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Yet Another Grift -- Trump Mobile! -- Evaporates Like All Their Family Scams

Yet Another Grift -- Trump Mobile! -- Evaporates Like All Their Family Scams

Back in June, the grifty Trump family launched its Trump-branded cell service and super-luxe Trump T1 smartphone with maximum hype and minimal details. Now, five months later, neither is anywhere to be found.

We were told that the phone would be sleek, gold, made in the United States, and somehow only $499. And you could use your Trump phone on the Trump Mobile service for a mere monthly fee of $47—yes, you know why it’s that number. All you had to do to secure one was put down a $100 deposit—because who wouldn’t want to do that?

NBC News actually tried to buy the phone, dutifully paying the $100 down payment back in August. Since then, the network has waited. And waited. And waited.

According to NBC, it received “no proactive updates” since placing the order. That seems to be just a fancy way to say that the company went radio silent after shaking down the rubes. NBC called the support linefive times between September and November, only to get the runaround about the phone’s release.

In October, the support line said that the phone would ship on Nov. 13—which has come and gone with no Trump phone of any kind, much less a sleek, gold, American-made bargain.

After NBC followed up again, a customer service representative said that the delivery would be at the “beginning of December.”Why the delay? Well, the government shutdown, according to the customer service representative.

Not really beating the accusations that the Trump Organization is inextricably connected with the presidency here. If it’s just a private project of President Donald Trump’s sons, then why would it be affected by the government shutdown?

The details of this excellent—yet somehow nonexistent—phone keep changing. References to the phone being made in the United States are no longer anywhere to be found on the Trump Mobile website. Now, it’s going to be “brought to life right here in the USA. With American hands behind every device” and with an “American-proud design.”

The phone itself is also in a state of flux. The original offering looked like a gold-plated iPhone, but when Trump Mobile started taking preorders in August, it changed to looked like a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, photoshopped with the T1 logo and an American flag. The phone also now appears to be in a Spigen case—because they literally forgot to remove the Spigen logo.

The dimensions of the phone also seem to have changed between June and August. In June, the phone had a 6.78-inch screen. But by August, it changed to a 6.25-inch screen.

The Trump Mobile T1 smartphone as depicted on Trump Mobile websiteScreenshot from trumpmobile.com

But surely Trump Mobile is going gangbusters, right? Even if you can’t show your patriotism with an ugly Trump-branded phone, you can at least prove you’re a real American by using Trump Mobile cell service, right?

Wrong.

First of all, it’s not actually Trump Mobile’s network. It’s just a licensing deal, with the Trump family slapping its name on Liberty Mobile Wireless, which operates a mobile virtual network operator on the T-Mobile network. An MVNO is a carrier that buys bandwidth on large networks like Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T. So if you’re using Trump Mobile, you’re actually just using Liberty Mobile, which is actually just operating on T-Mobile.

And good luck finding out if Trump Mobile actually exists. News reports touting its existence are all from June, when the Trump sons first made their launch. Since then, the only development seems to have been the company deleting its coverage map because it failed to label the Gulf of Mexico “Gulf of America.”

Definitely focusing on what matters to bring this thing to market.

The Trump phone will join Trump University and the Trump video phone as a way to steal from MAGA’s most loyal suckers. It was bad enough when Trump did this as a private citizen—but it’s extremely gross watching him get away with it as president.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Trump Offers 'Nazi Streak' Ingrassia A Top Federal Position That Needs No Senate Vote

Trump Offers 'Nazi Streak' Ingrassia A Top Federal Position That Needs No Senate Vote

Guess who’s back? It’s Paul Ingrassia! With a new government gig!

That’s right! It’s everyone’s favorite far-right troll who was a fake lawyer for Andrew Tate who became a Trump nominee who lost his shot at running the Office of Special Counsel after his self-professed “Nazi streak” came to light. Hoo boy, remember that? Even having his mommy yell at Democrats for being mean to him somehow did not save that nomination.

But listen, as a creepy little racist baby, Ingrassia is entitled to a high-level job in this administration. It’s his birthright!

So what to do, what to do, if you are such a bad bet that even Trump knows that the Senate won’t confirm you? Yes, the same Senate that has confirmed totally coherent and sane and qualified luminaries like FBI Director Kash Patel and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Given that this administration’s motto seems to be “no Nazis left behind,” we probably should have expected Ingrassia to turn back up. The administration just needed to find a position that Ingrassia was wholly unqualified for but that didn’t require Senate confirmation.

Voila! Ingrassia is your new deputy general counsel of the General Services Administration, America. Get hyped.

Politico broke the news, describing it as “Trump taps Ingrassia for new role after texting scandal.”

“Texting scandal” is a pretty polite term for saying actual things like “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it,” and “MLK Jr. was the 1960s George Floyd and his 'holiday' should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs.”

No doubt underneath all that racism he’s a swell guy.

Ingrassia is now essentially second-in-command to the chief legal officer of a sprawling government agency that handles procurement, real estate, construction, and other professional services and has about 12,000 employees. The General Counsel’s office advises and represents GSA officials, drafts legislation, and liaises with other federal agencies.

Sure, that’s a job that normally houses people with decades of legal experience, where Ingrassia finished law school in 2022 and only joined the bar in New York last year.

But have you considered that Ingrassia, per Wikipedia, has a “Substack page [that] has been cited by President Donald Trump on several occasions; in January 2024, Trump repeated Ingrassia's false claim that Nikki Haley was ineligible to serve as president.”

Can’t learn that valuable kind of stuff at law school or some stuffy law job where they mind if you’re a Nazi.

If you’ve been worried that Ingrassia was going hungry, down on his luck, and out of a job while waiting for this, worry no more. After the OSC nomination debacle, he just stayed right where he had been before getting the nod: White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.

Guys, he sent the sweetest goodbye to his colleagues!

It’s been the greatest honor to serve Secretary [Kristi] Noem and President Trump, alongside all of you. I genuinely feel this is the strongest group of political appointees anywhere in the federal government, which is a credit to not just this group’s work ethic, but above all, its character and integrity.

These must be definitions of “work ethic” and “character and integrity” that we were hitherto unaware of.

Ingrassia also let slip that Trump personally called him into the office to offer him the job. And why wouldn’t he? Ingrassia is exactly the kind of employee Trump values: vicious, underqualified, and wholly in thrall to Dear Leader.

Sorry in advance, GSA workers.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Halligan's Retribution Prosecutions Of Comey and James Are Falling Apart Fast

Halligan's Retribution Prosecutions Of Comey and James Are Falling Apart Fast

Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan is not having a good time.

Sure, indicting people because President Donald Trump said so was probably a bit of a rush, but now she’s stuck with two high-profile cases where the only help she has is prosecutors borrowed from other districts, since no one in her office would agree to handle these travesties.

While Halligan is running these cases on a shoestring, former FBI Director James Comey is going HAM and filing motion after motion to get rid of both Halligan and the indictment she secured against him.

