On Friday, President Trump is scheduled to appear at the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, for a Turning Point USA event. Trump’s appearance at the event is part of Turning Point USA’s “Build the Red Wall” campaign. It is an effort championed by Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, to secure victories for MAGA candidates in the 2026 and 2028 elections by increasing Republican support in Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada.

The event is free for people who would like to listen to Trump’s speech from the pews at Dream City Church. But a more interactive experience is available — for a price.

An email sent by Sinan Kanatsiz, an obscure but well-connected figure in Trump’s political orbit, offers its recipients a “one-on-one meeting and private photo with President Donald Trump” in exchange for a “contribution of $500,000 to TPUSA PAC.”

Kanatsiz describes his invitation as “strictly confidential and non-transferable.” The bottom of the message warns, “NOT FOR SHARING — CONFIDENTIAL.” The email was obtained by Popular Information from a source who received it. The source shared the email on the condition of anonymity, fearing professional consequences for providing information to a journalist.

In a phone interview, Kanatsiz confirmed he made the solicitation.

In addition to the meeting with Trump, donors of $500,000 or more receive a tour of Turning Point USA headquarters, a meeting with the organization’s leadership, a dinner, lodging, and “round-trip travel via JSX to Scottsdale Private Airport.” JetSuiteX (JSX) is a semi-private charter plane service. Flights to Scottsdale on JetSuiteX are available from a variety of cities for a few hundred dollars.

Kanatsiz is the founder and CEO of KCOMM, a PR and government affairs firm, and the chairman of the Internet Marketing Association (IMA). Amanda Gort, KCOMM’s Vice President of Government Affairs, is a registered federal lobbyist. (Gort also works for IMA.) Kanatsiz has never registered as a lobbyist but operates as a high-level networker.

Kanatsiz has transformed IMA from a marketing group to an organization that connects business executives to government officials. The IMA website promises “access to an elite network“ for an annual membership fee of $10,000. The 2025 flagship event, IMPACT, touted that 17 members of the Trump administration, including Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, and 12 members of Congress, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA), attended.

In December 2024, Kanatsiz coordinated an event at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Florida, according to a report in the Orange County Business Journal (OCBJ). It was attended by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios, two of Trump’s top advisors on technology issues. While Trump did not formally address the group, “he did stop by to exchange pleasantries.”

Kanatsiz warned business owners to “align” with Trump or suffer the consequences. “Donald Trump is a businessman and any business owner who doesn’t want to align with this administration will be left in the dark,” Kanatsiz told the OCBJ. “I am all in to help my network grow, communicate and engage with our administration,” Kanatsiz said.

In a February message posted on LinkedIn, Kanatsiz wrote that “my family and I opened up our Command Center to host Turning Point USA’s leadership for an evening with more than 60 leaders.” According to Kanatsiz, the discussion included “the culture war with Gen Z, President Trump’s strategy with voters going into mid-terms and Turning Point USA’s priorities for the next 2–4 years.” Matt Scherr, the Senior Major Gifts Director at Turning Point USA, who Kanatsiz references in the email, was in attendance.

“My family and I are committed to Turning Point USA, to our country, to the administration, and most importantly the next generation of Americans,” Kanatsiz said.

In the phone interview, Kanatsiz described himself as a “volunteer” helping Turning Point. “I have a network of friends that want to support Turning Point that may have never met them,” he said. Kanatsiz said he sent the offer to meet with Trump to “a few people,” but “unfortunately, no one took it on.” He acknowledged it was a “big request.” Outside of his personal invitations, Kanatsiz said he had “no idea” if anyone had paid $500,000 for the opportunity to meet Trump.

The solicitation of $500,000 contributions, with the help of Trump, is a major acceleration in Turning Point PAC’s fundraising. The organization has raised less than $10 million since its founding in 2021, and about one-third of its funds were funneled from other Turning Point organizations. Turning Point PAC has received only five donations from individuals of $100,000 or more in its history. The two largest, from casino mogul Steve Wynn and hedge fund manager Tom Klingenstein in 2024, were $495,000 each.

Notably, Erika Kirk has endorsed Vice President JD Vance for president in 2028. (Vance appeared at a separate Turning Point event on Tuesday.) Turning Point PAC’s aggressive fundraising could signal a push to provide Vance with a shadow political infrastructure in advance of a formal campaign.

In 2025, Tesla reported $5.7 billion in U.S. profits. The company paid absolutely nothing in federal taxes.

To achieve this remarkable result, Tesla took advantage of several corporate tax breaks expanded or made permanent last summer as part of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) — 100% bonus depreciation and immediate R&D expensing. It also generated savings by exploiting a long-standing deduction for executive stock options.

Tesla is not an anomaly. So far, 88 profitable corporations have reported paying $0 in federal income taxes last year, according to a new report by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). The list includes Citigroup ($4.45 billion in profits), CVS Health ($6.57 billion), GoDaddy ($981 million), Palantir ($1.58 billion), PayPal ($1.43 billion), Walt Disney ($8.3 billion), and Yum Brands, the parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, ($1.03 billion).

The statutory tax rate on corporate profits is 21%. Collectively, the 88 companies in the ITEP report reported $105 billion in profits in 2025. That means, absent special breaks, they would have owed the federal government about $22.1 billion. Instead, these companies collectively “received $4.7 billion in tax rebates.”

Trump’s OBBB is accelerating an existing trend of lower corporate income tax payments to the federal government. The statutory federal corporate income tax rate was 53% in 1969, 34% after former President Reagan’s 1986 tax cut, and 21% after Trump’s first term.

While the statutory rate has remained unchanged since 2018, effective rates have continued to plummet due to a growing list of new tax breaks and loopholes. The effective tax rate paid by the average profitable corporation has fallen from 38% in the 1960s to 22% before Trump’s first term, and to about 12.8% after Trump’s first tax cut was passed in 2018.

The impact of the OBBB is still being assessed, but in 2025, four large tech firms — Meta, Alphabet, Tesla, and Amazon — paid an average rate of 4.9%.

This has massive consequences for the federal budget. In the 1950s, corporate income tax revenue accounted for nearly one-third of all revenues.

In 2025, corporate income taxes amounted to just 8.6% of revenue. The Treasury Department reported federal corporate income tax revenue fell 14.7% — a $77.8 billion drop from last year — even as overall federal revenue grew 6%. This year is projected to be even worse, with corporate tax revenue accounting for just 7% of total receipts.

Overall, the corporate tax breaks in OBBB, excluding those that primarily benefit small businesses, are expected to cost over $1 trillion over 10 years.

This is a policy choice. While Tesla paid nothing in U.S. federal income taxes in 2025, it paid over $1 billion in taxes to China and other foreign governments.

When corporations pay less in taxes, the benefits flow to shareholders — who are overwhelmingly wealthy and, increasingly, foreign. A stock in a corporation that pays little to no taxes on its profits is more valuable. In the United States, 58% of corporate stocks are owned by the richest 5% of households. Overall, 40% of stock in American corporations is owned by citizens of other countries. We are reducing tax revenue that could be used to benefit Americans to further enrich wealthy foreigners.

The truth about DoorDash Grandma

As corporations pay historically low tax rates — or nothing at all — Trump has pushed the narrative that American workers are thriving. Earlier this week, Trump had McDonald’s delivered to the White House through the food delivery app DoorDash to promote the “no tax on tips” policy that was also part of OBBB. The food was delivered by DoorDash worker Sharon Simmons, who was wearing a “DoorDash Grandma” t-shirt.

Simmons claimed that she saved thousands of dollars because of Trump’s no tax on tips policy. “Isn’t that incredible?” Trump said. “We call it the Great Big Beautiful Bill, we should call it the Great Big Beautiful Tax Cut Bill, because it’s tremendous amounts of money.” Trump said it was “pretty amazing.” Simmons agreed, saying, “Yes, it is.”

Most workers will see little to no benefit from the policy. Only a small percentage of all workers — about 2.5% according to the Yale Budget Lab — even receive tips. In 2022, 37% of tipped workers did not make enough money to owe federal income tax and therefore would not benefit from the policy. Simmons, who said she makes $11,000 annually in tips, may not benefit at all. She lives in Arkansas and was flown in for the event.

The biggest beneficiary is the employers of tipped workers, who now have a justification to “hold down or cut base wages.”

Overall, workers are being compensated at historically low rates. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the “labor share” of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the U.S. “decreased to 53.8% in the third quarter of 2025,” the lowest level seen since 1947 when the Bureau first began recording labor share. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the labor share was only slightly higher, at 54.4%.

Many Americans have taken up gig work. A 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 16% of Americans had “earned money through an online gig platform.” But gig workers have considerably less job stability and are not offered the same benefits as a traditional job. For example, gig workers often cannot set or negotiate their own rates, and do not get overtime pay or paid sick leave. According to a study from the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center, workers for rideshare and delivery apps also often earn below the minimum wage.

Simmons said that Trump’s no tax on tips policy will help pay medical bills for her husband, who was diagnosed with cancer last year. Many workers are forced to do low-wage work due to rising health care costs in the United States. Trump’s OBBB included large cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, causing millions of people to lose their health insurance coverage.

On Monday, a federal judge dismissed Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal. The lawsuit alleged that the Wall Street Journal defamed Trump when it reported on a bawdy letter allegedly authored by Trump in 2003 in celebration of Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday.

According to Trump’s lawsuit, the letter, which includes a line drawing of a naked woman, was “fake and nonexistent,” and the Wall Street Journal “concocted this story to malign President Trump’s character and integrity and deceptively portray him in a false light.”

The alleged letter, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, is structured as an imagined dialogue between Trump and Epstein. “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey,” Trump says. “Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?” The letter concludes: “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

In a 17-page order, Judge Darrin Gayles found that, even assuming everything in Trump’s complaint is true, Trump’s lawsuit “comes nowhere close” to meeting the standard for defamation. Gayles does not weigh in on whether the 2003 Trump letter was genuine, but notes that the lawsuit fails to establish that the reporters acted with “actual malice.”

Specifically, Gayles notes that the reporters reached out to Trump and others for comment, and printed Trump’s denial that he authored the letter in the piece. This showed that the reporters both investigated the letter’s authenticity and allowed readers to draw their own conclusions.

At this stage, Gayles did not even consider the most damning fact about the lawsuit. The same letter featured in the WSJ report was provided to the House Oversight Committee by the Epstein estate in response to a subpoena. This directly undermines Trump’s claim that the letter was simply invented by the WSJ reporters, who do not control the Epstein estate’s archives. While Gayles did not consider the letter obtained by the House Oversight Committee, he does note that “the produced documents certainly appear identical to the album and Letter referenced in the Article.”

The lawsuit is not officially dead yet. Gayles dismissed the case “without prejudice,” which means that Trump can refile the case and attempt to allege facts that meet the actual malice standard. “President Trump will follow Judge Gayles’s ruling and guidance to refile this powerhouse lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and all of the other Defendants,” a Trump spokesperson said in a statement. “The President will continue to hold accountable those who traffic in Fake News to mislead the American People.”

It is unclear what allegations could credibly be added to the complaint to meet the actual malice standard. If Trump’s attorneys were aware of such facts, they would have been included in the original complaint.

The dismissal is the latest in a series of damaging blows to the lawsuit and Trump’s contention that the letter was fake. Trump initially said the letter was not written by him because it’s “not the way I talk.” This was echoed by Vice President JD Vance, who posted, “Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?”

But Popular Information illustrated that many of the distinctive elements of the letter — including “enigma,” “pal,” and referring to himself in third person — were frequently used by Trump.

Alternatively, Trump said that the letter could not be from him because he does not “draw pictures.” That claim is definitively false. “It takes me a few minutes to draw something, in my case, it’s usually a building or a cityscape of skyscrapers, and then sign my name, but it raises thousands of dollars to help the hungry in New York through the Capuchin Food Pantries Ministry,” Trump wrote in his 2008 book, Trump Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges Into Success.

