On Tuesday morning, Trump unveiled America.gov, a new website he dubbed “the ultimate product.” Trump called America.gov “a restoration of America’s founding promise” and “a reinvention of your government for the 21st century and beyond.”

Trump’s pitch is that America.gov can be an interface to provide any service from the federal government. “Instead of forcing citizens to search through the endless maze of tens of thousands of terrible government websites and rules and more than 10,000 forms,” Trump said, Americans will visit America.gov.

That is the vision, but currently, America.gov is not integrated with the services of federal agencies. At Tuesday’s event, Trump signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to facilitate integration in the future. Whether and when it will actually function as advertised is an open question.

Right now, America.gov functions as an AI chatbot that bases its answers on official government sources. “Simply ask for what you need and America.gov will provide answers and it will be provided immediately,” Trump said. “Anyone who has used Grok or Gemini or ChatGPT will understand instantly how to use America.gov.”

It was developed with the assistance of Google’s Gemini and SpaceXAI’s Grok, according to Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder who led development of the site for the Trump administration. (SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, was in attendance at the event.) In 2027, the site will move “from answers to actions,” Gebbia said.

Nevertheless, Trump encouraged Americans to start using America.gov right away. “This took a while to bring it to a point where it’s so good,” Trump said. “America.gov is a declaration to the world that every citizen of our nation will be treated with respect and dignity.”

The functionality of America.gov at launch, however, was awkward for Trump. By providing summaries of official government data and reports, it easily and comprehensively debunks many of the falsehoods that Trump frequently promotes.

For example, on Sunday, Trump repeated his frequent claim that grocery prices have “come way down” from when Biden was in office.

On Tuesday morning, America.gov was definitive: “Official BLS grocery prices (food at home) have not fallen sharply since January 2025.” In fact, prices have gone up. Helpfully, it provided Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data that proved Trump’s claim was not true.

By Tuesday afternoon, however, America.gov refused to answer the question.

In other words, after providing accurate information, the Trump administration made the website much less useful.

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By Tuesday evening, however, America.gov’s chatbot was answering these kinds of questions again.

At an August 10 event with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump claimed that the United States was “requiring 72 jabs for our beautiful, healthy, lovely, delicate little children.”

America.gov made it clear that the U.S. did not require 72 shots. Rather, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides guidance for clinicians. It said CDC materials have described protecting children from 14 diseases before age 2, and that “combination vaccines mean fewer injections than the number of diseases covered.”

At a September 4 event, Trump claimed that “tens of thousands of farms and ranches went bankrupt” during the Biden administration. On Tuesday morning, America.gov made clear that this was false. In fact, there were just 139 Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies in 2023.

On September 9, Trump claimed that, as a result of his efforts, Americans now “pay the lowest prices in the entire world for prescription drugs.” America.gov informed users that “[o]fficial U.S. data do not show that Americans pay the lowest prescription-drug prices in the entire world.”

Famously, Trump consistently claims that he “won the presidency three times.” America.gov was having none of it: “Winning twice (2016 and 2024) is not three presidencies.”

Will America.gov continue to tell the truth? Time will tell.

Since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump, who is constitutionally prohibited from running for president again, has raised over $400 million through his super PAC, MAGA Inc. Trump has made it clear that he has complete authority over the funds, although such direct control is prohibited by law. “This is money from MAGA Inc. This is my money that I control,” Trump said. “I can spend it for what I want to spend it for.”

The amount raised by Trump’s super PAC is unprecedented. It is a larger war chest than any entity has ever had to spend in a midterm election. Super PACs supporting former President Joe Biden, for example, raised $57 million in the year after his election. (Biden was also eligible to run again in 2024.)

So how is Trump raising so much money?

Over the last 20 months, Trump’s super PAC has repeatedly received large donations from corporations or individuals that are seeking — or have recently received — favorable treatment from the Trump administration.

In MAGA Inc.’s latest September filing, it reported a $1 million donation from Phillip Sarofim that it received on August 21. Sarofim is the founder and CEO of Trousdale Ventures, a venture capital firm. (Sarofim previously donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, according to the New York Times.)

Sarofim’s Trousdale Ventures is a major investor in CesiumAstro, which makes communications systems for satellites. Trousdale Ventures has led multiple rounds of financing for the company. CesiumAstro is listed under Sarofim’s “Notable Deals” on his company bio.

In January, CesiumAstro “announced it secured a historic $200 million financing package from the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM),” which is part of the Trump administration. The package included a “$185 million EXIM-authorized debt facility” and a “$15 million revolving credit facility from J.P. Morgan.” In May, EXIM named CesiumAstro as the “Make More in America (MMIA) Deal of the Year.”

On September 9, shortly after Sarofim’s donation to MAGA Inc., CesiumAstro’s loan from EXIM was formally increased to $280 million, “represent[ing] the Bank’s largest loan approval in the MMIA program to date.”

Correlation, of course, does not equal causation. But it is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern.

Trump administration backs Crypto.com, which has donated $35 million to MAGA Inc., in high-stakes litigation

Earlier this year, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) intervened on behalf of Crypto.com in a high-stakes lawsuit over whether Crypto.com and other prediction markets could operate without complying with state gambling laws. This came just 25 days after MAGA Inc. received a $5 million donation from Crypto.com’s parent company. In April, the CFTC filed unprecedented lawsuits against several states to block their efforts to rein in prediction markets. To date, Crypto.com has donated $35 million to MAGA Inc., making the company MAGA Inc.’s single largest donor.

After $5 million MAGA Inc. donation, Trump blocked rule that would have prevented a medical supply company from charging Medicare

In February 2025, Extremity Care, a company that sells extremely expensive “skin substitute” bandages, donated $5 million to MAGA Inc. Six days later, Trump made a post criticizing a pending Biden-era rule that would have blocked Medicare from covering Extremity Care’s products. Then in April 2025, the Trump administration delayed the rule so it would not take effect until January 2026. This allowed Extremity Care to continue charging Medicare up to thousands of dollars per square inch for its products. The rule has since been formally withdrawn.

Trump administration takes action sought by a small Native American tribe that donated $2 million to MAGA Inc.

As Trump retook office, a small Native American tribe, the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, gave Trump’s inauguration fund $1 million. For years, the Yocha Dehe had been trying to stop another tribe from building a casino close to its own. Soon after this donation, the Department of the Interior (DOI) sent a letter rescinding a previous determination that the land for the competing casino was eligible for gaming. The other tribe sued and a judge reinstated the eligibility temporarily, but still allowed DOI to reconsider its determination. During this reconsideration process, the Yocha Dehe donated $2 million to MAGA Inc.

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Days after receiving $5 million MAGA Inc. donation from tobacco company, Trump administration green lights fruit-flavored vapes

In April, two days after Reynolds American donated $5 million to MAGA Inc., Trump met with Reynolds executives at one of his golf courses. At the meeting, the executives complained about a ban on selling fruit-flavored vapes due to their appeal to children. Before the meeting was over, Trump had called the head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and within a week, Reynolds and other tobacco companies were allowed to sell fruit-flavored vapes. (The FDA commissioner reportedly resigned in protest.)

After pharmaceutical company sends MAGA Inc. $1 million, FDA goes quiet

On May 26, the FDA sent a letter to QOL Medical, a pharmaceutical company, alleging that the company had misled providers by trying to push one of its very expensive products as a treatment for symptoms that it had not been proven to help. QOL had 15 days to respond to the letter, which could have put QOL products at risk of being excluded from federal health care programs. Within that 15-day window, QOL’s CEO sent a $1 million check to MAGA Inc. By July, the FDA had not acted on its letter.

As TikTok co-owner donated $16 million to MAGA Inc., Trump repeatedly delayed ban

In the first half of 2025, billionaire Jeff Yass, co-founder of the trading firm Susquehanna International Group (SIG), donated $16 million to MAGA Inc. During the same time period, Trump repeatedly postponed a domestic ban on TikTok, which was required by law. SIG owns around 15% of TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and Yass personally owns 7%.

After nursing home industry donates $4.8 million to MAGA Inc., Trump administration abandons rule requiring increased staffing levels

Last year, the nursing home industry was trying to convince the Trump administration to permanently block a Biden-era rule that required increased staffing levels. During August and September 2025, the industry had donated a total of $4.8 million to MAGA Inc. Less than a month after industry executives had lunch with Trump to press their case, the Trump administration stopped defending the rule in court.

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Trump delays toll bridge opening after MAGA Inc. received $1 million from owner of competing roadway

In January 2026, Matthew Moroun, whose family operates the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, made a $1 million donation to MAGA Inc. A few weeks later, Moroun met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to discuss a competing bridge that was about to open. Within hours of that meeting, Trump posted on social media that he would “not allow” the new bridge to proceed and in June, the opening of the bridge was delayed.

After Trump administration drops an enforcement action against their company, crypto executives donate over $10 million to MAGA Inc.

In June, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, founders of the crypto exchange Gemini, donated over $10 million in bitcoin to MAGA Inc. This came less than a month after the Trump administration dismissed an enforcement action brought by the Biden administration against Gemini.

Private prison operator donated $1.4 million to MAGA Inc. as it received contracts worth $165 million annually

In July, GEO Group, one of the country’s largest private prison operators, announced it had secured a five-year contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to run a detention center in Colorado for $85 million a year. Three days later, GEO Group donated $1 million to MAGA Inc. Two weeks after that, GEO Group announced another $80 million annual contract with ICE and then donated an additional $413,000 to MAGA Inc. two days later.

Two criminals were pardoned by Trump shortly after their relatives donated millions to MAGA Inc.

In at least two cases, Trump has pardoned relatives of major donors to MAGA Inc. In April 2025, he pardoned Paul Walczak, a nursing home executive who pleaded guilty to tax crimes, just three weeks after his mother, Elizabeth Fago, attended a $1 million per-person fundraising dinner at Mar-a-Lago where attendees were promised face-time with Trump. He pardoned Julio Herrera Velutini, a banker indicted on bribery charges who had pled guilty to making an illegal political contribution, in January after Herrera’s daughter donated $3.5 million to MAGA Inc.

Jay Feely, a former NFL kicker and CBS Sports analyst, is running for Congress in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District. According to his campaign website, one of his top issues is “protecting women’s sports.” According to Feely, “radical gender ideology is destroying fairness and opportunity for young women, and weak leaders are letting it happen.”

Most of Feely’s commentary is geared toward excluding trans women from participating in women’s sports. This is largely a non-issue, as the NCAA has already limited participation in women’s athletics to “student-athletes assigned female at birth,” trans women are now barred from competing in women’s divisions in the Olympics, and there are no openly trans women competing in any professional sports in the United States. Most states, including Arizona, also ban trans girls from participating in girls sports.

This raises the question as to why Feely has made the issue central to his campaign. Is he truly concerned about women’s sports? Or is he just interested in exploiting women’s athletics as a political cudgel?

Unlike many congressional candidates, Feely has a lengthy history of public commentary before he entered the political arena. To gain insight into his real beliefs, Popular Information reviewed what Feely has said over the years about women’s and girls’ sports on television, during podcasts, and in other forums.

Feely has several daughters and has enthusiastically supported their athletic development, coaching the girls high school soccer team. His team won the state championship. But Feely’s public discussion of that experience, along with other comments, has also revealed his retrograde views about how females approach athletic competition, the economic value of women’s sports, and the skills of professional female athletes.