He’s assembled a giant team of high-powered, experienced attorneys, and they are absolutely burying Halligan in a flurry of motions —an excellent strategy against an inexperienced prosecutor. Now, Halligan has to respond to all of these, and meanwhile, time marches on. Both Comey’s case and Halligan’s prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James are on the rocket docket, so Halligan has to simultaneously prepare for two big trials scheduled just a few weeks apart in January.

Comey had already filed two earlier motions to dismiss, one based on Halligan being illegally appointed and one alleging vindictive and selective prosecution. This week, he added three more.

First, he filed a motion to force the government to disclose the grand jury proceedings. Normally, grand juries are entitled to a “presumptionof regularity,” meaning the actions of the grand jury are presumed to be reasonable. But if a defendant can point to significant irregularities, they can get access to the grand jury materials.

Here, Comey points to two significant irregularities. First, it appears there may have been a tainted witness—an FBI agent who may have had access to privileged material between Comey and his attorneys, which would be covered by the attorney-client privilege. If the agent provided the grand jury with attorney-client information in an effort to buttress the indictment against Comey, that’s a big problem.

Additionally, Comey alleges that Halligan kept the grand jury well into the evening instead of sending them home after they refused to indict Comey on three counts. She then presented the two-count indictment and kept the jury until nearly 7 PM. Comey wants access to those proceedings to see if Halligan basically told the jury they couldn’t leave until they indicted him.

That might sound fanciful and ridiculous in a normal case with a normal prosecutor—a long-shot complaint. But this is no normal case, and Halligan is no normal prosecutor, so it’s not hard to imagine her thinking it’s totally appropriate to hammer a grand jury until she got what she wanted.

He’s also filed a motion for a bill of particulars. A defendant is supposed to know the basis for the charges against them so they can prepare for trial. But the indictment Halligan presented has literally no information about the factual basis for charging Comey. So, Comey is asking for all of it, and let’s face it: We know that whatever Halligan has as material supporting her fact-free indictment is probably pretty sparse.

If that wasn’t enough, Comey also filed a motion to dismiss the indictment “based on fundamental ambiguity and literal truth.” That’s a mouthful, but what it’s about is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s mangled, multi-part questions to Comey, creating confusion as to what, exactly, he was asking Comey about. The “literal truth” part is precisely what it sounds like—that Comey says he was literally truthful when responding to Cruz. Of course, if Comey was truthful, the whole indictment falls apart.

Meanwhile, in the Letitia James case …Halligan charged James with fraud over lying to her bank to get a better mortgage on a second home, but then renting it out in violation of the “Second Home Rider” contract. But there is language in her contract that says she can use the home “including short-term rentals.” In fact, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac say that a second home rider means the property “may be rented out on a short-term basis.”

James’ grand-niece lives in the home and testified to a different grand jury convened by Halligan that she had lived there for many years without paying rent. But then Halligan didn’t put the grand-niece before the grand jury that ultimately indicted James. That looks a lot like Halligan withheld material—that could have shown James’s innocence—from the grand jury that ultimately indicted James.

Halligan is overmatched and, honestly, seems to think her job ended after she secured indictments. Even though she’s gotten Justice Department attorneys from other jurisdictions to help out, that assistance can’t remedy the deficiencies in her indictments.

These experienced defense attorneys are not going to let up, and by now, Halligan has to feel like a mouse being batted around in a cat’s claws.

How long do we give her before she quits? Of course, if either of these indictments gets dismissed, Halligan might be purged by the same people who installed her in the job.

Perhaps she’ll go back to her previous job in the administration, where she got to singlehandedly remove any material from the Smithsonian museums that made white people sad, like exhibits about slavery.

She’s not qualified for that either, of course. But it’s got to be easier than her current thankless gig.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Peripatetic Patel Is Vacuuming Up Taxpayers' Cash On FBI Jet Trips

Peripatetic Patel Is Vacuuming Up Taxpayers' Cash On FBI Jet Trips

FBI Director Kash Patel is committed to making the most of his time as the unlikely, unqualified head of the nation’s law enforcement agency.

No, he’s not building big cases or figuring out better ways to keep people safe. Instead, Patel is making the most of the perks of his job. Well, not perks, really. More like just a straight-up misuse of government resources.

You may recall that, despite being the nation’s top law enforcement official, a job one would think required a lot of hands-on attention, Patel has not seen fit to fully relocate to Washington. Instead, Patel likes hanging out in Las Vegas in a house owned by a timeshare tycoon pal. He’s also down with staying in Nashville, where his girlfriend lives.

Must be tough managing a house in Vegas, a girl in Nashville, and a job in Washington, right?

Well, not if you just use the FBI jet, which also frees you up to get to your fave sporting events. So why not slurp up some taxpayer dollars to use that FBI jet to go on a date to see your girlfriend sing at a wrestling match at Penn State? Better still, it was a hella dumb thing called “Real American Freestyle,” a professional wrestling promotion co-founded by none other than Hulk Hogan.

Aren’t you glad that your money went to this?

The girlfriend in question, Alexis Wilkins, is ostensibly a country singer, but most of her output seems to be singing at events like this garbage and Turning Point USA gatherings. But Patel really, really loves to see her sing, apparently, so he seems to have taken the FBI jet from Virginia to State College and then back to Nashville.

It’s always nice when you can give your girlfriend a ride home, right? And even better if that ride home is on a private jet paid for by the taxpayers.

Despite all this, Patel is putting out the word that he works so hard every day. He’s too modest to say so, of course. So his extremely pliant deputy, Dan Bongino—yes, the guy so bad at his job that he now has a co-deputy babysitter—went on Fox to insist that Patel works 13 hours per day, getting to the office at 6 AM and not leaving before 7 PM.

This is as much of a lie as the one about how President Donald Trump works all day, every day, long into the night, when we all know what he’s really doing is watching television and drinking Diet Coke.

In reality, much like the man who appointed him, Patel has already cut down on the briefings he will attend, in part because he just can’t make it to the office by 8:30 AM. Well, yeah—he’s got to get there from Las Vegas or Nashville or wherever. You can’t expect him to be on time every day.

Aside from his lazy grifting, Patel is also a terrible boss, threatening polygraphs and firing people with the remotest connection to someone Trump doesn’t like.

Well, if Patel loses his job at any point, he can fall back on his merchandising skills. If you’re in need of a tacky sweatshirt with a graphic that is a mashup of Trump and The Punisher, Patel has you covered with his K$H hoodies.

It’s always good to have a side gig, though kind of unusual when you’re the FBI director. But his terrible clothing is just another way to show a cult-like devotion to Trump, which will probably keep him (un)gainfully employed by the federal government for the next few years.

What Are The Actual Plans For Trump's Ballroom? Nobody Knows, Including Him

What Are The Actual Plans For Trump's Ballroom? Nobody Knows, Including Him

The East Wing of the White House was reduced to a pile of rubble last week in a hasty, brutal demolition that shocked the country. Now, it’s time to build President Donald Trump’s big, dumb, gilded bribe palace—but no one knows exactly what that entails.