While Trump is eager to turn the page on the Epstein controversy, the administration has still not released dozens of pages related to the allegations of a woman who alleges that Trump sexually assaulted her as a minor.

Melania Trump thrust the Epstein issue back into the headlines last week when she delivered an unusual statement from the White House denying she had a close relationship with Epstein or his criminal accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. In a 2002 email to Maxwell, Melania is friendly and warm, referring to Maxwell as “G” and signing the email “Love, Melania.” In Maxwell’s response, she refers to Melania as “sweet pea.”

Sabrina Carpenter, the headlining act of Coachella 2026, is an outspoken critic of the Trump administration and MAGA politics. The proceeds from her performance, however, will help get more MAGA Republicans elected.

Last December, when the Trump administration used her hit song “Juno” in an online video of ICE arrests, Carpenter issued a harsh rebuke. “This video is evil and disgusting,” Carpenter posted on X. “Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.”

Carpenter’s progressive advocacy goes well beyond objecting to the appropriation of her tracks. In June 2025, as ICE raids intensified across the country, Carpenter encouraged her 50 million Instagram followers to donate to the National Immigration Law Center, which is fighting the Trump administration’s deportation agenda in court.

Since 2024, Carpenter has set aside $1 for every ticket sold to support a variety of causes, including LGBTQ rights. After Trump won a second term, Carpenter added the Transgender Law Center to the list of beneficiaries. In June 2024, Carpenter partnered with Van Leeuwen Ice Cream to create an Espresso flavor, donating a portion of the sales to an organization supporting LGBTQ youth.

In June 2025, Carpenter signed an open letter protesting the Trump administration’s decision to end federal funding for suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth. During her September 2025 performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, performers held signs reading “Protect Trans Rights,” “In Trans We Trust,” and “Support Local Drag.”

Carpenter’s performance came as Republican governors across the country signed anti-trans legislation and Trump issued multiple anti-trans executive orders.

Whether or not Carpenter is aware, the proceeds from her 20-song headlining set at Coachella — along with the other musical acts at Coachella — will help elect more MAGA Republicans and advance their “inhumane agenda.”

Here is how it works: Coachella is run by Anschutz Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of The Anschutz Corporation, which is owned by right-wing billionaire Philip Anschutz. Money from The Anschutz Corporation’s treasury, which includes the profits from Coachella, is funneled directly to right-wing organizations that support key politicians funding ICE, undermining LGBTQ rights, and restricting abortion.

Republican governors, for example, have been signing legislation and taking other action to require local law enforcement to assist in ICE deportation raids. This has been a key lever to accelerate ICE’s crackdown.

The Anschutz Corporation donated $125,000 to the Republican Governors Association (RGA) on April 3, 2025.

The company also donated $125,000 to the RGA in 2024, $100,000 in 2023, and $100,000 in 2022. (The RGA, which is organized as a 527 organization, has not yet had to disclose any 2026 donations.) This money is used to ensure as many Republicans as possible are elected governor. Over the same time period, the Anschutz Corporation has not donated any money to the Democratic Governors Association.

Republican attorneys general have also acted aggressively to assist ICE. In December 2025, for example, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill (R), a Trump loyalist, wrote a letter to the New Orleans Police Department demanding the department “fully cooperate” with a Trump administration ICE raid. Murrill suggested the failure to do so would be illegal.

The Anschutz Corporation donated $100,000 to the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) on April 1, 2025. This is the company’s first donation to RAGA since 2022, when it donated $125,000. Democratic attorneys general are fighting the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in court, but The Anschutz Corporation has not donated any funds to the Democratic Attorneys General Association.

The Republican-controlled Congress has provided tens of billions of dollars in additional funding for ICE. The Anschutz Corporation donated $250,000 to the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), a Super PAC devoted to maintaining Republican control of the Senate, on April 3, 2025. The company donated $500,000 to the SLF in 2024 and $500,000 in 2023. In 2023 and 2024, The Anschutz Corporation donated a combined $375,000 to the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), the Super PAC supporting Republicans in the House. If Republicans lose control of either the House or the Senate, it will be much more difficult for the Trump administration to fund its immigration crackdown. The Anschutz Corporation has not donated any money to Super PACs supporting the election of Democrats.

Candidates and officials who are supported by RGA, RAGA, SLF, and CLF have also worked to undermine other issues important to Carpenter, including LGBTQ rights. Republican governors signed dozens of anti-LGBTQ laws last year, Republican attorneys general are filing lawsuits to restrict LGBTQ rights, and Republicans in Congress are pushing anti-LGBTQ legislation.

Carpenter is not the only prominent musician taking the stage at Coachella this year to speak out against the MAGA agenda. Justin Bieber, another 2026 headliner, wore an “ICE Out” pin to the Grammy Awards in February 2026. Jack White called Trump an “obvious fascist” in 2024 and sued the Trump campaign to prevent the use of “Seven Nation Army” in a campaign video. White specifically called out Trump’s “gestapo ICE tactics.” During the ICE raids of 2025, Karol G wrote, “I am Latina, and what is happening to my community is deeply painful. Being Latino shouldn’t generate rejection or fear.” Addison Rae also condemned the ICE raids, writing, “I’m so disappointed and disturbed by what is happening across our nation. This country could not exist without immigrants.”

Karly Hartzman of Wednesday, an indie band, closed its 2026 Coachella set by declaring, “Fuck ICE’ and free Palestine.” David Byrne, the lead singer of Talking Heads, projected images of anti-ICE protests as he performed the song, “Life During Wartime.”

All of these artists, and others who have made similar statements, are now generating profits for Anschutz, which he is using to support MAGA politicians.

In 2022, Popular Information reported on The Anschutz Corporation’s support of RAGA in light of the group’s efforts to restrict abortion rights. Representatives of The Anschutz Corporation told Popular Information the donations should not be considered an endorsement of the organization’s views on any issue. “Mr. Anschutz makes contributions to numerous organizations, usually for specific reasons,” a spokesperson said. “He does not review or support each of the positions taken by such organizations.”

In 2017, Anschutz faced scrutiny after his foundation donated to anti-LGBTQ groups, including the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council. He denied he was financing anti-LGBTQ causes, calling the claims “fake news.” Anschutz declared that he “unequivocally” supports “the rights of all people without regard to sexual orientation.”

Anschutz claimed in 2017 to have “immediately ceased all contributions” to groups that oppose LGBTQ rights. Anschutz, however, continues to support groups like the RGA and RAGA, which support politicians who are restricting LGBTQ rights.

In an unprecedented move, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced that it had filed lawsuits against several states to block their efforts to rein in prediction markets. Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois have variously sought to prevent Kalshi, Polymarket, Crypto.com, and Robinhood from running what they claim are “unlicensed gambling sites that circumvent state laws.” Several of these companies are business partners of President Trump and his family members.

On March 17, Arizona filed a criminal case against the prediction market platform Kalshi, arguing that it allowed “illegal gambling” and unlawful betting on elections. But the CFTC argues that prediction markets are distinct from traditional gambling.

The CFTC has authority over “swaps” that provide “for any purchase, sale, payment, or delivery… that is dependent on the occurrence, nonoccurrence, or the extent of the occurrence of an event or contingency associated with a potential financial, economic, or commercial consequence.” For example, a contract to pay a certain price for corn in the future would serve as an economic hedge against any potential price fluctuations that could affect producers of corn-based products.

Prediction markets, however, allow bets on a range of activities that have no discernible economic consequence. Users commonly place bets on the outcomes of sporting events, which account for 90% of all trading volume on Kalshi. Polymarket allows bets on whether the temperature in London today will be 21 or 20 degrees Celsius. Kalshi has a market for whether Justin Bieber will perform “Baby“ during his April 11 performance at Coachella.

The platforms have also taken bets related to the war in Iran. Bloomberg reported that over $170 million was bet by Polymarket users on a potential ceasefire. Some of the bets have raised suspicions of insider trading. Three Polymarket accounts “earned more than $600,000 by correctly betting” on a ceasefire, shortly after the accounts “made an earlier round of profitable wagers on the U.S. attacking Iran,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The accounts also lost smaller sums on earlier bets on a potential ceasefire.

In a press release, the CFTC argued that “various states have attempted to outlaw, regulate, or otherwise restrain” platforms that “facilitate trading in lawful event contracts.” CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig said, “The CFTC will continue to safeguard its exclusive regulatory authority over these markets and defend market participants against overzealous state regulators.”

In February, the CFTC filed an amicus brief in federal court defending its right to regulate prediction markets, intervening in a lawsuit on behalf of Crypto.com. But this is the first time that the CFTC itself has sued to block state regulators from policing prediction markets. Ronald Filler, a scholar of CFTC history, told Bloomberg that “he wasn’t aware of any instance when the agency had sued a state in its 50-year history.”

In the lawsuits, the CFTC cited cease-and-desist letters that states sent to platforms such as Kalshi, Polymarket, Crypto.com, and Robinhood that alleged that the platforms were violating state online gambling laws. On April 1, 2025, the Illinois Gaming Board sent letters to Kalshi, Crypto.com, and Robinhood, and accused the companies of “engaging in unlicensed sports wagering.” The letters state that “[i]t is unlawful to knowingly establish, maintain, or operate an Internet site that permits a person to play a game of chance or skill for money or other thing of value via the internet, or that permits a person to make a wager upon the result of any sport, game, contest, political nomination, appointment, or election via the Internet,” without the proper license. The Illinois Gaming Board sent a similar cease-and-desist letter to Polymarket in January.

Kalshi, Polymarket, and Crypto.com all have extensive ties to the Trump family. The Trump administration is now using the power of the CFTC to file lawsuits that will benefit Trump and his family’s business partners. The companies benefiting from the CFTC lawsuit have also donated extensively to Trump’s political operation.

Trump’s business and political ties to prediction markets

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), Trump’s media company and the parent of Truth Social, has an extensive business partnership with Crypto.com. Trump is the largest shareholder of TMTG.

In 2025, TMTG announced it would offer rewards for engagement on Truth Social using Crypto.com’s Cronos tokens (CRO). TMTG and Crypto.com are collaborating to form a new company, Trump Media Group CRO Strategy, Inc., which will hold billions of CRO tokens. In October 2025, TMTG and Crypto.com also announced a partnership to create a prediction market called Truth Predict, which has yet to launch.

Crypto.com has spent millions supporting Trump. Popular Information previously reported that in January, Crypto.com’s parent company, Foris Dax, Inc., donated $5 million to MAGA Inc., the primary Super PAC supporting Trump. A few weeks later, the CFTC filed its amicus brief supporting the company. Since 2025, Crypto.com has donated at least $35 million to MAGA Inc.

Shortly after Trump became president, the Trump administration also dropped a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation into Crypto.com that was started under the Biden administration, with no enforcement action.

Many of Trump’s political allies also have connections to the prediction market industry. Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel, for example, has helped raise millions in funding for Polymarket. Paradigm, an investment firm, and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz also participated in a funding round for Kalshi. Paradigm donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz both donated millions to a super PAC supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign, and Trump recently appointed Andreessen to his “President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.”

On Monday, Robinhood announced that it had been “tapped as brokerage and initial trustee for Trump Accounts,” Trump’s new investment accounts for children, which are expected to launch this summer. Robinhood also donated $2 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

Trump Jr. advises both Kalshi and Polymarket

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is deeply enmeshed in the prediction market industry. In August 2025, 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm where Trump Jr. is a partner, “invested double-digit millions of dollars into Polymarket,” according to Axios. Trump Jr. also joined the company’s advisory board. In a statement at the time, Trump Jr. praised the company and advocated for the U.S. to allow Americans to use the platform. “Polymarket is the largest prediction market in the world, and the U.S. needs access to this important platform,” Trump Jr. said.

In January 2025, Trump Jr. also announced that he was joining Kalshi as a strategic advisor. “After using Kalshi on election night to track our victory in real time…it was obvious that prediction markets were going to upend mainstream media,” Trump Jr. said in a statement at the time. “I’m thrilled to be joining them.”