On a September 2021 episode of What’s Next with Eric Wood, a podcast hosted by a former NFL center, Feely said that girls’ athletic performance is dictated by their emotional state while “guys” can easily set their emotions aside:

For girls, girls are so emotional that to go out and play their best, they have to be right emotionally. You know, whereas guys, like, we can fight in the locker room. And I’m like, those don’t matter. Like, you can fight and then go out and like, it doesn’t matter. So what? That’s done with and we can go play the game. And for girls, like, if they’re not right emotionally, they’re not going to go out and play their best.

Feely also discussed his experience coaching girls soccer on an April 2020 episode of the When The Game Ends podcast. He said that girls cared more about their personal relationships with other players than success on the field. “Girls are so emotional,” Feely said. “They care more about the way they make people feel and the camaraderie than they do about winning.”

During the same podcast, Feely noted that coaching girls was “a little bit different than coaching guys.” He relayed a story when “every girl” started crying over a practice that wasn’t going well (even though he was not “riding them hard”) and he was forced to cancel practice the next day:

I remember there’s one, one practice this year. We’re getting ready. It was in the playoffs and we had a game coming up two days later and we had the worst practice we had maybe in four years, you know, just awful. No one could do anything. And the girls were completely emotional. And at one point I look over and there’s literally like four girls crying and I’m not even getting on them. I’m not like riding them hard. They’re just emotional. I think the pressure of the moment, you know, it’s kind of getting to them all. And so I have jokingly told our captains, like, go take them over, get some water, you guys hug it out, get all your crying out and then come back. And I turn around about two minutes later I look over and they literally are all over there crying like every girl is over there crying and they’re all hugging each other and I look at my coaches and I’m like alright we can’t practice tomorrow we gotta do something different.

Feely said that maybe if he coached girls for “six more years” he would “understand them” because “I’m not sure I do right now.”

Discussing female professional athletes, Feely has been more caustic.

In the summer of 2025, WNBA players were negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement. The minimum salary of about $66,000 was forcing many players to get a second job, even though arenas were packed. During an August 2025 episode of Fearless with Jason Whitlock, Feely said that WNBA players should stop complaining and be grateful for the money they are making:

If they lived a real life and they were they were making, you know, 50, 60 grand as a teacher or a coach or, you know, going out, getting a job, starting out in sales, having to travel all over the place, not being home, you know, making 60 grand a year. I think they’d have a different perspective. I think every person at WNBA would appreciate a lot more. They wouldn’t complain near as much about what they’re making. I think that holds true for the NFL and other sports as well.

Prior to his interview with Feely, Whitlock delivered a monologue calling the WNBA “the most unlikable league in the history of American sports by far.” He described WNBA players as wanting “all the glory, none of the work” and blasted their “entitlement.” Whitlock criticized Diana Taurasi, one of the greatest WNBA players of all time, for advocating for more money because, in his estimation, millions of men are better at basketball.

“I heard all your commentary,” Feely volunteered to Whitlock. “I don’t disagree with it at all.”

Feely has also said, as a then-49-year-old retired kicker, he could best many professional female athletes. On a June 2025 episode of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show, Feely said that he “could take on the women’s U.S. national team in soccer.” On the same show he said that he plays “with LPGA girls in golf” at his country club and “when I play well and I putt well, I can beat them head to head.” Feely said he can beat LPGA golfers even though he is a two handicap and “not great.”

A spokesperson for the Feely campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Between September 5 and September 21, Elon Musk’s America PAC spent about $1 million on ads accusing Democratic candidates of supporting “taxpayer-funded sex change surgeries on kids.” The catch? None of these candidates have said they support taxpayer funding for such surgeries (which are extremely rare), and several explicitly oppose the proceedures.

On Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) and 11 other state attorneys general settled a lawsuit to block Paramount, which is controlled by the Trump-supporting Ellison family, from acquiring Warner Bros. A real settlement would have included an agreement from Paramount to divest important assets. But the deal did not require any divestiture, or any meaningful concessions by Paramount.

This week, New York City announced a historic enforcement action against DoorDash for underpaying or delaying payments to workers. The company will pay $131.5 million, with over $115 million going to more than 260,000 workers who were underpaid. The city said it was “the largest worker settlement in New York City history and the largest settlement involving food delivery workers in the United States.”

The best of the rest

In 2020, the FBI launched an investigation into the relationship between the former CEO of a defense contractor and the staff of Senator Susan Collins (R-ME). “The senator’s office steered government contracts worth millions toward the company while her campaign was pumping [the CEO] and his network for donations,” ProPublica reported, citing emails it reviewed. But then Trump began his second term and purged the unit working on public corruption investigations. (ProPublica)

The Associated Press reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding thousands of detainees who are subject to final deportation orders,” making it harder for their families and lawyers to find them or to file additional legal challenges. (Associated Press)

Last year, when Trump administration housing chief Bill Pulte looked into the mortgages of prominent Trump opponents like New York Attorney General Letitia James, he also pulled mortgage records for Attorney General Todd Blanche. According to officials who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, Pulte investigated Blanche, who was the deputy AG at the time, in order to pressure him into more aggressively investigating Trump’s opponents. (Wall Street Journal)

In 2025, journalists were arrested 32 times and assaulted 170 times in the United States. This year, things are not looking better as journalists covering the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown have been assaulted by federal agents. Reporters who are immigrants themselves have been detained by ICE, and at least one has been deported. (The Guardian)

Numerical information

$6.50: The price of a gallon of diesel, an all-time record.

760,000: The number of people Vice President JD Vance announced that the Trump administration was removing from Affordable Care Act coverage, alleging fraud.

20%: According to a new report from the Urban Institute, one in five middle-income renters could not afford to pay their rent at some point in 2025. In 2024, that number was 14%.

Quote of the week

“I struggle to understand the mindset and the psychology of a person who makes billions of dollars in the greatest country in the history of the world and decides to use that money, not to maybe provide health care to people who need it…”

– Vice President JD Vance at a Tuesday press conference during which he announced the ACA removals.

Photo of the week

This week, New York City announced a historic $131.5 million enforcement action against food delivery app DoorDash for underpaying or delaying payments to workers. The company will pay more than $115 million to over 260,000 workers who were underpaid. DoorDash will also pay over $16 million in civil penalties and costs.

In a press release, the city said it was “the largest worker settlement in New York City history and the largest settlement involving food delivery workers in the United States.”

According to DoorDash, the median amount paid to workers “will be around $48.” City officials said that over 27,000 workers are owed over $1,000, and around 700 workers are owed over $10,000, the New York Times reported.

“When a worker earns a wage, they deserve to be paid that wage — not tomorrow, not after a lawsuit, but on time and in full,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a press release. “The size of this settlement shows the damage done to workers by wage theft,” Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su said. “But it also shows that enforcement matters.”

The settlement stemmed from an investigation by the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) into allegations by DoorDash workers that the company had not properly paid them. DCWP additionally uncovered that DoorDash had been violating a 2023 rule setting a minimum pay rate. The rule “requires companies to pay couriers a base wage of $22.13 per hour, multiplied by the sum of all workers’ total delivery trip time and time spent waiting between orders,” according to Bloomberg.

According to DoorDash, the majority of the settlement (over $83 million) covers violations of the minimum pay rules, including not properly paying for “on-call time,” or the time workers spend on the app waiting between deliveries.

In a statement posted to its website, DoorDash argued that it “calculated on-call time differently than the City,” stating that while it “believe[d] our approach was fair, practical, and legal… rather than spend years fighting over whose method was right, we chose to pay Dashers sooner and use the City’s method going forward.” The company also blamed errors on technical problems or complicated situations.

“Simply put, we screwed up,” DoorDash said in the statement. “Our mistakes meant some Dashers were underpaid or paid late. While these mistakes weren’t intentional, that doesn’t make them okay.”

As part of the settlement, DoorDash also agreed to a compliance monitoring program. The company will submit monthly data reports for three years, make software updates, and create internal controls to prevent new violations. Two worker advocacy groups are also partnering with the city to develop software that will allow workers to share data with the city about their trips and pay.

Affected workers will begin receiving emails about payments next month. At the beginning of next year, there will be a second round of payments as “DoorDash is still correcting elements of the compensable-time calculation logic that caused additional underpayments.”

DoorDash spent over $1 million to defeat Mamdani

DoorDash spent heavily to defeat Mamdani in last year’s election. On May 8, 2025, DoorDash donated $1 million to Fix the City, a super PAC supporting mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo. At the time, it was “the single largest donation in the race,” according to Politico. (In June, Michael Bloomberg donated $5 million to Fix the City, surpassing DoorDash.)

DoorDash’s super PAC, Local Economies Forward NY, spent over $368,000 on advertisements and other campaign content supporting Cuomo in the lead-up to the Democratic mayoral primary in June 2025. On June 13, 2025, Local Economies Forward NY also donated $150,000 to Competent New York, a committee launched by a public sector union in support of Democratic mayoral candidate Adrienne Adams.

“We’re committed to supporting leaders who prioritize practical, pro-local economy solutions that encourage growth and innovation,” John Horton, DoorDash’s head of public policy for North America, told Politico in May 2025.

Mamdani campaigned on a pledge to further regulate delivery apps. “This is a city where we will choose our own mayor,” Mamdani said in September 2025. “It’s not going to be Donald Trump… It’s not going to be DoorDash.”

Mamdani made the DoorDash donation a campaign issue at a debate with other mayoral candidates, including Cuomo. “I find it ridiculous to hear Andrew Cuomo talk about how we need to regulate the apps,” Mamdani said in June 2025. “How are you going to regulate DoorDash when they are giving you a million dollars to influence your street safety regulations and your labor regulations?”

DoorDash sued to block laws protecting delivery workers

In 2023, DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub sued New York City over the minimum pay rules that DoorDash has now violated. The lawsuit highlights that DoorDash was (or should have been) aware of the rules and what they required.

The delivery apps argued that the pay minimum would force them to increase prices and cut the number of delivery drivers. While the judge in the case initially blocked the pay minimum, he ultimately allowed it to proceed in September 2023. DoorDash and the other delivery apps appealed this decision, but a New York state appeals court denied them again, and the rule took effect in December 2023.

In 2025, DoorDash and Uber Eats sued New York City again, this time in federal court, to prevent the city from enforcing new laws on how consumers can tip drivers through delivery apps. Until December 2023, the apps allowed customers to tip their drivers at checkout, but the platforms switched to a model that only allowed tipping at the end of a delivery. The city found that this led to significantly fewer tips for drivers, so they enacted a regulation mandating an up-front tipping option. DoorDash and Uber Eats argued this would cause a loss of “goodwill” among customers, but a judge refused to block the regulation in a January 2026 ruling.

DoorDash’s legal troubles beyond NYC

In addition to the New York City settlement, DoorDash has doled out millions of dollars over the last few years to resolve lawsuits and investigations across the country related to pay and other benefits for its drivers.

Between 2020 and 2025, DoorDash reached four settlements with Washington, D.C., Illinois, New York state, and Chicago over DoorDash using tips from customers to cover drivers’ baseline pay. For example, if a driver was guaranteed to be paid $10 by DoorDash for an order and the customer tipped $3, then DoorDash would only pay $7 instead of giving the full $10 in addition to the tip. The lawsuits alleged that DoorDash misled customers about how the tips would be used.