The New York Times tried to figure this out, looking at the plans—which Trump waved around in the Oval Office—posted on the White House website and a physical model of the ballroom.

And guess what? None of them are the same.

Honestly, of course they aren’t. This is all being done on the fly, subject to Trump’s daily whims. The ballroom could hold 650 people, or maybe 1,350—it’s a mystery! Maybe it will cost $200 million, maybe $300 million. Wait, scratch that—it’s $350 million. Definitely $350 million.

You might find it odd that construction is already starting on a building that has multiple building plans—where one version of the ballroom holds nearly twice the other, with a price tag that increases by about $50 million every time you turn around.

You fool! You rube! You just don’t understand how construction works! Let White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt school you.

“With any construction project, changes come. And we have informed all of you, we've been keeping you apprised of this project. We've shown you the renderings,” she said.Well, yes. It’s the fact that there are renderings plural that is the problem here. All we really know for sure is that it will be 90,000 square feet, or nearly double the size of the White House, which stands at 55,000 square feet—at least until Trump destroyed the East Wing.

Former First Lady Jackie Kennedy’s garden is also gone, as are two magnolia trees that were planted in the 1940s to honor former Presidents Warren G. Harding and Franklin D. Roosevelt. And why not? Trump doesn’t want to honor any past presidents. He only wants to honor himself.

Even the small details are inconsistent in Trump’s plans for the ballroom, including the number of decorative columns and staircases. There’s also the small problem of the renderings having physically impossible features, like a stairway to nowhere and overlapping windows.

To be frank, it looks a lot like someone just used AI to render a crappy facsimile of Mar-a-Lago.

Maybe these plans all look like haphazard, slightly different versions of golden crap because McCrery Architects, which is designing the ballroom, mostly builds churches—not ballrooms. However, James McCrery, the firm’s owner, is a hard-right religious zealot and has also designed buildings for Hillsdale College, the right’s beloved ultraconservative school.

But Trump knows that the companies showering him with money for this project don’t actually care about the ballroom's aesthetics or who builds it; it’s just another opportunity to curry favor with the president.

And Trump certainly doesn’t care about quality. He revels in gilded everything, a king in the world’s tackiest castle. He’s created a perfect ecosystem of grift without oversight or public input.

And what do we get? A comically ill-designed piece of garbage where the People’s House used to be.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

New ICE Recruits Failing To Meet Agency's Minimal Qualifications

New ICE Recruits Failing To Meet Agency's Minimal Qualifications

The Department of Homeland Security is positively awash in cash to hire Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons galore, but it turns out that all that money is not enough to buy even marginal talent.

NBC News is out with a report about ICE’s current training regime, or lack thereof, and it’s tough to figure out what part is worst. Is it the part where new recruits are starting training before DHS has finished vetting them, a thing that seems sort of suboptimal for law enforcement jobs? Is it the part where ICE only figures out mid-training that recruits have failed drug tests, have criminal backgrounds, or can’t meet the physical and academic requirements? Is it the part where recruits don’t submit their fingerprints for background checks even though ICE requires that as part of the hiring process?

Oooh, wait! How about the recruit who had a charge for strong-arm robbery and battery? From a domestic violence incident? Simply the best people.

Look, the administration is doing everything it can to smooth the path forward for wannabe fascists, but how much more can they do? Training had been slashed from 13 weeks to eight, and is now down to six weeks. The fitness requirements are startlingly low-key for a job that ostensibly requires you to be able to chase people down, but more than a third of the new recruits couldn’t do the required 15 push-ups, 32 sit-ups, and run 1.5 miles in 14 minutes.

Almost half of the new recruits who arrived for training in the last three months were sent home because they couldn’t pass an open-book written exam on the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Fourth Amendment. To be fair, it isn’t like the administration cares if any of these people follow the law, but presumably they have to go through this fiction.

And ICE is pulling out all the stops to get recruits in the door. ICE and Border Patrol retirees are being wooed back with the promise of up to a $50,000 hiring bonus.

Also, no more pesky age limits! “Border czar” and bribe aficionado Tom Homan says age is only a number, baby! “I'm 63 and I love to put a badge and gun on and go out there and do these things,” Homan said in August.

The administration is trying to make all of this look less pathetic, explaining that these are just the new recruits that suck. Experienced law enforcement officers don’t have to go through the fitness test but can instead “self-certify” that they are plenty fit.

The administration wants more agents because it is convinced that part of the bottleneck in hitting the 3,000/day arrest goal set by deputy White House chief of staff and Chief Nazi Stephen Miller is a lack of staff. Surely, if there are thousands more ICE agents, they will be able to arrest even more people with no criminal records to try to hit the mark.

Meanwhile, any federal law enforcement that isn’t about hurting immigrants is on hold, as the administration froze all other training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, preventing dozens of other federal law enforcement agencies from training.

Trump can shower all the money on people and eliminate every last training requirement, but it doesn’t seem like it is possible to water down the requirements much more than they already are. They’ll probably just get rid of all the physical and academic requirements, knock out the rule that you can’t have a criminal background, and just give the worst people in the country weapons and unfettered power.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

She's Prosecuting Comey For Trump, But Lindsey Halligan Isn't Having Any Fun

She's Prosecuting Comey For Trump, But Lindsey Halligan Isn't Having Any Fun

Sure, they said: Go take a job as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, even though you’re not qualified, they said. It’ll be fun to be Trump’s Best Little Hatchet and go after his enemies, they said.

By all measures, Lindsey Halligan is very much not having fun these days, just a month or so into her tenure at a job she holds not based on her skills, but instead on her willingness to prosecute and persecute Trump’s enemies. Sure, she got indictments against both former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, but apparently no one told Halligan that the indictment is only the beginning.

Now, to be fair, by securing indictments, Halligan is at least doing better than U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro. Pirro is busy putting up unprecedented numbers of grand juries refusing to indict on the comically inflated charges she keeps bringing.

But, the way things are unfolding, Halligan might be wishing she’d gotten no-billed on the Comey indictment and could just walk away.

On Sunday, Halligan filed a comically broad demand for a protective order, basically contending that Comey could never be left alone with discovery in the case for … reasons. The thing reads like a book report about protective orders, complete with one of Halligan’s justifications being that she looked up some other protective orders in criminal cases in the Eastern District of Virginia, and this was just like those!Reader, it was not just like those.

By Tuesday, Halligan had her answer from the judge: LOL nope. The request that basically all material in the case be subject to a protective order and that Comey not be able to access it, save for in the presence of his attorneys, was far too broad, said U.S. Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff, and would hinder Comey’s ability to prepare for trial.

Halligan also tried another motion designed to slow-walk the government’s obligation to produce discovery by pushing out a standard discovery deadline, and that didn’t work out either.

Halligan would be outmatched anywhere, but no more so than EDVA, the home of the rocket docket. Cases race through this district court. It’s a whole thing. Comey’s trial is already scheduled to begin on January 5, 2026. If Comey had requested it, the court was prepared for an even earlier start date in December.

