though the state had already reached one.

Two Black Americans found hanging or connected to a ligature this month remain without publicly established final answers. Civil-rights researchers have collected dozens of additional deaths they believe merit renewed examination, and those suspicions cannot be substituted for proof, but neither should the cases be dismissed without review simply because authorities assigned them another classification.

Above all, the United States still lacks a national system capable of answering the question that brought me here.

That may be the most consequential finding of this investigation.

Public discussion of these deaths tends to collapse into two certainties. Some people see a Black body hanging and decide that they are looking at a lynching. Others see “suicide” in an official statement and decide there is nothing more worth asking.

Both approaches end the investigation before the evidence has finished speaking.

Show us

One sentence has stayed with me through every case:

The hanging is the search criterion. It is not the conclusion.

A hanging tells us where to look. The evidence tells us what happened.

Sometimes the evidence will establish suicide, even when the image carries a history that makes suicide difficult for people to accept. Sometimes it will reveal a homicide with no racial motive. Sometimes investigators may reach the correct conclusion while communicating it so poorly that they deepen the distrust surrounding the case. Sometimes the evidence will remain incomplete because something was never collected, preserved or made available.

And perhaps somewhere in this record the evidence will establish that a Black American was murdered because of race in circumstances that deserve the word this country already knows.

Lynching.

If that evidence exists, we will not need to make the word fit. The facts will do it for us.

There is still another obligation here, and it belongs to the institutions asking Black Americans to accept their conclusions.

My fiancée Ranasha’s great-aunts were Maggie and Alma Howze. They were taken from a jail and hanged from a Mississippi bridge.

That happened.

Their descendants do not need someone to explain why the image of a Black body hanging carries a meaning beyond the immediate mechanics of death. Black Americans do not need to prove that distrust of official explanations has an historical basis. American history has already supplied more evidence for that than anyone could reasonably require.

History, however, cannot convict an unknown killer in 2026. That job still belongs to evidence.

So when authorities conclude suicide in a case that evokes this history, there is a reasonable response available between immediate acceptance and immediate accusation.

Show us.

Show us the surveillance when privacy and law permit it. Show us the autopsy findings. Explain the toxicology. Explain the scene reconstruction and the evidence that excluded another person’s involvement. If the medical examiner records the manner of death as undetermined while officials publicly call it suicide, explain the difference. Tell us what investigators collected, what they did not collect, what was preserved and what was lost. If a classification changed, tell us why.

When the evidence establishes suicide, the record should say suicide.

When it establishes homicide, follow the homicide wherever it leads.

When the evidence cannot establish either one, say that too. Uncertainty may be frustrating, but it is more honest than certainty the evidence has not earned.

More than a century after Maggie and Alma Howze were taken from a Mississippi jail and hanged from a bridge, the burden should no longer rest with Black Americans to explain why they are suspicious when history appears before them in an image they know too well.

The burden belongs to the institutions asking to be believed.

Earn it.

With evidence.

If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day by call or text at 988.

For your news and investigative stories, head over to aeblymedia.com

By Steven J. Boardman

There is a question Americans ought to ask ourselves more often, and with considerably less self-pity: when the rest of the world looks at us now, what exactly do they see?

Not what we imagine they see. Not the old film reel we keep running for ourselves, all Normandy beaches and moon landings, Ellis Island and the Marshall Plan, jazz and Jackie Robinson, a nation forever arriving at the last possible moment to save democracy from somebody worse. Those things are part of the American story. Some are among the finest parts of it. But countries, like people, get into trouble when memory becomes mythology and mythology becomes an excuse to stop looking in the mirror.

I listened recently to a British man describe what he believes much of the world now sees when it looks at the United States, and there was nothing particularly enjoyable about hearing it. He did not describe the indispensable ally or the beacon on the hill. He described a country that increasingly appears unpredictable, belligerent and strangely comfortable with governments Americans once understood instinctively as adversaries. He talked about Russia and North Korea, about old friends wondering whether Washington can still be trusted, and about a growing sense abroad that the United States itself has become something other countries must account for as a danger rather than depend upon as a source of stability.

The part that stung most was not his judgment of Donald Trump. It was his judgment of us.

We voted for this.

There are a thousand qualifications available to us. Millions of Americans did not vote for Trump. Millions actively oppose what is happening. Our electoral system is not a perfect translation of the public will, our information environment is poisoned, and a country of more than 340 million people cannot be morally reduced to the person occupying one office. All of that is true, but none of it makes the accusation disappear. Democracies do not get to claim credit for their finest choices and declare themselves innocent bystanders to their worst ones. Whatever else may be said about this moment, it was not imposed upon the United States by a foreign army. Americans participated in making it possible, and the rest of the world is entitled to notice.

That should hurt. I think it is supposed to.

Patriotism that cannot survive embarrassment is not patriotism. It is vanity.

And vanity has become one of the defining features of American political life. We have spent years being told that acknowledging national failure is somehow an act of national betrayal, as though loving your country requires behaving like the mother of a delinquent child insisting everyone else simply misunderstands him. Every criticism becomes an insult. Every historical fact becomes an accusation. Every foreign ally who questions us is suddenly ungrateful. Every institution that challenges power is corrupt. The answer to nearly every uncomfortable truth is the same: deny it, attack whoever said it, and retreat into the warm bath of American exceptionalism.

Then wave the flag.

The flag has survived worse indignities.

What worries me far more is the growing insistence that the rest of us participate in the lie.

We are watching a powerful country rediscover the language of acquisition and intimidation. Greenland is discussed not primarily as the home of a people entitled to determine their own future, but as something strategically useful that the United States ought to possess. Its minerals matter. Its geography matters. Its military value matters. The consent of Greenlanders somehow becomes a secondary complication in a conversation being conducted thousands of miles away by people discussing their homeland like undeveloped property. Trump’s fascination with acquiring Greenland, once treated as one of the stranger curiosities of his first presidency, has become sufficiently serious in his second that The New Yorker documented an expanding political and influence campaign around the idea. (The New Yorker⁠)

There is an earlier story that makes the whole thing considerably uglier.

Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, has said Trump did not merely ask whether the United States could purchase Greenland. According to Taylor, he asked whether America might sell Puerto Rico or swap it for Greenland because, in Trump’s words as Taylor recalled them, Puerto Rico was “dirty” and “the people were poor.” The account has now followed Trump’s Greenland obsession into his second presidency because it reveals something far more important than another outrageous remark. (The New Yorker⁠)

Puerto Rico is home to millions of American citizens. It has sent its sons and daughters into the American military, lived under American law for more than a century, endured colonial ambiguity that Washington has never had the courage to resolve, and suffered Hurricane Maria under the authority of a federal government that had an obligation to help its people recover. Yet, according to a former senior official, the president could look at those American citizens and imagine their home as something to exchange because the island was poor while another piece of territory looked more valuable.

That is not merely insulting. It is revealing.

It is a worldview in which land has value according to what can be extracted from it, people have value according to what they can contribute to it, and sovereignty begins to look remarkably negotiable whenever the United States is powerful enough to make the negotiation uncomfortable.

Which is why Canada cannot be dismissed as another Trump joke.

For generations, Canadians and Americans have lived beside the longest peaceful international border in the world with a relationship so familiar that most of us barely thought of it as foreign policy. Our economies grew into one another. Families crossed the border for weddings, hockey tournaments and weekends. Canadian soldiers fought beside Americans. Intelligence, defense, manufacturing, energy, trade, transportation and culture became so deeply connected that Canada was not simply another country with which the United States happened to do business. It was one of the relationships that demonstrated what American power could look like when it was exercised through partnership rather than domination.

Then the president of the United States began talking about making Canada the fifty-first state.

At first, Americans were encouraged to hear it as trolling, another provocation from a man who enjoys watching people react to him. Canadians did not have that luxury, particularly when Trump made clear that he was willing to connect his annexation rhetoric to economic pressure. In January 2025, when asked whether he would use military force against Canada, Trump said no, but raised the possibility of using “economic force.” (Reuters⁠)

That is no longer a joke about changing the stars on a flag.

That is the president of one country contemplating economic coercion while repeatedly suggesting that the neighboring sovereign democracy ought to cease being a country.

Since then, the relationship has been battered by tariffs and threats of still more tariffs. As recently as this week, Canada was negotiating under the possibility of new 50 percent U.S. tariffs on billions of dollars of Canadian goods before Trump announced a temporary pause while negotiations continued. (Reuters⁠)

Americans should consider for a moment how this would sound if the countries were reversed.

Imagine a Canadian prime minister repeatedly announcing that the United States ought to become several Canadian provinces, referring to an American president as though he were merely a provincial governor, then threatening to damage the American economy until Washington became more cooperative with Ottawa. We would not call that humor. We would not shrug and say the prime minister was merely negotiating aggressively.

We would call it a threat.

Canadians noticed.

In 2025, Pew Research Center asked Canadians which country represented the greatest threat to Canada. Fifty-nine percent named the United States, nearly three times the share that had done so in 2019. At almost the same time, 55 percent of Canadians still identified the United States as their country’s most important ally. (Pew Research Center⁠)

Sit with that contradiction for a moment.

Our closest neighbor looked across the border and saw its most important ally and its greatest threat standing in the same place.

That should break an American heart.

Canada did not suddenly move. Canadians did not wake up one morning and forget two centuries of shared history. We changed the terms of the relationship and then acted surprised that they noticed.

By 2026, the deterioration had become even more difficult to dismiss. Pew found that just 33 percent of Canadians held a favorable view of the United States while 44 percent viewed China favorably, a reversal that would have sounded almost absurd only a few years earlier. (Pew Research Center⁠)

There is something profoundly wrong when the nation that spent generations building an alliance with Canada manages to make Canadians more comfortable expressing a favorable view of China than of us.

We can respond to that by calling Canadians ungrateful, or weak, or woke, or anti-American. We can call the polls meaningless. We can insist that everybody secretly needs us more than we need them.

Or we can ask the question adults ask when someone they have loved and trusted begins backing away from them.

What did we do?

That is the question patriotism ought to permit.

Instead we have increasingly been offered a counterfeit version of patriotism in which questions themselves are suspect. Loyalty means agreement. History must reassure us. Journalists should flatter us. Teachers should protect children from knowledge that might complicate the national mythology. Universities should avoid ideas politicians dislike. Libraries should be cleansed of books that make somebody uncomfortable.

Which brings us to perhaps the most ridiculous and revealing feature of the entire moment.

A COUNTRY AFRAID OF BOOKS

There is something almost medieval about banning books in the twenty-first century.

We live at a moment when a teenager carrying a telephone has access to more information than most kings and presidents possessed during the entire twentieth century, yet adults are marching into meetings demanding that Toni Morrison disappear from a shelf because somebody fears what a seventeen-year-old might think after reading her.

The American Library Association documented 5,668 books banned from libraries in 2025 and another 920 subjected to access restrictions. PEN America counted 6,870 instances of school book bans during the 2024-25 school year and reported that censorship of nonfiction, including history, biography, memoir and health, had doubled. (PEN America⁠)

Nonfiction.

That word should trouble us.

We are not merely having the legitimate conversation every generation of parents has about whether a particular book is developmentally appropriate for a particular age. Parents have every right to decide what their own children read. Schools have always made judgments about age, curriculum and educational purpose, and reasonable people can disagree about individual choices.

But deciding what your child may read is parenting.

Deciding what everybody else’s child may read is something else.

The current movement has repeatedly targeted books about race, sexuality, gender, discrimination, history and the lives of people whose experiences sit outside a preferred version of America. And once the target becomes history and biography, the objective becomes much harder to disguise. We are no longer protecting children from a graphic scene. We are protecting adults from children learning something adults would rather not explain.

That is not education.

It is intellectual cowardice.

A confident society does not fear books. A confident parent does not require every library shelf to reflect his worldview, and a confident country does not need to erase difficult history in order to produce citizens who love it.

Quite the opposite.

If an idea is wrong, teach a young person how to dismantle it. If a book contains ugliness, discuss the ugliness. If history is complicated, teach the complication. If an author is dishonest, teach students to recognize the dishonesty. That is what education is for. The alternative is to produce adults who are protected from bad ideas until the first demagogue who understands television places one directly in front of them.

A library is not an endorsement machine. Reading Marx does not make someone a communist. Reading Hitler does not make someone a Nazi. Reading the Bible does not automatically create a Christian, and reading a memoir by a gay teenager will not transform the sexuality of the child holding it.

Books are where human beings encounter ideas without having to surrender to them.

That is the fucking point.

The beauty of a library is that it contains books you would never choose, written by people you may dislike, describing lives you have never lived and making arguments that might infuriate you. It is one of the few institutions deliberately constructed around the assumption that citizens can be trusted to encounter ideas without someone standing over their shoulder deciding which thoughts are safe.

History is embarrassingly consistent about what happens when governments lose that confidence.

You do not have to begin by burning books in a square. That image is almost too theatrical for modern censorship. You begin more politely. You create lists. You pass vague rules. You make librarians nervous. You make teachers wonder whether a paragraph is worth the complaint. You allow activists and officials to create enough professional risk that people begin removing difficult material before anyone formally orders them to do so.

Eventually censorship does not need a censor.

Fear does the work.

And there is something particularly obscene about doing this in the name of American patriotism because the history being hidden is often the history that explains why American democracy became better than it was.

America was not born innocent.

It enlarged itself through conquest. It permitted human bondage and encoded slavery into constitutional compromise. It displaced Indigenous peoples and broke treaties. It tolerated Jim Crow, lynching, exclusion, internment and discrimination. It denied women political equality, persecuted gay Americans, crushed workers, excluded immigrants and repeatedly failed to extend its magnificent language about liberty to the human beings standing directly in front of it.

Those facts are not anti-American.

They are American history.

So are Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. So are the abolitionists and suffragists. So are the striking workers, Freedom Riders, civil-rights lawyers, muckrakers, investigative reporters, whistleblowers and ordinary citizens who looked at the distance between America’s promises and its behavior and decided that hypocrisy was not a reason to abandon the country, but a reason to force it to become more honest.

That is the part of history the book banners never seem to understand.

If you remove the injustice because it makes America look bad, you also erase the courage of the Americans who fought it.

There is no Harriet Tubman without slavery. No Frederick Douglass without bondage. No Rosa Parks without segregation. No Martin Luther King Jr. without American racism. No labor movement without exploitation. No suffrage movement without disenfranchisement.

You cannot turn American history into a comfortable story without eventually removing the people who made the country better.

And maybe that is the deeper connection between the books, Greenland, Puerto Rico, Canada and the strange authoritarian admiration that has infected parts of American politics. Each begins with the assumption that power confers a right to decide for someone else.

The people of Greenland become an obstacle to acquiring Greenland.

Puerto Ricans become an inconvenient population attached to an island someone else might prefer to trade.

Canadians become future Americans who somehow have not yet understood the benefits of surrendering their own country.

A librarian becomes subordinate to a politician.

A teacher becomes subordinate to an activist group.

History becomes subordinate to whatever version of America makes the people currently in power most comfortable.

Consent becomes an inconvenience.

And once consent becomes inconvenient, democracy itself begins to look inconvenient.

That is what frightens me.

This sickness did not begin with Donald Trump, and it will not end with him. America has always lived somewhere between its appetite and its conscience. There have always been people who believed greatness meant having enough power to impose our will, and others who believed greatness meant learning when not to. There have always been Americans who treated criticism as betrayal and Americans who understood that criticism is one of democracy’s purest forms of participation.

The country moves forward because the second group refuses to shut up.

Trump’s particular genius was recognizing how easily patriotism could be separated from principle and turned into merchandise. The flag becomes a brand. The anthem becomes a loyalty test. Cruelty becomes strength. Shamelessness becomes authenticity. Ignorance becomes rebellion against elites. Every correction becomes persecution, every indictment proof of innocence, every independent institution evidence of conspiracy.

Eventually belief itself becomes tribal.

You no longer ask whether something is true.

You ask whether saying it helps your side.

That is how democratic citizenship becomes fandom.

Journalism has always had its hucksters, propagandists and cowards. There was never some immaculate age when every publisher was courageous and every reporter disinterested. American newspapers have manufactured fear, served political machines, amplified racism and protected powerful owners. But there is a difference between biased information and the deliberate destruction of the idea that information can be trusted at all.

Every journalist lies.

Every court is political.

Every scientist is bought.

Every expert has an agenda.

Every election is legitimate when we win and suspicious when we lose.

Every photograph might be fake.

Every statistic is propaganda.

Every fact is merely someone’s opinion wearing a necktie.

Once a population accepts that proposition, the liar has accomplished something extraordinary. He no longer needs to make his lie convincing. He only needs to make truth exhausting.

That may be the most dangerous political innovation of our time.

And this is where I want desperately to say the sentence millions of Americans are probably desperate to say themselves.

This is not who we are.

But history will not let me hide inside it.

Some of this is who we are.

America has bullied weaker nations before. We have censored, conquered, threatened, lied, segregated, deported, imprisoned dissenters and elevated demagogues. Pretending otherwise would simply be another version of the national mythology I am arguing against.

So perhaps the more honest sentence is this:

This is not all we are.

And it is not who we have to become.

The loudest Americans do not own America. Donald Trump does not own America. No political party owns it. The people screaming at librarians do not own it. The billionaires buying political access do not own it. The propagandists do not own it.

America also belongs to the teacher quietly explaining the chapter somebody wanted removed from the curriculum, the librarian who places a difficult book back on the shelf, the veteran who understands an oath was made to the Constitution rather than to a man, the immigrant studying for citizenship and taking the words of that Constitution with touching seriousness.

It belongs to the union worker asking for a fair wage, the journalist asking the question everyone in the room wishes would disappear, the nurse finishing a twelve-hour shift, the firefighter walking toward the house everyone else is fleeing, the Black grandmother who waits as long as necessary to cast a ballot because she remembers how recently this country placed obstacles between people like her and the voting booth.

It belongs to the kid reading the book someone tried to take away.

It belongs to people who volunteer after floods, feed neighbors after fires, argue at school-board meetings, show up for elections and still believe public life can be something more dignified than choosing which stranger to hate.

That America exists too.

Perhaps the world cannot see it clearly right now.

Perhaps that is partly our fault.

For generations Americans became accustomed to being described as the leader of the free world. We grew comfortable with Reagan’s shining city on a hill and with older American ideas of ourselves as a beacon without asking often enough whether anyone beyond our borders could still see the light.

But a beacon is not a title.

It is a light somebody else can see.

You do not get to extinguish it and then become furious because the ships stop navigating by you.

If Canadians fear us, listen.

If Europeans doubt us, listen.

If people who once regarded American democracy as something to emulate begin regarding America itself as a source of instability, listen.

The international judgment is not automatically correct simply because it is international. The world can misunderstand America just as easily as Americans misunderstand the world. But contempt for every outside criticism is simply another form of cowardice.

Perhaps the British man I listened to was unfair in places. Perhaps he underestimated the number of Americans fighting against the country he described. Perhaps he looked at our government and mistook it for all of us.

I hope so.

But proving him wrong is our job, not his.

We cannot demand that the world remember Normandy forever while forgetting what we are doing on Tuesday.

We cannot demand gratitude for the Marshall Plan while threatening democratic neighbors with economic coercion.

We cannot call ourselves defenders of freedom while politicians decide which books citizens ought to encounter.

We cannot lecture the world about sovereignty while discussing friendly nations as acquisitions.

We cannot admire strongmen and then insist that everyone continue regarding us as the indispensable democracy.

And we cannot keep telling ourselves that we are the good guys simply because, somewhere in our history, we sometimes were.

Real patriotism is harder than that.

I am patriotic enough to be ashamed when my country behaves shamefully. I am patriotic enough to be frightened when an American president treats sovereign people as pieces on a property board, when authoritarian rulers are admired for the very absence of democratic constraints that generations of Americans claimed made our system superior, when books become dangerous because history has become inconvenient.

And I am patriotic enough to believe none of this has to be permanent.

I do not want an America that needs to be told it is the greatest country on Earth every five minutes like an insecure child demanding reassurance. I want a country confident enough to hear criticism, strong enough to correct itself, curious enough to permit dangerous books, decent enough to respect its friends and mature enough to understand that power without principle is not strength.

It is merely force with a flag pinned to it.

We do not need to recover some imaginary former greatness. Nostalgia is convenient because imaginary golden ages never have to answer questions about who was excluded from them.

We need to become worthy of trust again.

That means confronting our history without despising our country. It means defending institutions without pretending they are flawless, criticizing government without surrendering the idea of self-government, protecting speech we dislike and books we would never read, and understanding that the freedom of another person means very little if it exists only when that person makes choices we approve.

It means growing up.

There are moments when patriotism means standing for the anthem.

There are others when patriotism means standing in the way.

This is one of them.

I still believe in the American experiment, although perhaps not in the uncomplicated way I once did. I believe in it precisely because it has survived people who tried to narrow its meaning before, because every generation has produced citizens stubborn enough to insist that the promises belonged to them too, and because America at its best has never been a finished achievement.

It has been an argument.

An argument over who counts.

An argument over who gets to speak.

An argument over who gets to vote, who gets to read, who gets to marry, who gets to belong, who gets to tell the truth about what happened here.

That argument is ours now.

And I refuse to concede it to people who think loving America requires lying about it.

No man owns this country. No movement gets to erase its history. No government should decide which ideas its citizens are permitted to encounter. No neighboring democracy becomes ours because we are bigger than it. No American becomes disposable because he is poor. No lie becomes sacred because someone wraps it in the flag.

If America is ever again to be seen as something other than a danger by people who once regarded it as a friend, it will not happen because we demand their admiration or remind them endlessly of who we once were.

It will happen because of what we choose to become.

That work is difficult, unglamorous and profoundly patriotic.

And it begins with telling the truth.

Especially when the lie is wearing the flag.

By Steven J. Boardman

When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.

Donald Trump first told us a long time ago.

On October 15, 2007, Trump sat across from Larry King and started talking about success. The conversation moved through business, family and the qualities that separate people who rise from those who do not. Then Trump reached for an explanation that would remain with him for the next nineteen years.

“The racehorse theory.”

There was, Trump said, “something to the genes.”

King pressed him.

Something?

“A lot.”

Three years later, CNN asked Trump whether the drive behind his success had been learned or whether he had simply been born with it. Trump chose heredity. He called himself “a gene believer,” talked about his successful father and explained that when two fast racehorses are bred, people expect another fast horse. His own success, he suggested, owed something to a good gene pool.

This was 2010. Barack Obama was in his first term. MAGA did not exist. Trump had not descended the escalator, Charlottesville was years away, and nobody was contemplating a second Trump presidency in which mass deportation, refugee exclusions and white South African resettlement would become matters of federal policy. Donald Trump was still primarily a celebrity businessman and television personality with an apparently inexhaustible appetite for talking about himself.

Yet the idea was already there: some people possess qualities that make them successful because those qualities travel through blood, and Trump’s preferred analogy for explaining human beings was the selective breeding of animals.

America heard it again in September 2020.

Trump was campaigning in Bemidji, Minnesota, before a crowd he praised for the toughness and determination of the people who had settled the region. Then he told them they had “good genes.” He asked whether much of what separates one person from another comes down to genetics and returned to his old comparison.

The racehorse theory.

“You think we’re so different?”

Different from racehorses.

The remark drew criticism. Reporters examined the history of eugenics. Jewish organizations objected. Critics noted the racial implications of a president praising the genetics of a largely white audience during a speech in which he also attacked refugee resettlement and singled out immigrants from Somalia and elsewhere as threats. The story joined the enormous pile of Trump outrages accumulated during his first presidency, and the country moved on.

Trump did not.

On January 19, 2025, Elon Musk stood with Trump at a pre-inauguration rally in Washington. Musk’s young son was there too. Trump praised the boy’s intelligence and immediately returned to the explanation he had given Larry King eighteen years earlier. If you believe in the racehorse theory, Trump said, Musk has a smart son.

The father is intelligent. The son is intelligent. Pedigree explains the result.

Then came July 1, 2026.

At the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, Trump spoke about Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the president’s eldest son, who received the Medal of Honor for his actions on D-Day. Trump described Roosevelt Jr. as brave and explained why.

“It’s genetics.”

Once again, the racehorse theory.

Bravery deserves attention here. Trump was no longer talking about height, hair color, hereditary illness or any other trait for which ordinary conversation about genetics would be unremarkable. He was talking about courage under fire, a profoundly complicated human quality involving character, circumstance, training, fear, loyalty and choice, and he reduced it to heredity.

Twelve days later, while discussing Lindsey Graham’s family history of heart disease, Trump announced again that he was a believer in the racehorse theory. On August 11, speaking about Graham’s sister Darline, Trump praised her and said she had “good genetics” because she was related to Lindsey.

Nearly nineteen years had passed since Larry King asked what Trump meant.

He was still talking about the horses.

Trump makes almost everything sound unserious enough to discourage serious examination. He jokes, exaggerates, digresses, mangles sentences and moves from subject to subject so quickly that analysis can begin to feel like overinterpretation. “Good genes” can be shrugged off as a clumsy way of saying somebody comes from a talented family. Racehorses can be dismissed as one more metaphor that has been rattling around his head for decades.

That explanation becomes harder to sustain once good genes acquire an opposite.

During an October 2024 interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump was talking about immigrants convicted of homicide when he offered his theory of murder. A murderer, Trump said, could have murder “in their genes.” America, he continued, had received “a lot of bad genes.”

His campaign later insisted that Trump was referring specifically to murderers and not to immigrants generally. The qualification belongs in the record, but it leaves the underlying belief untouched. Trump described murderous criminal behavior as something that can reside in inherited biology.

By March 2026, the language had become even more explicit.

Brian Kilmeade was speaking with Trump about violent attacks and the people who committed them. Trump talked about people who had entered the United States, described some as sick and bad, and returned to genetics.

“The genetics are not exactly,” Trump began.

Kilmeade tried to interject.

“They’re not exactly your genetic,” Trump finished.

The distinction appeared inside a conversation about dangerous outsiders. By then the pattern had become difficult to miss. Success could come from genes. Intelligence could come from genes. Bravery could come from genes. Murder could come from genes. Some people had good genes, America could receive bad genes, and the genetics of threatening outsiders might differ from those of the Americans discussing them.

That is more than one unfortunate phrase at a Minnesota rally. It is a way of seeing people.

History has a name for the effort to turn that way of seeing people into social science.

Eugenics.

Francis Galton coined the term in the nineteenth century from a Greek expression carrying the meaning of good birth or good stock. Eugenicists took genuine discoveries about biological inheritance and stretched them far beyond what science could sustain. They argued that complicated human qualities such as intelligence, morality, criminality, poverty and social worth were carried through heredity. Human beings could therefore be divided into better and worse stock, and society could supposedly be improved by encouraging the reproduction of some people while restricting the reproduction of others.

The United States embraced those ideas enthusiastically.

American eugenicists catalogued people they considered defective, lobbied for sterilization laws and supplied intellectual respectability to a movement that treated poverty, disability and criminality as hereditary contamination. Tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized under laws justified by the supposed need to protect society from people deemed unfit. Eugenic thinking also entered the immigration debate, where entire national and ethnic populations were ranked according to their presumed biological desirability.

Donald Trump does not need to have studied Galton or American eugenics for the history to matter. No evidence shows him running a compulsory breeding program or ordering sterilizations. What the record does show, repeatedly, is his belief that complex human qualities and deficiencies can travel through bloodlines, that families transmit more than physical traits, and that human beings can be understood through the logic of breeding.

The overlap becomes especially uncomfortable when the quality under discussion is bravery.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes Nazi racial thinking behind the Lebensborn program as including the belief that qualities such as bravery and loyalty were hereditary and could be strengthened through controlled reproduction. Nazi racial theory treated ancestry as a measure of human value and sought to increase the number of children born to those classified as biologically desirable.

In July 2026, Donald Trump stood at an American presidential library, described Theodore Roosevelt Jr. as brave and said the explanation was genetics. Then he invoked racehorse theory.

There is no need to invent a line of intellectual transmission from Nazi racial theory to Donald Trump. The propositions can simply be read beside one another. Nazi racial theorists believed bravery could be inherited. Trump said bravery was genetic and illustrated the idea through breeding racehorses.

The comparison is uncomfortable because the proposition is uncomfortable.

Trump’s strange orbit around Adolf Hitler has lasted almost as long as Trump himself has been a national celebrity. A 1990 Vanity Fair profile reported that Ivana Trump had told her lawyer that Trump kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches nearby and sometimes read from it. When confronted, Trump acknowledged that a friend had given him a Hitler book but disputed the title and later denied reading it. The friend confirmed giving him a collection of Hitler speeches.