To settle the lawsuits, DoorDash paid $2.5 million in D.C., $11.25 million in Illinois, $16.75 million in New York state, and $18 million in Chicago. (The Chicago lawsuit also included other allegations, so only a small portion of the settlement covered lost tips for drivers.)

In 2021, DoorDash settled claims that it misclassified drivers in Massachusetts and California for $100 million. The drivers alleged that they should have been classified as employees, but DoorDash had been treating them as gig workers, which hindered their ability to receive a minimum wage, overtime pay, and compensation for costs like fuel and mileage.

DoorDash has also settled investigations in San Francisco and Seattle over allegations that the company did not provide mandatory healthcare and sick leave benefits to drivers. DoorDash paid $5.3 million in the San Francisco case and $1.6 million in the Seattle case.

Paramount, controlled by Trump-supporting media mogul David Ellison, is attempting a $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. The combined company would own two of the largest movie studios (Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures), two of the largest streaming platforms (Paramount+ and HBO Max), and a slew of broadcast and cable TV networks (CBS, CNN, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Showtime, HBO, TNT, TBS, truTV, Animal Planet, Cartoon Network, and Food Network).

On July 13, after the Department of Justice declined to challenge the transaction on antitrust grounds, a group of 12 Democratic attorneys general, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, filed suit. Their complaint argued that the proposed merger “would extinguish competition between Paramount and Warner Bros. and inflict substantial harm on movie theatres, basic cable distributors, and, ultimately, audiences nationwide.”

In short order, Bonta and the other attorneys general had Paramount over a barrel. On July 20, a federal judge granted a request for a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking the merger. The court’s order did not require the states to post a bond, which is sometimes required to cover potential losses to the defendant if the lawsuit is ultimately unsuccessful.

Paramount, eager to avoid an even more damaging preliminary injunction, agreed on July 24 not to proceed with the merger until five days after a ruling on the merits of the suit or June 1, 2027. This created a big problem for Paramount because it had agreed as part of its offer to Warner Bros. to pay $7 million per day if the deal did not close by October 1, 2026.

On August 17, Paramount reversed course and attempted to amend its stipulation to require the states to post a $1.88 billion bond to cover the $7 million daily ticking fee and other costs. A hearing was scheduled for September 24 on that issue. There was no indication, however, that Paramount’s gambit would be successful. The same judge had already granted a TRO without requiring a bond and Paramount voluntarily stipulated to delay the closing pending a ruling on the merits without a bond.

Paramount paired its more aggressive legal strategy with threats to leave California if the lawsuit continued. This bullying tactic convinced several prominent Democratic officials in California, including Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, to call on Bonta to settle.

On Monday, days away from a hearing that likely would have left Paramount in an even weaker negotiating position, Bonta and the other attorneys general agreed to drop the lawsuit. A real settlement would have included an agreement from Paramount to divest important assets — some of its cable TV assets like CNN or its 49% interest in a third movie studio, Miramax. But the deal, formalized in a consent decree, did not require any divestiture.

The consent decree, moreover, does not include any real concessions by Paramount.

A prime example of the vacuousness of the settlement is the requirement for an “Editorial Independence Board.” The consent decree requires the new combined entity to create this group within 180 days of the merger closing. The Editorial Independence Board will be responsible for “establishing and monitoring adherence to ethical journalism as defined by journalism industry best practices and to editorial independence.”

That sounds great, but the details of how the Editorial Independence Board functions are less encouraging. First, the five members of the Editorial Independence Board are all selected by the combined entity’s board of directors. The board of directors is fully controlled by David Ellison and his father Larry Ellison, a MAGA billionaire. The Ellison family will control 77.5% of voting shares in the new company. In other words, an Ellison-controlled board will select five people to determine whether the Ellisons are interfering with the editorial independence of the company.

Even if the Editorial Independence Board were independent of the Ellisons, it has no power. It is tasked with “[e]stablishing a set of guiding editorial principles based on CBS News and CNN’s Standards & Practices policies and principles… of accuracy, independence, fairness, and journalistic integrity.” The Editorial Independence Board will then be responsible for “resolving any disputes between CBS News employees, CNN employees, and management of the Combined Entity regarding alleged violations of the News Editorial Principles.” There is no explanation as to how the Editorial Independence Board will resolve such disputes.

David Ellison will control the resources of the combined entity. That means he controls what kind of reporting at CBS News and CNN will be funded and what will be promoted. Since he took over CBS News in August 2025, the network’s news coverage has shifted to the right. David Ellison reportedly told Trump administration officials that “he’d make sweeping changes to CNN“ as part of his campaign to win Trump’s support for the merger.

It is not surprising that the concept of an “Editorial Independence Board” was first floated by Ari Emanuel, a business partner of David Ellison who supported the merger, last month.

Other major sections of the consent decree are similarly toothless.

Paramount’s empty pledge to release 30 movies per year

As part of the settlement, Paramount committed to distributing at least 30 films per year across both studios for five years. For the first two years, Paramount is required to distribute 30 films, of which at least 20 must be wide-release films. For the following three years, the company must release at least 32 films. At least four of the films released each year must be independent films and at least 20% must be blockbusters.

If Paramount does not meet this requirement, after a six-month cure period, “the company will be required to divest Miramax Studios and must pay $30 million per missed film,” with the majority of the money going toward health care and retirement funds for workers.

But this requirement is something that David Ellison has repeatedly volunteered to do for months. In March, David Ellison said, “[W]e are committed to delivering a broad pipeline of high quality storytelling, including 15 theatrical films per year per studio, for a total of at least 30 films annually.” In April, David Ellison repeated the sentiment, telling a crowd at CinemaCon, “I wanted to look every single one of you in the eye and give you my word once we combine with Warner Bros., we are going to make a minimum of 30 films across both studios.” In a New York Times op-ed written by David Ellison in August, he reaffirmed the pledge.

The two studios are already planning on releasing more than 30 movies next year. According to Deadline, as of September, the two studios have a combined “36 movies on the release schedule for 2027.” The studios also already have 25 movies scheduled to be released in 2028. This is not a significant increase from what the studios are set to release this year. In 2026, the studios are scheduled to “release a combined 28 films nationwide,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Furthermore, Paramount is not even required to create all of the films itself. The settlement states that “at least fifty percent (50%) of the Films subject to this section shall be produced or jointly produced by the Combined Entity.” This means that Paramount could just distribute films made by others to meet the requirement. “So in fact, if you add up the numbers, Ellison promised to make fewer films going forward than Paramount and Warner are putting out today,” Matt Stoller wrote in BIG.

The settlement also includes a provision that states that the company will not be responsible for the requirements laid out in the agreement if “force majeure events beyond the Parties’ reasonable control” take place. This includes circumstances like “war,” “hurricanes and other major storms,” and “pandemics.” But the provision also includes “strikes,” “labor disruptions,” and “economic recessions” as valid circumstances to excuse Paramount from its obligations under the consent decree.

“The terms of this settlement at this moment in our nation’s history will be extraordinarily damaging,” Jane Fonda said in a statement for the Committee for the First Amendment, the group she founded, noting that the settlement states “that all its terms are void if there is a strike, labor disruptions, or an economic recession—meaning this settlement is also a union-buster.”

But Republicans do have one thing in their corner: the world’s richest person, Elon Musk.

After a falling out with Trump and the Republican Party last year, Musk has begun financially supporting Republicans again through his super PAC, America PAC. The New York Times reported in July that Musk “authorized his super PAC to spend $100 million to $120 million” to boost Republicans in the midterms.

How is Musk spending his ad dollars? He is playing the hits.

Across the country, Musk’s America PAC is spending money on advertising attacking Democrats for purportedly supporting “taxpayer-funded sex change surgeries on kids.” But gender-affirming surgeries are extremely rare for minors in the United States. A 2024 study by Harvard researchers “found little to no utilization of gender-affirming surgeries by transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) minors in the U.S.” And transgender youths themselves make up a very small part of the population.

Research has shown that gender-affirming care can be beneficial for the mental health of transgender youths and can save lives. But this care centers around supporting the children, not surgery.

Musk has spent years attacking trans people. Musk has an estranged transgender daughter, whom he has described as “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.” (In 2022, in a California court filing to change her name, Musk’s daughter wrote, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”)

Across Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, and Alaska, Musk’s America PAC spent about $1 million on these ads between September 5 and 21. America PAC has spent the majority of this money attacking Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, spending over $500,000 in Texas.

But the claims in the ads are not true. None of the candidates being attacked by Musk’s super PAC actually support these surgeries for minors.

Texas

America PAC’s ads attacking Talarico reference a Fox News article from March 2026 which states, “[Talarico] also voted against a bill to ban sex change surgeries for children.” (The Fox News article never mentions taxpayer funding.)

The underlying bill, Texas SB 14, which Talarico voted against in 2023 as a state representative, not only banned surgery for minors, but other gender-affirming care. Talarico called the bill “overly broad” and instead supported an amendment to the bill that would have only banned surgery. (State Medicaid funding for “sex change operations” was already prohibited in Texas, including for adults, before SB 14 was passed.)

Earlier this month, Talarico said in an interview with Fox News that he does not support gender-affirming surgeries for minors. When asked if he would support a nationwide ban on such surgeries, Talarico said, “Absolutely.”

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Ohio

America PAC’s ads about Sherrod Brown, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Ohio, cite a 2023 interview in which Brown was asked about a bill sponsored by then-Senator JD Vance (R-OH) that would have made it a felony to provide surgery or other gender-affirming care to trans minors.

Brown said, “A child’s health care decisions are between them, their parents, their families and their doctors.” He did not offer support for “taxpayer-funded sex changes on children” as the ads claim.

Vance’s bill was referred to committee and never received a vote.

Iowa

In its ads attacking Josh Turek, an Iowa state representative running for Senate, America PAC cites his 2025 vote against Iowa House File 1049, a bill funding the state’s health and veterans departments. There was a provision in the bill that stated state Medicaid money “shall not be used for reimbursement for sex reassignment surgery or associated procedures.” It was a blanket ban, with no mention of minors.

At the time of this vote, such surgeries for children were already banned outright in Iowa. (Turek was absent from the Iowa House when the ban was passed in 2023.) So his vote against the 2025 budget bill had absolutely no impact on “taxpayer-funded sex changes for children,” which were not occurring anyway.

In June, a spokesperson for Turek told PolitiFact that he does not support surgeries for trans minors.

Michigan

America PAC’s ad about Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, is deceptive. It features clips of a viral exchange between El-Sayed and Fox News host Jesse Watters in which Watters asks El-Sayed if he supports surgeries for trans minors. It splices in this response from: “Do you really want to have this conversation? Are you circumcised?... You probably should want to move on.”

The ad takes El-Sayed’s “move on” line out of context. It says, “Abdul El Sayed supports sex changes for minors and tells parents they should move on.” He was addressing Watters, not parents.

In the interview, El-Sayed said, “I just think the government shouldn’t tell you what kind of healthcare you should have,” adding, “I’m not advocating anything.”

El-Sayed made similar statements at a recent campaign event. “The decision about what healthcare is necessary ought to be held between a patient — and or their parents if they’re under the age of 18 — and their doctor,” El-Sayed said. “That’s it.”