Well, at least Halligan did find some prosecutors to help her with the case. Sure, she had to go outside her own office—the office she is literally in charge of!—and get two DOJ lawyers from North Carolina assigned to the case.

At least those two have some experience in prosecution, a thing Halligan very much does not. But hopefully, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Gabriel Diaz and Nathaniel Lemons have some right-wing sinecure gig lined up for after this thing crashes and burns, because baby, it’s going to crash and burn.

Comey has already said he is going to file a motion of unlawful appointment, arguing that Halligan is just as improperly in her office as two of Trump’s other top-tier picks, Alina Habba and Sigal Chattah. Both Habba and Chattah have been ruled ineligible to hold their U.S. attorney offices because the complicated machinations Trump has gone through to avoid submitting their nominations to the Senate are, well, illegal.

Given that Halligan is also in her role via a shady temporary appointment rather than Senate confirmation, Comey’s move is in no way an empty threat.

Turns out that while it’s fun to do press conferences and get indictments on threadbare nonsense, it sucks to actually do the work of prosecuting. Does anyone want to lay odds on how long Halligan lasts?

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

As Latino Voters Flee MAGA, Koch Outfit Launches Dark Money Influence Op

As Latino Voters Flee MAGA, Koch Outfit Launches Dark Money Influence Op

Latino support for President Donald Trump and his policies is cratering, which is no surprise given that he has turned the entire federal government into a brutal nativist deportation regime aimed largely at Hispanic and Latino people. But Republicans need those votes, so they’re doing what the right wing always does: launching a dark money campaign.

What? You thought the solution would be for the administration to change the policies that are designed to terrorize Latino people specifically? Come on.

In advance of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding, the cool geniuses at Americans for Prosperity, a Koch Brothers creation, are working with LIBRE, another Koch Brothers creation, to engage Latino voters about the “founding policies” of America.

A quick glance at the LIBRE website shows just how generic and astroturf-y this group is. They want “worker freedom”—aka no unions. They want “school choice”—aka undermining public schools. They love Trump’s tax bill.

Sure, this is vaguely linked to the interests of Latino voters. But honestly, you could just Ctrl-F every mention of “Latino” and replace it with any other ethnic group. It would be the same thing: a hollow exhortation that real freedom is a complete lack of government programs or any semblance of a safety net.This feeble, generic nonsense is the basis for a seven-figure campaign, One Small Step, that will include paid media, civics classes, and community events.

Let’s all take a quick moment to imagine what, exactly, a civics class targeted at Latino voters would look like in this day and age. Will they tell them how it is super great that Trump is trying to erase birthright citizenship? What does worker freedom mean when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are arresting and deporting day laborers looking for work?

Or maybe they can explain how it is cool and good and totally reflective of America’s founding policies to detain migrants while they are on church grounds?

Oh wait! Perhaps they will share the good news about how the administration raced to the Supreme Court to beg to be allowed to racially profile Latinos? And how the court’s conservatives happily obliged, saying it was fine to detain people if they were brown, speaking Spanish, and working at certain low-wage jobs like car washes. Probable cause is for suckers, right?

Surely Latino voters will thrill to hear about how ICE is ticketing and fining legal residents if they fail to carry their papers at all times. Nothing says freedom like “papers, please.” Or perhaps the Koch folks can share the heartwarming stories of legal Latino residents being detained by ICE just for being brown.

Maybe LIBRE will reprint Trump’s very touching announcement about Hispanic Heritage Month. Sure, he didn’t get around to making a statement until a week had elapsed, at which point he produced a nothingburger that was mostly about how great he, Donald Trump, is.“Every day, my Administration is working tirelessly to bring opportunity, prosperity, and success to citizens of every background,” he crowed. Happy Hispanic Heritage Month, indeed.

Right-wingers are so comprehensively steeped in racism and anti-Latino bias that they had an absolute meltdown over the selection of Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny as the Super Bowl halftime performer. Some of the dimmest, most vicious commentators, like Tomi Lahren, had to be reminded that, as a Puerto Rican citizen, Bad Bunny is actually an American.

Nevertheless, they’re furious that he will be singing in Spanish.

The Trump administration is so transparently racist that merely the selection of a Latino performer led to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem screaming about how ICE will be “all over” the Super Bowl. Her paramour, Corey Lewandowski, went even further, saying, “We will find you, we will apprehend you, we will put you in a detention facility, and we will deport you.”

So weird that Latinos aren’t coming out in droves to support this, right?Trump was pretty psyched to increase his share of the Latino vote in 2024, but these days his numbers among that group are suffering, so it makes sense that the right wing is resorting to dark-money-fueled astroturf efforts to try to shore up his support.

Good luck, babe. It’s going to be pretty tough to pull this off when the news is an unending stream of federal agents committing violence against Latinos across the country. No amount of the Koch brothers’ money can paper over that.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

It Was So Cool When We Could Still Get Packages From Overseas

It Was So Cool When We Could Still Get Packages From Overseas

By the time you’re reading this, it’s already too late. While President Donald Trump’s erratic tariffs are wrecking the economy writ large, they’re now going to wreck your personal economy writ small if you happen to like buying things from overseas.

The de minimis rule, which had allowed overseas goods worth less than $800 to enter the country duty-free, ended on Friday. Now, no matter how low the value, import costs apply.

Much of the focus on Trump’s tariffs has been on the increased costs of the goods themselves, noting that the things Americans routinely buy at low costs from overseas will become much more expensive. However, there’s also the issue of increased friction and chaos for overseas sellers, shippers, and foreign postal offices.

The de minimis rule smoothed the way for that low-cost commerce. Goods under that $800 threshold could be shipped directly to consumers, meaning no complicated determinations of tariff costs for sellers and shippers, and buyers didn’t have to go to the post office to pay duty fees to get a $9 Labubu accessory out of hock after it has undergone a full customs inspection.

If Trump’s tariffs were at least stable, sellers and shippers might decide they could deal with the tariff problem. Indeed, big shippers like UPS and FedEx are already equipped to figure out and pay country-specific duty costs. However, many smaller shippers ship through their country’s post office.

In killing the de minimis exemption, Trump also ordered that Customs and Border Protection wouldn’t assess the tariff duties stateside from packages sent via the international postal network. Therefore, post offices overseas must now calculate the duty and pay it to U.S. Customs. That involves the post office first setting up a way to collect tariff duties—yep, the ones that keep changing—from package senders. Then the post office has to pay the duties to CBP. Then the shipment can be handed over to the USPS for delivery within the United States.

While postal services get that sorted, the only real solution in some instances is just to not ship any packages here. Note that “any packages” part. It’s not just that some overseas postal services aren’t going to send you that Labubu accessory purchased from an overseas website tapping into the Labubu frenzy. They’re not going to send any packages at all until there is more certainty about what sending things to the United States looks like.

So, if you were expecting a nice letter with some photographs from a relative in Mexico? That’s a package, and you can’t have it if your relative tried to send it via the country’s postal service.