More than thirty years later, John Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff and a retired four-star Marine general, said Trump had told him that Hitler had done some good things. Kelly also said Trump wanted generals like the generals he imagined Hitler possessed, personally loyal to the leader rather than principally loyal to constitutional institutions. Trump denied Kelly’s account.

Arguments over these episodes tend to bog down in questions of intent. Did Trump read the book? Did Kelly hear him correctly? Did Trump understand what Hitler’s generals actually did? Was he praising Hitler himself or merely admiring command, obedience and power?

Those questions do not make Trump’s attraction to authoritarian rulers disappear.

He once described his relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un by saying the two men “fell in love” through their correspondence. Kim presides over one of the most repressive states in the world, a hereditary dictatorship built on political prisons, censorship, executions and the elimination of meaningful opposition. Trump’s affection survived all of it.

Vladimir Putin has received similar indulgence. Trump has repeatedly spoken about the Russian ruler through the language of personal respect, strength and relationship, even while Russia waged war against Ukraine and Putin tightened his control over domestic opposition. Trump can become frustrated with Putin and complain that he has been disappointed by him, but he repeatedly returns to the idea of the powerful man with whom he believes he can deal personally.

There is nuance in calling Trump a fan of Hitler or any other dictator because admiration does not require ideological identity. Trump does not have to subscribe to every belief held by a ruler in order to admire what he thinks that ruler represents. His authoritarian fascination has always appeared less philosophical than instinctive. He likes the man at the top. He likes the one who appears untouchable. He likes power that does not ask permission.

That attraction fits neatly into a worldview built around hierarchy.

Trump has always divided people into winners and losers, strong men and weak men, beautiful people and ugly people, geniuses and fools, warriors and cowards, successful countries and failed ones. Genes add something darker to that hierarchy because they make it feel permanent. If success is inherited, the winner did not merely win. He came from winning stock. If intelligence is inherited, genius becomes pedigree. If bravery is genetic, courage belongs to the bloodline. If murder resides in genes, criminality becomes a biological inheritance capable of crossing generations.

Once Trump begins sorting nations through the same vocabulary of desirability, his genetics obsession stops being merely an eccentric feature of his personality. The president controls who enters the country.

He gave America a crude glimpse into that hierarchy during an Oval Office immigration meeting in January 2018.

Lawmakers were discussing immigration from Haiti and African countries when Trump was reported to have asked why the United States should accept people from what he called “shithole countries.” He expressed a preference for immigrants from Norway. Trump denied using the phrase at the time, and the meeting became another national argument over whether the president was racist, whether witnesses had heard him correctly and whether his defenders could construct some economic explanation for the countries he preferred.

Years later Trump removed much of the ambiguity himself.

In December 2025, he publicly recalled the meeting and acknowledged asking why America took people from “shithole countries.” Then he supplied the preferred alternatives again: Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

The obscenity had always distracted from the more revealing part of the sentence. Trump was sorting populations. Haiti and African nations occupied one side of the ledger. Wealthy northern European countries occupied the other. There were places whose people he could not understand America wanting and places whose people he wished America had more of.

By then his immigration language had already become biological.

At a New Hampshire rally in December 2023, Trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country. He spoke of people arriving from Africa, Asia and elsewhere. The phrase immediately produced comparisons with Hitler’s rhetoric about blood contamination and racial purity.

Trump responded that he had never read Mein Kampf.

Perhaps he had not. The answer never addressed the more important fact that Hitler did not introduce Donald Trump to good genes, bad genes or racehorse breeding. Trump had been using that language publicly since 2007.

America, for that matter, did not need Nazi Germany to introduce it to biological theories of immigration.

Eugenicists were deeply involved in the campaign for immigration restriction during the early twentieth century. They argued that the country was threatened by the arrival of supposedly inferior nationalities whose poverty, criminality or lack of intelligence they regarded as inherited characteristics. The Immigration Act of 1924 created national-origin quotas that heavily favored northern and western Europeans while restricting people from southern and eastern Europe and excluding much of Asia. Eugenic ideas helped provide a scientific veneer for judgments about which populations Americans believed would improve the country and which would degrade it.

German racial theorists later studied American sterilization statutes, immigration restrictions and racial classifications while constructing their own system. Nazi Germany eventually carried biological politics into persecution and extermination on a scale that dwarfed its American precedents, but the American origins of some of this thinking do not disappear simply because the Nazis carried them into an abyss.

That history gives Trump’s language about national desirability a context much older than MAGA.

Then came the Afrikaners.

On January 20, 2025, Trump suspended the United States Refugee Admissions Program, declaring refugee entry detrimental to American interests except in limited circumstances. His order said future admissions should consider whether people could fully and appropriately assimilate into the United States.

Eighteen days later, Trump created an extraordinary exception.

He signed an executive order directing the federal government to prioritize refugee relief and resettlement for Afrikaners in South Africa, descendants largely of Dutch and other European settlers, on the grounds that they faced racial discrimination.

As the broader refugee system remained largely closed, the Afrikaner pathway expanded. By May 2026, the administration had raised the refugee ceiling by another 10,000 places specifically to admit additional white South Africans. Roughly 6,000 white South Africans had already been admitted during the fiscal year while only a handful of refugees from elsewhere had entered under the same system. South Africa’s government rejected Trump’s portrayal of Afrikaners as victims of systematic racial persecution, and the broader claim of a white genocide has not been supported by the available evidence.

Officials inside the American government even wrestled with whether non-white South Africans could qualify. Reuters reported that U.S. diplomats sought clarification after a senior State Department official was described as indicating that the program was intended for white applicants. The department later said other racial minorities could also qualify.

The contradictory guidance matters. So does the outcome. A refugee system largely closed to the world became remarkably efficient at admitting white South Africans.

Standing near the beginning of that story was Elon Musk.

Musk was born in South Africa and became Trump’s most powerful billionaire ally during the 2024 election and the opening months of the new administration. He amplified claims that white South Africans faced racial persecution and helped propel a narrative that had circulated for years through far-right networks in South Africa, Europe and the United States.

His relevance extends beyond South Africa because Musk supplies a modern version of another question that has followed hereditarian politics for more than a century: who should have children?

Musk has spent years warning that collapsing birthrates pose an existential threat to civilization. Falling fertility is a legitimate public-policy problem. Aging populations create serious economic and social pressures, and governments around the world are struggling with shrinking workforces and the costs of supporting older populations.

Musk’s rhetoric goes farther.

Walter Isaacson’s biography recounts Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis saying that Musk “really wants smart people to have kids.” Zilis had been considering an anonymous sperm donor when Musk offered himself. Her explanation was equally revealing: she could not think of genes she would rather have for her children.

Musk and Zilis went on to have children together.

There is nothing sinister about two consenting adults choosing to have children. What belongs in this story is the reasoning attached to reproduction: smart people should reproduce, Musk’s genes are desirable, and civilization needs more births.

Trump then looks at one of Musk’s sons and explains the child’s intelligence through racehorse theory.

That convergence is difficult to ignore. Trump supplies the language of inherited human quality. Musk has spoken about reproduction as a civilizational necessity and, according to Zilis, specifically wants intelligent people producing more children. Musk also helped amplify claims that a particular white population in South Africa was under threat, and Trump’s government later created an extraordinary refugee preference for that same population.

No evidence shows Trump and Musk sitting down to design a racial population program, and their political alliance eventually fractured spectacularly. None of that is necessary for the similarities in their thinking to deserve scrutiny. Ideas survive friendships.

Trump’s fascination with physical excellence sits nearby, although it requires more care. He has always loved fighters, athletes, champions and displays of dominance. Meeting UFC fighters in the Oval Office in May 2026, he called them warriors, the toughest people and the greatest fighters in the world. His administration revived the Presidential Fitness Test and tied physical discipline to national strength.

The Patriot Games, created as part of the federal celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, brought together 120 athletes between the ages of 14 and 17 from the states, territories, tribal nations and military bases. They competed in events including an obstacle course, military-inspired fitness challenges, basketball, dodgeball, kickball and tug of war, with one male and one female winner each receiving a $125,000 scholarship.

The event’s public record gives us no basis to call it a eugenic project or attach some private sexual motive to Trump’s interest in it. Its relevance is more modest. Trump has built a political aesthetic around physical strength, competition, champions, warriors and national vigor. Sport and physical fitness are not sinister. They become more interesting in the context of a president who has spent nineteen years explaining human quality through bloodlines, genes and breeding.

The documented record is already strong enough without trying to make every Trump obsession carry more weight than the evidence allows.

He has repeatedly said he believes in racehorse theory. He has spoken of good genes and bad genes. He has explained intelligence through lineage, bravery through heredity and murderous behavior through biology. He has described immigration as something capable of poisoning the nation’s blood and contrasted the genetics of threatening outsiders with those of an American interviewer. He has publicly ranked countries according to the populations he wants entering the United States, preferring Scandinavians to people from Haiti and Africa. His administration then restricted refugee admissions across much of the world while creating an extraordinary pathway for thousands of white Afrikaners.

That record raises a question the country has spent years finding reasons not to ask directly.

What does Donald Trump believe makes a person desirable?

For too long, every part of the answer has been examined in isolation. The Hitler book becomes a dispute about whether he read it. John Kelly’s account becomes an argument about memory. “Poisoning the blood” becomes a question about whether Trump knew the historical resonance. “Bad genes” becomes a debate over whether he meant immigrants or only murderers. His preference for Scandinavians becomes an argument about economics. The Afrikaner exception becomes a humanitarian-policy dispute. Racehorse theory becomes a joke.

Any one of those explanations may work once. Some may even be correct in the narrow circumstances in which they are offered. The problem is what happens when the same underlying idea keeps returning across nearly twenty years, before and after Trump entered politics, across interviews, rallies, White House conversations and presidential speeches.

The subjects change. The hierarchy survives.

Trump has always understood the world through rank. People win or lose. Nations dominate or submit. Men project strength or invite humiliation. Dictators fascinate him because they seem to occupy the highest rung, men who command armies, silence opponents and answer to nobody. His admiration for Hitler, Putin and Kim Jong Un does not require us to pretend those men are interchangeable or that Trump shares every element of their politics. What joins them in Trump’s imagination is power without embarrassment. They rule. Others obey.

His genetics obsession moves that hierarchy from achievement into the human body. The winner may have been born with the qualities that made him win. The intelligent child may be evidence of superior lineage. The brave soldier may carry courage in his genes. The murderer may carry murder there too. Immigration can then become more than a question of law, labor or culture. It can become a question of what kind of human material enters the country.

That is where the history of eugenics becomes impossible to dismiss.

America once convinced itself that government could distinguish good stock from bad. We sterilized people judged unfit and restricted immigrants whose national origins offended our racial hierarchy. Poverty, disability and criminality were treated as hereditary defects and prejudice was dressed in the vocabulary of science. German racial theorists studied parts of that system before carrying biological politics into horrors on a scale that transformed the word eugenics forever.

Donald Trump does not have to be Adolf Hitler for any of that history to matter.

He can be exactly what he has spent nineteen years telling us he is: a man fascinated by powerful rulers and human hierarchy, a man who believes families transmit more than physical traits, a man who has repeatedly described intelligence, success and courage as inherited qualities, a man who has said murder can live in the genes and immigration can poison the blood, and a president with the authority to turn judgments about desirable and undesirable populations into government policy.

Perhaps Trump has never considered where all of those ideas lead when assembled together. Perhaps he does not know the history well enough to recognize the company his rhetoric keeps. Perhaps he never opened the collection of Hitler speeches. None of that changes the words he has chosen or the consistency with which he returns to them.

For years, the country has searched for a hidden Donald Trump behind the one standing at the microphone, as though somewhere beneath the vulgarity, improvisation and spectacle there must be a more complicated man whose intentions will rescue us from the obvious meaning of what he says.

There may be no hidden Trump.

There may simply be the man who told Larry King in 2007 that there was a lot to the genes, who called himself a gene believer three years later, who told a Minnesota crowd they possessed good genes, who described immigrants as poisoning American blood, who said the country was receiving bad genes, who explained a decorated soldier’s bravery through heredity and who, nearly two decades after first explaining the idea on television, still reaches for the same analogy.

The racehorse theory.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.

Donald Trump did.

The rest of us spent nineteen years deciding he could not possibly mean it.

Please visit aebly.com for news and stories like this.

By Steven J. Boardman

There is a comforting way to tell the story of what is happening to Flock Safety in Arizona. A few police officers misused a powerful investigative tool. Their departments caught them. Audits worked. Officers were disciplined or investigated. Policies will be tightened. The technology will survive.

That explanation has the advantage of being simple. It also requires ignoring almost everything that has happened.

Over the past several weeks, Arizona law enforcement agencies have begun dismantling pieces of a surveillance network that took years to construct. Chandler terminated its use of Flock’s automated license plate readers after an internal audit found activity the city could not connect to legitimate police work. Apache Junction disclosed that an officer used the system to locate his wife during a personal dispute. Goodyear placed an officer on leave after investigators identified activity serious enough to raise the possibility of a criminal violation. Surprise suspended its license-plate reader program and placed an officer on administrative leave after another audit found potential misuse. Tempe, despite finding no misuse within its own department, shut down all outside sharing of its Flock data. Pinal County Sheriff Ross Teeple went further and announced that his office would allow its Flock contract to expire because he has serious Fourth Amendment concerns about the technology itself.

They were not the first. Flagstaff, Sedona, South Tucson and Sierra Vista had already discontinued their contracts. What changed this month is the size of the departures and the reasons given for them. These are not variations of the same incident. They are different failures exposing different vulnerabilities in the same system, and Mesa may have exposed the most important one of all.

Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers photograph vehicles as they pass, recording license plates and other identifying vehicle characteristics along with time and location information. Those records become searchable by authorized law enforcement users. The value to police is obvious. A stolen vehicle can appear on a camera miles from where it disappeared. A car associated with an Amber Alert can be found quickly. Investigators working a homicide can reconstruct the movement of a suspect vehicle without waiting for a detective to discover a useful security camera by chance.

Police departments have legitimate reasons to want that capability. The problem begins with what else the capability creates.

A camera does not know whether the Honda Accord passing beneath it belongs to a murder suspect, a woman driving to an abortion clinic, a journalist meeting a source, an undocumented father taking his daughter to school, a police officer’s estranged spouse or somebody buying groceries. It photographs the car first. Purpose comes later.

And when thousands of those cameras are connected through searchable databases and interagency sharing arrangements, the question is no longer simply what one police department can see. The question becomes who can ask somebody else to look.

Apache Junction has already provided Arizona with an unusually clear demonstration of what happens when access intended for law enforcement becomes access to another person’s movements. According to Police Chief Michael Pooley, an officer asked dispatchers on April 19 to run his wife’s license plate. Dispatch complied but raised concerns to a supervisor. The officer was involved in a personal dispute and later contacted Casa Grande police seeking a welfare check. During that contact, according to police, he disclosed that he had already used Apache Junction’s Flock system to locate his wife’s vehicle in Casa Grande.

Casa Grande contacted Apache Junction. The officer was placed on leave the following day. He later resigned after the internal investigation was completed, and Pooley said he would have been fired had he remained.

There is a temptation to treat the episode as proof that the safeguards succeeded because someone noticed, someone reported it, the department investigated, and the employee left. But an audit capable of discovering misuse after someone has searched a surveillance database is fundamentally different from a safeguard that prevents an unauthorized search from happening. The wife had already been located. The search had already occurred. The system had already done exactly what the officer asked it to do.

That is the reality underneath the phrase “audit controls.” An audit may tell you that the gate was opened improperly. It does not keep the gate closed.

Arizona is not an outlier in this. Court documents in Wisconsin show that a former Milwaukee police officer used Flock to search the location of a romantic partner 124 times. That is not a lapse in judgment. It is a habit that the system accommodated. Arizona is not discovering a local problem. Arizona is arriving at a national one.

Then came Chandler.

On August 7, the city announced that it would discontinue its 40 fixed Flock cameras and abandon plans to renew its agreement with the company. The decision followed a routine audit that identified what the city called an anomaly that could not be explained through standard police activity. Police Chief Bryan Chapman said the potential misuse involved someone within his organization, and access was immediately restricted for the roughly 200 Chandler Police employees who had been authorized to use the system while the investigation proceeded.

Chapman was not a critic of the technology. He credited the cameras with assisting more than 2,000 cases, including recovered stolen vehicles and located missing dementia patients. He said the shutdown would slow the department’s investigative capacity.

Then the department’s own audit found something it could not explain.

Chandler did not announce another training seminar. It walked away.

That response makes little sense if the problem is merely that critics misunderstand the technology. Chandler Police understood the technology extremely well. They had trained users, policies and audits. The audit itself worked. The city’s conclusion was still that the system should be shut down while stronger safeguards are considered.

Goodyear followed with an investigation of its own. Surprise suspended its program and placed an officer on administrative leave. None of those investigations should be prejudged, and an unexplained search is not proof of criminal conduct. But that is precisely why the broader pattern deserves attention. We do not yet know whether every suspicious search was malicious. We already know the agencies themselves no longer consider the existing controls sufficient.

Pinal County Sheriff Ross Teeple did not need an officer scandal to reach his conclusion. On August 5, he told the county Board of Supervisors that his office will not renew its Flock contract when it expires at the end of September. His stated reason went directly to the Constitution. Teeple cited serious Fourth Amendment concerns about the ability of surveillance technology to assemble information about citizens’ day-to-day movements.

That is noteworthy because Teeple had previously defended the value of Flock cameras in locating missing people and assisting law enforcement. The sheriff did not suddenly discover that license plate readers can solve crimes. He decided that utility was not the only question.

The Fourth Amendment was written long before a camera could photograph a vehicle, convert the image into machine-readable information, attach a time and place to the observation, preserve it in a private company’s database and make that record searchable by law enforcement agencies far beyond the camera’s jurisdiction. Constitutional protection does not become obsolete because government surveillance becomes efficient. Efficiency is precisely why limits become important.

Tempe’s response may tell us even more. Its police department audits Flock searches every month and requires officers to enter a report number before accessing the data. The most recent audit found no misuse. Chief Ken McCoy said no previous audit had found any either.

Tempe shut down outside sharing anyway.

The city had already limited sharing to Arizona law enforcement. It eliminated even that access, saying the change would give Tempe tighter control over its own information. That is the strongest available evidence for the defense of this technology. Tempe followed the rules, its employees apparently followed the rules, and the department found no misuse. It restricted the network anyway.

Think about what that implicitly acknowledges. A department can have good policies. Its employees can follow them. Its audits can come back clean. Its data can still leave the jurisdiction. Once another authorized agency can query it, Tempe’s integrity depends partly upon that agency’s integrity.

That is the architecture Flock created.

And that brings us to Mesa.

In June, ABC15 investigator Melissa Blasius reported something that deserves to be reread in light of everything that has happened since. Chandler Police had publicly said it did not share its Flock information with federal agencies. Chief Chapman was explicit: Chandler’s sharing agreements were with state and local agencies in Arizona, not federal entities.

One of the agencies with which Chandler shared data was Mesa.

ABC15 obtained records showing that a Mesa Police officer assigned to the East Valley Fusion Center had performed Flock searches in response to requests from the Department of Homeland Security. Mesa told ABC15 those requests involved suspects at the center of criminal investigations. The Flock audit records contained another detail: some of those searches were categorized as immigration violations.

Mesa said the searches required supervisory approval and that federal requests without a criminal nexus would be rejected. That explanation may describe entirely lawful police cooperation. It also exposes the structural problem.

Suppose Chandler refuses to give ICE direct access to Chandler’s Flock data. Suppose Chandler shares its database with Mesa. Suppose DHS asks Mesa to search for a vehicle as part of an investigation. Mesa performs the search.

Whether the query is permitted may depend on the criminal predicate, agency policy and the facts of the investigation. What no longer depends exclusively on Chandler is whether Chandler’s cameras contribute information to the answer.

The route has changed. The data has not.

ABC15 put essentially that question to Chandler. The city reiterated that it does not share with ICE and said it blocks Flock searches explicitly categorized as immigration-related. It also acknowledged that other agencies are responsible for complying with their own laws, policies and terms.

There is the weakness in one sentence: other agencies are responsible for their own policies.

A city can promise its residents that it will not use Flock for immigration enforcement. It can deny direct federal access. It can prohibit certain search categories. It can audit every search made by its own officers. Then it can share its database with dozens of agencies whose personnel, policies, supervisors, federal relationships and auditing practices it does not control.

Local control begins to resemble local control over the first hop.

Mesa’s own public position on immigration enforcement makes the issue even more deserving of scrutiny. The department says its officers do not enforce federal immigration laws in the community and describes its 287(g) participation as narrowly confined to jail enforcement after someone has been arrested for a state criminal offense. Mesa separately acknowledges collaboration with federal partners on serious criminal investigations.

Those positions can coexist. But the public deserves to know exactly where the line is drawn when a federal agency asks a local fusion-center officer to search a regional database containing location information collected by cameras belonging to other Arizona cities.

How many DHS-requested Flock searches has Mesa performed? Which components of DHS made those requests? How many originated with ICE or Homeland Security Investigations? Which Arizona agencies’ data was returned? Were those agencies told their records had been searched? What was the criminal predicate in each case? Can the originating city audit a secondary agency’s search of its data? Can residents?

Those questions are no longer academic.

Arizona agencies also did not discover a flaw nobody had imagined. Privacy advocates and lawmakers had warned for months that a network this large could outrun local restrictions. Senator Ron Wyden had already challenged Flock over safeguards, federal and out-of-state access and account security.

Then, on Thursday, Flock changed the rules.

The reforms are substantial. Audit Assistance, an automated tool that flags abnormal search patterns for administrator review, will become mandatory for every law-enforcement customer by the end of the year. It had been optional. Roughly one third of agencies had enabled it. Two thirds had not.

Flock will also add a proactive lockout that suspends a user’s access in real time when activity meets abnormal-behavior criteria. Case codes will be required for searches. Multifactor authentication is becoming mandatory. The company is commissioning an independent security review. It is also reducing its recommended default retention period for license-plate data from 30 days to seven.

Those are meaningful changes, but one reform matters more than the others for what has happened in Arizona.

Flock is introducing offense filtering.

That allows a city to specify which categories of offense another agency may use when searching its cameras. The company’s own example is revealing: one city could permit another to search its cameras for a stolen vehicle, missing person or violent crime while blocking searches related to immigration enforcement.

Read that carefully.

That is essentially Chandler and Mesa.

Flock has now described, as the kind of vulnerability its new permission controls are designed to address, the precise structural problem Arizona has been stumbling into.

For years, the central defense of Flock’s system has been that customers control their own data. Agencies decide with whom they share. That defense was incomplete because the problem was never simply who owned the data. The problem was what happened after access was granted.

“Agency B may search Agency A’s data” is an enormous permission when Agency B has different policies, different supervisors, different federal relationships and perhaps a different understanding of what constitutes a legitimate search.

Flock now appears to recognize that agency-level permission was not enough. The company deserves credit for changing it. It does not erase the years in which the network operated without that guardrail.

Flock’s strongest argument remains real. The cameras help police solve crimes. They locate stolen vehicles. They help find missing people. They allow investigators to develop leads that might otherwise take days to uncover or never emerge at all. Police chiefs who defend the cameras are not inventing those benefits, and a serious debate about this technology cannot pretend otherwise.

But powerful tools do not require less scrutiny because they work. They require more.

A searchable map of vehicle movements does not know the purpose of the person conducting the search. That judgment comes from the human being sitting behind the screen.

Arizona has now demonstrated several different failure modes in rapid succession. An officer can use access for a personal purpose. An audit can uncover activity serious enough to trigger a criminal investigation. A department can lose enough confidence in the system to shut down dozens of cameras. A city with no evidence of employee misuse can decide that interagency sharing itself creates too much risk. A sheriff can conclude that the technology raises constitutional concerns even when it is being used exactly as designed. And a city that refuses direct federal sharing can still participate in a network through which another local agency answers requests originating with the federal government.

At some point, describing each event as an isolated incident becomes its own form of denial.

The common element is access.

This is where I’m going to stop, because the final section is the part I most wanted to write. It asks what the Fourth Amendment means when surveillance that once required officers, vehicles, time and manpower can now be accomplished by typing a license plate into a search box. It asks whether a police chief can genuinely promise a community that its data will not be used for a particular purpose after that data enters a regional network. And it asks the question beneath all the others: who actually controls that network?

Aebly gave me the platform to do this work properly. They gave me the room to investigate, to write long, to follow the evidence where it went and to publish work like this without asking me to turn it into six paragraphs and a clickbait headline. I don’t forget that.

So I wanted to give you most of the investigation here rather than hold the argument hostage just to manufacture a click. But the complete piece, the final constitutional section and the full source record belong at Aebly.

Read the complete investigation at Aebly:

THE BACK DOOR
Arizona’s Flock Network Was Only as Safe as the Next Police Department

https://aeblymedia.com/home

A surveillance network does not stop at a city limit.

Neither does its risk.

By Steven J. Boardman

There is a phrase in the American immigration debate that has survived every administration, every border panic and every round of political theater because it sounds so reasonable that almost nobody thinks to interrogate it. We welcome immigrants, we are told, provided they do it the right way. Wait your turn. File the paperwork. Submit to the background checks. Give the government your address, your employment information, your fingerprints when required, your family history and whatever else the forms demand. Pay the fees. Appear when summoned. Renew when instructed. Keep your information current. Stay visible to the system and trust that your willingness to abide by its rules will count for something.

The phrase carries more than a procedural instruction. It carries a moral promise. It tells the public that American immigration policy distinguishes between those who evade the system and those who submit themselves to it, and it tells immigrants that lawful compliance provides some measure of security. Nobody is guaranteed citizenship merely for filling out the right forms, and temporary status has never meant permanent residence, but “do it the right way” becomes meaningless if doing so leaves a person no more secure than someone who never entered the legal process at all.

That promise is now colliding with the machinery of the state.

Hundreds of thousands of Haitians have lost Temporary Protected Status after years of being permitted by the United States to remain and work legally. Employers have been forced to reverify employment documents and remove workers whose authorization vanished with the termination. Haitians already known to the immigration system have received letters directing them to ICE offices and, in some cases, have walked back into their communities wearing electronic monitors. At the same time, the State Department has announced more than 175,000 visa revocations since Donald Trump returned to office, many following what it calls “law enforcement encounters,” a category broad enough to include arrests, charges and allegations that never became criminal convictions.

These actions are legally distinct, and there is no reason to blur them. Visa revocation does not automatically erase every lawful status a person may possess inside the United States. Haitian immigrants summoned to ICE offices do not all share the same legal history. Some held TPS, some have asylum claims, some arrived through humanitarian parole, and some have overlapping immigration cases that do not fit neatly into a single political slogan. The argument becomes stronger once those distinctions are observed, because the common thread is not that everyone affected occupied the same category. The common thread is that the government already knew who they were because they had complied with systems the government itself created.

That is where “do it the right way” begins to reveal its darker meaning. A lawful immigration process requires visibility. An applicant creates a file, supplies an address, submits documentation, attends appointments, updates information and often provides biometrics. Those requirements are ordinary administrative necessities when a government is deciding who may enter, work or remain in the country. They also create a remarkably efficient enforcement map if the political decision surrounding that protection changes. The person who did everything properly does not disappear when the authorization does. The file remains, the address remains, the biometric record remains, and the obligation to appear when the government sends a letter remains.

The machinery does not have to be rebuilt. It simply has to be turned in the other direction.

The Court That Narrowed the Challenge

Temporary Protected Status was created by Congress in 1990 for nationals of countries facing war, natural disaster or extraordinary conditions that make safe return impossible or impracticable. Congress deliberately made the program temporary and gave the executive branch significant authority to decide when a country’s designation should continue and when it should end. It also wrote a formidable restriction on judicial review into the statute, stating that courts may not review the secretary’s determination concerning designation, extension or termination.

For years, however, the breadth of that prohibition remained contested. There is an obvious difference between a judge substituting his own judgment for that of the Secretary of Homeland Security and a judge examining whether the secretary followed the procedures Congress required, consulted the appropriate agencies, considered the available evidence or offered an explanation grounded in something more than political preference. The first question concerns who has the final authority to make the decision. The second concerns whether the decision was lawfully made.