Alaska

America PAC claims that Mary Peltola, a former Alaska representative running for Senate, supports taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgeries (without specifying such surgeries for minors).

To support its claim, America PAC points to a vote Peltola took in 2024 against an amendment to a defense policy bill. The amendment barred dependent minors of service members from getting most gender-affirming care through the Exceptional Family Member Program (EFMP).

EFMP is a program meant to provide support to military families coordinating care for family members with special needs. The EFMP program, however, never provided surgeries for trans people because the program does not provide any medical procedures. That is provided through TRICARE, which does not fund such surgeries. Peltola never voted for anything that would have provided taxpayer funding for “gender transition surgeries.”

The amendment was not included in the final version of the law. Peltola ultimately voted to pass the bill, which included other restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors.

Legally speaking, Trump cannot directly control how it is spent. Super PACs must be technically independent, which means they cannot be controlled by an officeholder or candidate. Generally, this is accomplished by giving strategic and spending authority to a close ally.

At a press conference earlier this month, Trump made it clear that he does not intend to pay attention to this legal requirement:

I’m going to spend whatever amount of money necessary to try and help us. This is money from MAGA Inc. This is my money that I control. Now, this is separate from the RNC… I can spend it for what I want to spend it for. But I’m going to help a lot of the Congressmen and Senators that need help.

In an August interview, a reporter described MAGA Inc. as a super PAC “your allies control.” Trump quickly corrected the reporter. “Not my allies. I control it,” he said. Trump’s comments are now the subject of a Federal Election Commission complaint, although the agency does not have enough commissioners to function.

Last week, Popular Information covered MAGA Inc.’s initial ad spending, which is mostly being routed through a spinoff PAC called No Going Back. The report revealed that many of these ads contained false or hypocritical claims.

Since then, MAGA Inc. has released several new ads through No Going Back, targeting new races. This new batch of ads, which has received almost no media scrutiny, is even more brazen.

For example, in Florida’s 25th District, a new No Going Back ad attacks Congressman Jared Moskowitz (D) for “repeatedly violat[ing] federal law designed to stop Congress from insider trading” and failing “to properly disclose nearly 100 stock trades worth up to $1.7 million.” It notes that the New York Times has “noticed suspicious trades around Moskowitz.”

MAGA Inc., through No Going Back, has spent over $1.2 million in just five days airing this ad in Moskowitz’s district, blanketing the district with millions of impressions.

Stock trading by federal elected officials is a bipartisan problem. Members of Congress have influence on a range of issues that impact stock prices and should not be able to profit from that information by trading stocks. Many members of Congress, however, like to trade stocks, so the law has not changed. It only requires members to disclose their stock transactions within 45 days.

It is true that Moskowitz has made 580 stock trades from 2023 to the present, with a total transaction value of $1.18 million to $10.1 million. On two occasions in August 2024, Moskowitz filed his disclosures late. These late filings involved 94 trades, resulting in a $200 fine. In 2023, The New York Times reported that Moskowitz “sold shares of Seacoast Banking Corporation worth $65,000 to $150,000” belonging to his children around the time “he had attended a bipartisan congressional briefing” on the banking crisis.

But what the MAGA Inc. ad attacking Moskowitz fails to disclose is that the same laws “designed to stop Congress from insider trading” also apply to Trump. Since 2025, Trump has made almost 28,700 trades of securities with a total value of $898 million to $2.87 billion. Almost all of Trump’s trades were disclosed late (some by more than a year) and Trump paid multiple $200 fines. This is the same conduct — at a much larger scale — that Trump is spending millions to convince Florida voters is disqualifying for Moskowitz.

A Bloomberg analysis found that, since returning to office, Trump has traded more securities than all members of Congress combined.

As president, of course, Trump has far more influence over policy and stock prices than an individual Congressman. Popular Information has documented numerous instances where Trump bought stock in a company and then praised the same company days (or even hours) later.

The MAGA Inc. attacks on stock trades are not limited to Moskowitz. Through No Going Back, MAGA Inc. is running an ad attacking Congressman Vicente Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat representing the 34th District. The ad accuses Gonzalez of “hiding his secret stock trades.”

Since 2018, however, Gonzalez has made just 13 stock transactions with a total value of $646,000 to $1.57 million. In 2022, Gonzalez failed to timely report a single stock sale worth between $1,000 and $15,000. The ad cites a Business Insider report about that singular late filing. No Going Back has spent about $130,000 so far on the Gonzalez ad, with most of the spending on digital platforms.

A third No Going Back ad on stock trading targets Congressman Thomas Suozzi, a Democrat representing New York’s 3rd District. Suozzi’s record of stock disclosure is poor, particularly during his first stint from 2017 to 2023. Suozzi failed to file any periodic transaction reports until September 2021, when he reported over 400 trades late. An ethics investigation was dismissed after it failed to uncover evidence that Suozzi’s conduct was intentional.

Overall, Suozzi has engaged in 669 transactions with a total value of between $9 million and $28 million since first becoming a Congressman in 2017. To put that in perspective, in his second term, Trump has made 669 stock transactions roughly every two weeks. Now, Trump’s super PAC is spending over $1.1 million attacking Suozzi for stock trading.

The No Going Back ad goes beyond Suozzi’s failures and attacks him dishonestly. The ad claims that Suozzi “voted against banning congressional insider trading.”

But Suozzi voted against the stock trading ban because it had Trump’s unrelated voting restrictions (the Voter ID Act) attached. Suozzi does publicly support a stock trading ban and co-sponsors a bipartisan bill that would ban members of Congress from owning stocks.

The ad also accuses Suozzi of getting “caught breaking the law doing it just last year” because he was late disclosing purchases of Treasury bills, not stocks. Trump has been “caught breaking the law” multiple times this year for failing to disclose thousands of stock trades on time.

The crypto industry was desperate to pass the Clarity Act, which would legitimize and stabilize its business by providing it with a federal regulatory framework. Trump, who earned around $1.4 billion through his family’s crypto ventures in 2025, would be one of the primary beneficiaries of a permissive regulatory environment. On Monday, Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) released a new version that she claimed included more ethics requirements for Trump. But it does nothing to actually limit Trump’s business. (UPDATE: The Senate saw through the ruse and blocked the bill from advancing on a 49-50 vote.)

As the midterm elections approach, the AI industry has tapped a former Obama aide, Jay Carney, to build ties with Democrats. This move was celebrated by former Vice President Kamala Harris as an “encouraging effort.” But Carney brings considerable baggage to the role. After leaving the Obama administration, Carney spent years as an executive at Amazon, where he worked to quash privacy and AI regulations.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission moved to rescind a rule that aims to curb “pay-to-play” scandals relating to public pension funds. The rule prevents money managers from wooing public officials with campaign contributions. The rule was inspired by corrupt pay-to-play schemes involving pension funds in New York and California.

The best of the rest

A Bloomberg analysis found that, in the first 17 months of his second term, “Trump or his money managers made nearly 28,700 trades,” which is more than every single member of Congress combined. At the same time, Trump is seeking “to pass a stock-purchasing ban for lawmakers that would exclude him from any restrictions.” (Bloomberg)

Illegal deportations have risen under the second Trump administration. Since 2025, “judges have ruled that the Trump administration has deported more than 170 people in… violation of court orders, in defiance of legally mandated due process protections, or to countries from which they had sought or received protection from torture and persecution.” (Politico)

In May, Donald Trump Jr. got married in the Bahamas in a lavish celebration that lasted three days and spanned two private islands. Despite his roughly $300 million net worth, Trump Jr. did not foot the bill for much of the wedding. Instead, Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the celebration, despite seeming to meet Trump Jr. only recently. (ProPublica)

Numerical information

$6.7 billion: The amount that federal employees were paid by the Trump administration to not work in 2025 due to DOGE’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

$7 billion: Trump’s net worth, according to a new Forbes estimate. Trump has increased his net worth by an estimated $2.7 billion since he won the 2024 election.

21%: Decline in viewers for the premiere of CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday. The show was recently overhauled by conservative pundit Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News.

Quote of the week

“We spent more than $2 billion in FEMA funding. You’re waiting for some additional money… I’m gonna get that to you… Now if Michael [Whatley] loses, I’m not sending it. No, I’m only kidding. You’re getting it. You’re going to get it, Michael.”

– President Trump during a North Carolina rally on Wednesday

Photo of the week

On September 3, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) made a quiet announcement: the commission, which oversees Wall Street, is proposing to rescind a 16-year-old rule enacted to prevent “pay-to-play” schemes involving investment advisers and pension funds for public employees.

The rule, officially known as Advisers Act Rule 206(4)-5, prohibits investment advisers from managing money for state or local government entities for two years after they have made campaign contributions to elected officials within those entities. In other words, the rule is meant to stop investment advisers from enticing elected officials with campaign cash. It was adopted in 2010 in response to pay-to-play scandals in New York and California.

Pension funds are massive pools of money that are invested to provide for the retirement of public employees such as teachers, firefighters, and police officers. In the United States, there are over 5,000 publicly run pension funds that hold a collective $6.5 trillion in assets. Millions of public employees rely on these funds to be managed in their best interest.

Yet SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins and the two other Republican SEC commissioners (the two Democratic seats on the commission have been left vacant by the Trump administration) are arguing that prohibiting investment firms and their employees from giving money to officials who control pension funds is an attack on political expression.

In a statement, Atkins said that the rule has “effectively resulted in the suppression of political speech” because many firms prohibit their employees from making political contributions to state and local candidates. “People should not have to choose between their political speech rights and a job in a particular industry,” he said.

This sentiment about the rule being a free speech issue has been echoed by many investment adviser interest groups. For example, the president of the Investment Adviser Association (IAA) — an organization which has lobbied the SEC on various finance issues — issued a statement saying, “We have long raised concerns that the rule imposes severe consequences without regard to whether a political contribution was actually intended to influence the award of advisory business.” (The rule does allow individual investment advisers to donate up to $350 to candidates they are eligible to vote for and up to $150 to any other candidates.)

Both the SEC and interest groups like IAA argued that the rule is unnecessary because state and local laws would be sufficient to prevent pay-to-play schemes. But when the SEC initially proposed the rule, it reasoned that “pay to play practices are rarely explicit and often hard to prove.” For this reason, the SEC determined that a broad, preventative approach was “particularly appropriate.”

From Rupert Murdoch to Jeff Bezos to Elon Musk, billionaires control much of the information you read.

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What were the pay-to-play scandals that inspired the SEC’s rule?

In October 2009, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) revealed a massive pay-to-play scandal: one of its former board members, Alfred Villalobos, had accepted over $40 million in fees for acting as a middleman to help billionaire Leon Black’s private equity firm Apollo Management secure investments from CalPERS.

As a part of the scheme, Villalobos delivered $200,000 in cash bribes, stuffed in paper bags and a shoe box, to then-CalPERS CEO Fred Buenrostro on behalf of firms including Apollo Management. In exchange, Buenrostro pushed investments toward Villalobos’ clients and provided him insider information on CalPERS. According to the Wall Street Journal, CalPERS employees felt pressured by Buenrostro to accept investment opportunities brought by Villalobos. In 2013, Villalobos and Buenrostro were indicted on criminal fraud charges.

As a result of Villalobos’ scheme, CalPERS invested over $3.5 billion in various Apollo funds.