If your theoretical relative lives in Japan and wants to use Japan Post, they could send you that letter and those photos, and could even throw in trinkets worth up to $100 in value. But if you tried to buy those same trinkets, a Japanese seller can’t send them to you through the country’s postal service. Similar to Australia, where your relative can send those trinkets but must comply with new mandatory declaration requirements regarding the value of the trinkets and their country of origin. If it looks like this is just a purchase in disguise, it can’t be sent.

India, Thailand, South Korea, New Zealand—all of those postal services are now suspending package services, as are Switzerland and Taiwan. See also Austria, Belgium, and portions of Scandinavia.

For an example of how untenable this is, let’s pretend your relative moved to Finland and wants to send you a letter via post. No photos, no trinkets. Just a two-page handwritten letter about how well the little ones are doing at school and how nice summer vacation was. As of Aug. 22, you couldn’t even get that letter, because Finland’s postal service, the adorably named Posti, was dealing with the issue that airlines were refusing to accept anything bound for America, including letters. Then airlines began accepting some items again, so Posti announced it would again be accepting letters to be sent here. But as of Friday? Airlines are now again refusing to send postal items here, so Posti is back to sending nothing, not even cards or letters, to the United States. And you can’t blame them, really.

And it’s not just countries that are suspending package shipments here. DHL, the German shipping group that handles tons of shipments for European sellers, announced it will not ship any business parcels here. Even major companies, like Lego, can’t hang with this chaos and are restricting what they will send here. And good luck if you’re trying to buy from a small Etsy seller or the like.

There is a credible and logical argument to be made that the de minimis exemption was too high, that it had become an import loophole for big companies rather than a way for you to get a sweet vintage fountain pen from a French seller on eBay without both of you having to be import-export specialists. There’s even a credible and logical argument to be made that the exemption allowed for unsafe or knockoff goods to enter the country in large quantities without ever being inspected.

But those aren’t the arguments the administration is making.

Trump is a fool and has no idea what the exemption is, but he tries to cover it up with hyperbole: “It's very important, de minimis. It's a big deal. It's a big scam going on against our country, against really small businesses, and we've ended it. We put an end to it.” He’s also sure this will make it harder for fentanyl to enter the country, presumably under the theory that your relative can no longer tuck a couple of grams in with the family photos.

In the meantime, please enjoy America’s retreat from the global economy. Maybe we’ll just start making Legos and Labubu stateside and fix the economy that way?

Reprinted with permission from DailyKos.


Lewandowski's Dominant Role At Homeland Security Raising Eyebrows

Lewandowski's Dominant Role At Homeland Security Raising Eyebrows

Corey Lewandowski, the pugnacious brawler who once managed Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, will just not go away. No, literally. He has apparently exceeded the 130 days he can serve as a “special government employee”—but he’s not leaving.

Lewandowski has been a frequent presence at the Department of Homeland Security, acting as the de facto chief of staff for Secretary Kristi Noem and amassing power at DHS. He’s fired people, signed off on billions of dollars in grant funding, demanded that employees take polygraph tests, and went to war on employees with pronouns in their bio. Quite the busy boy for someone with no official role.

In order to get around the 130-day limit, it appears that he’s just not clocking in, instead sliding in with other employees so he doesn’t have to swipe his badge. It’s totally great and cool to learn that government building security is so lax that it’s no problem for someone to get in without a badge.

Lewandowski has been keeping his own time, and according to him, he’s only worked 69 days (nice) since January 2025. The administration believes it is an undercount, but thus far, the White House hasn’t taken any action to remove the squatter.

Lewandowski’s employment status is the same as Elon Musk had, but Musk really did leave at the 130-day mark after launching his DOGE disaster. Of course, that departure got very messy when he started feuding with Trump.

Lewandowski draws no salary as an SGE, so it’s not like he’s clinging to this for the cash. But if he leaves, he can’t continue consolidating his power at DHS. He probably wouldn’t be able to accompany Noem on trips to Israel, Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica, Colombia, El Salvador, and Mexico, even if he is her not-at-all-secret boyfriend.

It would be kind of weird to bring your boyfriend to high-level meetings with overseas diplomats or let him steer no-bid government contracts to cronies, as Noem has done with Lewandowski. But hey, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is letting his wife help run the Pentagon and bringing her to sensitive meetings with foreign military leaders, so maybe Lewandowski could just keep tagging along with Noem while she cosplays as a firefighter, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, and a border patrol cowgirl.

The real problem for Lewandowski isn’t the 130-day limit. If the White House wanted him to stay, they’d engage in complicated appointment shenanigans to let him do so, just like they did with Trump’s former personal attorney Alina Habba in her role as Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. There, the White House has strung together various short-term ways to keep her in her job despite not being confirmed by the Senate. But it’s Trump who doesn’t want Lewandowski in an official role, and it’s not like there’s any way around that.

Reportedly, Trump refused to let Lewandowski become Noem’s official chief of staff because he was worried about the optics of him working for someone he is romantically involved with. There’s also the small matter of both Noem and Lewandowski being married to other people, neither of whom ever seem to be mentioned.

So, possible romantic entanglements keep you out of the administration, but inciting people to kill police officers is no problem. Being a far-right troll who represented Andrew Tate? Totes cool. Hanging with white supremacists? You get to lead the U.S. Institute of Peace!

No one knows if the White House will bring the hammer down on Lewandowski, but maybe he can just officially move in with Noem rather than keeping an apartment across the street. It’s no chief of staff job, but at least he’d save some money on rent.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Margie Greene Asking Trump To Pardon Felon Santos

Margie Greene Asking Trump To Pardon Felon Santos

Let it never be said that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not loyal to her friends.

The Georgia Republican out here pleading former Rep. George Santos’ case, trying to get President Donald Trump to commute his sentence and free him from his grueling confinement, which has lasted … about 12 days. And without naming names, she’s happy to insinuate that far worse criminals than Santos still roam the halls of Congress.

Before diving into the merits of whether Trump should grant Santos mercy, let’s speculate about whom Greene could be referring to.

Fortunately, GovTrack, a government transparency group, maintains a database about legislator misconduct. Maybe Greene is referring to Rep. Andrew Ogles, the Tennessee Republican so eager to stay in Trump’s good graces that he wants to amend the Constitution so Trump can serve a third term. Ogles is the subject of an ethics complaint thanks to a discrepancy in his financial disclosures. Ogles also possesses the Santos-like penchant for inflating his resume.

Or maybe Texas’ Troy Nehls? In 2024, the Office of Congressional Ethics found that Nehls may have made illegal campaign disbursements and appears to not have provided complete financial disclosures. Nehls still has his job, though, and little has happened with that complaint.

And thanks to the GOP controlling the House, Rep. Wesley Hunt and Rep. Ronny Jackson, both of Texas, are still hanging about despite the OCE determining that they had violated campaign finance standards.

According to Greene, Santos’ sentence is unfair because a seven-year prison sentence for

“campaign-related charges” is too much, so she’s asking the Office of the Pardon Attorney to urge Trump to commute Santos’ sentence. Of course, her characterization of Santos’ crimes is incorrect. Santos deceived donors, spent campaign funds on personal items, inflated the amount of donations he received so he could qualify for funds and assistance from the national GOP, did some identity fraud by charging donors’ credit cards without their authorization, committed some unemployment insurance fraud, and lied to the House.