On June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court resolved much of that dispute in Mullin v. Doe. By a vote of six to three, the Court read the statutory bar broadly enough to block the ordinary administrative-law claims that would normally permit a federal judge to inspect the process leading to a TPS termination. Constitutional claims were not extinguished altogether, and the Court separately considered the Haitian plaintiffs’ equal-protection argument, but the familiar Administrative Procedure Act route was largely closed.

That distinction matters precisely because administrative law is where government assertions ordinarily encounter evidence. It is where an agency can be forced to explain itself, where courts ask whether the record supports what officials claim, whether relevant information was ignored and whether the procedures written into law were actually followed. Once that route is largely unavailable, the secretary’s discretion becomes considerably harder to challenge even when the consequences are vast.

Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent recognized the breadth of what the majority had done. Congress had plainly insulated the ultimate TPS determination from ordinary judicial second-guessing, but she rejected the idea that this necessarily placed every preceding administrative step beyond scrutiny. The majority chose otherwise, leaving Congress with political remedies and TPS beneficiaries with far less access to the judicial machinery that normally tests executive action.

That choice is central to what followed in Haiti. The administration moved to end the protection, a federal judge halted the termination while litigation proceeded, and the Supreme Court sharply narrowed the grounds on which that litigation could continue. The government did not merely win a dispute over whether TPS should remain in force. It won a far broader argument about how closely a court may examine the process by which the government decided to end it.

That is not a footnote to the story. It is the architecture underneath it.

Haiti, Sixteen Years Later

Haiti’s relationship with TPS began after the catastrophic earthquake of 2010, when more than 200,000 people were killed and an already fragile country suffered devastation on a scale difficult to imagine. The designation did not remain frozen in that moment. Successive administrations extended, redesignated and altered the program, bringing different groups of Haitians under its protection at different times. Some people affected by the current termination have lived in the United States for many years. Others arrived far more recently. The legal histories vary, but the federal government’s role does not.

These were people whom the United States permitted to live and, in many cases, work legally under programs created by American law. They filed applications, paid fees, supplied identifying information, renewed documents, maintained addresses and demonstrated eligibility as the government required. Employers hired them because Washington issued documents saying they could be hired. Families were raised inside that framework. Taxes were paid inside it. Communities and businesses adjusted around the assumption that the federal authorization meant what it said for as long as the protection remained in force.

In November 2025, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem moved to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation, concluding that the country no longer met the conditions necessary for the protection and that continuation was contrary to the national interest. The termination was scheduled to take effect in early 2026, but U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes intervened and stayed it while the litigation proceeded. Then Mullin arrived from the Supreme Court, the legal terrain shifted beneath the case, and Haiti’s TPS eventually terminated effective July 27.

The consequences were immediate because the administrative machinery was already in place. Employment authorization tied solely to Haitian TPS ceased to function, and employers were required to reverify affected workers. A Haitian employee who had been fully authorized to work the day before could suddenly become legally unemployable without changing jobs, missing a shift, committing an offense or doing anything at all. The person’s conduct had not changed. The government’s designation had.

There is something almost brutally elegant about enforcement carried out this way. Immigration raids make for dramatic television because the physical power of the state is impossible to miss. Administrative enforcement is quieter. It can happen when a document expires, a database updates and an employer becomes responsible for carrying out the consequence. No agents need to enter the nursing home or hotel because the federal paperwork has already reached into the workplace.

The state does not always need handcuffs when it has forms.

The Country We Warn Americans to Avoid

The administration’s defense begins with the word “temporary,” and nothing in the statute requires anyone to deny it. TPS was never designed as an automatic path to permanent residence. Congress could have created one and did not. Yet the invocation of temporariness becomes increasingly hollow when separated from the conditions that supposedly determine whether protection is still warranted.

On July 10, seventeen days before Haiti’s TPS termination took effect, the State Department continued to classify Haiti at Level 4: Do Not Travel. Americans are warned about kidnapping, violent crime, terrorism, civil unrest and inadequate medical care. The United States cautions its own citizens that the government’s ability to provide emergency assistance inside Haiti is severely limited. International reporting describes a country in which armed groups exert enormous control, roughly 1.5 million people have been internally displaced and violence has killed thousands.

The administration’s legal position is more nuanced than a declaration that Haiti is safe, and there is no need to misstate it. DHS has relied on its view of changing conditions and on the separate conclusion that continuing the designation conflicts with the national interest. The State Department’s travel advisory and the statutory TPS test are not identical. Yet once those technical distinctions are acknowledged, the underlying reality becomes even uglier rather than less so.

The federal government can warn American citizens that Haiti is dangerous enough to avoid, acknowledge gang violence and humanitarian collapse, admit the profound weakness of state institutions, and still decide that protecting Haitians already living legally in the United States no longer serves the national interest. The government does not have to claim that Haiti has become peaceful. It merely has to decide that whatever danger Haitians face there is outweighed by the administration’s desire to end their protection here.

That is an extraordinary power, particularly after Mullin has made the ordinary administrative route for examining how the decision was reached so much narrower. It leaves the secretary with enormous authority over the fate of hundreds of thousands of people while leaving those people with fewer tools to force the government to reconcile its own descriptions of Haiti with the decision it has made about them.

The contradiction is therefore not rhetorical. One department tells Americans that Haiti is so dangerous they should stay away. Another decides that Haitians who have built lives here can be sent back into that country when their legal protections expire. The federal government can hold both positions at once because the law gives it room to do so.

That should disturb anyone who still believes that immigration enforcement is simply a matter of applying neutral rules.

The Workers Who Vanished on Paper

The economic consequences of the termination have arrived with the same administrative efficiency.

An analysis prepared by demographer Phillip Connor for FWD.us estimated that roughly 200,000 Haitian TPS holders participated in the American workforce and generated approximately $5.9 billion in annual economic activity. The group estimated hundreds of millions of dollars in federal, payroll, state and local tax contributions, along with tens of thousands of U.S.-citizen children dependent upon income earned by Haitian TPS parents. Its estimates suggested that approximately 25,000 American children could fall into poverty if that household income disappeared.

Those figures come from an advocacy organization rather than a federal economic agency, but the workforce disruption they anticipated is already visible. Senior-care providers in Massachusetts began losing Haitian employees when their work authorization ceased. Connecticut nursing facilities reported immediate staffing losses, including certified nursing assistants, nurses, direct-care workers and other employees in sectors that have spent years warning that they cannot recruit enough people to meet demand.

The workers did not suddenly become unnecessary. Elderly patients did not stop requiring care. Employers did not discover that their Haitian employees were unqualified. The government altered the legal status of the document that allowed them to work, and the labor market absorbed the result overnight.

This is where the political rhetoric becomes almost impossible to defend. We have spent decades telling immigrants that legal employment matters, that taxes matter, that maintaining valid documents matters and that contribution to American communities matters. Then, when the government decides that a protection has ended, every one of those achievements becomes secondary to an administrative change over which the worker has virtually no control.

The same system that documented the worker’s legality yesterday documents the worker’s illegality today.

That is not an abstraction. It is a person showing up for the same shift at the same facility with the same skills and the same patients, only to discover that Washington has changed the meaning of the paper in his wallet.

The Letters Arrive

The development in Ohio reveals the next stage of the mechanism.

Haitian immigrants began receiving letters directing them to report to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations office in Blue Ash, outside Cincinnati. They appeared because appearing is what the immigration system requires of people who wish to remain compliant. They brought their documents, answered questions and, in some cases, left with electronic monitoring devices attached to their bodies.

The people receiving those notices do not all belong to the same legal category, and that distinction is essential. Some held TPS, some have pending asylum claims, some arrived through humanitarian parole, and some are navigating overlapping processes. What they share is that they were already visible to the federal government because they had entered the channels the government told them to use.

That is what makes the Blue Ash cases so revealing. ICE did not have to conduct a sweep through neighborhoods or follow anonymous tips. It did not have to search for people who had disappeared underground. The government sent letters to addresses already contained in government files, and the recipients came to the government because compliance required them to do so.

Sony Prenice described arriving at the ICE office and being offered a choice between accepting an ankle monitor or departing for Haiti with a $2,600 payment. She accepted the device and said it restricted her travel beyond a 75-mile radius without permission. Monsanto Maler emerged from the same facility wearing a monitor and collapsed outside in tears after having come to the United States to escape violence in Haiti.

ICE classifies electronic monitoring as part of its Alternatives to Detention program, and that phrasing is legally and bureaucratically accurate. The government argues that monitoring allows immigrants to remain in their communities while ensuring attendance at hearings and compliance with immigration proceedings. Yet the administrative description cannot erase the transformation taking place. A person who approached the government as an applicant, beneficiary or parolee can find that the very system requiring his visibility now makes continuous supervision effortless.

The address that once helped establish compliance becomes the address to which the summons is mailed. The required appointment becomes the place where the monitor is attached. The file created to demonstrate lawful participation becomes the file that makes enforcement easier.

There is no need to invent a conspiracy to understand what has happened. Government databases were built because legal immigration administration requires records. The danger emerges when the purpose surrounding those records changes while the records themselves remain in government hands.

Compliance becomes infrastructure.

The 175,000

The State Department’s announcement that it has revoked more than 175,000 visas since Trump returned to office belongs in this story because it reveals the same willingness to treat previously granted immigration permission as something readily revisited by executive authority.

The figure should not be inflated into something it is not. Visa revocation does not automatically equal deportation, and a visa is not identical to immigration status inside the United States. That distinction is straightforward. What deserves much more attention is the government’s explanation for the scale of the revocations.

The State Department says the majority followed “law enforcement encounters,” and its own descriptions include arrests and charges rather than limiting the category to people who were convicted of crimes. Department rules also permit prudential revocation when officials receive derogatory law-enforcement or intelligence information or suspect that the person may be ineligible. The criminal courtroom is therefore not the sole gatekeeper. A conviction is not always required before the government acts against the visa.

The administration has also used visa authority in cases involving alleged fraud, suspected birth tourism and political speech. Foreign nationals who celebrated or mocked Charlie Kirk’s assassination saw their visas targeted. Their comments may deserve contempt, but the significance lies in the power being exercised. The government was willing to use immigration permission as leverage over expression that senior officials considered repugnant.

That matters because “do it the right way” is usually presented as though legality produces stability. The expanding use of visa revocation demonstrates something quite different. Immigration permission can remain legally fragile even after the individual has gone through the process correctly, and the executive branch possesses considerable discretion to revisit that permission for reasons extending well beyond a criminal conviction.

The government may have lawful authority to do much of this. Lawful authority is not the same thing as the moral promise contained in the slogan Americans have repeated for decades.

The Trap Was Already Built

The great deception in “do it the right way” is not that every temporary immigrant was secretly promised permanent residence. The deception is that the phrase has been used to pretend that compliance itself provides a durable shield against the political volatility of the American immigration system.

It does not.

A person can obey every instruction given by the federal government, renew every document on time, work legally, pay taxes, raise American children, maintain a clean record and spend years making himself completely visible to the state, only to discover that a new administration has altered the rules governing the category under which he built his life. If the protection disappears, the government does not have to begin searching for him. He supplied everything necessary to find him when he was doing exactly what Americans told him responsible immigrants were supposed to do.

That is why the Haitian experience matters far beyond Haiti.

It exposes the hidden asymmetry in the bargain. The immigrant is required to comply continuously, but the state remains free to change the meaning of that compliance. The immigrant must provide accurate information, but the government may later use the same information in an entirely different policy environment. The immigrant is expected to treat every deadline, appointment and document as binding, while the political promises surrounding the system can disappear after an election.

The government keeps the file even when it withdraws the protection.

That fact should sit at the center of every future argument about “legal immigration,” because it destroys the comforting fiction that the system neatly separates people who obey from people who do not. Sometimes the very act of obedience creates the pathway through which enforcement arrives.

The people summoned to Blue Ash were not difficult to locate because they had spent years avoiding the government. They were easy to locate because they had spent years doing the opposite.

They had registered themselves. They had answered the questions. They had supplied the addresses. They had attended the appointments. They had trusted the government sufficiently to remain visible to it.

That trust is what makes this moment so grotesque.

We can continue telling immigrants to do it the right way, but we should have the decency to tell them what the phrase now means. It means follow every rule because failure to do so can destroy your claim to remain. It means give the government everything it demands because withholding information can destroy your claim to remain. It means show up whenever you are summoned because absence can destroy your claim to remain.

And it also means understanding that after you have done all of that, the government may still change the protection, invalidate the document, summon you to the address you provided and place a monitor on your ankle.

For years, doing it the right way told the government that these people were legally entitled to be here.

Now it tells the government exactly where they are.

That is the trap.

By Steven J. Boardman

There is a particular kind of cowardice required to look at a burning building and praise the warmth of the fire. Yet this has become the posture demanded of those who still defend the political existence of Donald Trump.

The argument has moved well beyond tax rates, regulation, immigration levels, abortion, guns, the size of government or any of the traditional ideological disputes that have divided Americans for generations. Reasonable people can disagree about those things. They always have, and a functioning republic depends upon their ability to continue doing so.

What concerns me is the record.

I am frequently accused of possessing some singular, irrational animus toward Trump, as though I wake each morning searching for another offense to attach to a man I have never met. It is a convenient accusation because it changes the subject. Reduce the criticism to obsession, partisanship or hatred and the substance of the criticism disappears. Make the argument about the observer and perhaps nobody will look too closely at the observed.

My opinion of Donald Trump is beside the point. The challenge is simpler: explain the record.

Prove me wrong.

Take a factual claim, examine the evidence beneath it and tell me where it fails. Find the document that was fabricated, the quotation that was altered, the statistic that collapses under scrutiny, the court ruling I have misrepresented or the causal connection that cannot withstand examination.

I would welcome the attempt. I would love to discover that I have misunderstood the last decade, that constitutional restraints are healthier than they appear, that American institutions are stronger than they look, that political violence has not been normalized, that cruelty has not become a governing aesthetic and that what increasingly resembles corruption, deception, retaliation and incompetence resolves itself into responsible government when examined more closely.

Closer examination keeps producing the opposite result.

The record has become a monument to the unforgivable.

The Architecture of Deceit

Begin with the accusation that underlies almost everything else: Donald Trump lies.

There is nothing remarkable in saying that a politician lies. Politicians exaggerate, omit, distort, evade and promise things they cannot deliver. Any serious observer of politics understands that dishonesty did not arrive in Washington in 2017.

Trump is extraordinary because of the scale.

During his first presidency, The Washington Post Fact Checker catalogued 30,573 false or misleading claims, an average of roughly 21 a day across four years. Anyone is free to challenge individual classifications, question the methodology or argue that fact-checkers occasionally treat hyperbole too literally. Give him the benefit of every reasonable doubt. Remove thousands of entries if you like. The number remaining would still describe something historically abnormal. (House Docs⁠)

The consequences extend beyond one man’s relationship with truth. A conventional political lie can become a scandal because the public has time to examine it. A sufficiently relentless flow of falsehoods changes the environment in which truth has to operate. Before one claim has been tested, another has replaced it. Before the correction reaches the audience, several new controversies occupy the space. Specific misconduct dissolves into a permanent atmosphere of chaos until yesterday’s outrage begins to feel quaint.

That exhaustion has political value. When extraordinary conduct becomes a daily occurrence, the extraordinary gradually loses its power to shock.

The only reliable answer is specificity. Dishonesty is established by placing the statement beside the evidence. Corruption lives in transactions and favors. Authoritarianism reveals itself in the treatment of elections, courts, investigators and independent institutions. Incompetence emerges from preparation, decisions and consequences.

So let us deal in specifics.

The Election He Would Not Accept

Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.

That sentence should occupy about as much historical controversy as the result of any other completed election. Instead, Trump’s refusal to accept it became the central grievance of an entire political movement.

He and his allies challenged results across the country and repeatedly failed. Republican election officials defended contests they themselves administered. Courts rejected challenges. Georgia conducted a statewide hand recount and additional reviews. The evidence required to overturn the result never materialized.

The pressure did.

On January 2, 2021, while still President of the United States, Trump telephoned Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. During a conversation lasting more than an hour, Trump repeated allegations Georgia officials told him were false, suggested Raffensperger and his lawyer could face criminal jeopardy and finally said what he wanted: “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” exactly one more than the margin required to reverse his loss in Georgia. The congressional investigation into January 6 later reproduced the episode in detail. (GovInfo⁠)

The criminal case later brought in Georgia did not result in Trump’s conviction. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was disqualified, a replacement prosecutor eventually declined to pursue the remaining charges, and the case was dismissed in November 2025. Any fair account should say that plainly. The demise of the prosecution does not rewrite the recording, change the number Trump requested or establish the widespread fraud he said had occurred. (AP News⁠)

Then came January 6.

The people who entered the Capitol that day did not all behave alike and should not be compressed into one indistinguishable category. Some assaulted police officers. Some destroyed property. Some committed serious felonies. Others trespassed or committed lesser offenses. Individual culpability matters.

What Trump did after returning to office matters as well.

On January 20, 2025, he commuted the sentences of a group of named January 6 defendants, granted full pardons to everyone else convicted of offenses related to the Capitol attack and directed the Justice Department to seek dismissal of pending cases. The White House says the action affected nearly 1,600 people. (The White House⁠)

The sequence deserves to be remembered whole. A president lost an election, insisted the result was fraudulent, pressured officials responsible for administering that result, watched the Capitol breached while Congress met to complete the transfer of power and, four years later, used presidential clemency on behalf of virtually everyone prosecuted in connection with that day.

Through all of it, the proposition that began the crisis remains unsupported. Trump has never produced evidence demonstrating that he actually won the 2020 presidential election.

Nearly six years later, his defenders continue to behave as though everyone else carries the burden of proving the election was legitimate. They have it backward. The person alleging that millions of Americans participated in, facilitated or somehow failed to detect the theft of a presidential election carries the burden.

If Donald Trump won Georgia, produce the votes.

Until then, 11,780 remains what it has always been: the precise number a defeated president asked an election official to find.

Power Without Inspection

People often imagine authoritarian government arriving with theatrical grandeur, as though democracies disappear because somebody walks onto a balcony and announces their abolition. Modern institutions usually erode more quietly. Oversight becomes disloyalty. Independent officials become enemies. Legal restraints become annoyances. Eventually, loyalty to the leader begins to merge with loyalty to the state.

Trump’s treatment of inspectors general offers a useful example.

In January 2025, he removed 17 inspectors general from agencies across the federal government without the advance notice and case-specific explanations required by the Inspector General Act. Even Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley objected to the administration’s failure to follow the statutory process. (American Oversight⁠)

Inspectors general exist because governments should never be trusted to police themselves entirely through political appointees. They investigate fraud, waste, abuse, mismanagement and misconduct inside the executive branch. A president who enters office promising to root out corruption should find independent watchdogs useful.

Seventeen of them were removed instead.

The same tension runs through DOGE.

There is nothing inherently sinister about reducing the size of government. Federal bureaucracies accumulate redundancy. Programs outlive their usefulness. Contracts deserve examination. Taxpayers should be able to ask whether an office, grant, position or project still serves a meaningful public purpose.

The problem arrives when destruction itself becomes the measure of accomplishment.

By May 2026, Office of Personnel Management data showed the federal workforce had shrunk by 272,283 employees since Trump returned to office, with departures occurring through deferred resignations, retirements, reductions in force and other separations. Nearly 140,000 employees left through the Deferred Resignation Program alone. (Federal Workforce Data⁠)

That scale demands an accounting of what the country received in return.

On August 6, the Government Accountability Office examined DOGE’s celebrated “Wall of Receipts,” the public ledger used to advertise enormous savings to taxpayers. GAO found savings estimates that were wrong or unsupported, said DOGE had failed to use its stated methodology for the majority of contract savings examined, and found insufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent of its reported grant savings. Of 264 leases listed as terminated, 108 were already being phased out before DOGE existed. (GAO⁠)

One entry captures the problem beautifully. DOGE claimed $1.7 billion in savings from a Defense Health Agency IT contract. GAO found that the contract had not been terminated, reduced in scope, reduced in value or reduced in funding.

The $1.7 billion existed on the scoreboard. The savings did not. (GAO⁠)

That should trouble fiscal conservatives every bit as much as liberals because efficiency was the justification. If hundreds of thousands of positions disappear in the name of saving taxpayers money, the savings become part of the bargain and have to survive an audit.

A government cannot be managed like a demolition site where the amount of rubble is offered as proof of productivity.

The Weaponization He Promised to End

Trump returned to office promising to end the weaponization of the federal government. Taken seriously, the principle is entirely defensible. Americans should recoil from prosecutors choosing defendants because of politics, investigators targeting people because they dislike a candidate or agencies using their coercive power against ideological enemies.

If any of that occurred under Joe Biden, investigate it. If prosecutors or FBI agents abused their authority while investigating Trump, hold them accountable.

Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi established a Justice Department Weaponization Working Group in February 2025 for exactly that stated purpose. Her memorandum identified Special Counsel Jack Smith and his staff, personnel associated with the Mar-a-Lago search, federal cooperation with New York investigations of Trump, and prosecutors and agents connected to January 6 cases. Importantly, the memo said the review should distinguish misconduct from “good faith actions by federal employees simply following orders from superiors.” (Department of Justice⁠)

That qualification was essential because a professional justice system cannot function if career consequences change according to the identity of the person being investigated.

Career agents do not choose who becomes president. Prosecutors do not know who the next attorney general will be. They are supposed to follow evidence, warrants, grand juries, supervisors and courts. Agents who falsify evidence should lose their jobs. Prosecutors who conceal exculpatory material should face discipline. Political prosecutions should be exposed and punished.

Simply having worked on an investigation involving Donald Trump is a different proposition.

The second administration has nevertheless removed prosecutors and FBI personnel connected to investigations of Trump, his allies and January 6. Reuters documented nearly 100 prosecutors and FBI agents fired or forced into retirement in a broader examination of what it classified as a campaign of retribution. Its tracker identified at least 470 people and organizations subjected to punitive action, pressure or investigation, including federal officials, law firms, universities and media organizations. The administration disputes the characterization and says it is correcting institutional bias and misconduct. (Reuters⁠)

The pressure soon reached private lawyers.

Trump issued an executive order targeting Perkins Coie, a firm whose political and legal history included representation of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and litigation Trump regarded with hostility. The order threatened security clearances, federal contracts and access to government facilities.

Perkins Coie sued, and U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell granted the firm summary judgment. Her ruling found unconstitutional retaliation and viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment, among other violations. Howell concluded that the order punished the firm for representations, litigation positions and speech the president disliked. (Justia Law⁠)

There is a reason that ruling matters beyond the fortunes of an enormous law firm. Lawyers must be able to represent unpopular clients. They must be able to sue presidents and challenge federal agencies without calculating whether their next client will lose government business because the president remembers the firm’s name.

Pressure does not have to come in the form of an explicit command. Every managing partner watches what happens to the firm that crossed the president. Every client thinking about challenging the government becomes a little more expensive to represent.

Meanwhile, the institutions responsible for policing misconduct inside the Justice Department have themselves weakened. Reuters reported this month that the Office of Professional Responsibility had fallen from 29 employees to 16 while receiving record levels of misconduct complaints, and that the department’s inspector-general office had lost nearly 100 staff. The Justice Department says its oversight functions remain operational and effective. (Reuters⁠)

Perhaps the administration will eventually produce evidence establishing serious misconduct by the prosecutors and agents it has targeted. Where that evidence exists, follow it wherever it leads.

The broader pattern already raises a simpler question. At what point does ending weaponization become indistinguishable from taking possession of the weapon?

The Audit Shield

That question becomes harder to avoid when the power of government reaches the president’s own tax affairs.

Every American who has ever received a letter from the IRS understands the basic relationship. The government may inspect your return. If an examination finds unpaid tax, it may assess the liability and pursue collection. Wealth buys better accountants and lawyers, but the legitimacy of the system rests on the premise that nobody receives a private exemption from the rules.

In May 2026, Donald Trump received something extraordinary.

Trump had sued the IRS over the illegal disclosure of his tax information by Charles Littlejohn, whose conduct was criminal and resulted in a prison sentence. Trump was entitled to seek legal redress for that violation. The controversy lies in what the government gave him while settling it.

On May 19, then-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an addendum declaring that the United States released the plaintiffs and was “FOREVER BARRED AND PRECLUDED” from pursuing an extraordinarily broad category of claims, examinations and related reviews involving Trump and affiliated parties, including matters that were pending or could have been pending and tax returns filed before the settlement became effective. The original document extended broadly to related and affiliated people and entities. (Department of Justice⁠)

After Republican senators objected during Blanche’s confirmation battle, he narrowed the arrangement. The protection now applies retroactively rather than to future filings and is limited to Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and the Trump Organization. It still covers claims that were open when the settlement was reached and, according to Associated Press reporting, could eliminate more than $100 million in potential back taxes, although the precise liability remains uncertain. (AP News⁠)

The official who signed the arrangement had previously served as Trump’s personal criminal-defense lawyer. He was confirmed as Attorney General on August 8 and sworn in on August 10. (Reuters⁠)

Federal law makes the arrangement even more remarkable. Section 7217 of the Internal Revenue Code makes it unlawful for the president, vice president and specified senior executive officials to ask the IRS to begin or terminate an audit of a particular taxpayer. The statute contains an explicit carve-out for one Cabinet official: the Attorney General. That exception may explain why Blanche is not automatically covered by the prohibition. It does not settle the separate legal question of whether an attorney general has authority to bind the IRS through an agreement of this scope. (U.S. Code⁠)

IRS employees are now asking a court to answer it.

The National Treasury Employees Union, representing Treasury and IRS workers, joined litigation on August 6 seeking to block the tax-audit agreement. The suit argues that implementation would require career employees to drop ongoing audits involving Trump and his businesses and force them to choose between ordinary enforcement responsibilities and a political directive. The administration says the agreement lawfully resolves claims arising from government misconduct against Trump and that the protection is limited to matters already open when the settlement was executed. (AP News⁠)

Strip the politics away and consider the institutional arrangement by itself.

The President of the United States sued an agency of the government he controls. His former personal lawyer, serving as the nation’s chief law-enforcement official, signed an agreement constraining that government’s ability to pursue portions of the president’s past tax exposure, along with the exposure of his sons and family company.

If Joe Biden had done that, Republicans would have been correct to demand investigations before the ink dried.

The same standard applies here.

If the Trumps owe nothing, ordinary examination can establish that. If the Trump Organization complied fully with federal tax law, the IRS can reach that conclusion through the processes available to every other taxpayer.

What requires explanation is why the president and his family needed a government guarantee that those processes would stop.

The Theater of Cruelty

Immigration offers another example of legitimate policy disagreement being swallowed by spectacle.

The United States has a right to control its borders. Visa applicants can be screened. People without lawful status may be removed under the law. Criminal organizations exploiting migration routes should be prosecuted. Asylum systems can be abused, and governments are entitled to distinguish legitimate claims from fraudulent ones.

None of that requires taking satisfaction in suffering.

During Trump’s first administration, the Zero Tolerance policy separated thousands of children from parents and other family members. A Department of Homeland Security inspector-general investigation later found that DHS lacked the technology needed to reliably track the families it was separating. The department estimated that Border Patrol separated 3,014 children while the policy was in effect, but the inspector general found deficiencies serious enough that the total number of separated families could not be confirmed. The report also documented delays in reunification and other failures created by inadequate systems and planning. (Office of Inspector General⁠)

These were human beings separated by their own government before that government had built a dependable mechanism for putting them back together.

That episode illustrates something larger about the politics of the Trump era. Enforcement has increasingly become entangled with humiliation. Suffering is offered as proof that government is finally serious. Mercy becomes weakness. The immigrant becomes a stage prop through which political resolve is demonstrated.

A country can enforce immigration law without making cruelty part of the performance.

Once political strength is measured by the amount of pain government can visibly impose on people with less power, the debate has travelled far beyond border security.

The Strongman and the Boats

Pete Hegseth deserves an accurate biography before his decisions are judged. He served as an Army National Guard infantry officer, deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan, and received two Bronze Star Medals among other decorations. Those facts belong in the record. (History of the Defense Department⁠)

Military service does not place the decisions of a defense secretary beyond examination, and one of the most troubling tests of Hegseth’s leadership has unfolded far from Iran.

Beginning in September 2025, the United States began carrying out lethal strikes against small vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific as part of Operation Southern Spear. The administration says the boats are associated with drug cartels designated as terrorist organizations and that the people aboard are combatants in an armed conflict with those groups.