For weeks, President Trump has threatened to destroy civilian infrastructure in Iran as retribution for the Iranian government’s refusal to open the Strait of Hormuz. On March 21, Trump posted the following to Truth Social:

If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!

That deadline, and subsequent deadlines set by Trump, have been pushed back. But Trump has continued to make similar threats. On March 30, for example, Trump threatened to end the war by “blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells… and possibly all desalinization plants!”

The targeting of civilian infrastructure is a war crime. The Geneva Conventions prohibit attacks on civilian targets and “acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population.” It would also violate a domestic law, the War Crimes Act.

Trump could argue that the power plants are essential for the Iranian military, but he hasn’t bothered. Instead, he has explicitly stated he is “not worried“ about whether he commits war crimes.

If there were any doubts about Trump’s intentions, he removed them on Tuesday morning, when he posted that, unless Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz by 8 p.m., “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Trump’s threats have appalled even some of his strongest allies. “I think it would be a huge mistake. I mean, he loses me if he attacks civilian targets,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told the Wall Street Journal. “Whatever we do has to be within the laws of warfare.”

As the 8 p.m. deadline approached, Trump announced that he “agreed to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks.” Crucially, Trump has not renounced his plans to attack civilian targets. If an agreement to end the war is not reached over the next two weeks, it will be back on the table.

Trump appears confident he will never be held accountable for war crimes, and, as the president, he is probably right. The same cannot be said for members of the military who follow Trump’s orders to strike civilian targets.

Members of the military have an obligation to refuse illegal orders

The Uniform Code of Military Justice states that it is a crime for a member of the armed forces to violate or fail to obey “any lawful general order or regulation” (emphasis added). According to the Manual for Courts-Martial, an order is lawful “unless it is contrary to the Constitution, the laws of the United States, or lawful superior orders.” An order to destroy civilian targets — or kill a civilization — clearly fails this test. The Military Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild explains that “members of the military have the right, and in some cases have the duty, to refuse illegal orders.”

In March 1968, during the Vietnam War, members of the military killed hundreds of civilians in an incident known as the My Lai massacre. In a subsequent court-martial, Lt. William Calley argued that he was simply following orders from superior officers. Calley was convicted, and the U.S. Court of Military Appeals found that conformity with an illegal order is not a valid legal defense.

Therefore, any members of the military who help destroy power plants or assist Trump in killing the entire Iranian civilization could be liable for war crimes. In an appearance on PBS News, retired Lt. Col. Rachel VanLandingham argued that Trump is “threatening to make our military engage in war crimes and therefore stain their honor and their soul and come back with moral injury.”

In November, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a retired Navy captain, appeared in a video with five other members of Congress. The video asserted: “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.” Trump claimed that the video was “seditious behavior” that was “punishable by death.” The Pentagon announced that it was investigating Kelly for possible violation of military law. Kelly responded by suing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

The DOJ also launched an investigation and sought to indict Kelly and the other members. But the information in the video was accurate. As a result, a grand jury unanimously rejected the DOJ’s indictment.

A federal judge also ruled in Kelly’s favor in his lawsuit against Hegseth, finding the actions against Kelly constituted unconstitutional retaliation.

Last week, President Donald Trump declared that the federal government cannot afford to spend “any money for day care” because “we’re fighting wars.” According to Trump, the well-being of America’s children is not a concern of the administration. “We have to take care of one thing: military protection,” Trump declared. “We have to guard the country.”

These comments were made at a luncheon that Trump thought was private but was inadvertently live-streamed on YouTube.

A few days later, as the Iran War raged, Trump submitted an eye-popping $1.5 trillion defense budget for the 2027 fiscal year. This figure alone represents a 44% increase over 2026 funding.

The request does not account for the war in Iran, which, according to a detailed calculation by Stephen Semler, is costing $2.1 billion per day. The Trump administration says it will request another $200 billion in supplemental defense funding to finance the war in Iran and other programs.

The combined $1.7 trillion is double the funding baseline before Trump’s second term of about $850 billion, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense.

This funding level, if maintained, would dramatically expand federal spending. The Committee for a Responsible Budget found that the increased military spending proposed for 2027 would cost an additional $3.2 trillion over ten years. In 2024, only two other countries spent more than $100 billion annually on defense — China ($317 billion) and Russia ($149 billion).

A comprehensive federal subsidy for childcare and universal preschool would cost about $65 billion per year.

Notably, the “Department of War” cannot account for the money it is currently allocated. Congress has mandated an annual audit of defense spending since 2018, and the Pentagon has failed every single one. Hundreds of billions of dollars in spending and more than $1 trillion in assets are not accounted for appropriately.

Thus far, the White House has released few details about exactly how the Pentagon will spend this money. But we do know this: many billions of dollars will be directed to Trump’s political allies to pay for unproven technology that some experts believe will never work.

The Pentagon’s golden egg

While there is no money for childcare, Trump’s defense budget allocates at least $17.5 billion to the “Golden Dome” — a space-based missile defense system. This is in addition to $25 billion that was earmarked for the project last year.

When the Golden Dome was first announced by Trump in May 2025, he claimed the project would cost $175 billion and be operational before the end of his term. Already, the price tag has increased to $185 billion, and the Pentagon says it will not be operational until at least 2035. Both of those estimates are likely much too optimistic.

In September 2025, Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute estimated that a system actually capable of neutralizing threats from all countries would cost $3.6 trillion. Among other limitations, a $185 billion system would not be effective against threats from China or Russia, which have thousands of missiles, Harrison argues. Bloomberg’s independent analysis found that an effective system would cost about $1.1 trillion. Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT), a Trump supporter and the founder of the Golden Dome caucus, acknowledged that “[i]t will likely cost in the trillions if and when Golden Dome is completed.”

Some scientists believe that, no matter how much is spent, a space-based missile defense system will not be effective. A February 2025 paper by the American Physical Society (APS) found that to defend against just one North Korean missile would require “a constellation of at least 1600 interceptors.” To defend against 10 missiles fired simultaneously, the United States would need 40,000 space-based interceptors, about three times the number of active satellites currently in orbit.

Even if a mutli-trillion-dollar system with tens of thousands of interceptors could be deployed, it could still be defeated with relatively inexpensive countermeasures, like decoys. The White House seems to acknowledge that the missile defense system it is building will not actually defend the country against a missile attack. “The goal is to not create a ‘perfect’ defense, but to provide an increasingly effective shield,” the White House budget document states.

While the efficacy of the Golden Dome is uncertain at best, the project will undoubtedly be a windfall for key Trump political allies.

Elon Musk spent over $250 million supporting Trump in the 2024 election. His company SpaceX is expected to receive “$2 billion to develop satellites that can track missiles and aircraft“ for the Golden Dome. This is likely the first of many payments to SpaceX to build and deploy hundreds — or even thousands — of satellites that the Golden Dome requires. SpaceX is slated to go public later this year and much of its valuation is tied to its $22 billion in federal government contracts.

Palantir, founded by Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel, is expected to develop software to run the Golden Dome, according to a Wall Street Journal report on March 24. Vice President J.D. Vance worked for Thiel, who donated $15 million to Vance’s Senate campaign. The software is the Golden Dome’s “glue layer” that will “connect the radars and other sensors that detect and track airborne threats.”

According to the report, Palantir is partnering with Anduril, a software company founded by Palmer Luckey. Luckey donated over $1.1 million combined to Trump’s presidential campaigns in 2020 and 2024, according to FEC data. In 2020, Luckey hosted a fundraiser for Trump at his Newport Beach home, with tickets priced up to $150,000, and co-hosted another high-dollar fundraiser in 2024. Anduril has already received a small $10 million contract related to the Golden Dome, according to a November 2025 Reuters report.

Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, is also expected to compete for Golden Dome satellite work. Bezos has prioritized improving relations with Trump, turning the Washington Post editorial board into a conservative mouthpiece. The effort appears to be working. Trump praised Bezos as a “good guy“ who is trying to be “more fair” at the Washington Post.

$350 billion with little oversight

Of the $1.5 trillion in military spending Trump is requesting, $350 billion is set to come through the budget reconciliation process, instead of the typical appropriations process. This $350 billion will include nearly all of the funding for the Golden Dome, meaning there will be little Congressional oversight of the project.

Funding the military is complex, and typically, lawmakers on either side of the aisle spend months speaking with military leadership and hammering out the details. The National Defense Authorization Act, which Congress has passed every year since 1962, takes twenty subcommittees around nine months to craft, and it is typically hundreds of pages long. It also requires a degree of bipartisan support because it is subject to the filibuster and thus requires 60 votes to pass the Senate.

Of the total defense budget that Trump has proposed, $1.15 trillion will be subject to this lengthy, bipartisan process, and the money will be obligated to specific programs laid out in the appropriations bill.

The rest will go through the much faster process of budget reconciliation, which allows Congress to quickly pass legislation that adjusts government spending and taxes. Because budget reconciliation theoretically does not introduce any policy changes, but only adjusts how the government spends on its existing policies, reconciliation bills are not subject to the filibuster. This means Senate Democrats will have little say over this portion of Trump’s defense budget, unless they can successfully argue that it does include policy changes.

Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) is already proving what can go wrong when a portion of the defense budget comes from budget reconciliation. OBBBA included over $150 billion in defense funding. Because budget reconciliation moves through the legislative process much faster, OBBBA only included broad guidelines for how Congress wanted to DOD to spend the money, but did not explicitly tie all of the funds to specific programs.

Republican senators tried to get assurances from Hegseth and other DOD officials that the department would stick to Congressional intent for spending the $150 billion, but the Trump administration has already proven that it is willing to break these promises.

In December, Trump announced that he was sending out $1,776 “warrior dividend” checks to over one million service members. To pay these dividends, the Trump administration pulled nearly $2.6 billion out of a $2.9 billion allocation under OBBBA that was meant to subsidize housing allowances for military families.

Additionally, it was unclear for several months how DOD planned to spend a large portion of its reconciliation funding. Initially, DOD only shared a classified plan for how it would spend $90 billion of the funds with certain Congressional committees. The other $60 billion was unaccounted for until late February, when DOD declassified its spending plan. While some of the details are still classified, it is now clear that DOD plans to spend all $150 billion during fiscal year 2026, even though some of the funds were to be spent over a period of five years.

President Trump and the election conspiracy theorists he surrounds himself with are determined to exclude people from voting in the 2026 election based on one database: the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE).

Why?

SAVE is an incomplete and flawed database that has been shown to produce a massive number of false positives, incorrectly identifying American citizens as aliens. Thus, using SAVE to exclude voters buttresses the lie that a significant number of undocumented immigrants vote in elections.

Trump’s latest effort came last week when he signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to use SAVE and other databases, to create, for each state, “a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.” Trump’s executive order then directs the Department of Justice (DOJ) to prosecute “individuals and public or private entities engaged in, or aiding and abetting, the printing, production, shipment, or distribution of ballots” to anyone not on the list.

It is an effort to coerce states to use the SAVE database to purge voters or risk criminal charges.

But SAVE, as its full name suggests, was designed to determine eligibility for government benefits — not citizenship. And, crucially, “[n]ot all of the data is necessarily up to date.”

Shortly after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) “optimized“ the SAVE database over two weeks, quickly adding a lot of additional information, including full social security numbers. DOGE also allowed state officials to search SAVE for hundreds of thousands of voters at once with bulk uploads.

Used in this manner, SAVE has produced an extraordinarily high error rate.

In Missouri, for example, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) ran the state’s voter list through SAVE in November 2025 and distributed the results to county election officials. In St. Louis County, Missouri, SAVE flagged 691 registered voters as non-citizens. But the county immediately determined that 35% of the names were naturalized citizens. After the list was cross-referenced with passport data in January, which has more accurate citizenship information, the list was cut to 133 — meaning at least 81% of the original data was incorrect. Even that list “may not be final“ and once a final list is established, anyone remaining on it will receive a letter and 90 days to appeal.