However, Greene might be in luck: The extremely morally flexible Ed Martin now runs the Office of the Pardon Attorney. So she probably has a shot at getting this request in front of Trump’s eyeballs at the bare minimum.

It’s somewhat surprising Trump hasn’t already pardoned Santos, since Trump apparently loves to pardon people who have committed crimes that remind him of his own crimes. He’s already granted clemency to 16 corrupt politicians, including former New York Rep. Michael Grimm, who hid income and lied on his tax forms, and Michele Fiore, a former Las Vegas city council member, for her diversion of donations for a memorial to a slain police officer to her own plastic surgery needs.

It isn’t like Trump is unaware of Santos’ plight, either. Last Friday, Trump mentioned he had the power to pardon Santos, musing, “He lied like hell, and I didn’t know him. … But he was 100% for Trump. I might’ve met him. Maybe, maybe not, but he was a congressman and his vote was solid.”

It’s the same weird preemptive statement he made about his authority to pardon convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, reminding the world that he’s perfectly happy to pardon the scuzziest people, given enough incentive.

And that might be Santos’ problem. He lacks the ability to provide Trump with the kind of incentive that woos him into pardons. Sure, Santos is notorious, but he’s not a reality star like Todd and Julie Chrisley, who, thanks to Trump, are free and clear of their 2022 convictions for fraud and tax evasion. And Santos didn’t donate millions to a pro-Trump campaign fund.

Ever the inveterate liar, Santos even had to lie about this. Per Santos, his pardon was a done deal, but then House Speaker Mike Johnson “blocked” it, which is not a thing. The presidential pardon power is absolute, not subject to veto by the speaker of the House. Santos knows this, but he likely just can’t stop himself.

Meanwhile, Greene will continue her efforts to free her friend. Greene and Santos could be a dynamic duo once again, cozying up side-by-side in Congress to spin conspiracy theories together. Now all they need is Trump.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Trump Prosecutors Drop Criminal Charges Against Favored Donor (Again)

Trump Prosecutors Drop Criminal Charges Against Favored Donor (Again)

Rich criminals sure are enjoying a heyday in President Donald Trump’s second term. The latest person to benefit from the Trump administration’s approach of rewarding big donors—who also happen to be major criminals—is Andrew Wiederhorn, chair of FAT Brands.

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles dropped two criminal cases against the fast food mogul. Was it newly discovered evidence that accounted for Wiederhorn’s good fortune? Heavens, no. It was what gets people off the hook these days: being a Trump donor.

Acting U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli is overseeing this particular travesty. Essayli has been on a similar employment journey to his equally unqualified compatriot on the East Coast, New Jersey's acting US Attorney Alina Habba.

And just like Habba, Essayli is clinging to his gig by appeasing Trump—which means treating his donors favorably.Wiederhorn had been charged under the Biden administration for concealing $47 million in income and, in a separate case, possessing a gun despite being a convicted felon. He also allegedly forgave himself about $65 million in loans. The Internal Revenue Service spent 15 years trying to collect back taxes from Wiederhorn, who owed more than $7 million by March 2021.

Having a company that was found guilty of criminal tax fraud and other companies that were fined $364 million in civil fraud, and being personally convicted of 34 felonies for falsifying business records, Trump was always going to inexorably let financial felons off the hook.

Indeed, that’s been a major feature of the first few months of Trump’s second term, where pardons and other favors have been doled out to people like reality TV grifters Todd and Julie Chrisley; Virginia sheriff and bribe enthusiast Scott Jenkins; Nevada’s worst politician, Michele Fiore, who stole from a fund honoring a slain police officer to pay for plastic surgery; and crypto bro Justin Sun.

Now Trump’s corruption is benefiting Essayli, who has used his office to charge politicians and judges who are perceived to be thwarting Trump’s agenda.

It’s always a good sign when the top law enforcement officer of a major metropolitan area uses his job to harass political opponents.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Susan Crawford

Wisconsin Supreme Court Reminds Us Why Judicial Elections Are Vital

As abortion-rights wins feel few and far between, it’s great to see the Wisconsin Supreme Court strike down the state’s 176-year-old abortion ban. Getting there has been a long process, one that required Wisconsin Democrats to make a significant, long-range commitment to winning judicial races. Oh, and also to beat back the deep pockets of the far-right billionaire Elon Musk.

In 1973, after the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to abortion, many states, including Wisconsin, kept their old abortion bans on the books. Known as “trigger laws,” they lived on like a zombie, ready to shamble back to life if Roe v. Wade was reversed. After Dobbs v. Jackson was decided in June 2022, Wisconsin’s ancient ban was technically back in effect—but only technically since the state’s Democratic leadership promised not to enforce the law. They argued that newer, more lenient abortion laws superseded it.

Enter the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

The fight over whether the 1849 ban would hold was a proxy fight for abortion access more broadly—and a fight for abortion access more broadly was always going to end up on the doorstep of a state court that had flipped control over the previous several years.

Wednesday’s 4-3 decision strikes down the ban and declares abortion legal in the state. This victory for reproductive care was possible only because of the multiyear efforts that Wisconsin Democrats and abortion activists put in. In 2023, Janet Protasiewicz trounced Daniel Kelly, a former justice on the court, to win a seat on the state Supreme Court. If you want to know what Kelly is like, just know that he went on to become a “Stop the Steal” lawyer.

Fast-forward to 2025, when liberal justice Ann Walsh Bradley announced she would not be running for reelection, and whoever won her seat would determine the balance of the court, given its 4-3 liberal majority. This made it one of the most important judicial races in the country, and in strolled Musk, thinking he could buy the race.

That very much did not work. Liberal candidate Susan Crawford beat the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel, by 10 percentage points, showing that heart and grit and organizing could beat back Musk’s torrent of cash. Better still, Crawford had previously represented Planned Parenthood in an abortion-related case, so to the right wing, she was basically Satan.

For decades, state judicial races were a pretty sleepy affair. But after the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously ruled that same-sex marriage was legal in 2009, three justices were ousted by a very well-funded, well-organized recall effort. Since then, state judicial races have gotten much more expensive and much more partisan. The Crawford-Schimel race was the most expensive state judicial race ever, with spending hitting $100 million.

It’s not great that state courts have become an expensive partisan battleground, but paying attention to them and committing to election support is more important than ever. Control of a state’s highest court can make the difference on LGBTQ+ issues, abortion access, election redistricting, and so on.

As Trump judges have ravaged the federal courts, and as the U.S. Supreme Court has continued to take a hacksaw to the Constitution, state courts remain a place where—sometimes—justice can still be served.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Not A Joke! Retired Justice Kennedy Praises Supreme Court's 'Independence'

Not A Joke! Retired Justice Kennedy Praises Supreme Court's 'Independence'

Retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is very concerned about what is happening with the courts, you guys. No, he didn’t have anything to do with it. Why do you ask?