The government’s own Lead Inspector General reports give a sense of the scale. From September 2025 through March 2026, the military struck at least 45 small boats, leaving 156 people killed or presumed dead. During the following quarter, through June 30, another 19 vessels were struck and another 56 people were killed or presumed dead. (Office of Inspector General⁠)

The legality of the campaign is contested. Members of Congress, human-rights groups and legal scholars have questioned whether suspected drug traffickers can lawfully be treated as enemy combatants and killed through military targeting rather than arrested and prosecuted. The administration insists that the organizations fall within an armed-conflict framework and that its strikes are lawful. (AP News⁠)

Then there are the people themselves.

The families of Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, two Trinidadian men killed in an October 2025 strike, filed a federal wrongful-death lawsuit alleging that the men were civilians who had done fishing and farm work in Venezuela and were travelling home to Trinidad. The White House says the strike targeted designated narcoterrorists bringing drugs toward the United States. The families’ allegations remain to be adjudicated. (Reuters⁠)

Those competing claims expose the central problem with conducting lethal policy behind a wall of secret intelligence. The government says the dead men were narcoterrorists. Their families say they were fishermen and laborers. The men can no longer answer for themselves.

Due process exists because governments can be wrong.

The Pentagon’s inspector general has now opened a review into whether the military followed its established six-phase targeting process during the boat strikes. The review is focused on targeting procedures rather than issuing a broader legal judgment on the campaign itself. (AP News⁠)

Perhaps the government’s evidence will ultimately establish that the people killed were exactly who officials said they were. If so, that evidence should survive serious congressional, judicial and inspector-general scrutiny.

The alternative is an extraordinary expansion of executive power: the government identifies a person on a boat through intelligence the public cannot examine, declares that person an enemy combatant, kills him and treats its own declaration as the end of the evidentiary inquiry.

Americans should require more than that before becoming comfortable with killing people at sea.

War by Improvisation

The Iran war raises the same question of judgment on a vastly larger scale.

War cannot be judged solely by its price. Military stockpiles exist for moments when the security of the country requires their use, and Americans have fought necessary wars at terrible cost. The relevant question is what those costs purchased.

By July 21, Hegseth told senators that the Iran war had cost the Defense Department $37.5 billion. He appeared before the Senate while seeking another $67.1 billion in emergency funding covering the conflict and other defense priorities, including billions for munitions and operations. At that point 18 American service members had been killed and more than 440 wounded. (Stars and Stripes⁠)

The pressure on American weapons inventories has since become a story of its own. The Pentagon is pushing defense manufacturers to accelerate production as advanced missile-defense inventories have been heavily consumed during the conflict. Trump has disputed suggestions that the United States is dangerously short of munitions and says production is increasing rapidly. (AP News⁠)

That disagreement does not eliminate the strategic accounting a war requires.

What durable objective has been achieved? Which Iranian capabilities have been destroyed rather than delayed? What deterrence has been gained? What military capacity has the United States consumed, how quickly can it be restored, and what does that mean for commitments elsewhere in the world?

Those are questions of statecraft.

A commander in chief should be judged by the relationship between force and purpose, not by a willingness to expend ordnance. Sometimes the measure of strength is recognizing what does not need to be bombed.

The Shadow of Epstein

And then there are the files.

No part of this argument demands greater care because association is easily confused with guilt, investigative files are easily mistaken for proven facts and the public discussion surrounding Jeffrey Epstein has long attracted speculation capable of outrunning evidence.

So establish the boundaries at the beginning.

Being named in an Epstein document does not establish criminal conduct. Knowing Jeffrey Epstein does not make someone a participant in his crimes. An FBI interview records what a witness told investigators; it does not prove the allegation. Allegations involving Donald Trump contained within portions of the records are disputed and uncorroborated, and Trump has denied wrongdoing.

With those qualifications in place, the government’s handling of the records becomes a separate question that can be examined without deciding whether any underlying accusation against Trump is true.

Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November 2025 with near-unanimous support, and Trump signed it. The law required broad disclosure by December 19. The Justice Department produced documents in several batches and announced on January 30, 2026, after releasing roughly 3.5 million pages, that it had satisfied its obligations. (Justia Law⁠)

Journalist and lawyer Katie Phang disagreed.

In April, she sued Todd Blanche, then serving as acting attorney general, alleging that DOJ had unlawfully withheld information, made improper redactions and failed to meet other requirements of the statute. On June 25, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan granted her request for a preliminary injunction. His opinion said Blanche had failed to substantively answer several of Phang’s merits arguments and could therefore be treated as having conceded them for purposes of the motion. Sullivan also wrote plainly that the Attorney General had conceded he was in violation of the Act. (Justia Law⁠)

That is a remarkably different evidentiary posture from an online accusation of a cover-up.

A journalist filed suit. A federal judge examined the statutory requirements, found Phang likely to succeed on relevant portions of her case and ordered relief. The litigation continues, and a preliminary injunction is not a final adjudication of every allegation she has made. It is nevertheless a judicial finding serious enough to make breezy claims of complete transparency impossible to sustain.

The controversy has since spread beyond Washington.

On August 5, New Mexico sued the Justice Department seeking unredacted investigative material connected to Epstein’s former Zorro Ranch. Attorney General Raúl Torrez says federal withholding is impeding the state’s reopened investigation into possible criminal activity at the property. DOJ says it has provided material where legally permissible and that privacy protections and court orders restrict what else can be disclosed. (Reuters⁠)

Good. Put that dispute in court too.

Protect victims. Protect information the law legitimately requires to remain confidential. Then disclose what the law requires without regard to whose name appears on the page.

Republican, Democrat, billionaire, prince, president, professor, financier or celebrity, the standard should be identical.

Transparency becomes meaningless the moment it depends upon whom transparency might embarrass.

The Machinery of Loyalty

The accumulation of these events produces an uncomfortable question: why does evidence so rarely alter political loyalty?

The easiest answer is to insult Trump supporters. It is also the least useful.

Research published this year in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology examined how Trump supporters responded to information that conflicted with their support for him. Across the studies, researchers encountered several recurring strategies: rejecting allegations, comparing Trump’s alleged misconduct with that of other political figures, elevating policy agreement above judgments about his personal behavior and reducing the importance of the conflicting information. One of the studies found evidence that discomfort associated with cognitive dissonance contributed to some of those responses. (JSPP⁠)

That research does not diagnose tens of millions of Americans, nor does motivated reasoning belong to one political party. Democrats do it. Republicans do it. Liberals, conservatives and independents do it. It is a human weakness.

The danger grows when political identity becomes so central to a person’s understanding of the world that contrary evidence threatens the identity itself. At that point, the belief acquires an extraordinary ability to protect itself.

Trump’s successes demonstrate his abilities. His failures reveal the enemies conspiring against him. A successful appointee confirms his judgment; a disastrous one betrayed him. A statement is literal when useful, humorous when embarrassing, sarcastic when offensive and misunderstood when disproven. An investigation producing damaging evidence becomes a witch hunt. One that does not produce a conviction becomes complete exoneration. A favorable judge demonstrates the integrity of the courts; an unfavorable judge proves the judiciary is corrupt.

Every road somehow returns to the same destination.

Trump was right.

A political proposition that has become structurally incapable of being disproven is no longer functioning as political analysis.

It has become faith.

The Standard Has to Survive the Jersey

Critics of my writing often assume that none of this would interest me if another name appeared at the top.

They are wrong.

If Joe Biden had called a state election official and asked him to find precisely enough votes to reverse a defeat, I would regard it as disqualifying. If Barack Obama had stripped independent watchdogs from government while his administration expanded executive power, he would deserve the same scrutiny. If Kamala Harris had presided over massive workforce reductions and the Government Accountability Office later found unsupported claims in her administration’s signature accounting of the savings, that would be a story worth pursuing until the numbers were reconciled.

The same principle extends through the rest. A Democratic president whose Justice Department punished law firms that had represented his opponents would deserve condemnation. A Democratic defense secretary overseeing lethal strikes on small vessels while families alleged innocent fishermen were among the dead would owe the country answers. If Hunter Biden and a Biden family business received a special agreement restricting IRS examination of past tax matters, Republicans would be justified in treating it as an enormous scandal. If an Obama Justice Department declared itself compliant with a disclosure law touching allegations against Obama and a journalist then obtained a preliminary injunction requiring further compliance, I would expect journalists to stay on the story.

The standard has to survive the jersey.

Otherwise it is fandom, and fandom is perfectly harmless in a hockey arena.

It is dangerous in a republic.

Prove Me Wrong

So the challenge stands, although by this point it needs very little ornament.

Pick an exhibit.

Start with the Georgia recording and explain 11,780. Examine the DOGE ledger and reconcile the savings GAO could not verify. Explain why independent watchdogs and career investigators became expendable while presidential power expanded. Defend an arrangement that shields the president, his sons and his company from portions of ordinary IRS scrutiny. Produce the evidence that justified lethal force against the people killed on those boats. Demonstrate what the Iran war has achieved in return for American lives, billions of dollars and depleted munitions. Explain why the Justice Department required a federal court order to meet obligations under an Epstein disclosure law it had already declared itself to have satisfied.

Correct the record where I have it wrong and I will correct myself.

What does not answer any of this is telling me that I hate Donald Trump.

Calling journalism partisan does not change a government audit. Calling a judge corrupt does not alter the order the judge signed. Calling an inspector general disloyal does not erase the statute governing the office. Calling an election stolen does not create 11,780 votes. Calling a dead man a narcoterrorist does not, by itself, prove that he was one. Calling a war successful does not restore a missile inventory. Calling transparency complete does not make a federal injunction disappear.

Reality remains stubborn.

Donald Trump wanted to become an historical figure, and he has succeeded beyond question. Presidents, however, do not get to commission their own monuments.

History is less accommodating. It will be built from transcripts, budgets, executive orders, casualty reports, audits, court rulings, sworn testimony, inspector-general findings, financial records, recorded telephone calls and the documents that remain long after slogans have lost their power.

That is why the accusation that I write too much about Donald Trump no longer interests me very much. I am writing about the presidency of the United States during one of the most extraordinary periods in the modern history of the republic. Had these acts belonged to somebody else, that person’s name would occupy these pages instead.

Coincidentally, almost impossibly, it keeps being the same man.

I did not create the record. I am reading it.

Corruption is established through transactions and favors. Authoritarianism reveals itself in the treatment of power and institutions. Dishonesty is measured by comparing words with evidence. Incompetence appears in the distance between the promise, the preparation and the outcome.

The same evidentiary burden applies to me.

If I have the record wrong, prove it.

Bring the evidence.

Until then, the monument stands.

Aeblymedia.com

By Steven J. Boardman

A NOTE ON TIMING

This piece is current through the close of trading on August 10, 2026, before Trump Media and Technology Group released its second-quarter results. The company is scheduled to hold its first-ever earnings call at 5:00 p.m. ET. The financial figures below therefore rely on the most recent audited and reported filings through the first quarter of 2026 and will be updated when the Q2 numbers are public.

Truth Social was supposed to destroy the gatekeepers.

That was the pitch. Donald Trump had been expelled from Twitter, Silicon Valley had accumulated too much power, and a new platform would restore the thing its founders insisted Big Tech had stolen: direct access. No censor. No intermediary standing between a political leader and the people who wanted to hear him.

Four years later, the people are leaving.

Trump has returned to the presidency, making his megaphone more consequential than at any point since Truth Social was created. A sentence typed beneath his name can raise tariffs, threaten governments, alter diplomatic negotiations and send billions of dollars moving through financial markets. Truth Social has become one of his principal channels for communicating decisions of state, and his posts routinely migrate within minutes from a social-media feed into television chyrons, trading terminals, diplomatic cables and the front pages of newspapers around the world.

Truth Social’s estimated audience nevertheless shrank.

Trump Media and Technology Group’s answer was not simply to find more readers. It found better customers.

On July 16, 2026, the publicly traded company whose largest block of shares is held in a trust for Donald Trump’s benefit announced a new product called Truth API. For as much as $100,000 a month, according to subsequent reporting, banks, hedge funds and algorithmic trading operations could buy something ordinary Truth Social users cannot purchase through an app-store subscription: speed.

Not advance knowledge of an unpublished presidential statement. There is no evidence of that.

Speed once the information enters Truth Social.

That may sound like a narrow distinction until you consider who is speaking and who is paying to hear him. Trump Media does not hide the commercial proposition. When it unveiled the service, interim chief executive Kevin McGurn supplied the sentence around which this entire investigation turns.

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts.”

They do. Trump Media knows they do. Wall Street knows they do. And Trump Media has now constructed a product around the financial value of getting to those posts faster.

The question surrounding Truth Social has therefore changed. This is no longer merely a story about whether Donald Trump’s social network succeeded. The more important question is what happens when the President of the United States can create economically consequential information simply by speaking, remains the sole beneficiary of a trust holding roughly 41 percent of the company carrying much of that speech, and that company begins charging Wall Street for the race to hear him first.

PART I: THE AUDIENCE REALLY IS SHRINKING

The company founded around a social network promising to bypass the gatekeepers has never built anything resembling the audience or advertising business of a major social platform.

Similarweb data reported by the Financial Times estimated Truth Social’s mobile daily active users at approximately 261,000 in July 2026, down from more than 436,000 in July 2025, a decline of roughly 40 percent in a year. Similarweb figures are estimates rather than company disclosures, but that qualification leads directly to one of the stranger features of Trump Media itself: the company does not tell shareholders how many people use Truth Social.

It has effectively told investors that it may never bother.

Trump Media’s 2025 annual report says management does not rely on standard social-media measurements such as signups, average revenue per user, advertising impressions, monthly active users or daily active users when making business decisions. The company argues that concentrating on those figures could distract management from its long-term strategy, and it says collecting and controlling such data may prove “resource-prohibitive.”

That is an extraordinary disclosure for a publicly traded company built around a social network. Trump Media is telling investors that the ordinary measurements by which one evaluates a social-media company are not important enough to guide management, and perhaps not important enough to collect. Independent analysts are therefore left to measure the audience from outside, and the estimates they produce show it falling sharply.

The timing makes the decline difficult to wave away. Trump is not an ex-president trying to remain relevant from Mar-a-Lago. He is President of the United States, and Reuters has described Truth Social as an important feed for traders, businesses and financial institutions precisely because he repeatedly uses it to make announcements capable of moving global markets.

Truth Social received what should have been the greatest customer-acquisition event imaginable. Its marquee creator regained the presidency and turned his account into a running wire service for American government policy.

The audience shrank anyway.

PART II: THE BUSINESS NEVER BECAME A REAL ADVERTISING BUSINESS

The revenue trajectory is even harder to explain away.

Trump Media generated approximately $4.13 million in revenue in 2023. In 2024, the year Donald Trump ran for president and won, revenue fell to approximately $3.62 million. In 2025, the first year of his second presidency, revenue reached only $3.68 million. In the first quarter of 2026, net sales were $871,200.

Put the calendar beside those numbers.

Trump’s criminal indictments. The Republican primary. An assassination attempt. The convention. The general election. His victory. The inauguration. His return to the White House. The first year of a second presidency conducted in significant part through social media.

After all of it, Trump Media generated less annual revenue in 2025 than it had in 2023.

The company finished the year with approximately 31 full-time employees. That juxtaposition is surreal enough without embellishment: a publicly traded corporation bearing the sitting president’s initials as its ticker symbol, carrying a market capitalization measured in billions of dollars, employing roughly three dozen people and generating $3.68 million in annual sales.

Trump Media also reported a consolidated net loss of $712.3 million for 2025. That number requires care because it would be misleading to present the entire loss as the cost of operating Truth Social. Much of it came from the company’s growing portfolio of digital assets and securities. Trump Media attributed approximately $403.2 million to changes in the fair value of digital assets and digital assets pledged, while investment losses added substantially more. Total operating costs and expenses nevertheless ran into the hundreds of millions against less than $4 million in annual revenue.

The distinction does not rescue the underlying media business. It reveals what Trump Media had already begun to become.

A company producing only a few million dollars in annual sales had accumulated a financial portfolio so large that movements in the assets on its balance sheet could overwhelm the operating results of the business that gave the company its name.

PART III: THE MONEY DID NOT COME FROM CUSTOMERS

Those billions did not arrive because Truth Social suddenly discovered advertising.

They came from investors.

In May 2025, Trump Media announced a financing with approximately 50 institutional investors involving roughly $1.5 billion in common stock and $1 billion in convertible senior secured notes, with expected aggregate gross proceeds of approximately $2.5 billion. Subsequent filings and transaction accounting place the effective proceeds somewhat below that headline figure once the precise issuances and transaction costs are considered, but the central fact does not change: the balance sheet was transformed by capital markets, not by customers buying Trump Media products.

By the end of 2025, the company reported approximately $2.47 billion across cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, investments, securities, receivables and digital assets.

For the quarter ended March 31, 2026, Trump Media reported approximately $2.2 billion in total assets and approximately $2.1 billion in financial assets.

Against those billions sat quarterly sales of $871,200.

Trump Media simultaneously reported a first-quarter net loss of approximately $405.9 million, with the vast majority coming from non-cash losses involving digital assets, pledged digital assets and equity securities. The company also generated $17.9 million in positive operating cash flow during the quarter, its fourth consecutive quarter of positive operating cash flow, and any honest account of the company should acknowledge it.

But put the entire balance sheet together and the picture becomes stranger, not more conventional. Trump Media was no longer simply a tiny social-media company burning cash. It was a company with less than $1 million in quarterly sales sitting atop a multibillion-dollar collection of financial assets whose price movements could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in accounting gains or losses.

The business and the balance sheet had become almost unrelated stories.

Truth Social remained the brand.

The money came from somewhere else.

PART IV: THE COMPANY STARTED MORPHING

Trump Media’s original mission now reads almost quaint beside the businesses it accumulated afterward. Its SEC filings continue to describe the company as a response to Big Tech’s “assault on free speech,” with Truth Social serving as the vehicle through which people could reclaim their voices.

Then came Truth+ streaming.

Then Truth.Fi.

Then exchange-traded funds.

Then a bitcoin and digital-asset treasury.

Then Cronos.

Then prediction markets.

And finally, nuclear fusion.

In December 2025, Trump Media entered into a definitive agreement to merge with TAE Technologies, a fusion-energy company, in a transaction valued by the companies at more than $6 billion. The merger remains targeted for completion later in 2026.

There was subsequently discussion of separating Truth Social and Trump Media’s other media properties into a different publicly traded company. That plan was put aside. Instead, Trump Media and TAE announced that after the fusion transaction closes, the combined board would evaluate “strategic alternatives” for the legacy businesses, expressly including Trump Media’s media assets.

Consider how far the company travelled in less than five years.

Truth Social was once the reason Trump Media existed. The social network was the mission, the product and the political argument bundled together.

Now it is a legacy business awaiting strategic review after a proposed merger with a nuclear-fusion company.

That is not merely diversification. It is evidence that the original business never became large enough to explain the corporation built around it.

PART V: THE NUNES EXIT

There was another marker in that transformation.

Devin Nunes left.

On April 21, 2026, Nunes ceased being an employee, officer and director of Trump Media, including chairman of the board. The filing does not establish that he was fired, and there is no need to invent a boardroom coup that the public record does not show. His separation agreement continued his base salary through September 30, accelerated vesting of 96,721 restricted stock units and forfeited other unvested equity. Kevin McGurn replaced him as interim chief executive.

The timing that followed is worth examining without pretending it proves causation.

McGurn took control in April. Within three months, Trump Media unveiled Truth API, and his own description of the company’s future makes clear that he sees something Nunes’s original “conservative Twitter” concept never fully captured.

Donald Trump is not merely Truth Social’s biggest user.

He is an asset.

McGurn told the Financial Times that Trump is the company’s largest shareholder and described him as extraordinarily engaged in media. He discussed recruiting additional creators whose posts could possess commercial value not simply for audiences, but for trading firms, news organizations, artificial-intelligence companies and prediction markets.

That is a fundamentally different business proposition from building a partisan social network.

The social network needs millions of readers.

The information business needs the right information.

PART VI: TRUTH API

On July 16, Trump Media formally announced Truth API.

Forget the critics for a moment. The company’s own description is enough.

Trump Media calls Truth API a recurring revenue stream. It promises institutional customers licensed real-time access to posts from Truth Social’s most influential accounts. It says no official integrated API previously existed, and Reuters reported that the initial product distributes posts from ten influential accounts substantially faster than an ordinary Truth Social push notification.

The company says the service is designed for organizations most affected by the “cost of a delay in information.”

Among the customers it explicitly identifies are high-frequency and algorithmic trading firms.

Then comes McGurn’s sentence.

“Markets already move on Truth Social posts.”

There is no accusation buried in those words. It is the sales pitch.

Trump Media understands that information posted to Truth Social can move financial markets. It understands that delay therefore has an economic cost. It has built a product to reduce that delay for institutions willing to pay.

Subsequent reporting placed the highest quoted price at approximately $100,000 a month, with lower rates tied to longer commitments.

This is where precision actually makes the story more damning. There is no evidence Truth API customers receive Donald Trump’s words before he publishes them, and the article should never suggest otherwise. If Trump Media were secretly selling unpublished presidential decisions to hedge funds, we would be writing a very different investigation.

What the company is openly selling is remarkable enough.

The President of the United States publishes information capable of moving markets. Trump Media owns the platform. And Trump Media is selling an express lane through that platform to traders whose competitive advantage is measured in fractions of a second.

PART VII: WHAT $100,000 ACTUALLY BUYS

For most people, the difference between receiving a post now and receiving it a few seconds from now is meaningless. For a trading operation that has spent millions of dollars placing servers closer to exchanges, shaving microseconds from network routes and writing algorithms capable of executing thousands of orders before a human being can respond to a notification, it is the product.

The Wall Street Journal reviewed trading activity surrounding Trump’s Truth Social posts and found examples in which millions of shares changed hands almost immediately after he spoke. Reuters likewise describes Truth Social as a crucial information source for traders because presidential announcements on the platform have repeatedly moved stocks, currencies and commodities.

When Truth API launched on August 1, Trump Media already had customers. By August 7, McGurn said the number had grown to approximately ten, primarily high-frequency quantitative trading firms.

Ten customers will not rescue a multibillion-dollar valuation.

They do reveal what Trump Media believes it has discovered.

It no longer needs to persuade tens of millions of people to join Truth Social before the platform can generate meaningful revenue. A much smaller group of institutions can be worth considerably more if the thing being sold is not advertising exposure but an informational advantage.

That is the inversion at the heart of this company.

Truth Social was founded as a mass-market rebellion against privileged access.

Truth API monetizes privileged access to the delivery system.

PART VIII: THE MARKET-MOVING RECORD

The value proposition is not theoretical.

April 9, 2025 remains the cleanest example.

At 9:37 that morning, with markets in turmoil over Trump’s sweeping tariff program, the president posted on Truth Social that it was a “GREAT TIME TO BUY,” followed by his initials. Less than four hours later, he announced a 90-day pause on many of the tariffs.

The market erupted.

The S&P 500 gained approximately 9.5 percent. The Nasdaq rose more than 12 percent. The Dow gained nearly 8 percent. Trillions of dollars in market value were created during one of the largest single-day rallies in modern American market history.

More than a year later, another fact emerged.

Trump’s financial disclosures showed that his investment accounts had executed 327 stock purchases on April 8, the day before the tariff reversal, with a maximum disclosed aggregate value approaching $13 million. The purchases included Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia, with several individual transactions falling into six-figure disclosure ranges.

The sequence is extraordinary.

It is also where a serious investigation has to know exactly where the evidence ends.

Nothing in the disclosure establishes that Trump personally ordered those trades, knew they were being executed or timed the tariff reversal to profit from them. The White House says his investment accounts are fully discretionary and managed by independent third-party institutions, and Trump has said outside funds run his money.

That defence addresses control.

It does not erase the financial interest.

Trump retained the assets. His wealth rose when they rose. And unlike presidents who placed individually held securities into blind trusts structured to prevent them from knowing precisely what they owned, Trump continues to possess extensive identifiable financial interests across businesses and markets affected by the actions of his own government.

The relevance to Truth API is not that the April trades prove insider trading. They do not.

The relevance is that April 9 demonstrated, in spectacular fashion, how economically valuable a few moments of advance reaction to Donald Trump can be.

Wall Street learned the lesson.

Trump Media built a product around it.

PART IX: THE CONFLICT GETS DEEPER

CNN added another layer in July when it compared Trump’s Truth Social posts with transactions listed in his annual financial disclosure.

Its analysis found at least 44 purchases involving 21 companies within a week before Trump subsequently posted complimentary remarks about the company, its executives or its products.

Once again, the sequence does not establish intent. It does not prove Trump knew what his investment managers had purchased or that the managers knew what he planned to say.

But the examples are difficult to dismiss as irrelevant to the conflict itself.

In April 2025, Trump praised Nvidia’s plans to build artificial-intelligence infrastructure in the United States and said necessary permits would be expedited. His disclosure showed purchases of Nvidia shares shortly beforehand.

In another case, Trump’s investment accounts bought American Eagle Outfitters shares before he praised the company’s Sydney Sweeney advertising campaign.

Then there is Axon Enterprise.

On February 10, 2026, Trump’s investment accounts purchased between $1 million and $5 million of Axon stock. Two weeks later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a procurement notice contemplating a five-year contract worth as much as $220 million for approximately 17,800 Tasers. Procurement experts reviewing the specifications told CNBC they appeared unusually well aligned with Axon products.

Axon shares subsequently rose.

There is no evidence Trump designed the procurement, knew it was coming or intervened on Axon’s behalf. That is not the allegation.

The problem is that the President of the United States should never be in a position where the public must ask whether a government procurement, a presidential compliment or a policy announcement affected a company in which the president himself holds a substantial economic interest.

That is why presidents traditionally separated themselves from identifiable assets in the first place.

Trump did not.

Truth API now adds a new dimension. His private financial interests are no longer merely capable of being affected by his presidential speech.

A company owned substantially for his economic benefit is selling the speed of that speech to traders.

PART X: WHO BENEFITS

The ownership structure is simple enough to state without euphemism.

Donald Trump does not personally hold the 114.75 million Trump Media shares in a brokerage account. They are held by the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust. Donald Trump Jr. is trustee and holds voting and investment authority over the securities. The SEC filing identifies President Donald Trump as the settlor and “presently the sole beneficiary.”

The most recent Schedule 13D calculated those shares at approximately 41.5 percent of Trump Media.

At the August 10 closing price of $9.39, the block carried a notional market value of approximately $1.08 billion. Trump Media as a whole was worth approximately $2.6 billion.

That gives us the conflict in its cleanest form.

Trump Media benefits if Truth API succeeds. Donald Trump is the sole beneficiary of the trust holding approximately 41.5 percent of Trump Media. Truth API’s commercial value depends on access to influential Truth Social accounts, and no account on the platform is more consequential than the one belonging to the President of the United States.

Trump therefore has an enormous economic interest in a company that is monetizing the distribution speed of presidential communication.

That is not rhetoric.

That is the corporate structure.

PART XI: IS IT INSIDER TRADING?

That is where the easy headline becomes less useful than the harder question.

Traditional insider-trading law generally involves material nonpublic information traded upon in breach of a duty or obtained through unlawful misappropriation. Truth API, as Trump Media describes it, distributes information posted publicly on Truth Social, only faster and in a form designed for automated institutional use.

Reuters spoke with securities lawyers who noted that technology platforms can generally sell clients faster access to public information. Bloomberg terminals cost thousands of dollars. Exchanges sell direct data feeds. Professional news services have always charged heavily for speed. American financial markets have never operated on the principle that every investor must receive every piece of public information at exactly the same instant.

Trump Media therefore has a real legal argument when it rejects the simplest insider-trading accusation.

But the argument solves a narrower problem than the company would like.

Bloomberg does not make American foreign policy.

The New York Stock Exchange does not impose tariffs.

Reuters does not command the armed forces.

And none of them is owned 41.5 percent for the economic benefit of the president whose official decisions create the market-moving information being sold.

Several legal scholars believe that difference could matter. Renee Jones, a Boston College law professor and former senior SEC official, has argued that the arrangement may implicate misappropriation principles if presidential information is monetized selectively in breach of duties owed to the public. Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, has raised a related tipper-tippee theory if government information unavailable for lawful personal trading is instead deliberately routed to someone expected to trade.

Those theories have not been tested against Truth API.

The absence of a ready-made prosecution theory should not be mistaken for the absence of a problem.