Seventy county clerks in Missouri, Republicans and Democrats, sent a letter to the state’s legislative leaders warning that the SAVE database is repeatedly flagging “individuals we know to be U.S. citizens — our neighbors, colleagues and even voters we have personally registered at naturalization ceremonies.”

Texas also uploaded its voter list to SAVE. In Denton County, Texas, SAVE identified 84 non-citizens who were registered to vote. Twelve of those responded to a notice with proof they were citizens. Fourteen others correctly marked on their registration forms that they were not citizens but were mistakenly registered anyway. The rest of the group did not respond to the notice and were removed from the rolls, but county election officials believe most of that group are eligible voters.

“What is bugging me is I think our voter rolls may be more accurate than this database,” Denton County elections administrator Frank Phillips told ProPublica. “My gut feeling is more of these are citizens than not.”

Trump’s executive order also attempts to weaponize the United States Postal Service (USPS), prohibiting it from mailing ballots to anyone who does not appear on the new federal list of voters.

Trump’s executive order, which would inject chaos into the voting process months before the election, is already being challenged in multiple court cases. These challenges have a good chance of success because the Constitution is very clear that states, not the federal government, have the primary authority to administer elections. Congress can pass laws that impact election administration, but Trump is attempting to invalidate state laws and procedures by executive fiat.

Trump’s efforts to enlist the USPS are also legally dubious, because it is an independent agency legally obligated to deliver mail throughout the country in a neutral manner. Trump’s order would transform the USPS into an arbiter of voter eligibility.

But even if this executive order is blocked by the courts, the push to purge voters from the rolls before November — or challenge ballots after the votes are in — remains a threat.

The other paths to a voter purge

Trump’s executive order is trying to force states to cross-reference their voting list with the SAVE database. But even before the executive order was issued, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced in November 2025 that 26 states “already have, or are in the process of establishing, a memorandum of agreement for voter verification with SAVE.”

The USCIS website specifically lists 24 states that have formally registered to use SAVE: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. It’s possible that more will join before the election.

According to the DHS, SAVE has labeled 21,000 registered voters submitted by states as “non-citizens.” Whatever happens with the executive order, the purging of voters based on SAVE data in these states will continue. It’s unclear what, if anything, each state will do to double check the list of non-citizens produced by SAVE.

Separately, the DOJ has requested detailed voter roll data from at least 48 states. The states were presented with a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) from the DOJ requiring them to remove any voters the federal government deemed ineligible using SAVE and potentially other databases. In December, the acting head of the DOJ Voting Section, Eric Neff, said that 11 states were willing to comply with the MOU.

According to a tracker maintained by the Brennan Center, 12 states have provided (or committed to provide) a full list of registered voters, including drivers license numbers and other personal information, to the DOJ. (Several other states have provided publicly available voter data to the DOJ.)

The DOJ has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia to force them to turn over detailed voter registration. Courts have dismissed cases against California, Oregon, Georgia and Michigan. But the DOJ has subsequently appealed or refiled in those states. The rest of the cases are still pending.

If the DOJ is ultimately successful in some or all of those cases, it could use the data to pressure states to purge their rolls of voters identified as non-citizens by SAVE — just as the executive order contemplates. It could also use SAVE’s list of alleged non-citizens to challenge the results of close elections after the ballots were counted.

The other reason Trump wants voter data

The Trump administration has claimed that it is requesting states’ voter roll data to check for compliance with federal laws requiring states to maintain clean voter registration lists, including the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act.

At the end of March, however, CBS News reported that the DOJ and the DHS “are close to finalizing an agreement that will allow the federal government to use sensitive voter registration data for immigration and criminal investigations.” According to CBS, under the agreement, the DOJ would share state voter registration data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to check whether non-citizens have voted or are registered to vote. Sources told CBS that the White House was also involved in discussions about the agreement.

The DOJ agreement with DHS appears to contradict statements made by DOJ attorneys in court. On March 3, during a hearing in Minnesota, the court asked DOJ attorney James Tucker if the voter data was being used for immigration enforcement. “Not to my knowledge,” Tucker said.

On March 19, a federal judge in Connecticut asked Tucker if the DOJ would guarantee that voter data would not be given to DHS. “I simply cannot state what the Attorney General’s purpose may be at some other time,” Tucker replied. “What I can say is, as of today, there has been no directive or instruction that the data, the non-publicly available data, is going to be transmitted to any other agency.” Tucker went on to say that, “Under the circumstances it’s not consistent with what the United States has specifically stated in its basis and purpose.”

But after CBS News asked the DOJ for comment on the agreement, a DOJ attorney acknowledged its true plans to the court. When asked by a Rhode Island judge if the DOJ could ask DHS to check for non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls, Neff said, “Yes, and we intend to do so,” the Rhode Island Current reported.

The timeline raises serious ethical questions about whether DOJ attorneys knew about the deal with DHS and have intentionally misled the court, which would violate American Bar Association rules. While CBS News “could not determine whether all of the lawyers… arguing the cases in court” knew of the plan, sources said that “at least a handful of senior attorneys from the Civil Rights Division have been privy to some discussions about the data-sharing plan… in addition to multiple officials in other Justice Department offices, including the deputy attorney general.”

Trump’s executive order further confirms that the Trump administration wants to use the voter roll data it is collecting to attempt to exclude purportedly ineligible voters by creating a national voter registration list.

Across the country, local and state officials are fighting to prevent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from turning local warehouses into sprawling detention centers to support the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.

The most powerful weapon in their arsenal? Water.

Over the last year, the number of people in ICE custody skyrocketed. According to a January report from the American Immigration Council, there are 75% more people in ICE detention on a given day than there were at the start of 2025. And although a smaller percentage have criminal records, fewer of those in custody are being released on bond.

The warehouses ICE is buying up are meant to help the agency keep up with its huge influx of detainees. But a warehouse and a facility where up to 10,000 people will live 24 hours a day are very different. A warehouse ICE purchased in Roxbury, New Jersey, for example, only has four toilets, one urinal, and five sinks. It is supposed to be converted into a facility that will hold 1,500 people. As detention facilities, these converted warehouses will need far more power, sewage treatment, and water.

ICE has claimed it conducted “thorough due diligence” to ensure that surrounding communities were equipped to provide the warehouses with necessary utilities and infrastructure. In at least three states, however, officials say that the new ICE facilities will overwhelm local water and sewage infrastructure or damage the local environment.

So, they are shutting off the water.

Upper Bern and Tremont Townships, PA

Shortly after ICE purchased two warehouses in small Pennsylvania towns in early February, Governor Josh Shapiro (D) sent a letter to then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem promising that his administration would “aggressively pursue every option to prevent these facilities from opening.”

Shapiro’s letter was accompanied by another letter from state health, environmental, and emergency response officials outlining the harm that the ICE facilities could cause in Upper Bern Township and Tremont Township, with populations of 1,600 and 300, respectively.

The Tremont facility previously used under 8,000 gallons of drinking water per day, but ICE’s plan for a 7,500-person detention facility would require an estimated 800,000 gallons per day. The total capacity of the Schuylkill County Municipal Authority’s water system — which serves Tremont and other nearby towns — is just one million gallons per day. The Schuylkill County area has experienced extreme drought in the last few months, meaning its water supply is already stretched thin, and the state has had to issue several emergency permits allowing more water to be hauled in.

Sewage at the Tremont facility poses similar problems. The warehouse was initially approved for just 6,000 gallons of sewage per day, but Pennsylvania officials estimate the ICE facility would produce hundreds of thousands of gallons per day.

The Upper Bern Township facility is a 1,500-person processing facility meant to hold detainees for just a few days. But officials in Pennsylvania say it will cause similar water and sewage problems.

As a result, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection sent five administrative orders to ICE stating that ICE’s current plans would violate state water and sewage regulations. As a result, water and sewer service will not be provided, and ICE cannot proceed with converting the warehouses until they comply with state law.

These orders, issued on March 6, gave ICE a 20-day deadline to show the state its plans for providing drinking water and disposing of sewage without overburdening local infrastructure. In theory, ICE should already have these plans completed. However, the agency recently asked Pennsylvania for an extension, saying it will not have completed water and sewage plans until the end of April.

Until then, the warehouses remain closed.

Social Circle, GA

When ICE purchased a warehouse in December 2025 in Social Circle, Georgia — a small town outside of Atlanta with a population of just under 5,500 — city leaders did not learn of the purchase until reporters asked about it.

The planned detention center, which could hold up to 10,000 detainees and employ 2,500 people, would triple the local population, overwhelming local water and sewage systems.

City leaders have shut off water and sewage at the warehouse and padlocked the water meter. “The lock is there until ICE indicates how water and sewer will be served without exceeding our limited infrastructure capacity. The City of Social Circle is not satisfied that an adequate engineering analysis has been conducted,” City Manager Eric Taylor said.

Social Circle currently has the capacity to treat 1.25 million gallons of wastewater per day, and an ICE document shared by the city indicates that ICE expects the detention facility to produce 1 million gallons of wastewater per day. In the document, ICE says that this is not a problem because Social Circle is planning to build another three-million-gallon treatment plant — but this plant has not been built, and accelerating the construction would come at a huge cost to the city.

“If DHS intends to rely on this future facility to meet the demands of its project, the question remains whether it plans to assist in alleviating the significant financial burden associated with accelerating or expanding that infrastructure,” city leaders have said.

Social Circle is primarily in Walton County, Georgia, which voted overwhelmingly for President Trump in 2024.

Salt Lake City, UT

In late March, the Salt Lake City council voted unanimously to alter city ordinances to prevent new nonresidential developments from using more than 200,000 gallons of drinking water per day.

This new rule will directly impact a warehouse in the city that ICE purchased earlier in the month to turn into a detention center that could hold up to 10,000 people. Salt Lake City officials estimate that such a facility could use up to two million gallons of drinking water per day. Previously, the warehouse used less than 6,000 gallons per day.

The new water use limit came after Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall vowed to “use every tool at the city’s disposal to stop [the ICE facility].” But city officials also say that the ordinance is as much about protecting the city’s water resources as it is about opposing ICE.

Salt Lake City, with a population of over 200,000, is much larger than Social Circle and Upper Bern and Tremont Townships. So the new ICE facility will not necessarily exceed the capacity of the city’s water or sewage systems.

However, Salt Lake City is facing a water crisis. The region received very little snow over the winter and faced record-breaking high temperatures in March, causing the city to issue a stage 2 drought advisory the week before voting to limit water use by new developments. As a part of the drought advisory, the city is aiming to reduce water usage by 10 million gallons per day.

Mendenhall said she met with ICE to discuss how they would mitigate the environmental impacts of the facility, and they were unable to provide a clear plan.

“They indicated they are waiting for a due diligence report on their recently acquired parcel of land,” she said. “They did not provide information about the anticipated environmental and traffic impacts to the area, nor did they have specific information on utility needs for the site.”

During the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump promised that if he were elected president again, he would reduce the price of a gallon of gas by 50% within a year of taking office. “12 months from January 20th… your gasoline for your car is going to be 50% cheaper,” Trump declared at a speech to the Detroit Economic Club on October 10, 2024. “That’s a big thing.”

On January 20, 2025, the day Trump took office for a second term, the average price for a gallon of gas was $3.12. Had Trump kept his pledge, gas would now cost about $1.57 per gallon.

On Tuesday, the average price of a gallon of gas was $4.02. Instead of the 50% reduction in gas prices that Trump promised, prices have increased by more than 28%.

Trump also promised to drive down other energy costs, including electricity bills and home heating gas, by 50%. “Energy costs, all of it, air conditioning, heating, all of it, including gasoline, will drop by more than 50% within the first 12 months,” Trump pledged during an August 19, 2024, rally in York, Pennsylvania.

Home heating oil has gone from $3.94 per gallon on the day of Trump’s inauguration to $5.57 per gallon today, a 41% increase. Residential electricity costs averaged 15.92 cents per kilowatt-hour in January 2025. Today, Americans are paying an average of 18.05 cents per kilowatt-hour, an increase of 13%.