Kennedy’s remarks came during his Thursday speech at a forum titled “Global Risks to the Justice System—A Warning to America.” He was one of several speakers, including judges from countries where authoritarian crackdowns threatened the independence of the judiciary.

The bravery of those judges most definitely did not rub off on Kennedy, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. In the face of repeated and ongoing attacks on the judiciary by President Donald Trump and his administration, the best Kennedy could do was praise judicial independence, as if that exists on the nation’s highest court any longer.

“Judges decide issues which have political consequences, but they don’t decide in a political way,” Kennedy claimed. “We have to honor the fact that judicial independence does not mean judges are put on the bench so they can do as they like—they're put on the bench so they can do as they must.”

Come on, Tony. Your cute little deal with Donald Trump in 2018, where you personally lobbied him to choose your former clerk Brett Kavanaugh to succeed you, was step two in Trump’s transformation of the court into a conservative grievance machine, following on the heels of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation the previous year.

You were perfectly aware that opposition to abortion was one of Trump’s litmus tests for Supreme Court nominees—he even campaigned on it. You were also perfectly aware that many of his lower court picks during his first term openly held anti-LGBTQ+ views. Trump explicitly chose judges because they would rule “as they like” instead of ruling “as they must.”

Indeed, when judges do rule as they must, and Donald Trump doesn’t like it, he attacks them personally. He called for Judge James A. Boasberg to be impeached after he blocked the administration from deporting Venezuelan immigrants.

At least 11 judges have had their families threatened with violence after they ruled against the Trump administration. Many of the threats occurred over at Elon Musk’s Nazi bar, X, where Musk himself amplified some of them. High-profile Trump supporter Laura Loomer shared a photo of Judge Boasberg’s daughter, alleging that she was helping undocumented gang members and calling for Boasberg and his daughter to be arrested and his entire family to be deported. James Boasberg was born in California to U.S. citizens, so the deportation demand is equal parts chilling and weird.

U.S. District Judge John Coughenour faced both a bomb threat and a swatting incident after he ruled Trump’s birthright citizenship order was unconstitutional. During his speech, Kennedy fretted that “Judges must have protection for themselves and their families. Our families are often included in threats” without ever acknowledging who is whipping up those threats.

Congressional Republicans have attacked judges on every front. They’ve called for the impeachment of judges who block Trump’s illegal actions. The Senate tried to get a provision in the Big Beautiful Bill restricting lower courts from issuing preliminary injunctions against the government unless the plaintiff posted a bond equal to whatever the government said were its costs and damages from not being able to do illegal things right away.

Whenever conservatives want to both-sides the threats to the judiciary, they have literally one example: At a 2020 rally outside the Supreme Court, Sen. Chuck Schumer called out Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch and said, “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You will not know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Roberts immediately issued a statement quoting Schumer and saying that “threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous.”

But when Trump relentlessly attacks the judiciary, including routinely defying court orders, and elected officials call for judges to be impeached, the best Roberts could come up with was, “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

This is equally as mealy-mouthed as Kennedy’s comments that the judiciary should stand for the rule of law and “we must always say no to tyranny and yes to truth.” Notably absent is any mention of who is attacking the rule of law. Notably absent is any mention that the rule of law went out the window when the conservative majority granted Trump immunity. Notably absent is any mention of who is saying yes to tyranny and no to truth.

Kennedy doesn’t deserve praise or a cookie for these vague statements. If he genuinely cared about attacks on the rule of law, he would need to challenge his former colleagues. He would need to challenge Trump, the man he cut a deal with to get Kavanaugh a lifetime appointment. He would need to say that the threats of violence against judges only occur when they rule against the administration. He would need to call out the ceaseless attempts by GOP elected officials to knee-cap the courts.

Kennedy is not going to do any of those things, but he’s probably going to continue to make a lot of high-minded speeches. Feel free to ignore him until he tells the truth.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Facing Federal Probes, Musk Can Now Hide Behind Trump

Instead Of Facing Federal Probes, Musk Can Now Hide Behind Trump

Winning the 2024 election didn’t just return Donald Trump to power. It also allowed him to dodge multiple criminal cases. And while his unofficial vice president, Elon Musk, didn’t need a Trump win to stay out of jail—at least under any existing charges—the victory likely freed Musk and his companies from regulatory oversight. That’s an exceedingly lucky break for Musk, currently being scrutinized by multiple government agencies for everything from his inflated claims about self-driving Tesla cars to his SpaceX rocket launches polluting wetlands to his purchase of social media platform X—just to name a few.

To be perfectly fair, Trump’s victory means a far friendlier atmosphere for all greedy billionaires who hate regulations, not just Musk personally. But Musk is the one sitting next to Trump at Thanksgiving and the one who threw roughly $260 million at Trump’s campaign while fawning over him on X and in person.

So which pesky investigations and regulations is Musk probably free of now that his bestie is headed to the White House?

For starters, perhaps he’ll get out from under the alphabet soup of agencies looking into Tesla’s so-called full self-driving system, or FSD. Musk has promised a vision of a completely autonomous hands-free Tesla since 2013. It’s not a vision that has ever come true. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has twice required Tesla to recall FSD because of the system’s bad habit of ignoring traffic laws, including being programmed to run stop signs at slow speeds. In October, the agency opened another inquiry after the company reported four crashes, one of which killed a pedestrian, when FSD was used in low-visibility conditions like fog.

The issue isn’t just that FSD is unsafe. It’s also that Tesla hoovered up cash by selling a product that basically doesn’t exist. Tesla owners filed a class-action lawsuit in 2022 alleging the company defrauded them by charging $15,000 for an FSD package that didn’t result in a Tesla being able to drive itself successfully. Tesla’s defense? Full self-driving is merely an aspirational goal, so a failure to provide it isn’t a deliberate fraud—just bad luck. Perhaps that’s the same excuse Tesla would have trotted out in response to the Department of Justice’s criminal investigation into whether the company committed wire fraud by deceiving consumers about FSD’s capabilities and securities fraud by deceiving investors.

Trump named former reality show star and former Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) to head the Department of Transportation, of which NHTSA is a part, and tapped one of his impeachment defense attorneys, Pam Bondi, to head the DOJ after Matt Gaetz’s nomination flamed out. There’s no reason to think either of these people will grow a spine and continue investigating “first buddy” Elon Musk or Tesla.

Trump’s election also probably gives SpaceX breathing room. Musk’s private space company, which receives literal billions in government money, hasn’t been terribly interested in following government rules.

In September, the Environmental Protection Agency fined SpaceX $148,378 for dumping industrial wastewater and pollutants into wetlands near its Texas launch site. The company paid that fine, albeit with some whining about how it was “disappointing” to pay when it disagreed with the allegations, but it’s planning on challenging the recent $633,000 fine from the Federal Aviation Administration. The regulatory agency proposed the fine after two launches in 2023 where the company allegedly didn’t get FAA approval for launch procedure changes and didn’t follow license requirements.