There is historical precedent for regulators caring deeply about tiny informational advantages. In 2013, Thomson Reuters suspended an arrangement under which premium subscribers received the University of Michigan consumer-sentiment index two seconds before broader release after the New York attorney general began investigating the practice. Business Wire later ended direct feeds to high-frequency trading firms under similar scrutiny.

Those cases were not identical to Truth API. In fact, the differences make this case more interesting. The Michigan arrangement involved information arriving before public release, while Trump Media says Truth API accelerates information that has already been published. Neither historical arrangement, however, involved a sitting president, presidential policy or a company in which that president retained a billion-dollar economic interest.

The question is therefore larger than whether some existing insider-trading doctrine can be stretched around this arrangement.

The question is why the arrangement exists at all.

PART XII: THE PRESIDENTIAL CONFLICT-OF-INTEREST PROBLEM

Ordinary executive-branch officials could not simply shrug at a financial relationship like this.

Federal law prohibits executive employees from participating personally and substantially in particular government matters in which they possess a financial interest. The purpose is obvious. Public power and private money are a dangerous combination, and the law attempts to separate them before prosecutors ever need to prove bribery or corruption.

The President of the United States sits outside that central criminal conflict statute.

The Office of Government Ethics has said plainly for decades that the president and vice president are not legally subject to the restrictions in 18 U.S.C. §§ 202 through 209, including the principal financial-conflict provision in § 208.

That exemption was never meant to constitute a declaration that presidential conflicts do not matter. Presidents dealt with the problem historically through norms, divestment, blind trusts and voluntary separation from assets capable of colliding with official duties.

Trump has spent two presidencies demonstrating what happens when those norms depend entirely upon the willingness of the president to observe them.

The result is not complicated.

He can make policy that moves markets. He can announce that policy personally. He can distribute the announcement through a private company in which he retains a massive economic interest. That company can then sell sophisticated financial institutions a faster automated route to his words.

And the criminal conflict statute that would stop an ordinary executive official from wandering into comparable territory does not apply to him.

That is not a defence of the arrangement.

It is the hole in the law that permits it.

PART XIII: CONGRESS IS ASKING THE SAME QUESTION

Congress noticed.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff asked SEC Chair Paul Atkins in late July to investigate Truth API and determine whether the arrangement implicates federal securities law. They argued that wealthy institutional investors could gain an advantage over ordinary investors by purchasing faster delivery of market-moving presidential communications through a company in which Trump possesses a substantial economic interest.

Trump Media’s answer is that the posts are public and the product merely provides professional customers with faster delivery.

That remains its strongest defence.

Then legislators began proposing laws aimed directly at the gap.

Senator Alex Padilla introduced legislation intended to restrict the president, vice president and companies in which they hold substantial interests from selling privileged access to information through systems such as APIs. Other Democratic senators have introduced or supported related restrictions.

Republicans have expressed concern as well. The emerging disagreement is increasingly about whether a sitting president should be able to earn economic value from preferential delivery of communications produced by the presidency itself.

The bill may go nowhere. The SEC may decide existing law does not reach the product. Congress may refuse to act.

None of those outcomes would answer the ethical question.

They would tell us something about the legal architecture surrounding the presidency.

There is an important difference.

PART XIV: THE FAILED CRYPTO DETOUR

Then, just days before Trump Media’s first earnings call, another part of the company’s sprawling strategy began to unwind.

On August 7, Trump Media, Crypto.com and Yorkville Acquisition mutually terminated the proposed Trump Media Group CRO Strategy transaction, which had been designed to create a publicly traded company accumulating and staking the Cronos token. Trump Media and Crypto.com also restructured their prediction-market relationship, abandoning plans for a direct integration on Truth Social in favour of a marketing arrangement.

The company has not abandoned cryptocurrency, and describing this as a wholesale retreat would be wrong. Trump Media still holds substantial digital assets and remains deeply tied to the crypto economy.

But the shift is meaningful because it occurred under McGurn, whose explanation was strikingly simple.

“We wanted to get focused.”

That focus is starting to become visible.

The Nunes-era company expanded almost centrifugally: streaming, ETFs, bitcoin, Cronos, prediction markets and an ever-growing list of financial ventures. McGurn is inheriting that structure while pursuing the fusion merger, reconsidering parts of the crypto strategy and trying to turn Trump Media’s existing media assets into revenue.

Truth API fits that strategy unusually well.

It does not require another speculative token.

It does not require building an audience from scratch.

It monetizes something Trump Media already controls.

Access to Donald Trump.

PART XV: THE BROADER PATTERN

Truth API does not exist in a vacuum.

Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure revealed private financial activity on a scale virtually impossible to disentangle from the powers of the presidency. Public reporting on the filing identified thousands of transactions, enormous holdings managed across several major financial institutions and substantial income tied to cryptocurrency ventures.

Every one of those interests exists in an economy profoundly affected by presidential action.

Trump can alter tariff policy. He can change cryptocurrency regulation. He can affect defence procurement, energy markets, antitrust enforcement, export controls, government contracts and sanctions. He can threaten a foreign country at breakfast and announce negotiations by dinner. Markets respond because they have to.

That does not mean every Trump policy is designed to enrich Trump.

It means the president has created a structure in which the American public is repeatedly forced to ask the question.

Previous presidents understood that the appearance of self-dealing can be corrosive even when criminal intent cannot be proved. That was the purpose of blind trusts and divestment. The point was not to make presidents poorer. It was to make certain questions unnecessary.

Trump instead retained extraordinary private financial interests while exercising extraordinary public power.

Truth API takes that conflict and gives part of it a subscription price.

PART XVI: THE REALLY DAMNING COMPARISON

This is where the history of Truth Social becomes almost too perfect.

The platform was born from a populist argument about access. Big Tech had accumulated too much control. Gatekeepers decided who could speak, who could listen and which voices would reach the public. Truth Social would tear down the barrier and return political communication to ordinary Americans.

Whatever one thought of Trump, there was a recognizable democratic idea buried inside the pitch.

Four years later, ordinary users are leaving.

Trump Media does not disclose conventional audience measurements. Advertising and subscription revenue remain microscopic beside the valuation of the corporation. Even Donald Trump’s return to the presidency did not produce the growth one would expect from a platform whose primary attraction is Donald Trump.

And then Trump Media found a different use for the gate.

Institutions capable of spending tens of thousands of dollars a month can now purchase a delivery system optimized for getting influential Truth Social posts into trading computers faster than ordinary users receive them through conventional notifications.

The company that built its identity around destroying the gatekeeper now sells position at the gate.

There have always been political actors capable of moving markets. Presidents announce sanctions. The Federal Reserve changes interest rates. Treasury alters debt policy. Governments go to war. Treaties fail. Regulators sue companies. Traders have always paid enormous sums to learn consequential information as quickly as possible.

What is extraordinary here is the collapse of previously separate roles into one economic chain.

The source of the market-moving information is the President of the United States. The president distributes much of that information through a private platform. He is the sole beneficiary of a trust holding approximately 41.5 percent of the platform’s publicly traded parent. That parent openly markets expedited delivery of influential posts to algorithmic traders and justifies the product by pointing out that markets already move when those posts appear.

Every element of that statement can be documented.

We do not need to invent a crime.

The arrangement is the scandal.

PART XVII: THE STOCK AND THE SPECTACLE

DJT closed August 10 at approximately $9.39, giving Trump Media a market capitalization of roughly $2.6 billion immediately before its second-quarter earnings release.

The company generated $3.68 million in revenue during all of 2025.

Comparing those numbers produces a price-to-sales ratio in the hundreds, but even that calculation risks pretending Trump Media has ever traded like an ordinary media company.

It has not.

DJT is part equity, part political instrument, part Trump fandom, part speculative vehicle, part crypto exposure and increasingly part bet on whatever Trump Media decides to become next. The balance sheet now contains billions in financial assets. The company is attempting to merge with a nuclear-fusion business. Its social network is only one component of a collection of ventures bearing little resemblance to the corporation investors originally bought.

Donald Trump himself remains embedded in the valuation.

How could he not be?

Without Donald Trump, there is no Truth Social in anything resembling its current form. There is no presidential megaphone. There is no market-moving feed worth selling to quantitative traders for $100,000 a month.

Truth API makes explicit what the market has understood for years.

Trump is not merely the company’s most famous user.

He is part of the product.

PART XVIII: THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN

There is a larger investigation beneath this one, and it begins with the customer list.

Trump Media says firms are already paying for Truth API. It has not publicly identified them.

Their identities matter enormously.

Which hedge funds are paying for the feed? Which banks? Which high-frequency firms and market makers? Do any own substantial DJT positions? Have any financed Trump businesses or Trump Media transactions? Do any trade heavily in sectors particularly sensitive to presidential policy? Are any regulated by Trump appointees? Do any seek federal contracts, mergers, approvals, licences or other decisions from the administration?

Then there are questions about the mechanics of the product itself.

Exactly what constitutes publication inside Truth Social? At what point does the API receive a post relative to its appearance in the ordinary public interface? Who controls that timing? Can employees or contractors see scheduled or unpublished presidential posts? Are all Trump posts entered personally, or do aides sometimes publish on his behalf? What internal controls separate Trump Media personnel from market-sensitive presidential communications before publication?

There are governmental questions as well.

How are these posts handled under the Presidential Records Act? Has White House Counsel reviewed the Truth API arrangement? Has the Office of Government Ethics provided advice concerning it? Has the SEC opened an inquiry following the Warren-Schiff letter? Do White House communications officials coordinate the timing of presidential Truth Social posts with anyone employed by Trump Media?

And then there is the question capable of changing this investigation entirely.

Does anyone outside the White House know the contents or timing of a market-sensitive presidential post before the public does?

There is presently no evidence that anyone does.

That is why it is a reporting question.

Find the customers. Follow the money. Examine the infrastructure. Establish who knows what, and when.

The corporate structure has already given us more than enough reason to ask.

CONCLUSION: THE GATE WAS PRIVATIZED

Truth Social promised a world without gatekeepers.

Perhaps that promise was sincere. Perhaps it was marketing. It hardly matters now. The business built around it never attracted an audience capable of explaining the valuation placed upon the company. Three years of revenue tell us that. Independent audience estimates tell us something else. Even possession of the presidency has not solved the underlying problem.

So Trump Media discovered another market.

Not millions of citizens worth fractions of a penny per advertisement, but a small collection of institutions for whom a fraction of a second can be worth millions of dollars.

There is a cold logic to it.

Donald Trump possesses something no other social-media company can manufacture. He is President of the United States, he communicates official decisions through Truth Social, and those decisions move money. The company does not need to create that value. The presidency creates it.

Trump Media only has to meter the pipe.

The American watching Truth Social gets the president’s words. The trader paying Trump Media gets the race to those words. And somewhere on the other side of that transaction sits a trust holding 114,750,000 shares of the company for the benefit of the man producing the information.

The gatekeeper was never abolished.

The gate was privatized.

And Wall Street can now buy a place at the front of the line.

WHAT WE CANNOT CLAIM

None of this requires speculation, and allowing speculation to outrun the record would only provide an escape hatch from facts that are already extraordinary.

There is no evidence Devin Nunes was forced out of Trump Media. His separation is documented; the reason for it is not.

There is no basis yet for declaring Truth API itself illegal insider trading. Serious legal arguments exist on both sides, and no court or regulator has resolved them.

There is no evidence Trump personally receives Truth API subscription fees. The revenue belongs to Trump Media, while Trump is the sole beneficiary of the trust holding 114.75 million shares of the company.

There is no evidence Truth API customers receive Trump’s posts before they are published, see drafts of presidential statements or receive secret government information through the service.

There is no evidence Trump times presidential announcements to benefit Trump Media, his investment portfolio or Truth API customers.

There is no evidence Trump personally directed the April 8 stock purchases before his tariff reversal, knew they had been made, or that his investment managers possessed advance knowledge of the reversal.

There is no evidence Trump influenced ICE’s Axon procurement.

And Trump Media’s $712.3 million 2025 net loss and $405.9 million first-quarter 2026 loss should not be described as operating losses caused by Truth Social. Much of both resulted from changes in the value of digital assets and securities.

Strip all of that away.

What remains is a sitting president who retains an enormous economic interest in the company carrying his presidential communications, a company whose original social-media business never produced meaningful revenue, and a new product through which that company charges some of the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world for faster access to information whose value is created by the presidency itself.

We do not need the claims we cannot prove.

What we can prove is worse.

For more of my writing along with so much more, visit https://aeblymedia.com

By Steven J. Boardman

Donald Trump has spent most of his public life selling Americans one central idea about himself: that whatever else they may think of him, he understands money.

That claim predates the presidency by decades. It was the foundation of the brand before politics entered the picture. Trump was the dealmaker, the builder, the man who understood leverage, debt, negotiation, capital and risk. His business experience, he argued, distinguished him from professional politicians who knew how to spend other people’s money but had never created anything themselves.

Eventually, voters handed him the largest enterprise he had ever managed.

So for the purposes of this argument, everything else can be set aside.

His conduct does not matter here. Neither do the criminal cases, the scandals, the insults, the vendettas, the constitutional fights or the long catalogue of controversies that have followed him through public life. None of those things are necessary to evaluate the specific claim Trump himself has made more consistently than almost any other: that he possesses unusual financial judgment.

That claim can be tested without ideology.

Open the books.

Measured by average monthly job creation, the modern presidential record looks roughly like this:

Clinton: 237,000.

Carter: 211,000.

Reagan: 168,000.

Obama: 121,000.

George H.W. Bush: 55,000.

George W. Bush: 5,000.

Trump’s second term, through July: roughly 38,000.

Trump’s first term: minus 56,000.

Biden: 336,000.

There are explanations behind nearly every one of those figures, and any serious analysis should acknowledge them. Presidents do not operate national economies as though they were privately held companies. They inherit business cycles, demographic trends, monetary policy, wars, financial crises, technological changes and decisions made years before they take office. Some are lucky. Some are not.

The problem begins when those qualifications are applied selectively.

Trump’s first-term average is frequently defended by removing the pandemic from the calculation. There is an obvious reason for doing so. Before COVID, the economy had added roughly 6.4 million jobs during his presidency. The collapse that followed was extraordinary, sudden and largely outside any conventional understanding of economic management.

But the official record does not stop in February 2020.

Nor should it.

George W. Bush is not permitted to end his presidency before the financial crisis. His eight-year average of roughly 5,000 jobs a month incorporates the destruction of employment during the Great Recession because the recession occurred while he was president. Nobody recalculates his tenure as though Lehman Brothers had survived or as though the final year of his presidency belonged to somebody else.

Bush owns the number.

Trump does too.

That principle becomes uncomfortable in the opposite direction, because it also means Joe Biden keeps his average of roughly 336,000 jobs a month. Much of that growth came as the economy reopened and recovered from the pandemic. Millions of jobs that had disappeared during COVID returned while he was in office. That plainly makes his figure unusual.

It does not make it imaginary.

A neutral accounting system cannot remove Trump’s collapse while also removing Biden’s recovery. Either circumstances remain inside the presidential ledger or they do not. Once exceptions are created only when they improve the preferred president’s record, the exercise stops being analysis and becomes advocacy.

The cleaner rule is also the harsher one.

You get what you get.

That is why Trump’s second term is more revealing than his first.

There is no pandemic shutdown embedded in these numbers. There has been no sudden national closure of factories, hotels, restaurants, airports and schools capable of explaining away a dramatically weak employment pace. Through July, the administration has averaged roughly 38,000 jobs a month, and the latest report made the underlying picture worse rather than better.

The economy lost 23,000 jobs in July. May and June were revised downward by another 103,000. The labor force shrank by 264,000 people.

There is legitimate context around the July number. A substantial portion of the decline came from local-government education employment, a category vulnerable to seasonal distortions during the summer, while private employers still added approximately 30,000 jobs. If July were simply one ugly report in the middle of a strong labor market, that explanation would carry considerable weight.

It is not.

The revisions matter because they reached backward and weakened months that had already been reported. July did not merely produce one disappointing headline. It told us that the labor market had been softer than previously understood.

The federal workforce has also declined sharply since Trump returned to office, but there the explanation is simpler. The administration intended to reduce federal employment and did so.

One can believe that was good policy. There is a legitimate political argument for a smaller federal government.

But those workers still count.

A government cannot deliberately eliminate jobs and then ask that they be excluded from the employment record because their elimination was intentional. Policy choices belong on the same ledger as policy successes.

And this is where the question of Trump’s financial judgment becomes more interesting than the monthly jobs table.

The argument for Trump has never simply been that he was another Republican president pursuing conventional Republican economic policy. His argument was personal. He knew business. He understood capital. He could negotiate better agreements, identify waste, manage debt and use the federal government’s enormous purchasing and bargaining power more effectively than politicians who had spent their lives in Washington.

That proposition deserves to be judged against his actual record as a financial manager.

The private history is considerably less impressive than the mythology.

Tax records obtained by The New York Times showed more than $1 billion in reported business losses between 1985 and 1994. In 1995 alone, Trump reported a net operating loss of $916 million. His casino companies repeatedly entered Chapter 11 proceedings, and the Trump Taj Mahal became one of the clearest examples of the problem that followed much of his business career: aggressive expansion supported by expensive debt and a confidence that future revenue would be sufficient to carry the load.

The Taj Mahal was financed with hundreds of millions of dollars in high-yield bonds carrying interest rates of approximately 14 percent. That borrowing created an enormous obligation before the casino had established whether it could generate enough cash to service it. Within little more than a year of opening, the property was in bankruptcy proceedings.

There is no need to turn that history into a morality play, and there is no need to pretend bankruptcy itself proves incompetence. Businesses fail. Restructuring exists because risk is inherent in commerce.

What matters is the pattern.

Trump’s reputation was built around financial discipline, yet some of the most consequential ventures associated with him were defined by overleveraging, unsustainable debt service and the assumption that growth would arrive quickly enough to make the structure work.

That history becomes relevant when the same instinct appears in public policy.

The administration’s tariffs are a useful example because they were sold in explicitly commercial terms. Trump argued that sweeping import taxes would restore American manufacturing, strengthen domestic industry and force foreign competitors to concede better terms. It was the language of a deal.

The results have not matched the promise.

Manufacturing employment has declined since the tariff programme began. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show tens of thousands fewer manufacturing jobs over the period following the April 2025 tariff announcement. The Center for American Progress calculated that 89,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared during the first ten months after the tariffs were imposed, an employment loss equivalent to roughly 2,800 average-sized manufacturing establishments. Manufacturing construction also declined.

Those figures do not prove that tariffs alone caused every lost job. No serious economist would make that claim. Manufacturing employment is influenced by interest rates, automation, investment cycles, consumer demand, exchange rates and a long list of other variables.

But tariffs were not sold as one modest influence among many.

They were sold as the mechanism that would revive American manufacturing.

That revival has not appeared.

Instead, many American manufacturers have had to absorb higher costs for imported components, machinery and raw materials while waiting for the promised industrial expansion to materialize. The administration can argue that such a transformation requires more time, and perhaps it does. But a strategy does not become successful merely because its promised results have been moved farther into the future.

Again, the ledger records what has happened, not what was promised.

The same discipline should be applied to the federal balance sheet.

During the first nine months of fiscal year 2026, the federal government ran a deficit of roughly $1.4 trillion, putting borrowing on a trajectory toward approximately $2 trillion for the year.

Trump did not create the entire federal deficit. No president does. Mandatory spending, interest costs, existing legislation and obligations accumulated under previous administrations all arrive with the office. Pretending otherwise would violate the same rule used throughout this analysis.

But inheriting a fiscal problem does not relieve a president of responsibility for what he adds to it.

A president who presents himself as uniquely capable of controlling costs, eliminating waste and applying private-sector discipline to government should eventually produce evidence that those skills are visible in the balance sheet.

That evidence is difficult to find.

Employment growth is weak. Manufacturing employment has declined despite a policy explicitly designed to revive it. Federal borrowing remains enormous. The government has deliberately eliminated hundreds of thousands of federal positions while promising that private-sector growth would more than compensate for the disruption.

So far, it has not.

None of this requires a judgment about Donald Trump’s character.

That is what makes the record more difficult to dismiss.

You do not have to believe he is corrupt. You do not have to dislike his politics. You do not have to care about his temperament, his rhetoric or any of the controversies surrounding his presidency.

You only have to accept the standard he created for himself.

He said he understood money better than the people who had been running the country.

Fine.

Judge him on money.

Judge the employment record. Judge the debt. Judge the manufacturing numbers. Judge the tariffs against the results they were supposed to produce. Judge the private business record against the reputation constructed from it.

Then apply exactly the same allowances you would give anyone else.

COVID counts for Trump.

The financial crisis counts for Bush.

The recovery counts for Biden.

Inherited debt counts as inherited debt.

Policy choices count as policy choices.

No thumbs on the scale. No retrospective exclusions. No alternate books prepared for the preferred defendant.

That is the advantage of a ledger.

It has no ideology.

It does not care who gives the speech, who owns the brand or how confidently the promise was made.

It records what came in, what went out, what was borrowed, what was lost and what remained when the accounting was finished.

For forty years, Donald Trump has asked to be judged as a businessman.

There is no reason not to oblige him.

To read more of my writing and much more, please visit https://aeblymedia.com/home

By Steven J. Boardman

Jeanine Pirro walked into the Oval Office on Monday pushing a banker’s box filled with evidence.

She was not there for a ceremonial photograph or another televised performance of loyalty. The U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia had come to defend herself against Donald Trump and accuse Interior Secretary Doug Burgum of misleading the president about the failure of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation.

Pirro told Trump that Burgum’s department had failed to provide prosecutors with records showing the pool was already coming apart before former Olympian David Hearn ever put his hand in the water. According to sources who described the meeting to ABC News and The New York Times, Pirro raised her voice at Burgum while Trump watched alongside Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and White House Counsel David Warrington. The Times reported that she has been even more direct in private, calling Burgum an incompetent liar.

What began with blue debris floating in green water has now produced a collapsed felony prosecution, an accusation of withheld evidence and a president who continues to demand belief in a crime his own government told a federal judge did not happen.

Pirro did not carry an explanation into the White House. She carried an allegation that one federal department concealed evidence from another while prosecutors pursued an innocent man.

Beneath the peeling paint sits a government contract.

THE MAN THEY NEEDED TO BLAME

The Reflecting Pool was already an embarrassment before David Hearn entered the story.

Trump had ordered it refurbished ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary, but the work was rushed, the water turned green and the blue lining began peeling across the basin. Photographs of the deterioration circulated nationally, turning what was meant to be a gleaming monument to Trump’s stewardship into an object of ridicule.

Trump responded by insisting that someone had done it to him.

He claimed vandals had dumped fertilizer into the water and suggested that someone had used a knife or box cutter to tear the lining. He wanted arrests, and the government soon found someone it could arrest.

Hearn, a 67-year-old three-time Olympic canoeist, was cycling near the pool on June 19 when he noticed a loose piece of blue coating and reached into the water to touch it. A distant camera captured the encounter, and that image became the foundation of the government’s case.

Pirro’s office accused him of making a violent effort to tear up the lining and secured a felony indictment for destruction of government property. A conviction reportedly carried exposure of up to ten years in prison.

Three other people, Justin Carreno, Cameron Thiers and Sophie Dennison-Gibby, were charged with misdemeanors involving the same pool. All four pleaded not guilty. All four cases have now been dropped.

The Justice Department was prepared to prosecute Hearn for touching material that had already separated from the pool. His freedom became the price of protecting Donald Trump from another public humiliation.

THE MONEY UNDER THE PAINT

The vandalism story had another advantage. It directed attention away from the contract.

On April 3, the Interior Department awarded the Reflecting Pool project to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia company with no record of federal construction work. There was no competitive bidding. Interior justified the exemption by citing the deadline for the America 250 celebration.

Trump had told the public that the work would cost less than $2 million. The contract was awarded for $13.1 million and later climbed above $14.6 million as the National Park Service added work. The company’s owner confirmed the figures to NBC News.

Trump then gave two irreconcilable accounts of his relationship with the contractor.

He first said the company had worked on the pool at his golf club in Sterling, Virginia, and that its owner had called him to offer his services. Days later, after questions mounted about the price and the no-bid process, Trump wrote that Interior had awarded the contract to a firm he did not know and had never used.

He either knew the contractor or he did not. The company either worked at his golf club or it did not. One version vanished as soon as the relationship became politically inconvenient.

Atlantic Industrial Coatings was not the only company hired without competition. Interior also awarded a $1.7 million no-bid contract to an Ohio water company to address the algae.

Two no-bid contracts were issued for one failing pool, while the president first claimed the principal contractor as his own and then disowned it.

That is why the vandalism theory was so useful. If the lining failed because a rushed project had been awarded to a company with no federal experience, responsibility would travel upward toward the officials who approved and supervised the work. If vandals caused the damage, responsibility could be placed on a canoeist riding his bicycle through Washington.

One explanation endangered the contract. The other endangered a man’s liberty.

The government chose the contract.

THE DOCUMENTS THAT COLLAPSED THE CASE

On July 31, Pirro’s office moved to dismiss the charge against Hearn.

The filing said records eventually produced by Interior revealed a rushed and flawed installation process, along with extensive peeling throughout the basin. Inspectors found failures across the pool, including near its centre, where no person standing at the edge could have reached the lining.

The damage predated Hearn.

The government acknowledged that the renovation had been rushed to meet the anniversary deadline and attributed the deterioration to problems with the contractor’s work rather than deliberate vandalism.

Pirro’s office said those records arrived only after Hearn had been indicted.

That claim is now at the centre of the scandal. If Interior possessed evidence that contradicted the vandalism theory and failed to provide it before prosecutors charged a man with a felony, the delay cannot be dismissed as bureaucratic confusion. Prosecutors were allowed to build probable cause around a convenient suspect while another department held records showing that the damage had already begun.

Pirro’s filing identifies an internal National Park Service communication dated June 11 that raised concerns about the peeling liner. Hearn did not visit the pool until June 19.

The government’s own people were discussing the failure eight days before the man they blamed ever touched the water.

BURGUM’S ANSWER

Burgum says his department did nothing wrong.

He has written that Interior provided prosecutors with eyewitness and expert testimony, turned over every piece of evidence requested on the timeline requested and supplied video showing some of the alleged vandalism. He has also insisted that his department will not back down from people who want to deface national monuments.

His defense deserves to be heard. It also needs to survive the calendar.

Burgum says Interior provided everything prosecutors requested on time. Pirro’s filing says the records that destroyed the case arrived only after the indictment. The filing also points to the June 11 National Park Service warning.

Those accounts cannot both be complete.

Either the June 11 document reached prosecutors before Hearn was charged, or it did not. If it did, Pirro’s office pursued the indictment despite evidence that the liner was already failing. If it did not, Burgum’s claim that his department provided everything on time becomes difficult to sustain.

He has not explained where that warning was during the weeks between June 11 and the indictment.

Burgum has also said Interior intends to use the same company to repair the pool because, in his words, it did a fantastic job. The contractor whose rushed installation the Justice Department blamed in a federal filing is now expected to repair the damage attributed to its own work.

THE GOVERNMENT’S STORIES DO NOT MATCH

Pirro’s version does not absolve her office.

Hearn’s attorneys say prosecutors knew, or should have known, that the case was defective from the beginning. The widespread peeling was visible, the vandalism theory was weak and career prosecutors reportedly expressed concerns before the indictment was obtained.

His lawyers have asked the court to dismiss the charge with prejudice, preventing the government from reviving it later. Trump’s continued insistence that Hearn committed a crime makes that request more than procedural housekeeping.

Two accusations now stand beside each other.

Pirro says Interior misled prosecutors and withheld the evidence that collapsed the case. Hearn’s defense says Pirro’s office already had enough reason to doubt the case and proceeded because the president wanted someone punished.

Those claims are not mutually exclusive. Interior may have delayed or withheld decisive records while prosecutors ignored obvious weaknesses because they understood the result Trump expected.

The arrival of additional evidence does not erase the decisions made before it arrived.

This was not one department corrupting an otherwise careful process. The administration moved in the direction Trump demanded until the evidence became too heavy to carry any farther.

TRUMP STILL WANTS THE LIE

Pirro dismissed the case. Trump attacked her for it.

He said she had folded like an umbrella and choked because the judge was hostile. He continued to call the episode major vandalism and refused to say whether Pirro would keep her job, telling reporters that he had not yet made a determination.

Trump is not offering a competing interpretation of disputed evidence. His own Justice Department filed the evidence in federal court.