The investments that Villalobos and Buenrostro directed to Apollo Management were among CalPERS’ worst-performing during its worst fiscal year ever. In 2009, amid the nationwide financial crisis, CalPERS lost $50 billion. This shrank the fund by 23%, while the median pension fund that year shrank by 19%. CalPERS’ investments in three different Apollo funds were each down between 50% and 60%.

In New York, former state Comptroller Alan Hevesi began accepting campaign donations from Elliott Broidy, chairman of Markstone Capital Group, and his wife in 2002. In exchange, from 2003 to 2005, Hevesi approved $250 million of investments in Markstone Capital Group from New York’s Common Retirement Fund. Over several years, Hevesi eventually took a total of $500,000 in campaign contributions and roughly $500,000 in gifts and travel expenses from Broidy. In October 2010, Hevesi pleaded guilty to a state corruption charge and was later sentenced to up to four years in prison.

Broidy’s wife also donated to Hevesi’s California counterpart, Controller Steve Westly, as Westly helped secure investments from the CalPERS pension fund for Markstone. As state controller, Westly was an influential member of the CalPERS board. In addition to Markstone, he also helped two other private equity firms — Perseus and Healthpoint — secure investments from CalPERS.

Markstone, Perseus, and Healthpoint donated over $200,000 combined to Westly’s campaigns between 2002 and 2006. The firms received a total of $80 million in investments from CalPERS. In the case of Healthpoint, for example, the firm had already pitched CalPERS without success. Then, in March 2003, Healthpoint executives began meeting with Westly and donated to his campaign at several fundraisers. By March 2004, Healthpoint had received a $5 million investment from CalPERS.

The Los Angeles Times reported these transactions in 2006, when Westly was running in the Democratic primary for California governor. He lost the race. No charges were ever filed in relation to the reporting.

The AI industry has placed a huge bet on President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. For example, in the 2026 cycle alone, AI executives and corporations have donated $42 million to MAGA Inc., Trump’s super PAC.

But the political winds may be changing. Trump’s popularity is near an all-time low. Republicans could lose control of one or both chambers of Congress in November’s midterm elections.

This all comes at a time when the public is increasingly concerned about the safety of frontier AI models, data center construction, and the impact of AI on their jobs. AI companies are looking to the federal government for help.

In a essay this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for “regulation that targets all US frontier AI companies.” While this is framed around an altruistic concern about safety, Amodei acknowledged that government regulation would allow AI incumbents to coordinate their activities while avoiding “antitrust” issues. Amodei’s letter was endorsed by the two other biggest AI players, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk.

Trump, however, immediately rejected the idea. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

According to reports, the AI industry may now be hedging its bets.

According to Politico, Jay Carney, who served as White House press secretary during the Obama administration, has been tapped “to run a new initiative aimed at shaping national AI policy.” Carney has been hired by SV Angel, an investment firm led by Ron Conway, a major Democratic donor.

The new initiative is called “Project Blueprint,” which the New York Times reports is an effort to “rebuild bonds between leaders in the artificial intelligence sector and Democrats who are demanding new rules to regulate the technology.”

On X, former Vice President Kamala Harris called Carney’s hiring an “encouraging effort to bring industry and government leaders together.”

It is unclear who should be encouraged by Carney’s new role. While Carney worked for a Democratic administration, he abandoned public service more than a dozen years ago.

After leaving the Obama administration, Carney spent seven years as a hired gun for Amazon, where he reported directly to Jeff Bezos. (His official title was Senior Vice President, Global Corporate Affairs.) In that role, Carney fought against government efforts to protect privacy and regulate AI.

A 2021 Reuters article describes Carney as the “architect of [an] under-the-radar campaign to smother privacy protections.” Internal documents obtained by Reuters revealed that Carney’s “mission included defeating restrictions on artificial intelligence and biometric technologies, along with blocking efforts to make companies disclose the data they keep on consumers.”

A memo reviewed by Reuters said that such restrictions could “impede growth for [Amazon’s] Alexa-powered devices.” It celebrated Carney’s role in “killing or amending privacy bills in ‘over 20 states.’”

Early in his tenure, Carney’s team targeted “a Washington state bill to regulate biometrics, including voice recordings, fingerprints and face scans.” The bill eventually passed “but only after lobbyists for Amazon and other firms had chiseled away at its privacy protections by convincing lawmakers to insert alternative language, often verbatim.” Among other concessions, voice recordings were exempted, sparing Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant from regulation. In an internal document, Amazon celebrated that the revised legislation “would have ‘little, if any, direct impact on Amazon’s practices.’”

After joining the company, Carney criticized Amazon’s lobbying efforts as “frugal” and “narrow.” Under Carney’s leadership, by 2020, “Amazon had registered at least 180 lobbyists in 44 U.S. states, up from at least 62 lobbyists in 27 states in 2014, the year before Carney arrived.”

At Amazon, Carney expanded a program called “Watering the flowers.” According to a 2019 CNBC report, “The flowers represent elected officials, and the goal is to create a well-tended ‘garden’ of pro-Amazon policymakers, from state governors and senators down to local officials and economic development teams.”

In a 2025 interview, Carney said in his corporate roles he spent “a lot of time thinking about how we can flood the zone with our narrative.”

Carney attacked whistleblower, dismissed concerns about poor working conditions

While at Amazon, Carney also dismissed concerns about conditions in the workplace. In 2015, the New York Times published an article alleging poor conditions for Amazon’s corporate employees. The article quoted a former Amazon employee, Bo Olson, who said, “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

Two months after the article was published, Carney posted a rebuttal on Medium. To discredit their accounts, Carney included additional details about some of the employees the Times had interviewed, including Olson.

“Attributed to Bo Olson, the image of countless employees crying at their desks set the tone for a front-page story that other media outlets described as ‘scathing,’ ‘blistering,’ ‘brutal’ and ‘harsh.’ Olson’s words were so key to the narrative the Times wished to construct that they splashed them in large type just below the headline,” Carney wrote. “Here’s what the story didn’t tell you about Mr. Olson: his brief tenure at Amazon ended after an investigation revealed he had attempted to defraud vendors and conceal it by falsifying business records.” Olson denied the allegation.

In 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that Carney was directly involved in a series of posts on Twitter (now X) responding to criticisms by some politicians. In one case, an official Amazon account responded to a post from Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI) that said, “Paying workers $15/hr doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust & make workers urinate in water bottles.”

“You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us,” Amazon wrote back. (The company later apologized for the tweet and acknowledged “that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms.”) According to the Wall Street Journal, “Unlike most tweets from Amazon’s news account, these tweets were crafted by executives including Mr. Bezos and Mr. Carney.”

Carney v. unions

Carney also participated in anti-union efforts while at Amazon.

In April 2020, Carney defended Amazon’s firing of Chris Smalls, an Amazon warehouse worker who led a walkout at a Staten Island warehouse over worker protections during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amazon said that Smalls “was fired for violating a company-imposed 14-day quarantine after he came into contact with an employee who tested positive for the coronavirus.” Smalls said that he was “singled out after pleading with management to sanitize the warehouse and be more transparent about the number of workers who were sick,” arguing that others had come into contact with the positive worker “for longer periods of time,” VICE reported.

“Amazon’s warehouse workers protested because people are getting sick on the job. Their demands were not radical: a safer workplace, protective gear and paid sick leave,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wrote on X. “Amazon’s response? Retaliate by firing a worker who helped organize the walk-out.” Carney responded to the post, “I’m confused. Thought you wanted us to protect our workers? Mr. Smalls purposely violated social distancing rules, repeatedly, & was put on Paid 14-day quarantine for COVID exposure.”

Leaked notes from an internal Amazon leadership meeting obtained by VICE, however, show that “company executives discussed a plan to smear” Smalls. Leadership reportedly “discussed encouraging Amazon executives to use Smalls to discredit the wider labor movement at Amazon.”

In 2021, Carney also responded to a post from Sanders supporting an effort to unionize a warehouse in Alabama. “Amazon workers in Alabama are sick and tired of being treated like robots. They are standing up and fighting back, and I am proud to support them,” Sanders wrote. “With all due respect, Senator @BernieSanders, you’re wrong on this. We treat our employees with dignity and respect. We offer a $15 min wage, health care from day one, and a safe, inclusive workplace,” Carney wrote.

The crypto industry is desperate to pass the Clarity Act, which would legitimize and stabilize its business by providing it with a federal regulatory framework.

Critically, the Clarity Act assigns most regulatory responsibility to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), a small agency with a permissive approach to industry oversight, instead of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has a much more rigorous approach to regulation and enforcement.

One of the primary beneficiaries of the Clarity Act would be President Trump himself. As president, Trump has expanded and promoted various cryptocurrency projects, including a special visit to the White House for the largest holders of his meme coin. Trump’s latest financial disclosure revealed he personally earned about $1.4 billion in 2025 from his family’s crypto ventures, including the meme coin and World Liberty Financial. (Retail investors in the same projects have lost billions.) A permanent, relatively permissive regulatory environment would likely make Trump’s holdings even more valuable.

Concerns about Trump using the legislation to further enrich himself have been the principal obstacle to the Clarity Act’s passage in the Senate. The bill needs at least 60 votes, requiring a minimum of seven Democrats, to clear the Senate. Democrats and Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) have said they will oppose the bill unless it curbs Trump’s profiteering. A key procedural vote is expected to occur Tuesday.

On Monday, Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) released a new version of the Clarity Act that she claimed imposed meaningful ethics requirements on Trump.

“President Trump voluntarily agreed to unprecedented ethics restrictions, holding every federally elected official, judge, and their spouses to some of the toughest ethics restrictions in U.S. history,” Lummis said in a statement. “Democrats got what they wanted; now they need to take yes for an answer.”

The latest version of the Clarity Act, which runs 635 pages, does nothing to meaningfully limit Trump’s conduct.

Trump’s corrupt crypto projects are grandfathered in

The current version of the Clarity Act prohibits “covered individuals” from issuing a digital asset like a cryptocurrency or meme coin. The same group is also prohibited from sponsoring or promoting digital assets.

A “covered individual” includes the President, Vice President, members of Congress, federal judges, and other high-ranking officials. Including the President in this list is one of the concessions being promoted by Lummis.

But this will have little to no impact on Trump. On the last page of the legislation, in a provision ambiguously labeled “Application,” the bill states that the prohibitions apply only to digital assets issued or sponsored on or after the effective date of the legislation. That means the digital assets that Trump has issued and promoted — his meme coin, the World Liberty Financial token, and the USD1 stablecoin — are grandfathered in. They are legal and Trump can continue to promote them in any way he wants.

The “effective date” of the legislation is up to 360 days after the enactment of the Clarity Act, so even if the legislation is enacted this month, Trump could theoretically issue new digital assets well into 2027 that would also be grandfathered in.

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Trump does not have to meaningfully divest his holdings

The version of the Clarity Act released by Lummis has a third significant provision: “covered individuals” are prohibited from having a “significant financial interest” (defined as worth $15,000 or more) in a company that earned a plurality of its revenue from issuing or sponsoring digital assets.

The legislation, however, does not prohibit Trump from owning digital assets, which still allows him to profit from the industry he is regulating. Much of Trump’s interest in World Liberty Financial is held in tokens. The text also suggests Trump would be allowed to continue to collect his cut of new token sales as part of a grandfathered sponsorship agreement.