This isn’t SpaceX’s first run-in with the FAA. The aerospace company paid a $175,000 fine in October 2023 over not submitting required safety data to the agency before a 2022 launch of Starlink satellites. After an April 2023 launch where one of the company’s rockets blew up shortly after takeoff, sending debris over South Texas, the FAA required the agency to make dozens of changes before another launch.

Like the NHTSA, the FAA is part of the Transportation Department. Sean Duffy’s past as an airline industry lobbyist doesn’t inspire confidence that he’ll take a hard line against SpaceX.

And as far as whether the EPA will continue to pose any problems for Musk? Under Trump, that agency will be run by former GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), whose primary qualification seems to be hating EPA regulations. He’s voted against replacing lead water pipes and cleaning up brownfields and sees his mission at the EPA as pursuing “energy dominance.” Again, not exactly someone who will bring the hammer down on Musk or his companies.

Musk is also in hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the possibility he delayed disclosing his acquisition of Twitter stock in 2022. Investors must disclose when they accumulate five percent of a publicly traded company, a requirement that ostensible super-genius Musk says he misunderstood somehow. Under President Joe Biden, current SEC chair Gary Gensler has aggressively pursued enforcement efforts, a trend in no way expected to continue under whoever Trump picks.

Lightning round! Musk tried hard to violate a consent order with the Federal Trade Commission by giving “Twitter Files” writers improper access to user data, but he was thwarted by Twitter employees who actually followed the order. He’s faced numerous unfair labor practices claims and been investigated multiple times by the National Labor Relations Board, so he’s suing to have the board declared unconstitutional. He lost out on $885 million in government subsidies after the Federal Communications Commission found that Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, couldn’t meet the speed metrics for the government’s rural broadband program.

Luckily for the multibillionaire, the incoming head of the FCC is a pal of Musk’s who thinks it is “regulatory harassment” to require Starlink to meet program requirements.

Musk will also have the advantage of helming a newly invented entity, the cringily titled Department of Government Efficiency (aka DOGE—ugh), that can put his rivals under a microscope. DOGE’s co-head, fellow tech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, has already said he’ll examine a government loan to Rivian, a competing electric vehicle manufacturer, calling the loan “a political shot across the bow at Elon Musk and Tesla.” Though DOGE is not an actual department—you need Congress to create one of those—and cannot slash spending directly, Musk could still suggest to Trump that government funding of fiber optic cables in rural areas be gutted. This would leave satellite services like Starlink as the only option for some rural consumers—an option either those consumers or the government would then have to pay for.

Until Trump was elected in 2016, it was impossible to imagine giving billionaires like Musk so much opportunity to use the levers of government to openly and directly benefit themselves. Now that Trump has won a second term in office, Musk is just one of many oligarchs looking forward to an extremely lucrative four years. It’s lucky for them—but terrible for the rest of us.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Donald Trump

Trashing Constitution, Trump Says He'll Order End To Birthright Citizenship

After running on a promise to end birthright citizenship, a victorious Donald Trump says he is planning on ending it on day one of his presidency. It’s a tall order given that the text of the 14th Amendment explicitly guarantees it to all people born on U.S. soil, but everyone knows Trump isn’t remotely interested in whether something is unconstitutional.

To anyone not enraptured by a racist fantasy of deporting millions of people, the first sentence of the 14th Amendment is extremely clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” If you were born here, regardless of your parents' citizenship status, you’re a citizen.

It’s a practice Trump hates and one he repeatedly lies about, claiming only America has it. That’s been repeatedly debunked, as some three dozen other countries bestow it, including Canada and Mexico. However, even if we were the only country with it, that wouldn’t negate its constitutionality, necessity, or importance.

The 14th was among the Reconstruction Amendments enacted after the Civil War. It guaranteed citizenship to formerly enslaved people, overturning the shameful Dred Scott decision from 1857. In that notorious ruling, the Supreme Court held that a “free Negro” whose ancestors had been brought to this country and then sold into slavery was not a citizen of the United States.

Granting citizenship to formerly enslaved people wasn’t just the right thing to do—it was a necessity in order for the country to move on in unison after the Civil War. Otherwise, former slaveholding states would have remained able to define “citizen” in such a way that would exclude Black people.

The issue these days, of course, is whether that guarantee was limited to the descendants of formerly enslaved people or includes anyone born here, regardless of parentage. For years, lawyer John Eastman has been pushing the idea that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means that the 14th Amendment was not intended to grant automatic citizenship to children of noncitizens because those noncitizens were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

This thought process led Eastman to declare that Vice President Kamala Harris may not be a citizen if her parents were only here with temporary permission under student visas. These days, Eastman is better known as a vociferous proponent of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. He is also one of the architects of the fake elector scheme, for which he now faces criminal charges in Arizona and Georgia and disbarment in California. Yeah, that’s definitely the person you want determining who gets to be a citizen.

Trump is currently running around saying that he can end birthright citizenship via an executive order, a stance he’s pushed since 2018. Anyone who made it through high school civics probably knows that an executive order can’t overrule the Constitution, making that plan a bit dicey. Even getting the incoming GOP-led House and Senate to sign on to a bill doesn’t change the Constitution: That takes 38 of the 50 states ratifying an amendment.

Another problem Trump faces is that the Supreme Court already ruled over 100 years ago that a child born to Chinese citizens residing in the country at the time of his birth was a citizen. Given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, though, who knows whether that long-standing precedent would hold any sway. It’s easy to imagine the conservative majority buying Fifth Circuit Judge James C. Ho’s brand new argument that undocumented people should be considered “invading aliens” and that birthright citizenship “obviously doesn’t apply in case of war or invasion.”

There’s no precedent or support for this idea; it’s basically something Ho made up out of whole cloth after Trump won the election last month. Ho had previously been an enthusiastic supporter of birthright citizenship, but now that he’s perpetually auditioning for a future Supreme Court seat, he had to figure out a way to align himself with Trump.

None of this means anyone should rest easy and assume the dismantling of birthright citizenship won’t come to some degree of fruition. Eternally ghoulish Trump adviser Stephen Miller has proposed refusing to issue citizenship documents such as passports and social security numbers to children born here but whose parents are not citizens. On “Meet the Press” last Sunday, Trump went a step further and said he’d just deport children who are citizens along with their undocumented parents because “I don’t want to be breaking up families.”

Speaking of families, Trump critics have pointed out that his children Don Jr., Eric, Ivanka, and Barron were all born to mothers who were not citizens at the time of their births and speculated that Trump’s proposal to end birthright citizenship would apply to them. That’s a nope, because Trump’s plan would still grant birthright citizenship to children when one of two parents is a citizen. How convenient.

Trump has promised to end birthright citizenship on his first day in office, which likely means the effort will be as chaotic as the Muslim travel ban he threw together a few days after his inauguration in 2017 and was ultimately struck down by the courts. The law will likely catch up with him again, but not before he does some serious damage.

Xenophobia is Trump’s most deeply held principle, and he’ll do anything to indulge it—no matter the consequences.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.