The government told a judge that the installation was defective, the lining was failing before Hearn arrived and Interior’s original account could not support the prosecution. Trump answered by attacking the prosecutor who acknowledged those facts.

Every federal official watching now understands the instruction.

The president does not want evidence brought to him if it contradicts the conclusion he has already announced. He wants the machinery of government used to make his version true.

He wanted vandalism, so investigators searched for vandals. He wanted a culprit, so prosecutors charged one. When the physical evidence contradicted him, he did not reconsider the accusation. He turned on the people who conceded what the records showed.

THE QUESTIONS ARE ALREADY BEING ASKED

Congress does not have to begin at the beginning.

At a House Natural Resources hearing, Rep. Joe Neguse asked Burgum whether he was familiar with Atlantic Industrial Coatings. Burgum said he was not. His department had awarded the company a no-bid contract worth more than $14 million, yet the man running that department claimed not to recognize its name.

House oversight Democrats had already written to the contractor in June, demanding records explaining how a company with no federal construction experience obtained the work.

The remaining questions are straightforward.

When did Interior first know the lining was failing? Who reviewed the contractor’s reports? What did the National Park Service tell investigators, and when did it tell them? What information was given to the Justice Department before Hearn was arrested and indicted? Who decided when the construction records would be produced? Did anyone at the White House communicate with Pirro, Burgum or investigators about finding and charging a suspect?

The contractor’s records should be preserved. So should every communication among Interior, the White House, the National Park Service and the U.S. attorney’s office.

A government that nearly imprisoned a man to protect a presidential project does not get to investigate itself in private.

THE POOL REFLECTED EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS BUILT TO REFLECT

The Reflecting Pool was designed to mirror the monuments around it. Trump’s renovation made it mirror his government instead.

The work was rushed because spectacle mattered more than competence. When the project failed, accusation became more useful than accountability. A private citizen was turned into a felony defendant because those in power needed somewhere else to place the blame.

A Cabinet secretary and a U.S. attorney are now accusing each other inside the Oval Office, while the president continues to insist that an imaginary crime occurred despite the evidence filed by his own government.

The blue paint was funny. The green water was funny. The absurdity made the scandal easy to underestimate.

David Hearn was still arrested. He was indicted. He hired lawyers and defended his freedom while records inside the federal government showed that the pool had been failing before he arrived. Prosecutors called him a vandal while the government’s own paperwork said the paint was already coming off.

Pirro now says the evidence was kept from her. Hearn’s lawyers say no hidden document was necessary to recognize that the case was rotten. Trump still wants the lie, and Burgum says he intends to hire the same contractor again.

The Reflecting Pool did not merely expose defective workmanship. It exposed the machinery behind it.

The president supplied the conclusion. His subordinates competed to confirm it. An innocent man became the cost, and the official who finally admitted the work was bad was accused of folding like an umbrella.

By Steven J. Boardman

The government charged an innocent man with a felony to protect Donald Trump from the consequences of a botched vanity project. We laughed at the blue paint and the green water, and we were right to. It was a stupid crime in service of a stupider ego.

But while the country stared at the Reflecting Pool, the real theft proceeded in the open.

Not the theft of one man’s freedom, though that happened. Not the theft of public trust, though that reserve is now so depleted the phrase itself sounds antique. The theft underway right now, in daylight, with the active cooperation of the Justice Department and the silent consent of the Republican Party, is the theft of the republic itself.

It is being laundered through the federal courts, monetized through a social media company, and guarded by the very institutions built to prevent it.

Donald Trump has secured a permanent, blanket exemption from IRS scrutiny for his entire financial past. He has turned the unpredictability of his own governance into a subscription product for hedge funds. He earned $2.24 billion in a single year from ventures whose value rests upon the fact that he is president. He has done all of it without a criminal charge, without a congressional hearing of consequence, and without a genuine public reckoning.

This is not a president who occasionally blurs the line between his office and his balance sheet. This is a man who has bent the machinery of the state until it serves that balance sheet.

That is not a conflict of interest.

That is the architecture of a kleptocracy.

THE TEN-BILLION-DOLLAR SHAKEDOWN

Begin with the Internal Revenue Service, because that is where Trump’s self-dealing reaches its most audacious form.

For years, he fought to keep his tax returns hidden. He was the first major-party presidential nominee since Watergate to refuse to release them. When the records finally leaked, they did not reveal a master of the tax code. They revealed a man who paid $750 in federal income tax in 2016, another $750 in 2017, and nothing at all in ten of the previous fifteen years.

The self-proclaimed billionaire who ran on his wealth as proof of his competence had given the federal treasury less in the year he won the presidency than the average worker pays in a single month.

He was not embarrassed. He was enraged.

In January 2026, Trump, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization sued the IRS and the Department of Justice for $10 billion. Their theory was that the government had failed to protect Trump’s private tax data from Charles Littlejohn, a contractor who had already pleaded guilty to leaking the records to The New York Times and ProPublica.

The suit was legally hopeless. Courts have consistently refused to hold the government liable for the criminal acts of its contractors. Littlejohn had confessed. The limitations clock had all but run. Trump’s own lawyers knew the case had no path to $10 billion, or to ten dollars.

It was never built to win in a courtroom.

It was built to be settled.

And the man negotiating that settlement on behalf of the United States was Todd Blanche, then acting Attorney General.

Blanche was not some detached government lawyer assigned to defend the treasury. He was Donald Trump’s former personal criminal defense attorney, the man who sat beside him at the New York hush-money trial, and the man whose recent professional life had consisted almost entirely of keeping Donald Trump out of a cell.

The lead plaintiff and the government were, functionally, the same person.

The man doing the extorting was negotiating with himself.

Judge Kathleen Williams of the Southern District of Florida saw exactly what had been placed before her. In a 56-page order, she said so without the usual judicial hedging.

She found the case had been brought for an improper purpose: to give judicial legitimacy to a settlement with no viable basis in law or fact. There was no genuine adversity between the parties because there could be none.

“There was never adverseness between the Parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail,” she wrote. “The Lead Plaintiff and the Government are one, a fully realized unitary interest.”

She had the receipts.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, IRS chief Frank Bisignano, and the department lawyers nominally assigned to defend the government were all bound, she found, to advance no position that contravened the President. During the 109 days the case sat on her docket, the lawyers assigned to oppose it never appeared to oppose it.

When she asked Blanche under oath on May 19 why the settlement had never been submitted for judicial review, he told her there was no judge to review it because the case had already been dismissed.

He was insisting there could be no referee in a game he had arranged to play against himself.

Williams referred Trump lawyer Alejandro Brito to the Florida Bar. She stripped a second Trump lawyer, Daniel Epstein, of his ability to practice in her district. She flagged Blanche to the New York bar and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward to the District of Columbia bar. She barred every party, Trump, his sons, and his company included, from ever citing the settlement again as evidence of anything.

She came as close to writing the word fraud in capital letters as a federal judge gets.

Then she stopped short of the one thing that mattered.

Whether the private agreement between the parties survived, she noted in a footnote, was not before her court.

So consider where that leaves the country.

The $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, the slush account designed to pay Trump’s allies and January 6 defendants with public money, collapsed under bipartisan congressional pressure. Even the number was a branding exercise.

But the audit immunity was the real prize. It was the thing the entire lawsuit existed to obtain, and it remains in force.

To purchase his own confirmation as Attorney General, Blanche rescinded the fund to satisfy two holdout Republican senators. He left the tax shield standing.

In a document sent to the lawmakers, Blanche assured them the immunity applied only retroactively, to returns filed before May 19, 2026. This was presented as a concession.

It concedes nothing.

It exempts from audit every return Trump has ever filed. It prevents the IRS from reviewing the returns of Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and the family businesses. By published estimates, it wipes away roughly $70 million in contested back taxes.

No other taxpayer in the country has received anything remotely like it.

The judge called the lawsuit risible. She sanctioned the lawyers. She voided the settlement.

And the immunity stands.

Now ask the question the administration does not want asked.

What is in those returns?

In 2025, Trump reported earning $2.24 billion, nearly four times what his businesses generated in 2017. Roughly $800 million came from World Liberty Financial, the family cryptocurrency firm whose fortunes depend upon the federal crypto policy Trump himself sets. Another $636 million came from the $TRUMP memecoin, a novelty token he launched and promoted from the Oval Office, whose value survives only as long as his power does.

He booked $125 million from foreign golf and real estate ventures in countries with active business before the United States government. He collected another $117 million in legal settlements from media and technology firms, CBS and Meta among them, corporations operating under regulatory agencies he controls.

Every dollar of that windfall is now shielded from the one agency charged with examining it.

He sued his own government, sent his own lawyer to surrender on its behalf, and walked away with a multibillion-dollar tax shield.

One of the finest legal minds of the age.

INSIDER TRADING AS A SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE

If the IRS deal protects the wealth Trump already has, his next venture manufactures the wealth he intends to acquire.

Donald Trump’s social media posts move markets. This is not a figure of speech. It is a measured, repeatable fact.

On April 9, 2025, he posted on Truth Social that he would pause many of his new tariffs for ninety days. The major indexes lurched upward within minutes. Fortunes changed hands in the seconds between the post appearing and the market absorbing it.

Trump has always understood this. The only question was whether he would find a way to charge admission.

He has.

Around August 1, 2026, Trump Media & Technology Group activated Truth API, a premium data pipeline that delivers posts from Truth Social’s most influential accounts to hedge funds and investment banks milliseconds before the public sees them. The service costs as much as $100,000 a month, or $1.2 million a year.

Bloomberg first reported the plan on July 17. By the time it went live, Trump Media said subscribers were already signing up. Fortune reported that five Wall Street firms had joined.

In high-frequency trading, a millisecond is not a rounding error. It is the whole game.

Firms have spent fortunes shaving nanoseconds from execution times because a few milliseconds on a large trade can mean tens of millions of dollars. They are not paying $100,000 a month to admire Trump’s AI portraits of himself as George Washington. They are paying to know, before the rest of the country, the instant the President of the United States is about to say something that moves the tape.

The proceeds do not disappear into some ordinary corporate account. Trump owns 114,750,000 shares of Trump Media, roughly 41 percent of the company, through the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust controlled by his son Donald Jr.

Every subscription lifts the value of a company in which the sitting president holds a controlling personal stake.

That gives him a direct financial incentive to produce more volatility, more market-moving announcements, and more convulsions, because each one now carries a price.

He is not merely governing by chaos.

He is invoicing for it.

The legal reaction has been unusually plain-spoken.

Renée Jones, a Boston College professor and former senior SEC official, said the service appears to run afoul of rules barring the misuse of nonpublic information, and that providing presidential posts to paying clients in advance breaches the president’s duty of trust and confidence.

Gian Luca Clementi, an economist at NYU Stern, was blunter.

“This is insider trading by definition.”

Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, invoked tipper-tippee liability, the doctrine under which the person who supplies material nonpublic information to a trader for payment can be held as culpable as the trader.

That doctrine, he noted, applies to the president exactly as it applies to everyone else.

Congress has begun to move. The ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee opened an investigation into the scheme. Senators have demanded that the SEC examine it. The SEC has declined to comment. The White House has not responded.

Wall Street will not speak.

NPR contacted twelve major brokers, fund managers, and institutional investors. Not one would go on the record.

One executive, granted anonymity for fear of retaliation, was direct.

“It’s insane. I can say for myself and 200 of my friends in finance, we’re not getting anywhere near this. In another administration, this would be considered criminal.”

The silence is the confession.

These are not shy people. They are quiet because the man selling them the product also commands the regulator capable of destroying them.

That is not a market.

That is a protection racket with a subscription page.

THE BANALITY OF PLUNDER

Confronted with the volume of it, the public goes numb.

The scandals arrive faster than outrage can be aimed, and each is buried beneath the next before it can be fully understood. That is not incidental. It is how the system survives.

So refuse the invitation to treat each theft as an isolated event.

The Reflecting Pool is not separate from the IRS immunity. The IRS immunity is not separate from Truth API. Truth API is not separate from the crypto billions.

These are not discrete acts of corruption. They are components of one working system.

Trump uses the power of the presidency to create financial opportunities for himself and his family. He uses the machinery of the state to shield those opportunities from scrutiny. He uses the threat of that machinery to silence anyone inclined to object.

He does it in the open, daring the republic to stop him.

Assemble the full picture.

He earns $800 million from a cryptocurrency firm whose value depends upon the federal crypto policy he writes. He earns $636 million from a memecoin whose price depends upon the relevance and power his office guarantees. He earns $125 million from foreign ventures in countries whose relationship with Washington he personally controls. Another $117 million comes from settlements with corporations governed by regulators he appoints.

Then he secures blanket immunity from the agency responsible for auditing all of it and sells early access to his market-moving posts to institutions trading on the policies he announces.

Call it what it is.

A conflict of interest requires two competing interests.

There is only one interest in this arrangement, and everything answers to it.

Asked to explain the earnings, the White House spokeswoman said Trump “was a massively successful businessman prior to becoming president, which was why he was elected to office in the first place.”

Examine the claim on its own terms.

The premise is that his wealth predates the presidency and therefore cannot be tainted by it. The numbers refuse the premise.

In 2017, Trump’s businesses generated $594 million. In 2025, they generated $2.24 billion.

The gap is not explained by the quality of his golf courses or the charm of his hotels. It is explained by one fact: he is president, and the presidency has made him enormously valuable to everyone who needs something from the federal government.

He did not grow rich because he is a gifted businessman.

He grew richer because he became president, and because he was willing to sell it.

DISMISSAL IS NOT ACCOUNTABILITY

The administration would like the country to read the judge’s ruling as proof that the system held.

It did not hold.

It moved only after Trump had already pocketed the immunity, after the slush fund had been created and abandoned under pressure, and after Blanche had been installed as Attorney General with the tax shield intact.

Williams voided the settlement, and the immunity survived it.

She referred the lawyers to their bars, and no criminal charge followed.

The Republican senators who gagged at the slush fund swallowed the immunity without complaint.

Killing the fund was the least the administration could do and still secure Blanche’s confirmation.

It was not integrity.

It was arithmetic.

The Senate Judiciary Committee should demand the full record of communications between Trump’s personal lawyers and the Justice Department during the settlement talks. Congress should test whether Blanche’s revised immunity order violates the federal statute barring executive interference with IRS audits.

The SEC should investigate whether Truth API constitutes insider trading. It should not wait to be asked.

And someone, somewhere, must force an answer to the question the administration has spent a year evading:

What is inside those returns that justified building this entire machine to hide them?

Because the scandal is not that Donald Trump found inventive ways to make money.

The scandal is that he used the presidency to make himself untouchable while doing it.

He wants the IRS immunity to stand quietly.

He wants Truth API to operate without scrutiny.

He wants the billions to accumulate unexamined.

The task is to make certain none of it stays quiet.

By Steven J. Boardman

We told you how this would end.

Not because we possessed some secret document. Not because we had a source inside Jeanine Pirro’s office. Not because the outcome required any great feat of legal analysis.

We knew because the prosecution was preposterous from the beginning.

Donald Trump ordered the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool painted blue as part of his effort to remake Washington according to his personal aesthetic. The project began failing almost immediately. The coating peeled. The water turned green. The photographs became impossible to explain away.

So Trump did what Trump always does when reality makes him look foolish.

He invented an enemy.

Vandals had done it. Saboteurs. Malcontents. Presumably the same invisible army that rigs every election he loses, fabricates every document bearing his name, plants every photograph he dislikes and conspires to make each of his failures appear exactly as it happened.

Then Jeanine Pirro’s office found him a defendant.

David Hearn is 67 years old. He represented the United States in three Olympic Games. His alleged crime was touching a loose section of coating inside the Reflecting Pool during a bicycle ride.

For this, the government arrested him, detained him for hours, hauled him before a grand jury and indicted him on a felony carrying as many as ten years in prison.

Pirro did not announce the charge with restraint. She wrapped it in the flag.

“These deliberate acts of destruction set back real progress and violate the law,” she declared. Vandalism of the pool, she said, was “an affront to our shared history and the dignity of our national heritage.” The government would hold accountable anyone seeking to “deface or diminish” America’s monuments. 

There was only one problem.

Hearn had not destroyed the pool.

The people Trump hired had.

On Friday, Pirro’s office asked the court to dismiss the case. In its own filing, the government acknowledged that the damage resulted from a “flawed installation by the contractor” and from the rush to complete Trump’s project before the America 250 celebrations. The coating had begun peeling almost immediately after the work was completed. Prosecutors conceded that the widespread damage could not reasonably be attributed to vandalism, much less proved beyond a reasonable doubt. 

That is not a technical reversal.

That is the collapse of a state-manufactured lie.

READY. FIRE. AIM.

The administration’s defense is now that the Department of the Interior failed to provide Pirro’s prosecutors with complete information before they obtained the indictment.

According to the dismissal filing, Interior supplied additional documents only after Hearn had been indicted. Those records showed that Atlantic Industrial Coatings had botched the installation and that the work had been rushed. Pirro’s office claims that it would not have pursued the indictment had Interior been forthcoming from the beginning. 

That explanation is not exculpatory.

It is an indictment of the entire administration.

The Department of the Interior apparently told prosecutors that a citizen had vandalized the Reflecting Pool while withholding evidence showing that the government’s own contractor had caused the damage. Pirro’s office apparently accepted that account, transformed it into a felony prosecution and publicly portrayed Hearn as an enemy of the nation before adequately examining the evidence.

One branch of Trump’s government concealed its incompetence.

Another branch converted the concealment into criminal charges.

And all of it served the same purpose: protecting the president from the humiliation of admitting that his gaudy, rushed renovation had fallen apart.

Hearn’s lawyers called the government’s approach “ready, fire, aim.”

Even that may be too charitable.

The administration knew what target it wanted before it knew whether a crime had occurred.

THE EVIDENCE WAS DISAPPEARING WITH THE CASE

The prosecution did not merely possess a weak case.

It behaved as though preserving the evidence were optional.

Hearn’s attorneys said photographs showed the damage already existed before he touched the coating. When the defense was later taken to inspect the precise location involved, the relevant portion of the liner was gone. The government had drained the pool and begun repairing the surface even after the defense demanded that the physical evidence be preserved. A judge warned that continued alteration of the pool could jeopardize the prosecution. 

Then came questions about the grand jury.

Hearn’s lawyers sought the complete transcript of the closed proceedings after testimony reportedly established that the pool was already leaking more than a million gallons each week, had deteriorated expansion joints and contained a tear that predated Hearn’s encounter with it. They wanted to know how prosecutors persuaded grand jurors that this man had caused more than $1,000 in damage when the government’s own evidence pointed toward an installation failure. 

Now, just as those questions were becoming unavoidable, the government wants the entire matter to disappear.

No trial.

No cross-examination.

No public accounting of what Interior officials knew.

No explanation of what prosecutors told the grand jury.

No examination of why the physical evidence vanished.

No answer to the most important question of all:

How did Donald Trump’s embarrassment become David Hearn’s felony?

THIS WAS NEVER ABOUT A SWIMMING POOL

It is tempting to laugh.

The blue paint. The green water. The peeling floor. The self-proclaimed builder presiding over a renovation that could not survive contact with water. The government assembling the machinery of criminal prosecution around a man touching a loose piece of coating.

There is comedy here.

But there is also corruption.

Not necessarily corruption in the narrow transactional sense of an envelope passed beneath a table. This is the more pervasive corruption of public institutions being bent around one man’s ego.

Trump’s embarrassment becomes a federal priority.

His suspicion becomes an investigation.

His accusation becomes an indictment.

His lie becomes the government’s official account.

And some ordinary person is forced to hire lawyers, enter a plea and contemplate ten years in prison while the people responsible search for a way to quietly retreat.

This is what personal government looks like.

The state no longer asks what happened. It asks what version of events protects the ruler.

Trump recently described himself, in his characteristically mangled fashion, as possessing one of the finest intellects in the history of the country. 

Let that marinate.

Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. James Madison helped design the constitutional system. Abraham Lincoln taught himself law and produced some of the most enduring political prose in the English language. W.E.B. Du Bois reshaped American history and sociology. Robert Oppenheimer mastered theoretical physics. Toni Morrison transformed American literature.

Donald Trump painted the Reflecting Pool blue, watched it peel apart and blamed a canoeist.

One of the finest intellects in American history.

Oh, for the love of the republic.

DISMISSAL IS NOT ACCOUNTABILITY

The administration would prefer that we treat the dismissal as proof that the system worked.

It did not.

The system worked only after an innocent man had been arrested, detained, publicly vilified and indicted. It worked after his attorneys exposed missing evidence, pre-existing damage, questionable grand-jury proceedings and records that should have prevented the prosecution altogether.

Dropping the charge is the minimum lawful action available to the government.

It is not an act of integrity.

Pirro owes David Hearn an apology. The Department of the Interior owes the public an explanation. Congress should demand the communications between Interior, the National Park Service, the U.S. Park Police and Pirro’s office. The grand-jury presentation should be examined to determine what prosecutors knew, what they were told and what they failed to ask.

And someone must answer for the decision to place a citizen’s freedom beneath the president’s vanity.

Because the real scandal is not that Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool looked stupid.

It did.

The scandal is that his administration was willing to threaten a man with ten years in prison rather than admit it.

They want this case dismissed quietly.

We should make certain its death is louder than its birth.

Steven J. Boardman

Every Arizonan knows what to do when a haboob arrives.

You stop what you are doing. If you are driving, you get off the road. You turn out the lights, take your foot off the brake and wait because visibility has disappeared and pretending otherwise can get someone killed. If you are home, you close the doors and windows, bring in whatever has not already blown away and hope the damage is limited.

Then the wall of dust moves through.

The sky returns. The roads reopen. We inspect what was damaged, sweep the dirt from the floors and begin cleaning up a mess created in minutes but capable of lingering for days.

The Trump administration governs like a haboob.

At the front is Donald Trump, naturally, positioned exactly where he wants to be: before the cameras, announcing that the storm has arrived.

This is the greatest threat America has ever faced. That is the most corrupt investigation in history. This executive order will transform the country. That court ruling is an assault on the republic. This policy must be enacted immediately because no previous president possessed the courage to do what must now be done.

Behind him comes the wall.

Cabinet secretaries, White House advisers, Justice Department lawyers, congressional allies, political operatives and an entire media ecosystem rush forward to amplify the emergency. Each one adds another layer of dust until the country can no longer see beyond the controversy directly in front of it.

Newsrooms abandon their schedules. Members of Congress issue statements. Advocacy organizations mobilize. Lawsuits are filed. Cable panels are assembled. Supporters are told that history is being made. Opponents are warned that something irreversible is about to occur.

For several days, sometimes several weeks, almost nothing else exists.

Then the cameras move.

And so does the administration.

That is why the Trump administration’s quiet abandonment of its promised Supreme Court fight over birthright citizenship matters far more than it may initially appear.

Trump had spent years describing birthright citizenship as a national scandal. He claimed the constitutional guarantee had been twisted into an incentive for unlawful immigration. He promised to end it, made the effort part of his broader campaign for the presidency and signed an executive order restricting it on the first day of his second administration.

This was not an incidental proposal buried in a policy document. It was presented as one of the defining constitutional and immigration battles of the era.

The administration pursued the case through the federal courts. The Supreme Court heard the dispute. On June 30, the justices rejected Trump’s order by a 6–3 vote, holding that the citizenship guarantee protected the children his administration sought to exclude.

Trump responded as Trump responds.

He denounced the decision. He attacked the reasoning. He assured the public that the fight was not over. On July 9, he said his administration would ask the Supreme Court to rehear the case.

Then the deadline arrived.

Twenty-five days passed. No petition for rehearing was filed. No request for additional time appeared on the docket. The White House offered no explanation. The Justice Department offered no explanation. An issue described for years as an urgent threat to the meaning of American citizenship simply vanished from the administration’s legal agenda.

That is not a scheduling error.

The Office of the Solicitor General does not accidentally forget a Supreme Court deadline in one of the administration’s most consequential constitutional cases. Lawyers at that level know the rules, track the docket and prepare for filing dates long before they arrive. The administration made a decision.

Someone decided not to file.

Someone knew that decision contradicted the president’s public promise.

Someone decided the American people did not require an explanation.

The missed deadline is therefore not the story. It is the opening through which we can see how this administration actually works.

Donald Trump creates the storm, but he does not create it alone.

Presidents do not personally draft Supreme Court petitions. They do not assemble legal arguments, verify citations, manage filing schedules or decide which procedural avenue offers the government its strongest chance of success. That work belongs to the administration around them, to the lawyers, advisers and senior officials whose job is to transform presidential declarations into the actions of the United States government.

Those people knew what Trump had promised.

They knew the deadline was approaching.

They knew whether a rehearing petition was being prepared.

They knew, almost certainly, that the petition had little chance of succeeding. Supreme Court rehearings are extraordinarily rare, and reconsideration would have required at least one justice from the six-member majority to reverse course.

That may have been a perfectly reasonable basis for declining to file.

It does not explain the silence.

An administration acting in good faith could have told the public that it disagreed with the ruling but concluded that rehearing would be futile. It could have announced that it would pursue legislation instead. It could have explained that its lawyers had reviewed the available options and chosen another path.

It did none of those things.

Trump announced another fight while the cameras were on. His administration abandoned the fight after they moved elsewhere.

That leaves two possibilities, and neither is comforting.

The first is that the adults inside the administration understood that Trump’s promise was irresponsible and quietly prevented him from following through. They allowed the president to rage before the public, waited for his attention to shift and then let the deadline expire because filing a hopeless petition would waste government resources and invite another defeat.

Under that interpretation, the administration contains a backstage system of informal restraint. Trump makes declarations. The professionals absorb them. Then, once the spectacle passes, they determine what the government will actually do.

Some people may find that reassuring.

They should not.

It would mean that the president’s public commitments cannot reliably be understood as statements of government policy. They are performances awaiting review by unelected officials who may or may not decide to carry them out. The president announces one reality before the cameras while the machinery of government quietly operates according to another.

The second possibility is darker.

Perhaps nobody inside the administration regarded the abandoned promise as a problem because the performance had already achieved its purpose.

Perhaps birthright citizenship was politically useful not because the administration expected to eliminate it, but because the fight itself generated anger, loyalty and attention. It identified an enemy. It transformed a complicated constitutional argument into a story of national betrayal. It allowed Trump to present himself once again as the only man willing to defend the country against immigrants, judges, bureaucrats and weak politicians.

Winning would have been useful.

Losing may have been useful too.

A victory produces a policy. A defeat produces a grievance.

And grievances are the renewable fuel of Trumpism.

When a court rejects him, the story need not remain about the weakness of his legal argument. It becomes a story about judges who betrayed the nation. When Congress refuses him, the legislators become cowards or traitors. When officials cannot execute what he promised, the bureaucracy becomes the deep state. When evidence contradicts his account, the evidence becomes fraudulent.

Every institutional obstacle becomes proof that the conspiracy is larger than anyone imagined.

The policy can disappear because the grievance remains.

This is why the birthright citizenship deadline deserves attention. It reveals the distinction between an administration committed to resolving problems and one committed to activating them.

A resolved issue eventually leaves the stage.

An unresolved grievance can be summoned again whenever the political atmosphere requires another storm.

That is the function of the haboob administration.

It governs through disruption, not continuity. It converts every subject into an emergency and every emergency into a test of personal loyalty. It overwhelms the country’s attention, reduces visibility and forces every institution to respond to the conditions it has created.

While the public is taking cover, the administration decides which promises were real, which were temporary and which were never meant to survive the news cycle.

Then, before anyone can fully assess the damage, another wall of dust appears.

This does not mean nothing happens beneath the spectacle. Quite the opposite. The administration has exercised enormous power, altered federal policy, removed officials, redirected resources and tested the boundaries of executive authority. A haboob is not imaginary. It can produce real damage.

But the storm also conceals.

It obscures the difference between declaration and execution. It makes it difficult to determine which policies are being pursued, which have quietly died and which were announced primarily to dominate the public conversation. It encourages citizens to measure government by the intensity of the president’s performance rather than by the durability of the administration’s work.

That confusion is not merely a byproduct.

It may be the point.

Trump understands instinctively that the opening announcement receives more attention than the later abandonment. The executive order commands headlines. The expired deadline becomes a brief. The promise reaches millions. The failure to honour it arrives quietly, after the audience has been directed toward something else.

His administration understands this too.

That is why responsibility cannot stop with Trump.