The sharp increase in energy prices, particularly oil prices, is not the result of misfortune. Rather, it is a direct and predictable consequence of Trump’s policies. Trump made the decision to start a war against Iran without a plan to secure the Strait of Hormuz, a sea passage used by about 20% of the world’s oil supply. Although most oil that travels through the Strait of Hormuz is not imported to the United States, oil trades in a global market, so cutting off a significant percentage of the supply increases costs for everyone.

Trump has pursued these policies even though his pledge to reduce energy prices was not a flip remark but a central plank of his reelection campaign, one he repeated over and over again.

“Under the Trump economic plan, we will cut your energy prices in half,” Trump said at a September 21, 2024, rally in Wilmington, North Carolina. “Mark it down, and you can get very angry at me if we don’t do it.” Two days later, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Trump promised, “If you vote for me, I will cut your energy and electricity prices in half within 12 months.”

There are many more examples, all of which are on tape. Popular Information has compiled some highlights. Watch:

Trump has addressed increasing energy prices in a variety of ways. At times, he has sought to spin the increased prices as a positive development. “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” Trump bragged on March 12, 2026.

Alternatively, he has claimed the price spikes would be fleeting. Trump predicted that prices would “go lower than they were before“ as soon as the war ended. This is unlikely because the end of the war would not necessarily mean the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. If the Strait remains closed for an extended period, crude oil prices could reach $200 per barrel, resulting in gas prices of about $7 per gallon.

Finally, after campaigning on lower energy prices, Trump has, at times, dismissed the issue as unimportant.

“If they rise, they rise,” Trump said.

The AI industry has tapped Taylor Budowich, a key operative in the effort to undermine the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, to lead a new group dedicated to boosting Republican candidates in the 2026 midterms. The group, called Innovation Council, is reportedly planning to spend $100 million.

Before the Innovation Council, AI companies and top executives had already committed nearly $200 million to influence the 2026 elections. President Trump’s allies, however, were reportedly irked that these funds were not being spent exclusively to promote his agenda. The Innovation Council — and Budowich’s involvement — are designed to placate those concerns.

“President Trump has made it clear, America will win the AI race against China, period. He built the framework, he’s leading from the front, and this organization exists to make sure he doesn’t fight that battle alone,” Budowich told Fox News. “The cavalry is coming to back up the policymakers who stand with the president and will hold accountable the ones who don’t.”

The group also quickly gained the endorsement of David Sacks, the conservative billionaire who recently stepped down as Trump’s AI czar. “Innovation Council will play a critical role in advancing the innovation agenda championed by President Trump and this administration,” Sacks said in a statement. “We welcome its support at this important juncture.”

The influx of cash comes at a critical time for Trump. The Iran War, the sputtering economy, a partial government shutdown, and the Epstein files have driven his approval rating to historic lows. With the November elections fast approaching, some Republicans are fearing a rout — with control of both the House and Senate in play.

Now, Budowich, described by Trump advisor Stephen Miller as “one of the true MAGA faithful,” has been handed a boatload of AI cash to reverse this dynamic. Budowich has shown a willingness to go to extreme lengths to advance Trump’s political interests.

Budowich was a senior advisor to Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, serving as chief of staff to Donald Trump Jr. After Trump lost the election, Budowich worked closely with Trump Jr. and his then-girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, to overturn the results.

Specifically, Budowich directed over $200,000 for radio and social media advertisements to build the crowd on January 6, 2021. The money was funneled through a dark-money nonprofit.

Budowich sued the Congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack to keep his bank records secret and protect the source of the cash. But Budowich lost the case, and the money was traced back to Julie Jenkins Fancelli, a top Trump fundraiser and heir to the Publix supermarket fortune.

In a text exchange with Caroline Wren, who was also involved in “Stop the Steal” organizing, Budowich said that Trump needed to “end his speech [outside the White House on January 6, 2021] by saying something like ‘Now go march on the capital [sic]. march to save America.’”

The text was uncovered by the Congressional investigation, and Budowich was asked about it during a deposition.

During the 2024 election, Budowich founded MAGA Inc, the main Super PAC supporting Trump, and Securing American Greatness, its associated dark-money non-profit group. After Trump prevailed in November 2024, Budowich joined the White House as Deputy Chief of Staff. He left that position in September 2025 and is now running the Innovation Council.

Thus far, the Innovation Council has a barebones public website featuring materials created by the Trump White House. But Popular Information found that the group created a series of pages, later taken offline, that describe concerns about AI job displacement, data center energy use, and safety as “hoaxes.”

The pages were indexed by the Bing search engine.

Despite the vast sums of money involved, there is no information about the Innovation Council’s donors. This is by design. The Innovation Council is currently organized as a nonprofit, so it is not required to disclose its donors or file with the Federal Election Commission.

Budowich has experience using complex organizational structures to keep donors anonymous while maintaining operational flexibility.

The AI industry’s “bipartisan” spending also leans Republican

While other new pro-AI PACs claim to be bipartisan, some are still tilted towards Republicans.

Leading the Future, for example, which has raised over $125 million, indicated it would “back candidates of both parties who support a national framework for artificial intelligence regulations.” The PAC hired Josh Vlasto, who has worked for Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Zac Moffatt, a prominent Republican operative.

The PAC, however, has received many large donations from prominent Trump allies, including $12.5 million each from Andreessen Horowitz cofounders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and $12.5 million each from OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman and his wife Anna. Andreessen and Horowitz both donated millions to a super PAC supporting Trump in the 2024 election. Last week, Trump appointed Andreessen to his “President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.” In September, Brockman and his wife gave $25 million to MAGA Inc.

As of mid-March, Leading the Future has spent around $2.9 million supporting Republicans and around $2.5 million supporting Democrats through its Republican and Democratic affiliates, American Mission and Think Big. But Think Big has also spent $2.3 million attacking Alex Bores, a Democrat running for Congress in New York. The Democrats the PAC supported, Jesse Jackson Jr. and Melissa Bean, are running in historically blue Illinois districts, where it is unlikely that Republican candidates will win. (Jackson lost the Democratic primary in March.)

The PAC has also pledged to spend $5 million in support of Representative Byron Donalds’ (R-FL) campaign for Florida Governor. This was reportedly an effort to solidify its relationship with the White House.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has also started multiple new pro-AI super PACs. One of the PACs, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (Meta) California, will focus its efforts in California, while the American Technology Excellence Project (ATEP) will focus on other states. The company gave $20 million to the California PAC and $45 million to the ATEP.

Like Leading the Future, Meta has also indicated that the PACs will support bipartisan candidates. But so far, the ATEP appears to favor Republicans. Company representatives told the New York Times in February that the company’s spending would start in Illinois and Texas. The New York Times reported that the company had started two additional Super PACs, Forge the Future Project and Making Our Tomorrow, which are expected to be funded by the ATEP. According to campaign finance reports, as of February 23, the company’s Forge the Future Project PAC, which supports Republicans, has spent around $1.3 million in Texas. In Illinois, the company donated $750,000 to its Making Our Tomorrow PAC in February, which has been spending in support of Democratic candidates.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, was named to Trump’s new President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology last week. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

A new product liability lawsuit alleges that the online sportsbooks DraftKings and FanDuel use a variety of sophisticated tactics to addict users, comparing their offerings to tobacco, cocaine, and heroin. The case, filed by the Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI) at Northeastern University School of Law on behalf of two former gamblers, is being led by Richard Daynard — the same lawyer who secured a $206 billion settlement from the tobacco industry.

Filed in Pennsylvania state court, the lawsuit argues that DraftKings and FanDuel are “defective” products that are fundamentally different from traditional sportsbooks. Specifically, the plaintiffs allege that the two companies “capture every aspect of a customer’s interaction in real-time through automated analytical tools, and then process the data through predictive algorithms to generate bets that are optimized to stimulate compulsive gambling.”

When sports gambling was restricted to brick-and-mortar locations, “a person had to physically go to a casino or a sports bookmaker’s establishment with their money in hand to place their bet.” That meant gamblers were offered a limited number of bets — generally on the winner of the game or the total points scored — that had to be placed before the game started. The outcome, crucially, was decided hours later when the game concluded.

DraftKings and FanDuel, on the other hand, use advanced analytics to offer near-instantaneous real-time bets throughout every game. In a typical NFL game, for example, the companies take real-time bets on “whether the next play in the game will be a passing or running play, or whether the outcome of the next play will be yards gained, yards lost, an incompletion, a touchdown, or a turnover.”

Across all sports, DraftKings offers an average of 517 different bets per game. In-game prop bets accounted for “54% of the total amount of money wagered on the DraftKings Sportsbook App” in 2025. According to the lawsuit, these in-game betting opportunities are “intentionally designed and implemented to be as addictive as possible, to ensure that customers spend as much time as possible in the ‘dark flow’ of gambling, and to prevent customers from understanding the risk of addiction that attends these products.”

The lawsuit also names the NFL and its data partner, Genius Sports, for providing the statistics to sportsbooks that enable in-game bets.

“These defendants, including the NFL, are engaging in a coordinated effort to convert ordinary sports fans into nonstop gamblers,” PHAI Executive Director Mark Gottlieb said. “By coordinating their use of immersive marketing, AI, cloud computing, and algorithms customized for every customer, they hijack customers’ brains.”

How users get hooked

One of the plaintiffs, Christopher Sage, had been gambling on sports since 2003, when he was a senior in high school. At that time, to place a bet, he had to travel to a physical sportsbook. Sage gambled periodically on football and tennis in this way for 15 years, and it “was a sustainable recreational activity in his life that did not create any friction or problems.”

This changed in 2018, when a Supreme Court decision allowed Pennsylvania to legalize online sports gambling. Sage signed up for DraftKings and FanDuel and “became consumed by the rapid pace of the microbets and became uninterested in making a bet that did not resolve instantaneously.” He would find a tennis match and “bet on every single point.” He also placed in-game wagers on “NFL football, soccer, and baseball.” If no U.S. games were available, he would place bets on individual points of international table tennis matches.

Although he had never previously had a gambling addiction, Sage “soon found himself betting nearly 24 hours per day, 7 days a week.” If he set his phone down for a moment, the DraftKings and FanDuel apps would quickly alert him to “various betting opportunities that were personalized to him” or lure him back to the action with “various promotions, profit boosts, and customized bets.”

As a result, Sage “soon became unable to pay his bills,” and his truck was repossessed twice. Sage “started to lie to everyone in his life, including his wife, to hide the depth of his gambling addiction and scope of his financial losses.” He borrowed $40,000 from family members and another $25,000 from loan sharks. In total, Sage “made more than $1,645,000 worth of wagers on the FanDuel Sportsbook App” — almost entirely in in-game bets — and lost more than $133,000. On DraftKings, Sage bet another $360,000 and lost about $42,000.

The other plaintiff, Terry Thompson, suffered even greater losses. Thompson paired in-game betting on football games with “parlays.” In a parlay, gamblers combine various individual bets (known as “legs”) to secure a higher theoretical payoff — but must win every individual leg to win. The lawsuit alleges parlays, which are heavily promoted by DraftKings and FanDuel, are “a particularly dangerous and addictive form of gambling…because of the ‘near-miss’ effect.” Gamblers frequently believe they just missed out on a huge payday, correctly predicting, for example, three of the four legs.

A 2009 University of Cambridge study found that “near-misses” increase the desire for more gambling through the “recruitment of brain reward circuitry.” The lawsuit alleges that DraftKings and FanDuel “supercharge addiction by combining the dopamine payoffs associated with fast-resolving in-game bets with the psychological reinforcement caused by near-misses.” Parlays are particularly profitable because they rarely win, and online sportsbooks “do not increase their payouts to customers to account for the increase in the house edge.”

Thompson “placed approximately $18,500,000 worth of wagers on the FanDuel Sportsbook App, almost all of which consisted of microbets on NFL football games, resulting in a loss of approximately $1,520,000.” Thompson also placed $4.5 million in bets on DraftKings, losing about $336,000.

