PopInfo Weekly: Ballrooms, bullets, and billions
Nearly a year ago, President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” cut $18.7 billion annually from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). In Arizona, nearly 200,000 children have been pushed off the program.
On Monday, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear Trump’s appeal of a 2023 jury verdict that found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll. Trump has mocked, insulted, and degraded Carroll repeatedly since 2019. But in the end, every court rejected Trump’s defense. Trump will now have to pay Carroll $5 million.
On Tuesday, Trump released his 927-page financial disclosure, which revealed that he made at least $2.2 billion during his first year in office. While Trump is known for being a real estate developer, most of his income (around $1.4 billion) came from his crypto ventures. Much of this income comes from his most frivolous venture — the $TRUMP meme coin. But while the $TRUMP coin has proved great for Trump, most investors in the coin have taken losses. Since it first launched, the coin has lost around 97% of its value.
A Popular Information investigation revealed that Congressman Mike Collins (R-GA), who is currently running for the Senate, spent $400,000 in taxpayer money on ads that are virtually identical to his campaign ads. Collins used funds designated for his Congressional office to pay the same political ad firm that works for his Senate campaign.
The best of the rest
Across the country, local libraries and historical societies were forced to scrap plans to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary after DOGE cut their funding. The Trump administration then “redirected tens of millions of dollars from the DOGE cuts toward the president’s plans for a triumphal arch and a statuary garden of ‘American heroes’ in Washington, D.C.” (NOTUS)
The Trump administration won an agreement with Kazakhstan officials to give an American company “access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten,” a rare metal. According to the New York Times, sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trump were soon “doing business with partners in [the] deal that their fathers were negotiating.” (New York Times)
This week, Idaho became the first state to make the firing squad its primary method of execution. (The Guardian)
The manosphere is alive and well, influencing the thinking of a large swath of America’s young men. One survey found that more than 40% of young American men trust at least one misogynistic online figure. The 19th investigated how this has impacted the treatment of female professors on college campuses. (The 19th)
Numerical information
$500 million: Last year, White House officials quietly awarded a no-bid contract worth up to $500 million for the construction of Trump’s new White House ballroom, the Washington Post reported.
4 million: Number of people who signed up for Affordable Care Act insurance plans in 2026 that have dropped out. Prices have exploded since Republicans declined to extend healthcare subsidies last year.
$11.1 billion: The minimum amount the Trump administration paid 140,000 federal employees not to work.
Quote of the week
“In America we do not punish children for the sins of their fathers, but instead we wipe the slate clean”
— The ACLU’s Cecilia Wang after the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s bid to end birthright citizenship
Photo of the week
Dear Judd,
This is one week of Popinfo. One week of corruption beyond belief coupled with a lack of interest by our government to feed starving children in Africa - believable - but in our own communities? How low can we go? Your investigations are fire, and I bet you never imagined that in one week, you could cover more garbage than most administrations could not muster in eight years.
What we are fighting right now is not the corruption but the normalization of corruption. And the belief by some who are not making money, and the absolute belief by those who are that Twump is a hero, not the sick perverted despot that he is and always has been. How the f did we get here, Pogo?
Thank you.