The people around him are not helpless debris caught inside the storm. They are the lawyers who choose whether to file, the advisers who decide whether to proceed, the communications officials who determine what the public will be told and the political strategists who understand exactly how quickly one controversy can be replaced by another.

They are not cleaning up after the haboob.

They are part of it.

The central question is therefore not whether Donald Trump sometimes exaggerates, changes direction or makes promises he fails to keep. We have had more than a decade to observe that pattern.

The more important question is what kind of administration has formed around it.

Is this a government whose professionals quietly contain the president after the cameras leave?

Is it a government in which presidential declarations are treated as disposable political theatre?

Or is it a government that has learned to use chaos itself as an instrument, creating storms powerful enough to command the country’s attention while preserving almost no obligation to explain what remains when they pass?

Birthright citizenship was supposed to be one of the great battles for America’s future.

Trump said so.

His administration said so.

They carried the issue to the Supreme Court, lost, promised to continue and then allowed the deadline to expire without a word.

Perhaps their lawyers made the responsible decision.

Perhaps the case was hopeless.

Perhaps another strategy will eventually emerge.

But none of that answers the question their silence created.

If this issue was important enough to dominate campaigns, justify an executive order and consume months of national attention, why was it not important enough to finish the paperwork?

And if it did not matter once the cameras were gone, how much did it really matter while they were rolling?

Every Arizonan understands that the wall of dust is not the end of the storm.

The true measure comes afterward, when visibility returns and we discover what has been damaged, what has disappeared and who has been left to clean it up.

The Trump administration keeps asking America to stare at the horizon.

We should begin looking behind the storm.

Steven J. Boardman

Caste should die at the border.

It should become useless the moment a person leaves the social order that gave it power. There are no American laws declaring one Indian family superior to another. No Canadian official assigns occupations according to ancestry. No corporation may reserve its executive offices for Brahmins and its service work for Dalits. No child born in California or Ontario is legally condemned to the social position of an ancestor buried thousands of miles away.

The machinery is gone.

The belief is not.

That is the part North America has been slow to understand. Caste does not require an Indian village to survive here. It does not need a segregated well, a separate entrance or a government registry. It needs a surname. A hometown. A language. A family history. A marriage inquiry. A supervisor who understands what the rest of the office cannot see.

It needs enough people who still know where everyone is supposed to stand.

We have tended to describe caste as an old Hindu system, and historically that is where much of its religious and social architecture was built. Hindu texts, customs and institutions supplied categories through which inherited hierarchy was explained, reproduced and sometimes sanctified.

But that description is no longer sufficient.

Caste became larger than the theology that helped organize it.

It penetrated Muslim, Christian and Sikh communities across South Asia. It adapted to different doctrines, survived conversion and continued through marriage, landholding, occupation, family reputation and social exclusion. It learned to function even where the religion itself denied that it should exist.

Sikhism makes that contradiction impossible to ignore.

The Sikh faith emerged in explicit opposition to inherited human hierarchy. Guru Nanak rejected the proposition that birth determined spiritual worth. The Sikh institution of langar, the communal kitchen, placed people beside one another on the same floor and fed them from the same kitchen. Equality was not left as an abstract promise. It was made physical.

Sit together.

Eat together.

No one above. No one beneath.

And yet caste followed Sikhs.

Jat, Ramgarhia, Mazhabi, Ravidassia and other caste identities retained social meaning in Punjab and across the diaspora. They continued to influence marriage, family networks, status and community organization. In some places, caste distinctions have even contributed to the formation of separate gurdwaras, despite a faith that rejects the hierarchy those divisions preserve.

Research into Sikh communities in the Pacific Northwest has found caste operating across the American-Canadian border through family, religious and social networks. The contradiction is particularly visible among dominant Jat Sikh communities and Dalit Sikh communities, where an egalitarian faith can coexist with inherited social distinctions its own teachings refuse to recognize. (EliScholar⁠)

That does not make Sikhism responsible for caste.

It makes caste more difficult to excuse.

A hierarchy capable of surviving a religion founded partly in opposition to it cannot be dismissed as a matter of scripture alone. It has become social memory. It lives in family expectation, marriage selection, property, status and the quiet confidence that some names carry more weight than others.

The Sikh Coalition has not attempted to hide from that fact. It supported California legislation explicitly prohibiting caste discrimination and grounded that support in Sikhism’s rejection of caste hierarchy. In 2026, it continued advocating for similar protections in New York with support from numerous gurdwaras. (Sikh Coalition⁠)

That matters.

It demonstrates that acknowledging caste discrimination is not an attack upon a religion. It can be an expression of that religion’s highest principles.

The same fairness must be extended to Hindu Americans.

The Hindu American Foundation does not support caste discrimination. It has repeatedly condemned birth-based hierarchy and collected statements from Hindu religious leaders rejecting the idea that human worth can be inherited. Its objection to caste-specific legislation is not that caste discrimination should be tolerated. HAF argues that such policies can encourage governments, universities and employers to associate caste automatically with Hindus and Indians, transforming an entire minority community into a presumptively suspect class. (Hindu American Foundation⁠)

That concern is legitimate.

A Hindu employee should not be interrogated about caste merely because of his religion. An Indian surname is not evidence of prejudice. A South Asian student should not be required to answer for a hierarchy she may reject, barely understand or never have practiced. No person should arrive in an American institution already burdened by an assumption of ancestral guilt.

HAF is right about that.

But its argument cannot become a reason for institutions to remain deliberately ignorant when caste discrimination is alleged.

Those are not competing principles.

Do not profile Hindus.

Do not erase Dalits.

Do not reduce Sikhism to the conduct of Sikhs who violate its egalitarian teachings.

Do not use Sikhism’s egalitarian teachings to deny the experience of Sikhs harmed by caste.

A serious civil-rights system should be able to hold all four ideas at once.

The stakes become clearer when caste moves out of private marriage negotiations and into institutions controlling money, labor and immigration status.

In 2020, California’s civil-rights department sued Cisco Systems over the alleged treatment of a Dalit engineer at the company’s San Jose offices. According to the state, two Indian supervisors knew the engineer’s caste through shared educational and professional connections and treated him unfavorably because of it. The engineer alleged that he was denied opportunities and retaliated against after complaining.

Cisco disputed the allegations. Claims against the individual supervisors were later dismissed. The remaining case against the company became legally complicated, as important civil cases often do.

But the litigation revealed something larger than the fate of one employee.

A caste dispute had travelled from India into one of the most sophisticated workplaces in the United States, yet it remained nearly invisible to anyone who did not understand the cultural information moving underneath the formal organizational chart.

The engineer was not required to wear his caste on an identification badge. His supervisors allegedly knew it through the social network connecting them to India. That was enough.

A California appellate court later considered whether the engineer could remain anonymous. He argued that revealing his identity and caste could expose members of his family in India to harm. The court held that possible danger to relatives abroad was legally relevant when deciding whether anonymity was justified. (Civil Rights Department⁠)

Think about what that means.

A man working for an American technology company feared that publicly identifying the inherited social position allegedly used against him in California could endanger his family thousands of miles away.

That is not a prejudice that failed to travel.

It is a prejudice operating across borders.

Caste becomes especially difficult to prove inside a modern workplace because it does not need to announce itself. A supervisor need not call someone an untouchable. He can deny him influential assignments. He can withhold mentorship, question his judgment, promote members of a familiar network and describe every decision as ordinary professional discretion.

Each act can look neutral.

The pattern may become visible only to those who understand why one surname opens a door and another quietly closes it.

Then there is New Jersey.

The BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham complex in Robbinsville is one of the most elaborate Hindu religious structures ever built outside India. Hundreds of Indian artisans and laborers helped construct it.

A federal civil complaint filed by workers alleges that BAPS-related entities intentionally recruited Dalits and members of other marginalized communities because their limited economic opportunities made them especially vulnerable. Workers alleged that they were brought to the United States on religious-worker visas, made to perform construction labor for extremely low wages, deprived of their passports, closely monitored and threatened with punishment or removal if they complained or attempted to leave.

The complaint alleges that the men were instructed to present themselves as religious volunteers performing seva, rather than as laborers expecting wages. It states that several named plaintiffs were members of Scheduled Castes and alleges that caste vulnerability formed part of the recruitment strategy. (ClassAction.org⁠)

BAPS denies the forced-labor allegations. It says the workers were volunteers engaged in religious service who received housing, food, transportation, medical assistance and other support. A federal criminal investigation ended without charges. The civil litigation remains contested.

Those qualifications are essential.

An allegation is not a verdict. A religious institution is entitled to defend itself. A closed criminal investigation must not be rewritten as a finding of guilt.

But the allegations cannot be dismissed as cultural misunderstanding.

They raise a direct and profoundly uncomfortable question: can inherited social vulnerability be used to turn labor into devotion and obedience into consent?

Religious service is real. People freely give enormous amounts of time, labor and money to institutions they believe in. Seva is not inherently exploitation. It is a meaningful spiritual practice for millions.

But service ceases to be freely given when the person serving cannot safely refuse.

Consent without freedom is not devotion.

It is submission with sacred language wrapped around it.

That is not a Hindu problem alone. Religious institutions across traditions have used obedience, sacrifice, vocation and divine purpose to obscure unequal power. Christian churches have done it. Islamic institutions have done it. Buddhist institutions have done it. Secular political movements have done it.

No faith owns exploitation.

No faith is immune from it.

The caste dimension matters because caste was designed to make inequality appear inherited, familiar and deserved. It places some people closer to authority and others closer to labor. It can train both sides of the relationship to understand subordination not as an injustice imposed upon a person, but as the place from which that person naturally begins.

That is what makes caste uniquely corrosive.

It does not merely distribute wealth or opportunity unequally. Every society does that.

It distributes human value.

It says that birth may determine whose work is clean, whose body is polluting, whose family is respectable, whose marriage is acceptable and whose suffering is ordinary enough to ignore.

America should have no difficulty condemning that.

Instead, it has become trapped in an argument over whether naming caste creates discrimination of its own.

Seattle became the first American city to add caste explicitly to its anti-discrimination laws in 2023. The ordinance applies across employment, housing and public accommodations. Supporters argued that victims required a category institutions could recognize. Opponents, including HAF, warned that the policy could single out South Asians and Hindus for suspicion. (City Clerk Seattle⁠)

California later passed legislation that would have defined caste as a form of ancestry under state civil-rights law. Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it, arguing that discrimination based on caste was already prohibited through existing protections for ancestry, religion and national origin. (Governor of California⁠)

That may be legally correct.

It may also be practically inadequate.

A right hidden inside a category no one knows how to interpret can become difficult to use. An employer may prohibit ancestry discrimination while having no idea that questions about surname, village, food, marriage or family occupation can carry caste meaning. A university may insist its existing policies are sufficient while administrators remain unable to recognize the conduct being reported.

The law does not necessarily need to place South Asians under special surveillance.

It does need to understand the discrimination it already claims to prohibit.

That is the line that must be held.

No caste questionnaires.

No presumption that Hindu or Sikh employees participate in caste hierarchy.

No institutional training that turns an extraordinarily diverse group of people into caricatures of ancestral prejudice.

But also no blank stare when a Dalit worker explains why a surname disclosed by a supervisor altered the course of his employment.

No dismissal when a Sikh says that a religion founded upon equality has not prevented caste exclusion within her own community.

No cultural exemption when a family treats marriage across caste as contamination.

No invocation of religious freedom when workers allege that poverty, immigration dependency and inherited status were used to extract labor they could not meaningfully refuse.

North America has always indulged a comforting myth about immigration.

People leave oppression behind. They arrive in a freer society. The old restraints fall away, and the immigrant becomes liberated from the assumptions of the world he left.

Sometimes that happens.

Distance can free people. Children reject prejudices their parents considered unquestionable. Public education, mixed workplaces and intermarriage break boundaries that once seemed permanent. New societies allow people to become something their old communities would not permit.

But borders do not perform moral surgery.

People migrate with their intelligence, ambition, faith, language, food, humor and memory. They can also carry sectarian hatred, misogyny, colorism, class contempt and caste.

A visa changes jurisdiction.

It does not automatically change conscience.

That is why Sikhism belongs in this story.

Not because Sikhism teaches caste. It does not.

Not because Sikhs as a people should be associated with inherited hierarchy. They should not.

Sikhism belongs because its failure to eradicate caste completely reveals how durable caste became. The hierarchy survived a religion that expressly rejected it. It survived the communal meal that denied it. It survived migration into countries whose laws refuse to recognize hereditary rank.

It survived because doctrine alone cannot destroy a social order people continue to reproduce in their homes, marriages, workplaces and institutions.

Hindu reformers have condemned it.

Sikh teachings rejected it.

Dalit activists have exposed it.

Governments have outlawed it.

Oceans have separated families from the villages that once enforced it.

Still it survives.

That is not evidence that any religion or immigrant population is uniquely corrupt.

It is evidence that inherited supremacy is extraordinarily difficult to kill.

Caste should die at the border.

Where it does not, the answer is not to place Hinduism on trial. It is not to accuse Sikhs of betraying their faith. It is not to turn every Indian immigrant into a suspect or every South Asian institution into an object of investigation.

The answer is to become literate enough to recognize the hierarchy without reproducing it.

Protect Hindus from collective suspicion.

Protect Sikhs from being defined by conduct their faith condemns.

Protect Dalits from being told that their discrimination is too culturally complicated to name.

Then place the entire idea where it belongs.

No person is polluted by birth.

No surname carries a natural right to authority.

No family inherits superior human worth.

No tradition is entitled to survive at the expense of another person’s dignity.

And no democracy worthy of the name should be so frightened of causing offense that it loses the courage to identify supremacy when it sees it.

Steven J. Boardman

In football, a red card is supposed to end the argument.

The player leaves the field. The suspension follows. The punishment does not depend upon who knows the president of the governing body, whether the offending player represents the host nation or whether someone powerful enough can reach the right person by telephone. The card matters because the game cannot survive if its rules become negotiable after the whistle.

On July 1, 2026, United States forward Folarin Balogun was sent off during the World Cup. The red card carried an automatic one-match suspension. Four days later, FIFA suspended that punishment for one year, allowing Balogun to play in the next round. The decision was extraordinary enough on its own. Then Donald Trump confirmed that he had personally telephoned FIFA President Gianni Infantino and asked him to review the case.

“I’m the one that got them to do it,” Trump said. “It was not Biden.”

The red card remained in the official record. The punishment disappeared when it mattered. FIFA said its disciplinary rules allowed the result. Trump claimed the intervention as a victory. The governing body of world football had received a call from the president of the United States and produced the outcome he wanted within days. (AP News⁠)

Three weeks later, FIFA proposed selling a piece of the commercial machinery surrounding the World Cup.

FIFA is not a privately owned league. It is an international nonprofit association established under Swiss law and composed of 211 national federations. It has no shareholders and pays no dividends. Its reserves and revenues are restricted to its statutory responsibilities, principally the operation and development of football. The World Cup is not merely a tournament it happens to own. It is the economic foundation upon which the institution rests. (FIFA Publications⁠)

On July 28, FIFA announced a plan to create FIFA Forward Enterprise, a new company consolidating its commercial rights and tournament operations. Broadcasting, sponsorship, licensing and ticketing would be placed inside the enterprise alongside the delivery of FIFA competitions, including the men’s and women’s World Cups and the Club World Cup. FIFA values the company at $20 billion and intends to raise as much as $4.2 billion by selling minority interests to private investors. JPMorgan is advising on the process. FIFA says it would retain sole control over sporting regulations, competition formats, calendars and governance, and that any private stakes would be non-controlling. (Inside FIFA⁠)

The proposal still requires approval from FIFA’s members and its council. Those members are not being asked to consider the plan empty-handed. Each of the 211 federations would be offered the opportunity to access as much as $20 million in immediate development funding through a new Fast Forward Programme, followed by substantially larger payments in future cycles. Participation would be voluntary, FIFA says, and the money would be devoted to stadiums, training centres and other long-term projects that poorer federations could not otherwise afford. (Inside FIFA⁠)

There is a legitimate argument for that money. Football federations in smaller and poorer countries operate without the facilities, coaching systems and development budgets taken for granted in Europe and North America. Twenty million dollars can build pitches, academies and national training infrastructure. It can create opportunities for children who have never played on a safe field. FIFA will say that private capital is being used to expand the game rather than control it, and that every net benefit will remain inside football.

It is also asking the people who must approve the transaction to vote while millions of dollars are waiting on the other side of approval.

That does not make every supporting federation corrupt. It does make the arrangement an almost perfect expression of how modern power works. The incentive is visible, the official purpose is defensible and no one needs to say aloud what everyone can already see.

The prospective investor group is expected to be led by Thrive Eternal, an investment vehicle associated with Joshua Kushner. Joshua is Jared Kushner’s younger brother. Jared is married to Ivanka Trump. That places the brother of the president’s son-in-law at the centre of negotiations to buy into a company constructed around the commercial heart of a tournament whose governing body has spent the previous eighteen months cultivating an extraordinary relationship with the president. (AP News⁠)

That fact, standing alone, proves almost nothing.

Joshua Kushner is not Jared Kushner. He has built a substantial investment business with a record that predates Trump’s second presidency and does not depend upon his brother’s work in government. There is no public evidence that Donald Trump selected Thrive, encouraged FIFA to select it, discussed the investment with Joshua Kushner or influenced the negotiations in any way. A family connection is not evidence of a conspiracy, and guilt by surname is not an argument.

The problem is not that Joshua Kushner has been shown to have done something wrong.

The problem is that FIFA appears no longer to recognize why such an arrangement requires distance, disclosure and extraordinary scrutiny before it is allowed to proceed.

That failure did not begin with the proposed company. It began with the relationship that made the proposal possible without anyone inside FIFA apparently understanding how it would look.

In March 2025, Trump established a White House Task Force on the 2026 World Cup and made himself its chair. There was nothing inherently improper about that. A tournament spread across the United States, Canada and Mexico requires federal coordination on security, transportation, visas and emergency planning. Infantino appeared beside Trump as the order was signed, and the machinery of the federal government was placed behind FIFA’s American tournament. (The White House⁠)

Four months later, FIFA opened a representative office in Trump Tower in New York. Infantino announced it alongside Eric Trump, thanked the Trump family and praised the support FIFA had received from the president and his administration. FIFA could have opened an office anywhere in the city. It chose a building carrying the president’s name and producing revenue for his family business. (Inside FIFA⁠)

In December, FIFA created a peace prize. It had never awarded one before. Infantino presented the inaugural prize to Trump during the World Cup draw, telling him that he deserved it and could rely upon the support of the football community. Trump, who had complained repeatedly about never receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, called it one of the great honors of his life. (Inside FIFA⁠)

Trump’s financial disclosure later showed that Infantino had given him ten FIFA tickets valued at $15,000, part of more than $120,000 in sports tickets the president reported receiving during 2025. The gifts were disclosed. There was no secret envelope, no hidden transfer and no apparent violation in accepting them. They were simply another strand in a relationship increasingly difficult to distinguish from mutual patronage. (Front Office Sports⁠)

In February 2026, FIFA entered a formal partnership with Trump’s Board of Peace, an organization created by the president and initially directed toward reconstruction in Gaza. FIFA committed itself to helping attract international investment for stadiums, academies and football infrastructure under the board’s banner. Infantino signed the agreement at the building now bearing Trump’s name as the United States Institute of Peace headquarters. (FIFA Quality⁠)

Then came the red card and the telephone call.

And then came reports that Trump wanted Infantino to become the next secretary-general of the United Nations. The account has not been independently confirmed, and neither Trump nor Infantino has publicly announced such a campaign. But the report fit a relationship that had ceased to resemble the necessary cooperation between a host government and a sporting federation. It had become an exchange of platforms, honors, access and favors in which each man repeatedly elevated the other. (New York Post⁠)

None of these acts, isolated from the rest, proves corruption.

A World Cup task force is reasonable. An office in Manhattan is ordinary. Tickets can be disclosed. Peace prizes are ceremonial. Development partnerships can serve real communities. A president is permitted to telephone anyone he wants. A private investment firm is entitled to pursue a potentially profitable asset.

That is precisely why the whole record matters.

Modern influence rarely arrives as one unmistakable transaction. It accumulates through relationships that are separately explainable and collectively impossible to ignore. Access creates gratitude. Gratitude creates accommodation. Accommodation becomes habit. By the time a financial opportunity appears, everyone involved has already learned that the usual boundaries are flexible.

The older Kushner brother demonstrated how valuable that flexibility can become.

Jared Kushner incorporated the firm now known as Affinity Partners on January 21, 2021, the day after the first Trump administration ended. He had served as a senior White House adviser with an expansive Middle East portfolio but had no significant record managing a private-equity fund. Six months later, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund committed $2 billion to his new firm.

The officials responsible for examining the proposal objected. They cited the inexperience of Affinity’s management, described aspects of its operation as unsatisfactory and questioned the fees and reputational risks associated with investing in a firm created by a man who had so recently shaped American policy toward Saudi Arabia. The objections were overruled by the fund’s board, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, with whom Kushner had developed a close relationship while serving in government.

The investment was expected to generate approximately $25 million a year in management fees for Affinity before the firm produced any profit at all. Affinity’s own presentation to prospective investors emphasized Kushner’s government experience and the network he had built while working in the White House. Congressional investigators asked whether a relationship developed through public service had been converted into a private financial windfall. The money remained in place. The fees continued. (Oversight Democrats⁠)

That is not proof that Jared Kushner traded a specific government action for a Saudi investment. No document has emerged in which one side promised policy and the other promised payment. The method does not require one.

Proximity was the product. Foreign state capital was the reward. The transaction occurred after Kushner left office and was structured as an ordinary investment carrying ordinary fees. Each component could be defended separately. The Saudi fund was entitled to invest. Kushner was entitled to open a business. Management fees are common. Personal relationships survive changes of government.

Nothing needed to be called a bribe because the arrangement was more durable than bribery. A bribe purchases one act. Patronage purchases a continuing relationship.

The same collapse of public and private interest has since appeared in forms so different that treating them as one scheme would be dishonest, but so similar in moral structure that treating them as coincidences would be absurd.

In May 2025, the administration accepted a Boeing 747-8 from Qatar, an aircraft valued at approximately $400 million. The plane was transferred through the Defense Department, modified at public expense and placed into presidential service on July 1, 2026. The arrangement contemplated its eventual transfer to Trump’s presidential library foundation after his time in office. The administration argued that Qatar had given the aircraft to the United States government rather than personally to Trump, and the Justice Department approved the structure. Constitutional scholars argued that accepting such an enormous benefit from a foreign state without congressional consent implicated the foreign emoluments clause. Attorney General Pam Bondi, whose department approved the arrangement, had previously performed lobbying work involving Qatar. (AP News⁠)

There it was again. The foreign government offered something of extraordinary value. The benefit was routed through an official institution. Lawyers separated temporary government use from eventual library ownership. Each stage acquired a technical explanation, and the substance of the arrangement was lost inside the sequence.

Qatar supplied the aircraft.

American taxpayers paid to convert it.

Trump began flying on it.

Nobody stopped it.

The cryptocurrency arrangement was less visible than a 747, but its structure was even more revealing.

Trump is identified as the Chief Crypto Advocate of World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company financially tied to his family and to the family of Steve Witkoff, his Middle East envoy. A Trump-affiliated entity obtained control of 60 percent of the company and a claim upon 75 percent of net revenue from its token sales, according to company documents and congressional inquiries. World Liberty also created a dollar-pegged stablecoin called USD1. (Reuters⁠)

A stablecoin issuer receives conventional assets in exchange for digital coins intended to remain worth one dollar. The issuer holds reserves, often in cash or Treasury securities, and can earn income from those reserves while the coins remain in circulation. The more widely the coin is used, the larger the potential reserve base and the more valuable the business becomes.

In May 2025, MGX, a state-backed Abu Dhabi investment firm, used $2 billion in USD1 to settle an investment in Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange that had pleaded guilty in the United States to anti-money-laundering and sanctions violations. The transaction placed a newly created Trump-linked stablecoin at the centre of a multibillion-dollar deal involving foreign state-backed capital. It increased the coin’s circulation and legitimacy almost overnight. The announcement was made by Zach Witkoff, a co-founder of World Liberty and the son of the president’s Middle East envoy. (Senate Committee on Banking⁠)

Again, the mechanism matters.

The $2 billion did not simply arrive in Trump’s personal bank account. The financial benefit was more sophisticated. It came through reserve income, adoption, market position, token revenue and the valuation of a company in which the president’s family held a controlling financial interest. The foreign-backed transaction helped turn an untested coin into a significant instrument while the company’s most famous beneficiary occupied the White House and his business partner’s father conducted American diplomacy in the Middle East.

Congress responded by passing the GENIUS Act, the first federal regulatory framework for stablecoins. Trump signed it in July 2025. Supporters argued that the law would strengthen the dollar, establish reserve requirements and bring a fast-growing industry under federal supervision. Critics warned that it did not adequately address the unprecedented conflict created when the president regulating the industry was also financially connected to one of its products. The law passed. The business continued. (Reuters⁠)

These transactions are not identical.

The Saudi money went into Jared Kushner’s company after he left government. The Qatari aircraft went first to the Defense Department. The Emirati-backed transaction used a financial instrument issued by a company connected to Trump’s family. The proposed FIFA investment involves Joshua Kushner’s legitimate private firm, and no public evidence currently establishes that the president played any role in arranging it.

The connection is not a single secret agreement.

It is the disappearance of institutional distance.

Again and again, public authority, foreign or politically connected capital, presidential relatives and private financial interests are allowed to occupy the same space. Again and again, the officials responsible for maintaining a boundary explain why this particular arrangement does not technically cross it. Again and again, the public is told to examine each transaction in isolation and ignore the governing culture they collectively reveal.

The Saudi panel objected, but the crown prince’s board approved the investment.

Constitutional experts objected to the aircraft, but the Justice Department approved the transfer.

Senators objected to the stablecoin conflict, but Congress established a regulatory system that allowed it to continue.

A president intervened in a World Cup disciplinary case, but FIFA found a provision permitting the punishment to be suspended.

Now FIFA proposes creating a private company around the commercial foundation of the World Cup, while a firm led by the president’s extended family sits at the head of the prospective investor group and FIFA’s own president reportedly considers a future role leading the enterprise.

At every stage, the institution that might have said no instead explains how yes can be made procedurally defensible.

The strongest argument for FIFA’s proposal is not frivolous. It may produce billions of dollars for football development. The investors may remain genuinely non-controlling. FIFA may preserve complete authority over sporting decisions. Joshua Kushner may have entered the process because Thrive is well financed, experienced and capable of seeing a legitimate opportunity in one of the world’s most valuable cultural assets. Infantino may never lead the company, and no investor may ever influence a match, a tournament or a rule.

The wider defense is equally familiar. Jared Kushner was a private citizen when Affinity received its Saudi investment. The Qatari jet belonged to the government. World Liberty operated under the laws Congress enacted. Trump’s telephone call to Infantino was advocacy rather than coercion. No court has found a criminal conspiracy connecting these events.

All of that may be true.

It is also an astonishingly impoverished standard for public life.

The absence of a criminal conviction does not establish the presence of integrity. A conflict does not disappear because attorneys have divided it into separate transactions. Influence does not become imaginary because no one recorded the agreement. The founders understood that foreign dependence and private patronage could corrupt judgment without ever producing the tidy exchange required for a bribery prosecution. That is why the Constitution speaks in terms of presents, benefits and emoluments rather than waiting for a signed confession.

They knew something we have chosen to forget.

Power is rarely purchased at the moment it is needed. It is cultivated in advance.

The favor creates access. The access creates obligation. The obligation remains unspoken because speaking it would make the arrangement crude. Everyone understands the relationship. Everyone benefits from not defining it. When a decision eventually arrives, it can be presented as independent, reasonable and entirely consistent with the rules.

That is the danger surrounding FIFA Forward Enterprise.

There is no evidence that Trump ordered FIFA to include Joshua Kushner. There is no evidence that Joshua Kushner has promised Trump anything, that Infantino has promised either Kushner anything or that a secret ownership interest has been concealed.

The documented facts are damning enough.

FIFA placed an office in Trump Tower. Infantino gave Trump valuable tickets. He created a peace prize and awarded it to him. FIFA partnered with an organization Trump chairs. Trump telephoned Infantino about a disciplinary ruling, and FIFA suspended the punishment. Trump was then reported to be promoting Infantino for the leadership of the United Nations.

After all of that, FIFA proposed placing the commercial centre of its tournaments inside a $20 billion company, with the brother of Trump’s son-in-law expected to lead the prospective investment group.