The VIP treatment

Both Sage and Thompson were assigned “VIP Hosts” by the online sportsbooks. These hosts employ a variety of tactics to ensure big gamblers keep betting.

Bryttanni Morgan, one of Sage’s VIP hosts on FanDuel, “would text him multiple times a week to ensure that he continued to wager,” offering “gifts, bonus bets, and other promotional perks.” If Sage lost a significant amount of money, he would “receive a commiserating text “ and “an exhortation to continue betting.” Sage’s host gave him free tickets to Phillies baseball games and even helped him plan a bachelor party in Atlantic City. Another VIP host assigned to Sage, Dyleisha Lewis, “would even send him pictures of herself while she was out and about at different sporting events, including a golf outing.” Lewis allegedly continued to contact Sage even after he put himself on the gambling self-exclusion list in March 2025.

Thompson was also assigned Bryttanni Morgan by FanDuel. According to the complaint, Morgan messaged Thompson “hundreds of times as part of FanDuel’s strategy to ensure that Plaintiff Thompson continued to gamble and lose money.” She sought to portray herself as a friend to Thompson, chatting about “their favorite restaurants and bars in the Philadelphia area and their preferred brands of tequila, travel plans, vacations, and children.”

Although her role was to keep Thompson losing money, she portrayed herself as part of his “team,” rooting for his success. “Hit a crazy one! Get us on a good roll!” she texted in November 2021. As journalist Danny Funt explained in the book Everybody Loses, winning players are kicked out of VIP programs.

In 2022, Morgan gave “Thompson and his son free tickets and hotel accommodations for Super Bowl LVI in California, including special access that allowed them to walk on the field before the game and hobnob with celebrities, including comedian Chris Rock.” In January 2023, when Thompson was on a particularly brutal losing streak and trying to cut back on his betting, Morgan told him to call her due to an “emergency.” It turned out the emergency was “yet another Super Bowl gift package that included two tickets for Super Bowl LVII in Arizona, free hotel accommodations, two tickets to a FanDuel Super Bowl party, two tickets to a Sports Illustrated Super Bowl party, and free transportation during Super Bowl weekend.” That spurred Thompson to resume betting heavily again.

Thompson ultimately took a second and third mortgage on his home to fuel his gambling addiction until he completely exhausted his family’s financial resources. In February 2026, according to the complaint, he voluntarily checked himself into a psychiatric facility.

The NFL’s role

Genius Sports, which provides data from NFL games to DraftKings and FanDuel, says its business is to convert fans into in-game gamblers. Genius Sports describes itself as “an immersive, intelligent, interactive tool to convert traditional fans into high-engagement, in-play bettors” who are “significantly more profitable for Genius and for our sportsbook partners.”

Genius Sports earns a commission on the in-game bets facilitated by its data. The company “earned $126.1 million in commissions from live microbetting in 2025.” Although many sports leagues partner with Genius Sports, the NFL is also Genius Sports’ second-largest investor.

In response to the lawsuit, the NFL, Genius Sports, FanDuel, and DraftKings have all declined to comment.

As corporate profits surge, American workers are taking home a record-low percentage of the proceeds from their work. In the third quarter of 2025, the “labor share” of Gross Domestic Product in the U.S. decreased to 53.8%, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This was the lowest level seen since the Bureau began recording labor share in 1947.

One likely factor: the rise of algorithmic pay. In recent years, major companies have begun to use artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to set wages for some workers. The practice has become particularly common among rideshare and delivery companies like Uber and DoorDash.

According to 2023 research by Veena Dubal, companies collect data on each worker, including where they live, what hours they normally work, and what their typical earnings target is, and “use that data to personalize and differentiate wages for workers in ways unknown to them.” Dubal found that algorithms may offer a lower rate to a worker more likely to accept jobs, or someone who will keep working until they hit a daily target. One driver told Dubal he suspects the algorithm delayed offering him rides after he was one trip away from earning a $100 bonus. Studies have also found that workers for delivery platforms are often offered different wages for the exact same job. Uber disputed the findings of Dubal’s research.

Fundamentally, using algorithms to determine pay erodes worker power. When wages are determined by an algorithm, workers have no one to ask for a raise. A 2025 report from Human Rights Watch highlighted that AI algorithms can lead to pay discrimination, with workers offered the “lowest rate each is likely to accept.”

A study by researchers at the University of Oxford found that driver pay dropped significantly when Uber introduced dynamic pay, finding that “82% of longer serving Uber drivers are now earning less per hour than they did before dynamic pay and pricing was introduced.” Using data from the Oxford study, Worker Info Exchange estimated that algorithmic pay resulted in “a $8.7 billion global loss of income for Uber drivers globally in the 12 months to March 31, 2025.”

Rideshare and delivery app workers often earn well below the minimum wage, according to a study from the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center.

While using algorithms to determine pay was first popular among delivery platforms, it is now expanding to other industries, including customer service and health care, according to a report by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

The states fighting algorithmic pay

Several states have introduced legislation to protect workers from having their wages determined by AI using data unrelated to their job.

California has come the closest to shielding workers from AI determining their pay. Last year, state legislators passed SB 7, the “No Robo Bosses Act,” which would have required employers to notify employees before using AI to make any consequential decisions about the employee’s compensation, promotion, scheduling, discipline, or firing. It would also have allowed employees to appeal any such decisions made by AI.

However, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 7 in October 2025, saying it was “unfocused” and “overly broad.”

Now, California is considering a similar bill that would protect gig workers and other employees from discrimination by AI. It would prohibit algorithmic pay decisions, unless the employer can “clearly demonstrate that any differences in compensation for substantially similar or comparable work assignments are based upon cost differentials in performing the tasks involved, or that the data was directly related to the tasks that the worker was hired to perform.”

In other words, employers could still use AI to determine wages, but only data directly related to how employees perform their jobs. Several other states — including Illinois, Maryland, New York, and Georgia — are eyeing similar laws.

A few states — Colorado, Texas, and Illinois — have already passed bills that provide workers with limited protections.

The Texas Responsible AI Governance Act, for example, prohibits employers from using AI to intentionally discriminate against an employee based on a protected class, like race or gender. It is difficult for workers to seek redress under this law, however, because they would have to prove that their employer knew that their AI model was factoring data on protected classes into its decision-making and continued to deploy the algorithm anyway. This would be very difficult given that AI executives and researchers openly admit that they don’t yet understand exactly how AI determines its output. Employees may report their employer to the Texas attorney general if they believe they experienced discrimination by AI, but they do not have the right to sue.

Texas’s AI law took effect on January 1, 2026. Colorado’s law was scheduled to go into effect on February 1 and would have provided slightly broader protections against discrimination when companies use AI. But lawmakers delayed the law until June 2026, as they reconsider some of its provisions under intense pressure from tech lobbyists to narrow it.

Trump pushes back

The Trump administration is seeking to halt any state efforts to protect workers from AI wage discrimination — or regulate AI in any other way.

In December 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order rejecting state-level AI laws he claimed thwarted innovation. Trump specifically mentioned Colorado’s AI law, saying it could “force AI models to produce false results in order to avoid a ‘differential treatment or impact’ on protected groups.”

While Trump cannot unilaterally ban state-level AI regulation, the executive order instructs the Department of Commerce to identify all “onerous” state laws and issue a notice to states that, unless they decline to enforce these laws, they will be unable to access federal funds for broadband internet. The order also directs the Department of Justice to sue states over their AI regulations.

Last week, Trump put out a laundry list of AI policy priorities he wants Congress to enact, most notably preempting state AI laws. In July 2025, the Senate rejected a similar proposal to put a 10-year moratorium on state AI regulation by a 99-1 vote.

Trump has received millions of dollars in donations from the AI industry and from companies like Uber and Amazon, which use AI to decide how to pay workers.

“I’m not going to start a war,” President Trump pledged during his November 2024 victory speech. “I’m going to stop wars.”

Today, the United States has been at war with Iran for almost a month, with no clear objectives and no end in sight. Why is Trump, who promised to avoid foreign entanglements, allowing it to drag on?

On Tuesday, the New York Times published a bombshell report. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has been aggressively lobbying Trump not to end the fighting:

Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has been pushing President Trump to continue the war against Iran, arguing that the U.S.-Israeli military campaign presents a “historic opportunity” to remake the Middle East, according to people briefed by American officials on the conversations.

In a series of conversations over the last week, Prince Mohammed has conveyed to Mr. Trump that he must press toward the destruction of Iran’s hard-line government, the people familiar with the conversations said.

Oddly, the New York Times story does not mention that Trump’s chief negotiator, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, is being paid tens of millions annually by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is controlled by MBS.

The PIF invested $2 billion in Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners. According to an investigation by the Democratic staff of the Senate Finance Committee and the House Oversight Committee released on March 19, “since 2021, Mr. Kushner has collected more than $110 million from the government of Saudi Arabia for investment management services that have reaped little to no return.”

Meanwhile, as Kushner purportedly represents the United States in negotiations with Iran, his private equity firm is seeking to raise an additional $5 billion from foreign sources. According to reports, “Affinity’s representatives have already met with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.”

Trump said that Kushner was one of a handful of top officials who convinced him to start the war. This was consistent with MBS’s petition. According to the Washington Post, in a series of calls in February, MBS privately lobbied Trump to attack Iran. (Now, Iran is refusing to meet with Kushner, having concluded that he is not participating in discussions in good faith.)

Also unmentioned in Tuesday’s New York Times report is that the Saudi government, through PIF, recently financed a $7 billion development deal in Saudi Arabia with the Trump Organization. Under the January 2026 agreement, Dar Global, a developer with close ties to the Saudi government, will build a “Trump-branded hotel and golf course,” along with “500 mansions, priced between $6.7 million and $24 million.” The project is part of Diriyah, a $63 billion development funded entirely by PIF.

When Trump visited Saudi Arabia in May 2025, MBS took him on a tour of Diriyah and showed him a model of the development. According to Jerry Inzerillo, who heads the Diriyah Company, a PIF subsidiary, Trump was “amazed“ with the quality and scale of the project.

Not only does MBS want Trump to continue the war, according to the New York Times report, but he has “pressed for attacks against Iran’s energy infrastructure” and “argued that the United States should consider putting troops in Iran.”

In recent days, Trump has threatened to attack Iranian power plants and moved thousands of troops to the region, heightening “the possibility that American servicemembers will go into Iran.”

Since the outset of the Iran War on February 28, President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that things are going well. Within a few days, Trump began declaring that the war was “won” and nearly over.

“We’re knocking the crap out of them. I think it’s going very well,” Trump told CNN on March 2.

“We’re doing very well on the war front -- to put it mildly, I would say. Somebody said, ‘On a scale of 10, where would you rate it?’ I said about a 15,” Trump said at a meeting with tech executives on March 4.

“I think the war is very complete, pretty much… If you look, they have nothing left. There’s nothing left in a military sense,” Trump declared in an interview with CBS News on March 9.

“Let me say we’ve won… You never like to say too early you won. We won. We won,” Trump said at a rally on March 11.

“The United States of America has beaten and completely decimated Iran, both militarily, economically, and in every other way,” Trump asserted on Truth Social on March 14.

“As far as I’m concerned, we’ve essentially defeated Iran,” Trump said aboard Air Force One on March 15.

“I think we’ve won,” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House on March 20.

Despite Trump’s claims, the war in Iran is not going well.

More than 1,500 people have died, including over 100 school children and 13 U.S. troops. American taxpayers are on the hook for tens of billions of dollars. And all Americans are facing dramatically higher energy prices because the Iranians have closed the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil route, to most tankers.

In sum, the U.S. military is mired in a deadly conflict with no clear objectives or exit strategy. According to a report in the Washington Post, the new “goal” of the military campaign is to open the Strait of Hormuz, returning the region to the status quo before the war began.

In recent days, Trump has responded to the deteriorating situation with a series of erratic, disturbing, and puzzling moves.

