Profiting from the Presidency

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist. Trump is abusing his power to increase his wealth.

Ben Protess, Andrea Fuller, Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany at NYT:

President Trump reaped a stunning windfall in his first year back in the White House, including about $1.4 billion from his family’s cryptocurrency businesses, a new filing shows.

All told, the president pulled in at least $2.2 billion, a figure that includes other parts of his vast holdings, such as his real estate assets. That compares to a minimum of $622 million his enterprises pulled in for all of 2024, before he returned to the presidency.

One of his biggest hauls in 2025 came when an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates bought nearly half of the Trump family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, a transaction that blurred the line between foreign policy and private enterprise.

Mr. Trump also collected hundreds of millions of dollars from sales of his $TRUMP memecoin and World Liberty’s sale of its own digital tokens.

The results, detailed in Mr. Trump’s mandatory financial disclosure report for 2025 and released on Tuesday, pulled back the curtain on the president’s business operations. His crypto ventures, the report shows, are now some of his most lucrative enterprises, a remarkable turnabout for a man who once slammed crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.

The president’s finances, which had been something of a mystery, highlight a conflict in his crypto business: Mr. Trump is a major crypto industry operator and its top policymaker.

Eric Lipton, Andrea Fuller and David Yaffe-Bellany:

A large chunk of the $2 billion haul President Trump took in last year came as hundreds of thousands of his fans and other investors bet on a speculative cryptocurrency called $TRUMP, hoping its value would soar with his return to the White House.

But while Mr. Trump amassed an eye-popping $636 million from the cryptocurrency, known as a memecoin, many of his followers who heeded his call to purchase the coin came out losers.

That outcome, documented by an independent analysis of trades and fees paid out from $TRUMP token sales, is drawing renewed attention this week, as Mr. Trump for the first time has detailed the extraordinary $1.4 billion in revenue he secured just from the cryptocurrency industry since he returned to the White House.

The president’s 927-page financial disclosure showed how Mr. Trump and his family reaped huge financial rewards in 2025 through his money-losing Trump Media venture and a separate cryptocurrency firm called World Liberty Financial, even as routine investors suffered vast losses.

...
“It is hard to wrap your head around that the president of the United States would engage in this level of self-enrichment at the expense of so many of his supporters,” said Lee Reiners, a former Federal Reserve Bank examiner who now studies cryptocurrency issues at Duke University. “This is a president of the United States who has made more money off crypto since he took office than he made in any prior year in his entire business career.”

The Widening Gyre

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

-- W.B. Yeats

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration was full of ominous developments -- including a tranche of racist and anti-Semitic chats by prominent Young Republicans.  Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, defended Tucker Carlson after his softball interview with Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes.  Meanwhile, the Democrats grapple with their own extremists, including anti-Semites and hardcore leftists.  Seventy-two years after the fall of Joe McCarthy, some of the new leftists are saying "You're goddamn right we're communists!"

Charlie Sabgir at The Atlantic:

Most of the men I spoke with said that the president is abandoning his “America First” agenda, which is what attracted them to the Republican Party in the first place. Rather than defect to the Democratic Party, they want a more radical GOP—one led not by MAGA insiders such as J. D. Vance but by figures further to the right, who they believe can deliver on the promises that Trump has failed to keep on immigration and foreign policy. Some young activists, though, articulated a political vision that goes far beyond any Trump-campaign pledge. For them, the future of American conservatism should be rooted in a patriarchal version of Christianity and an unapologetic ethnonationalism.

...

For Kai Schwemmer, who is the national political director for the College Republicans of America as well as Utah County’s deputy elections clerk, embracing overtly racial nationalism isn’t just good in itself. It’s shrewd politics. “If we go back to this kind of civic nationalism”—the idea that America is united by shared ideals rather than common ethnicity or culture—“I think the Republican Party will end up losing,” Schwemmer told me. “Nationalism is not a dirty word,” he continued. “We can’t retreat from it, and we can’t retreat from having a more conservative Republican Party.” He said that the party’s future leaders must “appeal to the fears and worries of the majority of Americans, who are white.”

Speaking of potential leaders, Schwemmer identified a “big three” for young conservatives: Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens. This “dissident” wing, Schwemmer said, has displaced the “old guard”—figures such as Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson who first drew many young conservatives into politics.

None of the conservative activists I spoke with endorsed Fuentes unequivocally, and a couple condemned him, distancing themselves from the “groyper” label that his white-nationalist followers embrace. A member of the College Republicans at a private Ohio university estimated that only a minority of his group’s membership considered themselves fans of Fuentes, and most rejected the streamer’s blatant anti-Semitism. But he also conceded that about three-quarters of them “broadly sympathize” with Fuentes’s views. Skepticism of Israel, he told me, is the “dominant narrative” among his peers.