Trump also has a separate equity stake in World Liberty Financial — holding about 38% of the company through an LLC, according to his latest financial disclosure. But he is not required to divest his equity in crypto companies. Rather, the Clarity Act allows him to place his equity in a “blind trust.” But since Trump would know he’s placing his World Liberty Financial stake in a blind trust and the company is not publicly traded, such an action would carry little significance.

No plausible enforcement while Trump is president

Another major objection to the legislation is that only the Attorney General could bring an enforcement action. This would mean that, even if Trump failed to comply with an aspect of the law, it would require Attorney General Todd Blanche to sue him. Some Democrats demanded that state attorneys general be permitted to file suit against officials to enforce the law, to give the provisions that apply to Trump some real meaning.

The updated legislation does not provide that. The only option for state attorneys general for enforcement against officials is to file suit against Blanche seeking an injunction. Even that option is foreclosed if the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), which Trump also staffs, issues an opinion that the conduct targeted by a state attorney general is permissible. That limitation is buried on page 631 of the legislation:

In the theoretical case where an injunction is issued, it is unclear what would happen next. Even in the face of an injunction it is hard to imagine a scenario where Blanche, Trump’s former defense attorney, effectively prosecutes Trump. (State attorney generals are able to take enforcement actions against crypto exchanges directly.)

In other words, there is no plausible scenario where the law is enforced against Trump.

With Trump’s approval ratings hitting all-time lows and many Republican candidates in swing races struggling, Trump has finally begun spending some of this money. Television advertising funded by Trump’s operation has gone on the air.

The clearest sense of the scale of the spending is through advertising that has been reserved in key races. While these reservations can be changed, they offer the clearest view of both the scale of Trump’s efforts and his priorities. With the exception of Texas, this money is being routed from MAGA Inc. through a new Trump super PAC, No Going Back.

Since August 31, MAGA Inc. and No Going Back have reserved over $81 million in advertising.

According to FEC filings, the same groups are spending millions more on direct mail, text messages, and other activities.

The fact that the Trump operation felt it necessary, outside of Texas, to route public communications through a new super PAC called No Going Back illustrates the current unpopularity of the MAGA agenda. (Ads paid for directly by MAGA Inc. must include the line “MAGA Inc. is responsible for the content of this advertising.”)

The same dynamic is also found in the ads themselves. Some ads inaccurately accuse Democratic candidates of supporting MAGA policies. Other ads, in an effort to find an effective attack, simply use false or fabricated claims.

Trump, not Pappas, cut funding for rural hospitals in New Hampshire

In New Hampshire, Trump’s No Going Back PAC is running an ad attacking Congressman Chris Pappas, the Democratic Senate nominee, for voting “against vital funding for rural and vulnerable hospitals.”

This is false.

Pappas voted against H.R. 1, Trump’s signature reconciliation bill, which cut Medicaid spending in rural areas by $137 billion over ten years, according to an analysis by KFF. About one-third of that cut was offset by a $50 billion fund distributed to states. But H.R. 1 left rural healthcare, including rural hospitals, much worse off.

Pappas said he voted against the bill in July 2025 for that reason. In an August 2025 statement, Pappas said he opposed H.R. 1 because it “will have severe repercussions across New Hampshire communities, from our hospitals to our rural health care centers to our nursing homes.”

Now the Trump political operation is spending millions running an ad accusing Pappas of supporting cuts to rural health care spending because he opposed a Trump-backed bill that dramatically cut rural health care spending.

Ossoff did not vote to increase “taxes on working families” by $16.7 billion

In Georgia, a No Going Back ad accuses Senator Jon Ossoff (D) of voting “to raise taxes by over $16 billion on working families like yours.”

This isn’t true.

The ad cites Ossoff’s vote for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022. The IRA did not increase individual income tax rates for anyone. It closed some tax loopholes for individuals earning over $400,000. No working families saw their tax bill increase because of Ossoff’s vote.

What the IRA did do is create a minimum tax of 15% for profitable corporations. Some economists claim that corporate taxes will then trickle down to individuals in the form of lower wages or share prices. The $16.7 billion comes from a report attempting to quantify that effect on individuals making $200,000 or less. Even in this analysis, most of the burden falls on those making between $100,000 and $200,000 and the impact shrinks to less than $3 billion by 2027.

The ad attempts to redefine an effort to make profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes — a proposition that is quite popular among voters — as a tax increase on working families.

Cooper did not agree to release a “convicted child molester” early

In North Carolina, No Going Back says that Governor Roy Cooper (D) “released 3500 criminals, released early.” The next line is: “This convicted child molester shot a man dead.”

The ad references Cooper’s COVID-era settlement, reached with the ACLU, to release some inmates early — mostly those already scheduled to be released within a year. The ad’s implication is clear: Jimmie Earl Speight Jr., who was charged with murder in April 2021, was among that group.

This is inaccurate.

Speight Jr. was released from prison, where he was serving a sentence for car theft, in November 2020. Cooper’s settlement was signed in February 2021. Speights Jr.’s release had nothing to do with Cooper or the settlement. (Speight Jr. was included on a list associated with the settlement because the settlement, according to WRAL, “counted some people who had already been released, before the settlement, so that the actual number of people being released would be lower.”)

The No Going Back ad is one of several blaming Cooper for crimes completely unrelated to the settlement.

This week, in the lead-up to the 25th anniversary of 9/11, President Trump pushed a false personal narrative of the attack. Most notably, he claimed to have sent 100 of his own construction workers to Ground Zero to help clear rubble. However, the Trump Organization had only around a dozen employees at the time, and Trump’s construction projects were being run by contractors.

American workers are taking home a historically low share of the value they produce, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In the second quarter of 2026, the labor share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) hit its lowest level since the BLS first began tracking it in 1947. But while labor’s share of GDP is plummeting, U.S. corporate profits are ballooning. Actions by the Trump administration could drop the labor share even further.

Updated information

In July, Popular Information reported that the New York Post ran a cover claiming that “Thousands of 9/11 families demand Mamdani be banned from 25th-anniversary.” The story was about a Change.org petition started by Giovanni Galante, whose wife was among the victims of the 9/11 attacks. The New York Post article contradicted the cover, reporting that the petition had “collected over 1,100 signatures in a little over a week, including from at least 300 victims’ families.”

In an interview with Popular Information, Galante admitted that there was no actual list of family members who had signed the petition. Galante explained that he did not “go through the list and look at the names” and that the 300 figure shared with the New York Post was just his estimate. Nevertheless, multiple media outlets repeated the claim.

On September 9, Maya Sulkin, a reporter for the Free Press, promoted an interview with former New York Governor George Pataki. In a post on X, Sulkin claimed that there was a “petition against [Mamdani’s] attendance that over 100,000 victims’ families have signed.”

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An analysis by ProPublica found that more women in the U.S. are dying after ectopic pregnancies. Nearly “200 women with the condition died from 2020 to 2025, compared with about 100 in the previous six years.” The increase “has been much steeper in states that banned abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.” (ProPublica)

A New York Times analysis found that Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) “filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills during his decades-long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist.” Some of those patients were new mothers sued over unpaid bills for their deliveries. (New York Times)

On Wednesday, Hunter Biden launched a memecoin, $LAPTOP, which briefly surged to around $222, but then dropped to less than $2 by the end of the day, losing 95% of its value. Biden follows in the footsteps of other political figures, such as Donald and Melania Trump, who have launched memecoins that rapidly declined in value. (The Hill)

Numerical information

Over $100 billion: The amount of extra money that U.S. consumers have spent on gasoline and diesel since the start of the Iran War, according to the Iran War Energy Cost Tracker by Brown University.

$5,000: On Wednesday, Trump promised to send every American adult a “Trump dividend” if Republicans win both the House and Senate.

$45,000: Trump gave his executive assistant Natalie Harp and two other White House aides large gifts amounting to nearly a third of their regular salaries of $150,000 each.

Quote of the week

“I am asking you to pretend I’m on the ballot. I’m on the ballot. I’m on the ballot. Just one more time.”

– Donald Trump, 9/9/26

Photo of the week

Workers in the United States are earning a historically low share of the value they produce, according to new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS estimates that the labor share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) “was 52.8 percent in the second quarter of 2026.” This is the lowest level that the BLS has seen since it first began recording labor share in 1947.

Labor share has been on a downward trend for months. In the first quarter of 2026, labor share was 53.7%, which was, at the time, a historic low. Over the last 25 years, the labor share of income has plummeted. In the first quarter of 2000, the labor share was 63.9%.

But while labor’s share of GDP is collapsing, U.S. corporate profits are surging. In the second quarter of 2026, corporate profits increased 9% compared to the first quarter of the year, according to data released in August by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Corporate profits “increased $400.9 billion in the second quarter, compared with an increase of $74.4 billion in the first quarter,” according to the BEA.

This may be one reason why, despite there being a relatively low unemployment rate and some GDP growth, 76% of Americans rated the economic conditions in the U.S. as “poor” or “only fair,” according to a July Pew Research survey. While the economy is growing, workers are not benefiting from economic growth.

There are many factors that may be driving down wages relative to GDP, including technological advancements and accelerated globalization. In recent years, more workers are also relying on gig work, and the share of workers who are part of a union has also declined drastically in recent decades.

Instead of addressing the problem, the second Trump administration is taking steps that may push the labor share of GDP even lower.

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A costly new rule

In February, the Trump administration proposed a new rule that would make it easier for employers to classify workers as independent contractors. Classifying workers as independent contractors is usually cheaper for businesses and detrimental to workers. According to Reuters, “[e]mployees can cost businesses up to 30% more” than independent contractors.

The new rule would formally rescind a 2024 Biden administration rule that made it more difficult to classify employees as independent contractors by using a rigorous set of standards to determine whether a worker is truly independent. In May 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would no longer enforce the rule.

The Trump administration rule would replace the Biden administration standards with a more permissive “economic reality” test to decide if a worker is “economically dependent on an employer for work.” As a practical matter, it would likely thwart efforts to classify ride-share drivers, delivery drivers, and construction workers as employees.

In a statement, then-Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer argued that “tens of millions of Americans who work as independent contractors are helping drive the Golden Age of the American economy” and that the “proposed rule seeks to protect these workers’ entrepreneurial spirit and simplify compliance for American job creators navigating a modern workplace.”

But while the proposed rule would be a windfall for businesses, workers who are classified as independent contractors “lose out on critical protections, benefits, and labor rights including minimum wage, overtime pay, unemployment insurance, the right to form a union, and anti-discrimination protections in most states,” according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Independent contractors must also “bear the full financial costs of Social Security and Medicare contributions.”

A 2025 EPI analysis found that a typical construction worker loses “as much as $19,526 per year in income and job benefits” when classified as an independent contractor instead of an employee. A truck driver would lose up to $21,532 per year, and a home health aide would lose as much as $10,246 per year.

The National Employment Law Project (NELP) opposed the proposed rule, arguing that classifying employees as independent contractors “degrades wages and working conditions, particularly in fast-growing, low-paying, and labor violation—prone occupations and industries.”

Gutting the NLRB

The second Trump administration has also sidelined the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency that protects workers’ rights, investigates unfair labor practices, and conducts union elections. Research has shown that “high rates of unionization are consistently associated with higher wages and better working conditions for both union and nonunion workers,” according to the EPI.