A responsible institution would not respond to that record by insisting that every individual act was permissible. It would understand why the investor-selection process must be opened, why every relevant communication must be disclosed, why Infantino’s future financial role must be resolved before a vote and why no one connected to the president’s family should be allowed near the transaction without safeguards strong enough to survive public examination.

Instead, FIFA offered assurances and presented its members with the possibility of $20 million each.

UEFA responded with the clearest sentence anyone has yet produced about the proposal: “The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade.”

“None of us are the owners of football,” it said. “It is not FIFA’s to sell.” (AP News⁠)

But this was never merely about whether FIFA could sell a piece of the World Cup.

It is about what happens when every institution learns that the safest response to power is accommodation.

The most important fact in this entire record is not the amount of money. It is not $2 billion from Saudi Arabia, $400 million from Qatar, $2 billion passing through a stablecoin or $4.2 billion sought for FIFA’s new enterprise.

It is the absence of cost.

Investigations are opened and disappear. Ethics objections are reduced to partisan complaints. Constitutional prohibitions become unsettled legal questions. Foreign money becomes investment. Gifts become government property. Conflicts become innovation. Intervention becomes advocacy. A governing body changes the practical effect of a punishment after a presidential phone call and calls the integrity of the process intact.

This is not an accountability system that failed after making an honest attempt.

Failure would imply that the machinery still recognizes what it was designed to stop.

The machinery has been repurposed. It now provides the language through which conduct once understood as disqualifying can be translated into something unprecedented but permissible. Lawyers construct the route. Legislators leave the opening. regulators narrow their authority. governing bodies hide behind procedure. The transaction moves forward, and the absence of punishment is offered as proof that nothing improper occurred.

That is why the contempt this record produces is not decoration.

It is not anger placed on top of the facts.

It is what remains after the facts have been allowed to finish speaking.

Donald Trump did not invent patronage. He did not invent ruling families, foreign influence or the conversion of public access into private wealth. His achievement has been to remove the shame that once forced those systems into the shadows.

The money arrives openly.

The aircraft lands in daylight.

The coin is announced from a stage.

The family relationship appears in the financial reporting.

The president boasts about the telephone call.

Everyone can see what is happening, and everyone entrusted with stopping it explains why the latest arrangement is technically different from the one before.

Nothing is corrupt unless the participants write down the exchange.

Nothing is improper unless a captured institution agrees to punish it.

Nothing is disqualifying because disqualification requires somebody willing to raise the card.

And nobody gets carded.

UEFA said the World Cup was not FIFA’s to sell.

It was never only FIFA that was for sale.

The problem is not that Americans disagree.

The problem is that too many of our institutions no longer know what to do with disagreement except monetize it, punish it or turn it into spectacle.

The Aebly Institute for Civic Intelligence is being created as an alternative.

We are bringing together people from different disciplines, communities and political traditions who still believe evidence matters, history matters and intellectual honesty requires more than finding better arguments for conclusions we already hold.

AICI will not ask members to surrender their convictions. It will ask them to explain those convictions, defend them, test them and remain present when someone intelligent reaches a different conclusion.

We are looking for journalists, historians, educators, lawyers, researchers, policy professionals, organizers, veterans, civic leaders and independent thinkers whose work can deepen public understanding.

We want conservatives, progressives, liberals, moderates and independents. We also want people who no longer find those labels particularly useful.

This is not a search for artificial balance. False equivalence is not civic intelligence. Every claim does not deserve equal weight, and every argument does not survive contact with the evidence.

But no political faction possesses a monopoly on wisdom, courage or error.

AICI is intended to become a permanent intellectual community, not a temporary panel convened to produce a predetermined statement. Its members will help shape research, public conversations, civic education and the standards by which the institute does its work.

You do not need a national profile. You do not need institutional prestige. You need something worth contributing and the discipline to contribute it honestly.

Contact me directly if you are interested.

Send me the name of someone we should know.

Share this with the person whose voice is missing from the rooms where consequential decisions are made.

We have spent long enough shouting across separate tables.

Let us build one strong enough to hold the argument.

Aebly Institute for Civic Intelligence
Comfort in Your Convictions. Courage in the Conversation.

stevenboardman@aeblymedia.com

By Steven J. Boardman

The driver has done nothing remarkable. The trip may include a school, a pharmacy, a workplace and a friend’s home. There may be a medical appointment, a church service or a meeting whose participants would rather their attendance were not catalogued by the government. No investigation has begun, no warrant has been issued and no officer is following the car. There is not even a suspect.

The cameras record the journey anyway.

Automated licence-plate readers have become an ordinary part of the American landscape, mounted near intersections, entrances and public roads, quietly photographing passing vehicles and converting those images into searchable records. A single camera captures a plate, a location and a moment in time. A connected network can create something far more revealing: a history of where a vehicle has travelled, assembled before anyone had a reason to seek it.

That advance collection is precisely what makes the technology useful. It is also what makes it dangerous.

Police departments have used licence-plate readers to locate abducted children, recover stolen vehicles and identify cars connected to serious crimes. Those successes are real, and any honest examination of the technology must begin by acknowledging them. When a child is missing, police have a plate and a camera has recently seen the vehicle heading north, the information can narrow the search while time still matters. Officers can alert nearby departments, intercept the vehicle and recover the child.

That is not a theoretical public-safety benefit. It is the kind of case that makes a categorical prohibition difficult to defend.

The same system, however, also remembers the ordinary driver travelling to work, the parent taking a child to school, the patient arriving at a treatment centre and the worshipper entering a church. The database does not distinguish among them when the image is taken. It collects first and waits for a reason to emerge later, if one ever does.

That reversal lies at the heart of a growing national dispute over Flock Safety and other automated surveillance systems. Congress is now considering competing responses. One proposal would broadly prohibit federal agencies from purchasing, operating or accessing these systems. Another would focus less on whether the technology may exist and more on when the government should need a warrant to search what the technology remembers.

That distinction may be the more important one, because the public debate too often treats automated licence-plate readers as though they perform a single function. They do not.

A real-time alert involving a stolen vehicle or missing child is one exercise of government power. A search for a known vehicle connected to a specific crime is another. Using repeated records to reconstruct where a person has travelled, whom they may have visited and what their routines look like is something else entirely. So is searching large volumes of ordinary movement to identify behaviour an algorithm considers suspicious when officers did not begin with a particular person, vehicle or crime.

These actions may rely on the same equipment, but they do not carry the same urgency, scope or intrusion. The law should recognise those differences before the technology erases them.

The constitutional question is not whether a licence plate can be seen on a public road. Of course it can. The question is whether thousands of public observations, retained and searched across jurisdictions, become something fundamentally different when they allow the government to reconstruct a person’s life after the fact.

An officer standing at one intersection may see a vehicle pass. A network can remember where it went next, where it appeared the following morning and whether it stopped outside a courthouse, a private home, a house of worship or a medical facility. Each observation occurred in public, but together they can reveal what no individual observer could reasonably have known.

The company does not need to follow the driver. The database can remain still and wait.

That patient accumulation is the product. It is also the danger.

The answer does not have to be the elimination of every camera or unrestricted police access to every record. A more defensible boundary would preserve tightly controlled urgent alerts while requiring stronger justification, and often a warrant, when investigators seek to reconstruct someone’s movements over time.

Such a standard would not prevent police from locating an abducted child or recovering a stolen vehicle. It would require the government to establish a reason before retracing the life of someone accused of nothing.

The full Aebly investigation examines the cases in which the technology worked, the moments in which it failed, the private network operating behind local cameras, the constitutional questions Congress has not yet resolved and the boundary a free society must draw between observation and surveillance.

The question is no longer whether these cameras can help police. They can.

The question is whether those successes entitle the government to build a searchable record around everyone else.

Read the full Aebly Exclusive: Before There Was a Suspect.

https://aeblymedia.com/home

Steven J. Boardman

Donald Trump built a career on a single instruction: trust me, not them. The media lies. The FBI lies. The Justice Department lies. The intelligence services lie. The judges are bought, the bureaucrats are corrupt, the experts are frauds, and the only honest man in a nation of liars is Donald Trump. That was the bargain. He would break the locks the establishment kept sealed and drag the truth into daylight, and in exchange his supporters would believe him over every institution built to check him.

That bargain has met Jeffrey Epstein. And transparency, it turns out, was always negotiable.

For years Trump and the people around him demanded the Epstein files. They said officials were shielding powerful men. They accused earlier administrations of burying names, warned that elites were protecting one another, and told the country it had been lied to about one of the most consequential trafficking investigations in American history. On that narrow point they were right. The public does deserve the record. The victims deserve it more. The country has every right to know how a wealthy, well-connected predator abused girls for years while prosecutors, financiers, politicians, socialites, and lawyers drifted through his houses and looked away.

Then Trump won the executive branch, and the promised daylight became delay. Partial disclosure. Redaction. Bureaucratic throat-clearing and the oldest instruction in Washington: trust the process. The movement that taught America to read every official assurance as a confession now asks America to accept that the rest of the archive is being handled responsibly, behind closed doors, by the very people it might implicate. The men who screamed that secrecy protects the guilty made their peace with secrecy the moment the guilt might be their own.

That reversal is not a footnote. It is the entire story.

Trump insists he has nothing to hide about Jeffrey Epstein. Fine. Then nothing should stand between the public and every record that can lawfully be released without exposing a victim or wrecking a live investigation. Every interview memo. Every investigative report. Every internal cable. Every document naming the people whose conduct was examined, waved off, minimized, or never touched. Not the fraction chosen for public consumption. Not the pages least likely to trouble the powerful. The releasable record, whole.

No one is obligated to assume the worst material has already surfaced. That is not how selective release works, and it is not how trust is built. Millions of pages sit outside public view. No honest person can claim to know what they hold, and no honest person should swallow the convenient guess that whatever is hidden must be trivial. Governments do not earn the benefit of the doubt by handing over fragments while keeping the vault. They earn it by proving, with evidence, that every decision to withhold was narrow, lawful, consistent, and built to protect victims rather than presidents.

Trump has spent a career demanding of others what he will not tolerate for himself. He wanted Hillary Clinton's servers cracked open. He wanted Hunter Biden's laptop autopsied on cable television. He wanted FBI files declassified, intelligence findings second-guessed, prosecutors investigated, election workers hunted, universities punished, and civil servants stripped of any presumption of good faith. His principle was never restraint. It was exposure. He taught millions that a locked drawer is a signed confession.

Good. Apply the standard to him.

If the Epstein records clear him, release them. If they implicate him, release them. If they show nothing worse than a rich man's social calendar, release them. If they show something far worse, release them. If they burn Democrats, Republicans, billionaires, royals, financiers, celebrities, spies, or former presidents, release them. The identity of the man who might be embarrassed cannot decide the public's right to know. Justice is not a buffet where the government plates only the evidence that flatters whoever holds power this year.

This matters because Epstein was never a lone deviant. He lived inside a world of people whose money and access routinely bought them out of consequences the rest of the country cannot escape. His case laid bare the rot in the institutions that were supposed to stop him: a sweetheart plea deal impossible to square with the scale of the alleged conduct, years of unimpeded access to vulnerable girls, and a standing army of associates who have spent decades insisting that whatever they saw amounted to nothing. The files matter because Epstein's power never came from money alone. It came from proximity to importance, and from the quiet confidence that important people do not inform on one another.

Trump cannot excuse himself from this story by demanding to be excused. His relationship with Epstein is a matter of public record. His name already sits in previously released Epstein material. He ran in the same circles, praised the man on the record, and scrambled to disown him once the association turned radioactive. None of that, by itself, proves he touched Epstein's crimes. All of it makes the pose of the neutral custodian impossible to sustain. He is not a president calmly administering an inherited archive. He is a figure whose own history runs straight through the middle of it.

That is a conflict of interest with no clean resolution. The president controls an executive branch that holds records that may concern the president, his friends, his donors, and his allies. In any serious accountability regime, that fact would demand aggressive disclosure and independent review, with hard barriers against the interested party touching the process. Under Trump it produced the reverse. Fewer answers. And the familiar theater in which every unanswered question is recast as an ambush staged by his enemies.

This presidency runs on grievance the way an engine runs on fuel. An agency is legitimate when it targets his enemies and corrupt when it examines him. A record is sacred when it wounds a Democrat and reckless when it might wound him. A leak is heroism in his service and a felony in his exposure. A prosecutor is a patriot when he indicts the opposition and a partisan hack when he looks at Trump. There is no consistent standard anywhere in it, because consistency would force Donald Trump to live under the rules he writes for everyone else.

The Epstein files expose what sits underneath all of it. Trump and his movement trained the public to believe that predators were being protected by a corrupt establishment. They stoked the fury over sealed names and secret deals. They turned the suffering of Epstein's victims into political ammunition and promised that once they held power, the cover-up would end. They hold the power now. The reckoning has stalled.

That is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is too soft a word. It is exploitation.

The victims were useful while their pain could be aimed at the other party. Their stories were useful while they kept the base enraged and sustained the legend of Trump as the lone man willing to torch elite corruption. But real transparency carries a cost. Real transparency does not let the president decide which names count. It might expose a friend, a donor, an ally, an institution, or the president himself. And so the movement that swore silence was proof of guilt has discovered, overnight, a tender new respect for privacy and procedure.

No one should grant it.

The case for release requires no invention. It requires no claim of certainty about crimes not yet proven. It rests on two facts a child could grasp. The government has not produced the complete releasable record. The president has a personal stake in how that record is read. Those two facts, alone, make passive trust impossible. No American should have to take the word of officials hand-picked by the man whose name and history are tangled up in the very documents they control.

His defenders will call this guilt by association. It is not. Guilt by association would mean branding him a criminal because he knew Epstein and shared a zip code with his crimes. That is not the charge. The charge is accountability by association. When a president holds power over records concerning an accused trafficker he once called a friend, he does not get to dismiss scrutiny as unfair. He carries the opposite obligation: to dissolve the suspicion through disclosure and independent review, in a process credible enough to stand without his personal say-so.

His say-so is worthless, and he earned that himself. He lies when a lie is convenient. He denies the documented, revises his own history, rewrites yesterday's statement, and treats every contradiction as a personal insult rather than a question owed an answer. A man who made deception the through-line of his public life cannot demand trust over records that may touch him. He forfeited the presumption. He did it on his own time, in public, for years.

The remedy is not complicated. Protect the victims and redact what identifies them. Preserve the integrity of anything genuinely still under investigation. Then release the rest. Put every disputed withholding in front of an independent judge. Publish a full accounting of what stays sealed, why, who ordered it sealed, and whether anyone named in the records had a hand in shaping the disclosure. Remove the president and his appointees from any decision that touches the president's own exposure.

Anything short of that is concealment wearing the costume of procedure.

This is not a demand that Donald Trump be convicted of anything. It is a demand that he be granted no more secrecy than any other citizen. He does not deserve a gentler standard because he is president. He deserves a harder one, because he is president, because he commands the institutions holding the files, and because he built his entire career accusing other people of the exact concealment now unfolding under his own hand.

Trump wanted a country trained to see hidden evidence as proof of corruption. He wanted Americans enraged by sealed records and contemptuous of official excuses, certain that elites always protect their own. He got that country. He does not get to complain now that its suspicion has finally reached his door.

Release the files.

Release the indexes and inventories. Release the memoranda, the interviews, the internal communications, and every piece of evidence that can come out without harming a single victim. Explain every redaction. Allow independent review. Stop demanding that Americans believe the important pages have already been turned over simply because the president and his people say so.

If Donald Trump has nothing to hide, disclosure protects him.

If he has something to hide, disclosure protects the country.

Either way, the files belong in the light.

The New Architecture | Steven J. Boardman

On July 21, Andy Biggs became the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona. He won with President Donald Trump’s endorsement and the support of Turning Point Action behind him. In November, he will face Katie Hobbs in a state where Republican primaries and statewide general elections have become two very different tests of political strength. (AP News⁠)

Between now and then, Arizonans are entitled to know what kind of public official he has been.

Not the caricature his opponents will draw, and not the profile his campaign is already selling. The record, in the form it takes in roll calls, court filings and the occasional piece of legislation that survives the distance between introduction and law. That version does not move after the campaign begins. It was written down at the moment the hand went up.

Start with the votes that ought to have been the easy ones.

On December 21, 2022, the House of Representatives passed the Respect for Child Survivors Act. The legislation followed the exposure of the FBI’s failures in the Larry Nassar investigation, during which agents received allegations from young gymnasts and then failed to respond properly while Nassar’s abuse continued. (Senate Judiciary Committee⁠)

The remedy was narrow and practical. It required the FBI, where practicable and consistent with federal law, to use multidisciplinary teams and trained child and adolescent forensic interviewers in investigations involving child sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking. It required those teams to follow a trauma-informed, victim-centred approach, coordinating investigators with victim advocates, medical professionals, mental-health clinicians and children’s advocacy centres. (Congress.gov⁠)

The purpose was not ideological. It was to ensure that when a child entered a federal investigation carrying an account of abuse, the investigative process did not become another source of injury.

The House vote was 385 to 28. Every one of the twenty-eight votes against the bill came from a Republican.

Andy Biggs was one of them. (Clerk of the U.S. House⁠)

Two years later, on December 18, 2024, the House passed the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act. The legislation was championed by Paris Hilton, who spent years returning to Capitol Hill to describe the abuse she said she endured inside residential facilities marketed to parents as treatment for troubled teenagers. (AP News⁠)

The law did not create a vast new federal enforcement bureaucracy. It established an interagency working group on youth residential programmes and directed the Department of Health and Human Services to commission recurring studies through the National Academies. Those studies were to document abuse, neglect and deaths, identify funding and regulatory gaps, examine the use of restraint and seclusion, improve the coordination of information and recommend stronger oversight for programmes receiving federal money. (Congress.gov⁠)

The Senate had passed it without objection. The House vote was 373 to 33. President Joe Biden signed it into law five days later.

Andy Biggs was one of the thirty-three. (Clerk of the U.S. House⁠)

Pause on that arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the argument.

To be one of twenty-eight in a chamber of 435, or one of thirty-three, is not merely to vote differently from the opposing party. It is to place yourself outside a consensus broad enough to include almost the entire Congress and most members of your own caucus.

There are legitimate reasons to vote against legislation with a benevolent title. Congress often attaches attractive names to complicated bills. A member may object to the cost, the constitutional authority, the administrative mechanism or provisions hidden behind the headline. Serious criticism requires reading the legislation rather than assuming that anyone opposing a child-protection bill must therefore oppose protecting children.

But that defence becomes less persuasive when the legislation is narrow, the federal role is already established, the measure has been negotiated across party lines and the member repeatedly finds himself inside the smallest available minority.

Biggs’s votes did not prevent either bill from becoming law. He lacked the numbers to stop them, and the outcomes were certain before he registered his opposition. That is the fairest fact that can be placed in his defence.

It is also what makes the votes revealing.

When supporting additional protections for abused children would have cost him almost nothing, Andy Biggs still chose no.

The two votes matter because they are not departures from his political identity. Biggs has spent more than two decades in public office, beginning in the Arizona House in 2003, moving to the state Senate and its presidency, then entering Congress in 2017 and later chairing the House Freedom Caucus. His national reputation was built not as a coalition-maker but as one of the Republican conference’s most persistent opponents of accommodation. Recent reporting on the gubernatorial race has described him as a hard-line conservative who championed Trump while repeatedly frustrating his own party’s leaders. (AP News⁠)

The legislative numbers sharpen that description. By September 2025, KJZZ had counted more than nine hundred bills and resolutions sponsored by Biggs since he entered Congress. Only one sponsored bill had been signed into law, and that measure renamed a Department of Veterans Affairs clinic in Gilbert. The percentage alone is not a perfect measure of a legislator’s value. Members can influence policy through amendments, oversight, committee work and co-sponsored legislation, while bills are often absorbed into larger packages without the original sponsor receiving a statutory monument. Still, after nearly a decade in Congress, one enacted sponsored bill is not merely an artefact of procedure. It is evidence of a political style that prizes declaration over construction. (KJZZ⁠)

Biggs introduces. He objects. He warns. He votes no.

What he has rarely done is assemble enough support to move his own ideas through both chambers and onto a president’s desk.

There is a genuine exception, and honesty requires giving it its full weight.

In 2016, while Biggs served as president of the Arizona Senate, lawmakers and public-safety stakeholders completed a significant reform of the Public Safety Personnel Retirement System. The package changed future pension benefits, shared more of the risk between employees and taxpayers, revised cost-of-living adjustments and altered the governance of a system facing serious long-term liabilities. Proposition 124, the constitutional component of the reform, was projected to save taxpayers approximately $1.5 billion over thirty years. (Reason Foundation⁠)

The public argument in favour carried names from both parties, including Andy Biggs, Debbie Lesko and Katie Hobbs. That matters. Biggs supported a negotiated reform, helped move it through the Legislature and lent the authority of his office to a difficult agreement. He deserves credit for doing so. (Arizona Secretary of State⁠)

It also demonstrates something essential to the case before Arizona. Biggs is capable of participating in constructive government when he chooses. The question is why that episode stands out so sharply against the record that followed it.

The pension reform emerged through the kind of governing machinery that ideological politics often treats with suspicion: extended stakeholder discussions, concessions among groups with competing interests and a final product no participant would have designed alone. Senator Debbie Lesko played a central role in that process, bringing together public-safety unions, municipalities and pension analysts. Biggs supported the result.

His clearest accomplishment came when his office was used to carry an agreement rather than destroy one.

Set that beside the 2013 fight over Medicaid expansion.

Jan Brewer was a Republican governor, one whose conservative credentials were not in serious doubt, but she concluded that Arizona should accept federal funding available under the Affordable Care Act and expand Medicaid eligibility. Biggs, then president of the state Senate, opposed her. The confrontation became so severe that Brewer called a surprise special session without consulting legislative leadership and worked with Democrats and a minority of Republicans to force the budget and expansion through over the objections of Biggs and the party leaders surrounding him. (AP News⁠)

Biggs did not negotiate himself towards a version he could accept. He did not trade his support for stricter limits, stronger safeguards or a concession somewhere else in the budget. Brewer went around him, and the policy became law without him.

That is a principled way to legislate, provided the principle itself matters more than the outcome. It is also a revealing way to lose.

Biggs would rather preserve the perfection of his objection than accept responsibility for an imperfect result. He would rather be recorded in opposition than implicated in compromise. In a legislative chamber, particularly from a safe district, that can become an identity. It can even become a successful one. A member can build a national following by proving that no leadership demand, spending agreement or bipartisan consensus is sufficient to soften him.

A governor does not possess that luxury.

Before reaching that question, however, the loyalty argument must be handled with greater care than his critics usually give it.

Biggs is often described as a Trump sycophant. The label is satisfying, but it is imprecise. A sycophant is someone unable to say no to power, and saying no is the faculty Biggs has cultivated more successfully than any other.

He opposed Kevin McCarthy’s elevation to the speakership, received votes for Speaker himself and later became one of eight Republicans who joined Democrats to remove McCarthy from office. Biggs has repeatedly defied Republican leadership when he believed it had compromised too much on spending, border policy or the internal rules of the House. (Clerk of the U.S. House⁠)

His loyalty is more selective than the word sycophancy allows.

Biggs objected to the Electoral College results from Arizona and five other states on January 6, 2021. He joined more than one hundred Republican members of Congress in an amicus brief supporting Texas’s attempt to challenge the presidential results in four states won by Joe Biden. He then voted against accepting electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania after the attack on the Capitol. (Congressman Andy Biggs⁠)

His rebellions are generally directed at Republican leaders beneath Trump, often because Biggs believes those leaders have failed to fight aggressively enough for the movement Trump commands. He will challenge a Speaker, wreck a leadership agreement or stand nearly alone against a bill his colleagues support. What he has shown far less willingness to do is confront Trump when confrontation still carries a political price.

That distinction brings the record to Jeffrey Epstein.

On July 23, 2025, the Federal Law Enforcement Subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee considered a motion directing the committee chairman to subpoena the Justice Department for records related to Epstein. Three Republicans joined five Democrats in supporting the motion.

Before the final vote, Biggs successfully added an amendment requiring the subpoena to include communications involving President Biden or officials in the Biden administration. Nancy Mace added protections requiring the redaction of victims’ names, personally identifying information and child sexual abuse material.

Those were reasonable amendments. Transparency should not be confined to one administration, and disclosure should never come at the expense of the people Epstein abused.

Then the amended subpoena came to a vote.

It passed eight to two. The two members who opposed compelling the Justice Department to provide the records were subcommittee chairman Clay Higgins and Andy Biggs. (House Oversight Committee⁠)

That is the precise record. Biggs did not vote to publish every unredacted document on the internet, nor did he cast a literal vote ordering the records to remain sealed forever. He voted against using congressional subpoena power to obtain the Justice Department’s Epstein records after the motion had been broadened by his own amendment and protected by Mace’s.

Four months later, the political circumstances changed.

Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna had launched a discharge petition to force a House vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Biggs did not sign it. On November 12, Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva became the 218th member to do so, giving the petition the number required to bypass the Speaker and move the legislation towards the floor. The next day, Biggs announced that he would vote for disclosure. (KJZZ⁠)

“There’s nobody here that can define what the Epstein files is, not even myself,” he said. “I don’t know what the Epstein files are, but what I’m in favor of is releasing and being transparent with all the documentation that they have that they can release.” (KJZZ⁠)

On November 18, he followed through and voted for the bill. He later defended that vote as support for transparency while arguing that Democrats were interested primarily in damaging Trump. (Congressman Andy Biggs⁠)

Give him the credit due: when the legislation reached the floor, Biggs voted yes.

Then read the sequence.

In July, when his vote could have helped authorise the subpoena that initiated congressional access to the records, he voted no. In November, after other members had gathered the signatures required to force the question, he announced that he would vote yes.

The chronology cannot prove his motive, and no honest writer should claim that it can. It does establish the order in which his courage arrived.

My judgment, and I mark it clearly as judgment, is that Biggs found his commitment to disclosure only after the cost of opposing it had overtaken the cost of supporting it. He did not join the members who created the confrontation. He consented to transparency after they made avoidance impossible.

That is not an insignificant distinction in a candidate for governor.

The name of this publication is The New Architecture, and I use the word deliberately. A political career is not defined by one vote, one bill or one moment when a member finds himself on the unpopular side of an overwhelming tally. It is a structure assembled through repetition.

Andy Biggs has constructed his from refusal.

He refused the narrow procedural protections in the Respect for Child Survivors Act. He refused the bipartisan framework created by the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act. He fought a Republican governor’s Medicaid expansion until she went around him. He helped reject his own state’s certified presidential result. He opposed his party’s Speaker and then helped remove him. He voted against compelling the Justice Department to surrender the Epstein records, then supported disclosure once others had forced the vote.

Some of those decisions arose from legitimate conservative principles. Some involved complicated legislation. Some will be defended by voters who believe the central problem in American government is not its inability to act but its relentless appetite for acting too much.

That defence deserves to be heard.

But governor is not a philosophical title. It is an executive office.

A governor must negotiate budgets, administer agencies, appoint capable people, respond to emergencies and preserve working relationships with cities, counties, tribal governments, federal officials and a Legislature whose members will not all share his politics. The office cannot be performed through ideological witness alone. It requires the holder to convert conviction into functioning government.

The difference between a legislator and a governor is not merely the size of the constituency. It is the direction in which authority moves.

A legislator can make a career by standing in front of a proposal and saying no. A governor must wake each morning responsible for what happens after the word has been spoken. The schools still open. The prisons remain occupied. The water system must still be negotiated, the roads maintained, the fires contained and the vulnerable protected.

A governor cannot run Arizona by refusing it.

Biggs will spend the next several months describing the state he intends to build. He will invoke conservative principle, his relationship with Trump and his years in public office. His campaign will argue that the same obstinacy that frustrated congressional leaders is proof that he cannot be bought, intimidated or absorbed by the institution around him.

There is truth in that description.

There is also a danger his campaign will not name.

Every instrument Andy Biggs has spent his career perfecting is an instrument of negation. His political identity was formed by the purity of opposition, the applause that follows obstruction and the security of knowing that someone else remains responsible for making the machinery work.

Arizona is now being asked to hand that machinery to him.

The honest question is not whether Andy Biggs knows how to stand in the way. His record has answered that beyond dispute.

The question is whether he has ever learned how to lead people somewhere.

The record is on file. Read it before November.