The Turning Point president from the southeastern university, however, has observed something much warmer, and more worrisome, than broad sympathy: the belief that Fuentes is a more genuine representative than Trump of the America First vision, not in spite of his anti-Semitism but because of it. “Almost all of Gen Z hates the Jews,” he told me. In his Turning Point chapter, he said, “Fuentes is the guy."

At The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait writes about the Democratic Socialists of America:

The DSA, in fact, seems to despise the Democratic Party. Darializa Avila Chevalier has called Joe Biden a “rapist” and wrote “Fuck Kamala Harris” on social media. She proceeded to be nominated for a House race in New York last week by Democratic voters who presumably do not all share those feelings. The DSA now includes a growing caucus of supporters in Congress, has mayoral candidates well positioned to win in several big cities, and has plans to throw its weight behind a yet-to-be-determined presidential candidate in 2028.

The DSA’s feelings about Democrats encompass not only the party’s leadership but also the philosophical commitments that have guided it since the New Deal: a mixed economy undergirded by democratic values. Chevalier, for instance, joined a post–October 7 celebratory rally and portrayed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defensive response to Western “bullying.” She previously called for seizing land and the means of production and has repeatedly praised communism.

...

Militant anti-Zionism became a wedge that the group’s more radical activists used to drive away critics of authoritarianism on the left. In 2025, the group’s convention voted to officially remove its founding language allowing for the expulsion of members who worked for communist cells, and added a provision calling the Palestinian “right to resistance” a central tenet of the DSA. Having dismantled the guardrails that Harrington built to exclude communists, the group established new guardrails to exclude anybody opposed to Israel’s destruction. “Michael Harrington’s DSA is dead,” a dispatch from the proceedings gloated.

The DSA’s Red Star caucus was formed the year after the North Star caucus, in an apparent rebuke. It writes that nearly half of the members of the National Political Committee, the DSA’s highest leadership body, “openly identify as communists.”

These left-wing factions have realigned the organization in firm opposition to liberal democracy. In 2021, the DSA joined the São Paulo Forum, a communist-led international network—a move that would, one DSA member protested at the time, “support authoritarian governments who systematically violate the basic tenets of democratic socialism.” It proclaimed its solidarity with Venezuela under the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro, and with Cuba under that of the Castro brothers. The DSA now locates its vision of the ideal society in the world’s most despotic regimes.

NRSC v. FEC

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

 Rick Hasen at Slate:

As disastrous Supreme Court election cases go, Tuesday’s decision in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission doesn’t make the list of complete abominations, like the court’s decision this term in Louisiana v. Callais killing off the remaining key part of the Voting Rights Act, or earlier decisions like 2010’s Citizens United that kicked off the unraveling of our campaign finance system. Indeed, it’s possible that the NRSC decision makes our campaign finance system a bit less distorted in bringing candidates and parties closer together. But NRSC, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the six Republican-appointed justices, is an excellent example of the Roberts court’s “deregulatory bootstrapping,” in which the court relies on its earlier partial overruling of precedents—that only makes things worse—to justify more changes in the law. Fundamental change to campaign finance will have to wait for a new Supreme Court.

...

The court went through a period in the early 2000s when it was deferential to Congress’ judgments as to the need for contribution limits and for spending limits on corporations and unions, and in one of those cases, Colorado II, from 2001, the Supreme Court held that Congress could limit how much money political parties may spend in coordination and cooperation with candidates. The court reasoned that without these limits, large donors could seek improper influence over candidates by giving money through political parties.

...

In Tuesday’s opinion in NRSC, the court overturned Colorado II, and said that the part of federal campaign finance law limiting how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates violates the First Amendment. The court pointed to the “unique” role that political parties play in helping candidates win, and that they have their own First Amendment rights.

But the court also pointed to the development of super PACs as a reason to overturn the limits. All of these outside groups are unaccountable, spreading negative messages. Parties help preserve democracy in the court majority’s view, and it was only fair to free the parties of limits on them.

Trump's Predator Problem

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Scandals persist.  Especially Epstein.

 Kelsey Dallas and Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog:

The Supreme Court on Monday announced that it will not hear an appeal by President Donald Trump seeking review of the $5 million jury verdict entered against him in the sexual abuse and defamation case filed by journalist E. Jean Carroll. The petition for review was conferenced by the justices for the first time on June 25 after being scheduled for a conference in February and then rescheduled more than a dozen times.