In an unprecedented move, President Trump fired NLRB board member Gwynne Wilcox shortly after he began his second term. (Wilcox sued the Trump administration, but an appeals court ruled in December 2025 that Trump had acted lawfully.) Wilcox’s removal left the board with only two members, and therefore without the necessary three-member quorum.

This left the NLRB unable to issue any new decisions for nearly a year. In that time, workers were stuck waiting for decisions on cases concerning unfair labor practices or potentially illegal firings. Any decision made by an administrative law judge can be appealed to the NLRB for a final decision, and every appeal case was stuck in limbo. Two new members were finally confirmed to the board in December 2025.

The NLRB is increasingly staffed with officials who are openly hostile to labor rights. After firing NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, for example, Trump appointed Crystal Carey for the role. Carey was formerly a partner at a law firm that “is pursuing the legal challenge that the NLRB is unconstitutional,” according to the EPI.

The board is now dealing with a backlog of cases. During the second Trump administration, the NLRB has been more likely to dismiss cases altogether. An analysis by the Center for American Progress (CAP) found that from the beginning of January 2025 to April 29, 2026, the likelihood that the NLRB dismissed a case alleging unfair labor practices filed by a union was 14.2 percentage points higher than in 2024.

A separate analysis by CAP found that the volume of private sector union elections overseen by the NLRB plunged after the Trump administration’s efforts to weaken the agency. In 2025, the “NLRB oversaw 1,498 union elections,” which is a “30 percent drop from 2024.” Worker participation in NLRB elections was also down, with “59,000 fewer workers participat[ing] in NLRB-run elections in 2025, a 42 percent decline from the previous year.”

This week is the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Trump is marking the occasion by describing his role in heroic terms, claiming he personally went to Ground Zero to aid recovery efforts. On September 6, Trump made the following remarks on Fox News:

And I went down. I was building a building in New York, and I had a lot of construction workers. And I went down there very shortly thereafter the following day, you couldn’t go down the same day, but like the following day, very, very quickly afterwards and we worked long and hard.

Trump relayed a similar story at a White House event on Tuesday:

I was building a big building in New York and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened, and they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was — it was raw. Nobody’s seen anything like it ever.

Although some details change, Trump has made similar claims in interviews for decades, claiming to have sent 100 or more construction workers to Ground Zero. Trump has claimed he “helped“ clear rubble and “spent a lot of time down there.”

There is no evidence any of this is true.

Two Trump-branded buildings were under development in New York at the time — Trump World Tower and Trump Place at Riverside South. But neither Trump nor the Trump Organization employed “a lot of construction workers.” Rather, the construction manager of both developments was Bovis Lend Lease. So any construction workers were employees of Bovis Lend Lease or their subcontractors, not Trump. Journalist Tim O’Brien, who wrote a biography of Trump, noted that in 2001, the Trump Organization as a whole employed around a dozen people. Trump has never identified an employee who worked on emergency response at Ground Zero.

Richard Alles, was a battalion chief of the New York Fire Department in 2001, and supervised “search and rescue units for the entire first two weeks of the operation.” After that, Alles worked at Ground Zero in various capacities for months. “I was in a supervisory role with the fire department at the time,” Alles told PolitiFact in 2019. “I was there for several months — I have no knowledge of his being down there.”

Further, Alles said, if Trump had sent 100 construction workers to Ground Zero, “there would be a record of it” because “[e]verybody worked under direct supervision of the police and fire department and the joint commander for emergency services.” In 2019, the New York Times reported that “there is no documented evidence of [Trump] marshaling his resources to aid in the relief effort.”

“They lifted me up and they started running with me.”

On Tuesday, Trump also offered a new version of a story involving him being physically carried away from danger by firemen:

United States Steel Building was creaking. Really creaking. And we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down.

And I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us. And two firemen, big strong guys — and I’m not the smallest guy in the world — they grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down.

On September 12 and 13, there were two evacuations of the area around around One Liberty Plaza — the former U.S. Steel Building. Authorities believed at one point the building sustained structural damage and Trump gave a couple of interviews in the general vicinity on September 13.

But Trump appeared to first tell the story of getting forcibly evacuated by firefighters 15 years later during a 2016 campaign appearance in New Hampshire. In that version of the story, he runs under his own power rather than being carried. An excerpt from the New Hampshire Sunday News on January 17, 2016:

Trump said that in the following days he went to the area where two towers fell and spoke with firefighters. Suddenly, they all heard an eerie sound -- and believed another one of the buildings could collapse.

“They grabbed me,” Trump said of the quick exit from the scene. “I never knew I could run that fast.”

Trump gave a similar account to Newsmax on September 7, 2021. It is not the only 9/11-related story he appears to have embellished.

In 2015, Trump claimed he was looking out a “window in my apartment” and “watched as people jumped“ from the World Trade Center. This would have been impossible, since his apartment is in midtown, about four miles away.

At a 2015 campaign rally, Trump also claimed that, on 9/11, “I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.” Pressed for more information by ABC News, Trump said he was watching TV and saw “people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down.” While there were a number of urban myths about Muslim populations in New Jersey cheering the attack, there is no evidence that it happened — and it was certainly not broadcast on television.

Vote.gov, which is run by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), does not ask for your personal information or track your activities. According to the site’s privacy policy, the EAC “does not collect personally-identifiable information about you when you visit our site, unless you choose to provide such information to us.” The exception to the policy is very limited. For example, if you email the EAC requesting information, they will retain your email address so they can send a response. Further, the EAC does not track your internet activity. “No cookies used by EAC ever store any information that may be used to identify you personally,” the commission’s privacy policy says.

But Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is funding an aggressive advertising campaign encouraging people in key states to check their registration status at a different website, votesafe.org. That website is run by America PAC, Musk’s super PAC.

While Vote.gov collects no personal information, votesafe.org collects the following:

Previously, votesafe.org had a privacy policy that provided some limitations on how America PAC could use this data:

Personal Identifying Information collected via the www.votesafe.org will only be used to support America PAC’s activities, and it will not be shared with any advertisers, political organizations, or third parties not directly affiliated with America PAC.

On August 29, 2026, the privacy policy was updated and no longer includes that language. The new version allows America PAC to “share” or “sell” personal information with “our business partners.” This includes selling information about “whether you are registered to vote” and “how you submit your vote… where permitted by law.”

In addition to selling your personal information, America PAC can also sell “inferences” it makes from the information it collects including “psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities and aptitude.” The “business partners” can then disclose your information to other parties.

You also agree to receive calls and texts, not only from America PAC, but also from “related entities as well as third parties.”

Votesafe.org is currently configured to share your information with numerous partners and to let advertising companies comprehensively track you across websites, apps, and streaming services.

As you visit votesafe.org:

Over the last week alone, America PAC has spent over $180,000 promoting votesafe.org on Meta. Some of the ads are innocuous-looking messages, just reminding people to vote:

Other Meta ads attack “socialists” or specific Democratic senate candidates with incendiary messages:

On Sunday, America PAC also launched YouTube ads attacking Democratic candidates. Nearly all of these ads promote VoteSafe.org at the end.

Overall, Musk has pledged to spend over $100 million in the midterm elections, focusing on turnout. The data collected through votesafe.org looks to be central to this effort.

Votesafe.org is not just a website but a platform that can be white-labeled by Musk’s ideological allies. The data is then sent to America PAC’s servers.

Sentinel Action Fund, the Super PAC affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, used votesafe.org to create its own voter registration site — register.sentinelactionfund.com. Sentinel Action Fund then spent $650,000 on advertising that promoted the site and defended Trump’s presidency during Fox News’ coverage of the State of the Union. Jessica Anderson, the president of Sentinel Action Fund, said the new site made registration “easier” and ensured “voter information isn’t going into the hands of extremist Democrat organizations.” Sentinel Action Fund’s connection to Musk’s votesafe.org has not been previously reported.

Votesafe.org also powers the registration site of another organization, Ready to Register. In North Carolina, the State Board of Elections reported Ready to Register “sent mailings to an unknown number of citizens with an outdated voter registration application which includes four political parties that are no longer recognized in North Carolina.” The North Carolina Board of Elections also “received reports that mailings are being sent to deceased individuals and that the group may be using outdated voter data.” Further, “QR codes on the mailings may cause information from other people to pre-populate on a form, which has raised privacy concerns among voters.” In July, the Washington Post reported that the source code of Ready to Register’s website “links to another group affiliated with Musk’s political outfit, America PAC.”

Last year, Popular Information broke the news that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stopped paying for third-party medical care for detainees on October 3, 2025. Eleven months later, ICE still has no system in place to pay for third-party medical care. Hospitals and other providers who have continued to treat detainees are owed millions of dollars.

During this year’s Super Bowl, State Farm went all out for an ad riffing on Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” poking fun at rival insurance companies for only going “halfway there” with their coverage. This week, the ad was cited in a lawsuit brought against State Farm by Los Angeles County. The lawsuit alleges that State Farm failed to pay benefits to victims of the 2025 LA wildfires and seeks at least $160 million in restitution.

The Senate Leadership Fund, a PAC supporting Senate Republicans, put out an ad last month featuring a father talking about the 2024 murder of his son. The ad connected the murder to the policies of Roy Cooper, the former Democratic governor of North Carolina who is now running for Senate. In an interview with Popular Information, the father in the ad, Ronald Hayes, said that SLF led him to believe he was being interviewed for an ad about gun violence and did not disclose its political affiliation. Hayes called the ad “deceitful.”

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A Mother Jones investigation found that “[m]ore than a dozen local law enforcement agencies across the country have used opioid settlement money to procure Flock cameras and other AI-powered automated license plate readers.” Advocates wanted the money to be used for underserved communities affected by the opioid crisis. (Mother Jones)

ProPublica reported that United States Postal Service (USPS) officials assigned to create new rules on mail-in voting “expressed concerns in internal meetings about how the rules they were drafting could delay or block ballots from reaching large swaths of eligible voters for the upcoming midterms, but the rules moved forward anyway.” (ProPublica)

The U.S. Department of Commerce quietly cut language from its scientific integrity policy that banned political interference from reports issued by the department’s umbrella of agencies, which include the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This change comes as the Census Bureau prepares for the 2030 national census, which could change the distribution of political representation. (NPR)

Numerical information

6 months: Last Friday marked six months of the war with Iran. There is currently no end in sight.

$61: The price of a roll of 25 $1 coins with Trump’s face on them, according to the U.S. Mint website. A bag of 100 coins costs $154.50.

Nearly $253,000: The value of a new contract for lighting renovations at the White House’s Harry S. Truman Bowling Alley.

Quote of the week

“The way the president is playing Iran… there haven’t been American deaths. It’s really just an economic choke-out…”

– U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick during a Wednesday interview with CNBC, ignoring the 18 Americans who have died during the war with Iran. Lutnick apologized for his statement on Thursday.

Photo of the week

Apple Maps changed the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America for U.S. users following Trump’s executive order changing the name last week. An official White House X account celebrated the change.

On August 5, the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the super PAC of Senate Republicans, announced a new television ad attacking Roy Cooper, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in North Carolina.