Trump’s $14 billion gift to Iran

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that, in an attempt to lower oil prices, the Treasury Department was temporarily lifting sanctions on Iranian oil already at sea. The license, which extends through April 19, will allow most countries to purchase oil from Iran that was already loaded onto a ship as of Friday.

“By temporarily unlocking this existing supply for the world, the United States will quickly bring approximately 140 million barrels of oil to global markets, expanding the amount of worldwide energy and helping to relieve the temporary pressures on supply caused by Iran,” Bessent wrote in a post on X.

But lifting sanctions on Iranian oil could bring a financial windfall to Iran at the same time that the U.S. is in a war with the country. In the post, Bessent argued that “Iran will have difficulty accessing any revenue generated and the United States will continue to maintain maximum pressure on Iran and its ability to access the international financial system.” But it is not clear how the U.S. could prevent Iran from accessing the revenue.

According to NBC, at current prices as of March 21, the amount of Iranian oil that the Trump administration lifted sanctions on “would be worth more than $14 billion for Tehran.”

Trump has repeatedly criticized the Obama administration for giving Iran access to cash. “We gave $1.8 billion in cash. That’s actual cash, barrels of cash. It’s insane. It’s ridiculous,” Trump said in 2018. The Obama administration agreed to give Iran around $1.7 billion in cash to “resolve an arms contract between the United States and Iran that predated the Iranian revolution in 1979.” This was money that Iran had originally paid to the U.S. and was subject to an extended legal dispute. It was also a fraction of what Iran could earn from the lifting of sanctions.

Trump has also criticized part of the Iran nuclear deal that allowed Iran to access some assets held abroad that were frozen under sanctions. The exact amount is not clear, with estimates ranging from $25 billion to $150 billion. As part of the deal, the Obama administration received a pledge that Iran would not develop nuclear weapons and an agreement for robust inspections. The Trump administration, on the other hand, lifted sanctions against Iran in exchange for nothing.

When asked Monday about the decision to lift the sanctions on Iranian oil and his previous criticism of the Obama administration giving Iran cash, Trump said, “I just want to have as much oil in the system as possible. And we don’t even know if Iran gets that money. Frankly, I think it’s very hard for them to get it.” Trump added, “Any small amount of money that Iran gets is not going to have any difference in this war.”

Trump threatens to commit a war crime

On Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social that Iran must “FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT” the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. If that didn’t occur, Trump said he would order the U.S. military to “obliterate” Iran’s “various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!”

There were a few problems with this threat. First, what Trump is describing is illegal. The Geneva Conventions prohibit civilian targets, including the “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.” Trump is not arguing that the power plants providing electricity to Iranian civilians serve a military purpose. He is simply using the power plants as leverage to coerce Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Ben Saul, UN special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, said that the power plant attack described by Trump would constitute a war crime.

Second, Iran immediately rejected Trump’s threat and said that if Trump attacked their power plants, Iran would retaliate against other energy infrastructure in the region. Trump’s threat was motivated by a desire to have oil prices, which have increased dramatically, return to normal. But the prospect of a significant escalation of the war created additional uncertainty and further increased prices.

Finally, following through on his threat to destroy Iranian power plants would not reopen the Strait of Hormuz. So Trump was left to either follow through on his ultimatum, making the situation worse, or abruptly change course.

Trump chose the second option.

Trump makes suspect claim of a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran

On Monday morning, with markets poised to plummet on the prospect of an indefinite and economically damaging war, Trump made a surprise announcement. The United States and Iran had a diplomatic breakthrough and, as a result, were poised to end the war. Trump said the strikes on Iranian power plants would be postponed for five days.

I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. BASED ON THE TENOR AND TONE OF THESE IN DEPTH, DETAILED, AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS, WHICH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD, SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS.

An Israeli official, seeking to bolster Trump’s claims, told Axios that “U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner had been in touch with the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.”

Iran, however, immediately denied that any such conversations took place. “No negotiations have been held with the US, and fakenews is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped,” Ghalibaf posted on X. The Iranian Foreign Ministry acknowledged “initiatives by regional countries to de-escalate tensions,” suggesting indirect communication through proxies.

Pressed on what had occurred, Trump played coy. He declined to name the Iranian officials involved in the alleged discussions. But he also claimed that Iran and the United States had come to 15 “major points of agreement.” Among them, according to Trump, Iran has agreed that it is “not going to have a nuclear weapon.” He did not specify the other 15 points.

The fact that, at this point, Iran is contesting the existence of negotiations raises significant doubt that the United States and Iran have reached a comprehensive agreement that could end the war.

Today, Americans are facing dramatically increased health care costs, with millions losing coverage and one in three cutting back on daily living expenses to cover medical bills.

For the health savings account (HSA) industry, however, these are boom times. In a triumphant March 17 earnings call, HealthEquity, the nation’s largest administrator of HSAs, reported “accelerating earnings power… significant margin expansion, and record HSA sales.”

Stephen Neeleman, HealthEquity’s founder and board vice chairman, attributed the company’s recent success to policy changes enacted by the Trump administration. During the call, Neeleman credited Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” for expanding HSA eligibility. He called the new law “the most significant structural change to the HSA market since the accounts were created.”

HSAs allow people to set aside a portion of their pre-tax income to pay for medical expenses. While more HSAs mean more profits for HealthEquity — and function as an effective tax shelter for the wealthy — they do little to reduce the costs or improve the quality of health care for working Americans.

HealthEquity is now making a major push for a more dramatic expansion of the HSA market. Meanwhile, a campaign finance report filed on Friday night revealed that MAGA, Inc, President Trump’s Super PAC, received a $1 million donation from HealthEquity on February 6. The money came directly from the company’s corporate treasury.

Previously, HealthEquity had never made a federal campaign contribution exceeding $5,000.

How HSAs benefit the wealthy and exploit working Americans

Most Americans with access to HSAs cannot afford to fund them. About 40% of Americans have outstanding medical or dental debt. This group, along with many others without current medical debt, does not have disposable cash to fund an HSA. That is why half of all HSAs have balances of less than $500, and one in five have a balance of zero.

Seventy-seven percent of the value of HSAs goes to households with incomes of $100,000 or more. They are also laden with junk fees imposed by HealthEquity and other administrators, which further diminish their utility for people with small balances. The accounts are typically attached to high-deductible health insurance plans that can make necessary care unaffordable.

In a February 24 advertorial published in the Washington Times, HealthEquity CEO Scott Cutler spun the fact that HSAs cause Americans to skip medical care as a positive feature that reduced costs. Cutler said that HSAs give Americans “skin in the game” and prevent “unnecessary utilization.”

Wealthy Americans, however, are able to benefit substantially from HSAs. Since they pay a higher marginal tax rate, they benefit more from each dollar deposited in the account. A couple with $800,000 in annual income saves 37 cents for every dollar contributed to an HSA, more than three times the savings for a couple with $30,000 in annual income.

The real value of HSAs for the wealthy lies in using them as a stealth retirement fund. They can contribute money to the account tax-free. Then invest those funds in stocks and have it grow tax-free. Wealthy HSA holders pay medical bills out of pocket, save the receipts, and reimburse themselves tax-free years or decades later while the money compounds. Even without significant medical expenses, withdrawals after age 65 are taxed as ordinary income, with no minimum distribution required.

Financial advisors recommend that the wealthy pursue this strategy. Thayer Partners, a firm that caters to high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), published an article earlier this month titled “Health Savings Account: The Ultimate Retirement Health Vehicle For HNWI.” The firm calls HSAs “a powerful wealth-building mechanism that savvy HNWIs are exploiting to maximum effect.”

This tax loophole for the wealthy diverts funds that could otherwise be used to help people who lack affordable health insurance. Over the next 10 years, HSAs will cost about $190 billion. That would have been enough to extend the premium subsidies that expired at the end of 2025 — and are substantially increasing costs for millions of Americans — for at least 6 years.

What the HSA industry wants

The administrators of the HSAs benefit from the creation of new accounts, through fees, whether or not the HSAs benefit the account holders.

The One Big Beautiful bill expanded the market for HSAs by allowing them to be attached to so-called bronze and catastrophic plans available in the ACA exchanges. These are high-deductible plans that previously could not offer HSAs. This change made about 10 million more Americans eligible for HSAs. This population is among the least likely to benefit from HSAs. More than 80% of marketplace enrolees had household incomes of $47,000 or less, making it unlikely that they have significant excess cash to fund an HSA.

In December, the Trump administration’s IRS went even further than the text of the law, expanding HSA eligibility to high-deductible plans offered outside the ACA exchanges.

HealthEquity is not satisfied and is pushing for much larger changes.

In his February advertorial, Cutler advocates allowing HSAs to be offered with any kind of insurance, expanding the market to every covered American. This would include wealthy Americans with generous health care plans and low deductibles. It runs counter to the original purpose of HSAs, which is to help people in high-deductible plans cover out-of-pocket expenses. While it would do little to make health care more affordable, it would allow many more HNWI to use HSAs as a tax shelter. While it’s unclear how many Americans would open HSAs under this scenario, it would undoubtedly cost tens of billions of dollars annually.

Cutler also wants to allow Americans to use HSAs to pay not just out-of-pocket expenses but also health care premiums. This would transform HSAs from a limited vehicle for out-of-pocket expenses to a broad tax subsidy for all health care costs, incentivizing most Americans to open an account. It would quickly become one of the federal government’s largest tax expenditures. Along the way, HSAs would collect fees and interest.

Finally, Cutler calls for increasing contribution limits “to reflect real healthcare inflation.” Annual limits are already indexed to inflation, and the annual limits for a family have increased by $1,000, to $8,750, over the last three years. This is a change that would only benefit the wealthiest Americans because most people who have HSAs do not contribute anywhere close to the annual limit.

HealthEquity began pushing these radical proposals just 18 days after donating $1 million to MAGA Inc.

The Trump administration’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday. Prior to her testimony, she submitted a written copy of her opening statement. It included the following passage about Iran:

As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer, Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability. The entrances to the underground facilities that were bombed have been buried and shuttered with cement.

In other words, after the Trump administration’s bombing campaign last June, Iran had no ability to enrich uranium. Since then, the Iranian regime has made no efforts to restore its ability to enrich uranium. Without the ability to enrich uranium, Iran cannot produce a nuclear weapon. Gabbard’s testimony was consistent with the views of outside experts.

Curiously, when Gabbard appeared in person, she read most of her opening statement, but skipped over the section above on Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities. Pressed on the omission by Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), Gabbard claimed she left out that passage because she “recognized that the time was running long.”

Gabbard omitted a key conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community that undercuts a core justification for the war that was repeatedly advanced by President Trump.

Trump and his proxies have repeatedly justified the war in Iran by claiming that, absent the decision to launch major combat operations, Iran would have had multiple nuclear weapons within weeks. According to the testimony of Trump’s top intelligence official, these claims were false.

Here are the key statements made in support of the lie:

“They’re probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material, and that’s really dangerous.” — Middle East Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, February 22

“If we didn’t hit within two weeks, they would’ve had a nuclear weapon. When crazy people have nuclear weapons, bad things happen.” — Trump, March 4

“And this had to be done. They were very close to a nuclear weapon.“ — Trump, March 7

“They would’ve had a nuclear weapon within 2 weeks to 4 weeks.” — Trump, March 9

“Had we not done this, you would have had a nuclear war that would have evolved into World War III.” — Trump, March 16

“[W]e’re doing very, very well in Iran, knocking the hell out of them. And you have to do that. We can’t let them have a nuclear weapon. They were two weeks away -- in my opinion, two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon. — Trump, March 17

At the outset of the war on Iran, on March 1, the White House released a statement characterizing it as an effort “to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime.”

During the hearing, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) pressed Gabbard on whether the intelligence community assessed that the “nuclear threat” from Iran was “imminent,” as the White House claimed. Gabbard repeatedly dodged the question.

Gabbard said, on the issue of imminence, “the president has to make that determination.” That is false. It is the job of the intelligence community to assess threats, including their severity and imminence. It is the role of the president and Congress to determine how to respond to those assessments.