Carroll filed the lawsuit that led to Trump’s petition in 2022 in a federal court in New York. She asserted that Trump had sexually assaulted her in a dressing room at a Manhattan department store in 1996 and then defamed her in 2022 after she went public with her assault allegations. A jury ultimately awarded Carroll $5 million, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld that verdict.

Marilyn W. Thompason at The Guardian:

A woman known as Jane Doe 4 in the Jeffrey Epstein files is “staying off the grid” and lives in fear of retaliation from the Trump administration amid an escalating controversy over its handling of her case, according to a family member.

“Trauma is brutal. Chronic trauma destroys,” said the relative, who described the woman’s life as layers of abuse dating back to early childhood. “She’s coping as best she can.”

The woman had four interviews with FBI agents in 2019 that keep resurfacing in the Epstein sex-trafficking scandal. She made unproven allegations she was abused by the New York financier in the 1980s, then sexually assaulted by Donald Trump, when she was between 13 and 15 years old. The White House has called her allegations “completely baseless” and “backed by zero credible evidence”, a claim it said was supported by the fact that the Biden administration’s justice department knew about the allegations but “did nothing with them”.

She is one of the only alleged Epstein victims to have directly accused Trump, and irregularities in the justice department’s handling of her case files have now become a rallying point for critics of acting attorney general Todd Blanche, who is the US president’s nominee for permanent appointment.

A federal judge in Washington last week gave Blanche until 2 July to produce unredacted versions of files the justice department has already released, or provide an explanation for why it cannot produce the unredacted records. The Department of Justice (DoJ) was also ordered to release interview notes related to Jane Doe 4’s allegations. The decision was part of a civil case against Blanche brought by journalist Katie Phang.

 

SCOTUS Decides Case on Mail Ballots

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

California sends mail ballots to every registered voter and allows the counting of ballots postmarked by election day even if they arrive a week later.  This process helps explain why the state's vote count is slow.  Despite the total lack of evidence for significant cheating,  the slow count gives Trumpists an occasion to spread lies about election fraud.

 Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog:

Just over four months before the 2026 midterm elections, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld a Mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by, and received within five days of, Election Day. By a vote of 5-4, the justices in Watson v. Republican National Committee rejected an argument, made by the political parties and others challenging the law, that federal law requires mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett concluded that “the election-day statutes require the electorate’s choice to be made on election day. That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote—as it is in Mississippi. But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.”

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito argued that “from this Nation’s founding until the last few decades of the 20th century—a period that spans the enactment of all three election-day statutes—having an ‘election’ on a particular day meant completing ballot collection on that day.”

Mississippi passed the law at the center of the dispute in 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Four years later, the Republican National Committee and the Mississippi Republican Party, along with a Mississippi voter and a county election official, went to federal court in Gulfport, Mississippi, to challenge the post-election ballot deadline; the Libertarian Party of Mississippi filed a similar lawsuit a few weeks later, which was combined with the first suit. They argued that Mississippi’s law clashes with a federal law, first passed by Congress in 1845, that designates the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as the “election day.”

Billionaire Bucks

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses campaign finance.

Bruce Mehlman:

Campaign costs are increasing much faster than inflation, with the richest Americans increasingly dominating election finance. Does this make our democracy more robust & resilient, or does it undermine trust, accelerate alienation & drive populism? 

Source: Americans for Tax Fairness 

Trump v. Republicans in Congress

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional,  state, and local elections.

Trump is acting without regard for the political needs of Republicans in Congress.  An unpopular war is just part of it. Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen at Axios:

• The big picture: Trump has spent his second term steamrolling his own party, confident the lawmakers he humiliates will keep voting his way. You see it everywhere:He canceled the signing of a landmark bipartisan housing bill just hours before the ceremony — trying to strong-arm the Senate into passing the SAVE America Act, a sweeping voter ID bill with no realistic path to 60 (or even 50) votes.
• He dismissed the housing bill — which his own White House had called "one of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history" — as "of minor importance."
• He berated the "Four Republican Losers" in the Senate who voted this week to rein in his Iran war powers, calling the rebuke "poorly timed and meaningless." (Hours after his barrage, Republicans passed a symbolic reversal.)
• He blew up a bipartisan scramble aimed at renewing the government's FISA surveillance powers, demanding the SAVE Act on voting rules be bolted on. He let the authority lapse rather than back down.
• He yanked his own intelligence nominee, Jay Clayton, from a confirmation hearing hours before it began, leaving the nation's spy agencies under an acting director both parties distrust.
• He refused to brief Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and other senators on his Iran deal until after the text was finally released, leaving them to defend terms they hadn't seen.
• He blindsided senators by proposing a $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund just as they moved a $70 billion immigration package, defending Jan. 6 rioters who attacked the building where the senators work.