The ad features Ronald Hayes, whose son Shemar was murdered in 2024. In just 30 seconds, it ties Shemar’s murder to Cooper, who served as governor of North Carolina from 2017 to 2025. The blame is pinned on a settlement Cooper reached with the ACLU to release some inmates early during the COVID pandemic. “As the governor, Mr. Cooper was allowing these criminals back on the streets,” Hayes says in the ad. “Is my son going to get a second chance? No, he’s never coming back.”

But in an interview with Popular Information, Hayes says that he was manipulated into appearing in the ad. According to Hayes, the SLF operatives who recorded the footage misrepresented the purpose of the interview, never revealed their political affiliation, and coached Hayes into providing the soundbites that appear in the ad.

Hayes is a member of a group of about a dozen grieving parents whose children have been murdered. The SLF operatives reached out to everyone in the group and offered an opportunity “to share our stories.” Hayes was left with the impression that “we’re doing an ad about gun violence and our deceased kids.”

Hayes said he was interested in “talking about Shemar and what I feel about gun violence.” He had also written a book about Shemar that he wanted more people to know about.

After he agreed to participate, Hayes began to communicate with Michael Luethy. Previously, Luethy worked for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the North Carolina Republican Party, and the Republican State Leadership Committee. Luethy currently runs a Republican consulting firm based in North Carolina called Oak Grove Campaigns.

But Luethy never revealed that he was working with the SLF or his connection to Republican politics. Rather, Luethy represented to Hayes that he was “independent.” Luethy invited Hayes to a luxury home in Charlotte and encouraged him to bring copies of his book. Hayes had never been on camera before.

The SLF paid Oak Grove Campaigns $456.90 on April 30, 2026, for travel. Luethy did not respond to a text message seeking comment.

At the outset, Hayes was given an opportunity to talk about his son and was asked about the book. Then, Hayes said, “all of a sudden, in the middle of the recording, it went from me talking about what happened to my son to Governor Cooper.”

“Well, what do you think about North Carolina letting out 3,500 murderers, rapists, and killers?” Hayes said he was asked. “Of course, I am a victim. What am I going to say?” Hayes said he initially responded without saying Cooper’s name. He was then prompted by the SLF operatives to deliver the soundbite they wanted. “Would you mind saying Roy Cooper?” the operatives asked.

Prior to arriving at the filming, Hayes said, he “never knew anything about the governor of North Carolina letting out 3,500 criminals due to COVID-19 back in 2019 and 2020.” Hayes noted that he knows the policy was unrelated to his son’s murder. (The man who murdered Hayes’ son in 2024 had no prior adult criminal record and, therefore, was not released from prison.) Hayes was distressed when he saw the ad, which makes it seem “as if I’m saying that my son’s murderer was one of the ones who Governor Cooper let out of prison.”

“Why would I go on there and just flat out tell a blatant lie?” Hayes asked. He called the ad “deceitful, conniving, and sneaky.”

Hayes said that the SLF operatives filmed at least two other interviews with members of the grieving parents group, but those were not turned into ads. In both cases, the SLF operatives redirected the discussion from the personal tragedy to a political attack on Roy Cooper.

According to data from AdImpact, the SLF has spent over $6 million airing Hayes’ ad on television and digital platforms. Hayes said the ad has profoundly impacted his day-to-day life. “You would not believe how many people now just walk up to me and ask me, ‘Am I that guy that’s in that commercial?’”

Hayes said he is a Democrat and would not have knowingly participated in a GOP attack ad. “Why would I do a commercial? I’m just an everyday man,” Hayes said. “They targeted me as a victim of gun violence and because of the death of my son.”

Murder as a political football

The Hayes ad is part of a concerted campaign by Republicans to link Cooper to murders with no plausible connection to his policies.

President Donald Trump blamed Cooper for the August 2025 murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, who was stabbed while riding the train in Charlotte, allegedly by Decarlos Brown Jr.

“The blood of this innocent woman can literally be seen dripping from the killer’s knife, and now her blood is on the hands of the Democrats who refuse to put bad people in jail, including Former Disgraced Governor and ‘Wannabe Senator’ Roy Cooper,” Trump said in a September 8 Truth Social post. According to Trump, Brown was on the streets because he was “released on CASHLESS BAIL in January.”

In January 2025, Brown was charged with a non-violent misdemeanor — misusing a 911 line. As is typical in such cases, he was released by a judge without bail. Even if he had been incarcerated by the judge pending trial, the maximum sentence for the charge would have been 120 days, meaning Brown’s sentence would have been completed before the August 22 murder.

In 2020, Cooper established a task force to consider “discriminatory law enforcement and criminal justice practices.” But the recommendations of the task force were never approved by the legislature and had no impact on the bail decisions related to Brown or anyone else.

More recently, the SLF, through a TV ad and a fake news website, has attempted to link the 2025 murder of Logan Federico, allegedly by Alexander Dickey, to Cooper. But Dickey was from South Carolina and had committed all of his crimes in South Carolina, including the alleged murder of Federico. He was incarcerated in South Carolina and was released prior to the murder by a South Carolina judge. The murder had nothing to do with Cooper’s policies or North Carolina at all, except for the fact that Federico was a North Carolina resident.

Jake from State Farm, call your office.

The company kicked off 2026 with a splashy Super Bowl commercial featuring two popular comedic actors, Danny McBride and Keegan-Michael Key, as insurance agents for a fictional State Farm competitor, Halfway There Insurance. The duo riffs on the Bon Jovi classic, Livin’ on a Prayer:

There is damage to your home on this block

We won’t make things right cuz filing a claim is tough

No luck

Whoa, we’re halfway there

Whoa, you’re living on a prayer

State Farm described the ad, which also includes a cameo by Jon Bon Jovi himself, as “a humorous parody that encourages viewers to not settle for coverage that makes you feel ‘halfway there.’” The ad “exaggerates potential common consumer frustrations with their insurance experiences, from confusing terms to impersonal corporate environments.”

No expense was spared. The full ad debuted during the most widely watched broadcast of the year and was extended through March Madness. In 2025, State Farm spent $1.139 billion on advertising.

On Monday, the ad was cited in a lawsuit filed by Los Angeles County on behalf of the people of California seeking at least $160 million in restitution plus civil penalties of up to $2,500 per violation.

The lawsuit alleges that State Farm failed to pay benefits due to victims of the 2025 LA wildfires. According to the complaint, many Californians with State Farm insurance “cannot return home because smoke, soot, ash, debris, and chemical contamination have made their homes unsafe and Defendants have failed to agree to conduct the necessary testing or to fully and timely cover the costs of remediation.” Some State Farm policyholders, the complaint claims, now “face eviction or homelessness.”

The 107-page complaint contains several horror stories. In one case, a “97-year-old Palisades resident” lived in a home “within 250 yards of burned structures.” Nevertheless, “State Farm refused to authorize or pay for environmental testing, telling the family that if they wanted testing, they could pay for it themselves.” Meanwhile, remediation contractors said “they could not begin cleaning without knowing what contaminants were present, because lead, asbestos, and other toxins require different protocols.”

The man’s daughter, despite persistent efforts, has been unable to reach a resolution with State Farm. In one instance, she was placed on hold for two hours and fifty-six minutes before being disconnected. The man, who suffered a stroke shortly after the fire, “has never been able to return to his home.”

In other cases, according to the complaint, State Farm denied payments until the policyholder went to the press or reported the company’s behavior.

In one total-loss claim, consistent with many others, State Farm began sending checks almost immediately after the policyholder went to the press. In another total-loss claim, State Farm refused to pay for 16 months and then immediately sent 4 checks to consumers the next morning after they told an EPA representative, who was visiting the Altadena area, about State Farm’s failure to pay them.

Los Angeles County also seeks penalties against State Farm for false advertising, specifically citing the Halfway There campaign. From pages 76-77 of the complaint:

State Farm’s Head of Marketing, Alyson Griffin, said the campaign was meant to convince viewers that State Farm’s services are more than just halfway there, and that State Farm chose the song because it “gets customers to realize we’re here to help.” She said State Farm wanted customers “to feel confident in their insurance” and did not “want them to feel like they’re living on a prayer.”

…The campaign was built to induce consumers to choose or stay with State Farm on the representation that it, unlike inadequate alternatives, delivers complete claims service and makes things right after a covered loss.

The complaint describes the Halfway There campaign as “a false-advertising problem of State Farm’s own making.” According to Los Angeles County, State Farm “defined adequate insurance as insurance that ‘makes things right’ after covered damage” even as it was, in the complaint’s words, “delivering to its own California and Los Angeles County policyholders the very inadequacies the advertisement mocked.”

The website State Farm created to promote the Halfway There campaign has been taken offline and the ads have been removed from YouTube.

The lawsuit cites the California Department of Insurance (CDI), which concluded that State Farm “delayed, underpaid, and buried policyholders in red tape at the worst moment of their lives.” CDI found that in more than half of the claims it reviewed related to the LA wildfires, State Farm violated state law.

The gap between the ad and the reality facing State Farm’s California policyholders, the lawsuit alleges, constitutes “a materially false statement about the nature of State Farm’s services, aimed at California consumers and likely to deceive them.”

Los Angeles County attempted to resolve its issues directly with State Farm, but the company allegedly “declined to substantially comply with the People’s requests for voluntary production of documents or a later-issued administrative subpoena.”

As State Farm slow-rolled California policyholders, its coffers continued to swell. The company “ended 2025 with $170 billion in net assets — $24.8 billion more than a year earlier.”

State Farm is not OK

California is not the only state with grievances against State Farm.

On June 24, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond (R) filed a lawsuit against State Farm alleging that the company fraudulently denied or underpaid claims to Oklahoma customers for damages caused by hail and wind. Drummond alleged that the company “engaged in a pattern of deceptive and fraudulent conduct that harmed policyholders throughout Oklahoma by using undisclosed claims-handling practices, restrictive internal standards and outcome-oriented engineering reviews to reduce claim payments and increase corporate profits.”

The lawsuit claims that the company started an internal program called the “Hail Focus Initiative” to limit the number of approved roof replacements and reduce claim payments. The lawsuit alleges that State Farm continued to market and sell homeowner policies as covering replacement costs for hail and wind damage, while creating undisclosed internal guidelines designed to deny claims and minimize coverage.

“The allegations describe a corporate scheme that threatens the integrity of Oklahoma’s insurance marketplace and undermines public confidence in an industry families rely on when disaster strikes,” Drummond said in a statement. Drummond also filed a similar lawsuit against Allstate in July.

Hundreds of Oklahoma homeowners have sued State Farm over similar issues. The company’s alleged scheme to reduce costs related to wind and hail damage allegedly began in Texas in 2020 before expanding to other states. Court documents released in August in a case between State Farm and an Oklahoma couple revealed that the company “reduced its payouts to policyholders by more than a billion dollars,” NBC News reported. In an internal email, a claims manager stated that there was “[a]bout a $1.4B decrease in indemnity from 2020 to 2021.” The email said, “When we started this work, we were replacing roofs at a rate of 5.6 to every 1 we repaired. In 2021 we landed at 2.0 for every 1 and 2022 increased to 2.2 to every 1.”

In a statement on its website, State Farm writes, “Over the past two years alone, State Farm has paid more than $1 billion to Oklahoma customers for wind and hail damage. By contrast, the number of bad-faith lawsuits currently pending in Oklahoma is equivalent to approximately 1% of the roughly 30,000 residential and commercial claims State Farm has responded to each year, on average, over the past five years.”