Clearly, the intelligence community did not assess that the nuclear threat from Iran was imminent because it determined they had no nuclear weapons and were not taking the steps necessary to create one. Joe Kent, who was selected by Trump as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center and reported to Gabbard, resigned on Tuesday. In his resignation letter, Kent wrote that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.”

Another tactic Gabbard used to make the views of the intelligence community more politically palatable is to credit the bombings last June with curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But Iran was not building a nuclear weapon before those strikes either. In March 2025, Gabbard also testified that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”

Shortly before bombing Iran in June 2025, Trump was asked about Gabbard’s testimony, which contradicted his claims at the time.

“She’s wrong. My intelligence community is wrong,” Trump said flatly.

According to its website, CRA has over 280 chapters across the country. As political director, Schwemmer will help determine which local candidates CRA will support — an influential position, as campaigns often rely on volunteers from groups like CRA.

In response, Schwemmer has argued that his views moderated during a two-year mission trip from 2023 to 2025. Last week, Schwemmer said he is “not a groyper” and has “made adjustments to become a better disciple of Christ.”

Schwemmer has deleted all of his X posts from before September 2025. But a Popular Information review of Schwemmer’s posts after he returned from his mission shows that he still holds bigoted and extreme views.

In November 2025, in response to a post by former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene related to her stepping down from Congress, Schwemmer wrote that women “generally do not have what it takes to endure the pressures of a public office.”

In two recent posts, Schwemmer compared a person of color to a “proboscis monkey“ and said the “physiognomy” of Congressman Byron Donalds (R-FL), who is Black, makes him look “deceitful and suspicious.” Physiognomy, the practice of reading faces to determine a person’s character, has gained popularity among those who believe in “scientific racism.”

Recent posts from Schwemmer suggest that Jewish people are “delusional cosplayers” and that most pedophiles are gay men.

During a recent livestream in which he discussed his CRA appointment and his goals as political director, Schwemmer said, “We are Christian, we are white. That is cool. We’re not going to apologize for that.”

In another stream from last month, Schwemmer called the video President Trump posted to Truth Social depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes “epic.” He went on to say, “Given that apes, gorillas, chimpanzees, monkeys are awesome, this is actually super cool.”

CRA did not respond to a request for comment on this article.

Schwemmer and Fuentes

Schwemmer met Fuentes in 2021 during Fuentes’s “white boy summer” speaking tour, according to a pro-Fuentes documentary released in 2024. In the documentary, Schwemmer said Fuentes “woke me up to immigration” and that he “fell in love” with Fuentes’s movement.

In 2022, Schwemmer was a special guest at Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference, and he began livestreaming on a platform run by Fuentes. At the time, Schwemmer frequently posted about Fuentes on social media and regularly defended Fuentes when he was criticized for extremist views.

In January 2023, Vice reported that an account apparently belonging to Schwemmer posted a livestream playing the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 with the title “Killing 100 Women in Under 10 Min in RDR2.”

Ben Lorber, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, identified several other older posts by Schwemmer, including ones that glorify the Unabomber and praise a notorious antisemitic author.

The radicalization of the College GOP

Schwemmer’s appointment to CRA leadership comes as several conservative youth organizations have come under fire for extremist views.

University of Florida College Republicans, a CRA member, was disbanded last week after a photo circulating online showed one of its leaders doing a Nazi salute. Schwemmer posted on X, defending the University of Florida College Republicans and blaming “cancel culture” for the club’s disbandment.

A group chat for conservative students at Florida International University, leaked earlier this month, included hundreds of racial slurs and repeated praise for Nazis.

Shortly after the start of the war in Iran on February 28, Iran declared that the Strait of Hormuz — which is used to transport about 20% of the world’s oil — was closed. Since then, vessels near the strait have been struck by drones and other projectiles. Only a handful of non-Western tankers have safely made it through the sea passage

As a result, the price of a barrel of oil has skyrocketed from $70 to over $100. Americans are now paying an average of $3.70 for a gallon of gas, an increase of about 80 cents over the last month.

The higher prices are already inflicting pain on Americans struggling to make ends meet, and if oil prices continue to rise, it could tip the economy into a global recession. Oil prices will likely continue to go up as long as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to most traffic. Thus far, the Trump administration has not identified an effective strategy to reopen it.

The administration “significantly underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to US military strikes while planning the ongoing operation,” according to a March 12 report on CNN. Trump and his advisors, according to CNN, “failed to fully account for the potential consequences of what some officials have described as a worst-case scenario.” Last June, after the U.S. military targeted nuclear sites in Iran, Secretary of State Marco Rubio downplayed concerns that Iran would target the Strait of Hormuz, calling such an action “suicidal.”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) relayed a similar message on March 10 after receiving a classified briefing. According to Murphy, the administration had “NO PLAN” on the Strait of Hormuz and “don’t know how to get it safely back open.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the CNN report as “100% FAKE NEWS“ and blasted the network for publishing “garbage.” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth called it a “fundamentally unserious report“ and insisted the administration had “planned” for every possible scenario.

These are strong words, but the administration’s actions tell a different story. In the lead-up to war, the Trump administration made a number of decisions that indicate it was relatively unconcerned that Iran would attempt to shut down the Strait of Hormuz.

Mining for disaster

The Strait of Hormuz remains unsafe, in part, because of Iran’s ability to deploy mines across the narrow passage. In September 2025, however, the Trump administration decommissioned the last of its four mine countermeasure ships, which had been based in Bahrain. These ships were “capable of finding, classifying and destroying moored and bottom mines.”

The ships were to be replaced with three more advanced Littoral Combat Ships. But according to U.S. Navy documents obtained by Hunterbrook, the “next-generation mine-hunting systems suffered from unreliable unmanned vehicles, critical single-point failures, and sonar that couldn’t see.” In a training mission, one of the unmanned vehicles became a “runaway” and could not be recovered by the mothership.

Two of the three replacement ships were recently spotted docked in Malaysia.

Had the Trump administration been competently preparing for Iran to try to close the Strait of Hormuz, it would not have begun operations without an effective anti-mine fleet in the region.

A coalition of the unwilling

In addition to mines, Iran can disrupt travel through the Strait of Hormuz with drones and small vessels. Eager to halt the run-up in oil prices, Trump promised the United States military would “escort” tankers through the strait. “If necessary, the United States Navy will begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, as soon as possible,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on March 3.

But escorting a tanker is complex work, and many U.S. Naval assets are occupied fighting the war itself. On March 10, Energy Secretary Chris Wright posted on social media that the “U.S. Navy had successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz.” That claim, Wright later admitted, was false. A week later, there are still no documented cases of a tanker traversing the strait with a military escort.

To accelerate this process, Trump has demanded that other nations help escort tankers. “I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territory,” Trump said.

Thus far, no other nation has offered to assist Trump. “This is not our war, we have not started it,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said. Spain’s defense minister also rejected Trump’s request and called on Trump to end the war.

Trump claimed on Monday that some ships from other countries were “coming“ but did not provide any specifics. Trump also revealed he was asking other nations, “Do you have any mine sweepers?”

Had the Trump administration planned for Iran to take adverse actions in the Strait of Hormuz, it would have secured agreements from international allies to assist in advance. Instead, Trump is making abrupt demands as the situation spirals out of control.

A war without a mission

As Popular Information previously documented, Trump and his administration lacked a clear rationale for the war in Iran. We documented 17 often-conflicting explanations for why the war began.

More than two weeks after the war started, its goals remain unclear. Is it to degrade Iran’s conventional missile capabilities? Is it to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program? Is it regime change?

Ultimately, the administration’s failure to plan for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is part of a broader failure to plan for anything beyond “shock and awe.”

“[T]here is no indication of preparedness for how to translate military action into effective and stable regime change, no plan to manage refugee flow or humanitarian consequences, no plan to handle arms proliferation, and no indication of a strategic direction other than blowing stuff up and seeing what happens,” Matthew Wallin of the American Security Project wrote. “Destruction is easy, but as the last few decades has taught us, the rest is hard.”

After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2024, Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, dismissed concerns that his private equity firm would be a vehicle to buy foreign influence.

In December 2024, Kushner said that he “preemptively” raised $1.5 billion earlier that year. The $1.5 billion came from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and Lunate, an investment fund linked to the UAE government.

The influx of cash, Kushner said, would allow his firm “to avoid any conflicts” and ensure “we don’t have to raise capital for the next four years.” Kushner made the comments on the December 20, 2024, edition of “Invest Like The Best,” a podcast hosted by Patrick O’Shaughnessy.

Kushner’s claim that he would not raise additional money during Trump’s presidency to avoid conflicts turned out to be a lie.

On Friday, the New York Times reported that Kushner “has spoken with potential investors in recent weeks about raising $5 billion or more for Affinity Partners.” Kushner’s team has “already met with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund [PIF].” PIF, Kushner’s biggest client, invested $2 billion with Affinity Partners in 2021. According to the report, Kushner is also seeking additional funds from Qatar and the UAE.

Kushner reportedly tried to drum up new investments while at the World Economic Forum in Davos as part of the official Trump administration delegation.

Kushner is seeking billions in additional funding from the Saudi government as he serves as one of Trump’s top negotiators with Iran. Notably, “Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman [MBS] made multiple private phone calls to Trump” in February, advocating a U.S. attack,” according to reporting in the Washington Post. Last week, Trump said Kushner was one of a handful of top advisers who convinced him to launch major combat operations in Iran. According to CNN, the UAE was also lobbying the Trump administration to strike Iran.

After leaving the White House in 2021 and quickly accepting billions from PIF, Kushner acted as a de facto foreign policy advisor to Saudi Arabia. According to a Reuters report, Kushner advised MBS on “U.S.-Saudi diplomatic negotiations involving Israel…multiple times.” Since Trump’s second inauguration, Kushner has resumed his role as one of his father-in-law’s most important foreign policy advisors. Kushner has been one of the administration’s top diplomats for nearly every major foreign policy issue — from the war in Ukraine to Gaza to Iran.

Kushner’s deep involvement with the Trump administration’s foreign policy also breaks a pledge he made before Trump’s second term.

In February 2024, at an event hosted by Axios, Kushner was asked whether accepting billions in investments from Middle Eastern governments would make it “very difficult… to do any sort of foreign policy work” in a second Trump administration.

“I’m an investor now,” Kushner replied. “I served in government, and I think my track record is pretty impeccable. Now I’m a private investor.” Axios titled the video, “Jared Kushner tells Axios he will not join Trump’s administration.”

During the December 2024 podcast with O’Shaughnessy, Kushner presented himself as law-abiding and scrupulously ethical. At the same time, Kushner insisted his critics were ignorant people who did not understand how business is done. “I’m not going to allow people like the media or these ethics experts, who quite frankly don’t have real jobs and get paid to try to find potential conflicts that don’t exist, to change what we think and what we’re going to do,” Kushner said.

Kushner’s dual role and the Constitution

Is it permissible for Kushner to hold a key position in the Trump administration while simultaneously accepting tens of millions in fees from foreign governments? Not according to the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits someone “holding any Office of Profit or Trust” from the federal government from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Previously, the Trump administration claimed that Kushner had no “office” and was simply acting as a volunteer. This argument was unlikely to withstand scrutiny, since the legal test is an individual’s actions, not the label assigned. Kushner is conducting high-level diplomacy on behalf of the Trump administration.

But all doubt was eliminated on February 19, when Trump named Kushner a Special Envoy for Peace. That designation formalized his role with the Trump administration and triggered a requirement to file a public financial disclosure within 30 days. Steve Witkoff, who participates in most negotiations, is also a Special Envoy and has filed his financial disclosure.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a government watchdog group, sent a letter to White House Counsel David Warrington last week highlighting this requirement. “As you know, collecting Mr. Kushner’s disclosure report is a critical first step, potentially followed by any needed divestment, changes to trust arrangements, or other steps as required by OGE to ensure that he is in compliance with federal law and the Constitution,” CREW wrote.

Kushner has five days left to comply.