More TACO Trump

In the end, Epic Fury is feeling more like Epic Furry. It barked like a dog, but morphed into a kitten. Aside from the hundreds of billions of dollars the U.S.-Iran agreement will make accessible to the latter, it also grants Iran influence over the Strait of Hormuz that it didn’t have before the war.

Early on, Donald Trump insisted that regime change in Iran “would be the best thing that could happen.” On Tuesday, he said “I never cared about regime change.” He promised to eliminate Iran’s ballistic missile program. On Wednesday he said, “I’m saying that if other countries have them, it’s a little unfair for them not to have some.” As for Iran’s supply of “highly enriched uranium”—or “nuclear dust,” as the president puts it—Trump has flipped from demanding that Iran surrender or destroy the material immediately to landing at “it has very little material value.” Meow.

Ballroom BS

With Donald Trump, there’s always a catch. Or a lie. Or a catch within a lie. Take the matter of who’s paying the bill for his precious ballroom. We all remember how the president assured us time and time again that his ballroom—now accessorized with a massive bunker and drone port—would cost $200 million, then $400 million. But not to worry, private donors and companies would cover everything. The whole thing, he said, like a car salesman throwing in undercoating at no extra cost, would be “taxpayer-free.”

Not quite. According to The Washington Post, a detailed project summary estimated the cost at $600 million, with half to be covered by taxpayers. In fact, at the same time Trump was hyping his ballroom “gift” to America, more than a dozen payments of public funds had already been made to the contractor.

Unintelligible intelligence

We have yet another bit of Trump bullying of congressional Republicans to report. The Senate Intelligence Committee was supposed to hold a confirmation hearing Wednesday for Jay Clayton, the president’s nominee to replace Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. But Trump, calling the hearing “a rush job by Democrats”—although Republicans control the committee—told Clayton not to show. The president said the Senate first had to approve Jamie McDonald as Clayton’s replacement as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. While he was at it, Trump also demanded that the Senate pass new voting restrictions through the Save America Act, which would require voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship.

The upshot? Republicans on the committee got the message, they canceled the hearing, and Trump hitman Bill Pulte, a man with no intelligence experience, will continue to oversee U.S. intelligence as the agency’s acting director.

Kash’s cash bonuses

Petty Kash Patel may need another drink. The FBI director is again under fire, this time from Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. Raskin wants Patel to address reports that he authorized as much as “hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlawful bonus payments” to loyalists on his staff and agents on his security detail.

“In some cases,” Raskin wrote in a letter to Patel obtained by MS NOW, “nearly $8,000 payments have been made to multiple individuals every two-week pay period despite many of the beneficiaries of your selective generosity already maxing out on a federal employee’s salary.”

Kash leaks again

Matt Quinn, Secret Service deputy director, clearly wasn’t happy with Kash Patel jumping the gun on the alleged plot to stage a drone attack on the Ultimate Fighting Championship event at the White House on June 14. The Secret Service and FBI worked together to nail down who should be taken into custody, and their plan was to make a joint announcement Tuesday afternoon. But Patel couldn’t wait. He posted a social media announcement before some of the suspects had been arrested. Quinn’s reaction: “I’ll tell you the Secret Service led that investigation from the beginning. I’ll tell you that the case is ongoing. In order to maintain the integrity of the investigation and the security plan, we chose not to leak it.”

UFC smacks taxpayers

Yes, the Ultimate Fighting Championship spent $60 million to stage the series of cage fights last Sunday on the White House lawn. But, no surprise, the federal government won’t get off scot-free. For starters, the District of Columbia is going to charge somewhere between $10 million to $12 million for providing supplemental security.

Trump crypto boost

Another bonus for a big Trump family moneymaker. Sometime soon, World Liberty Financial, the Trump Organization’s lucrative cryptocurrency venture, will likely receive a national bank trust charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. That credential would allow the company to get a cut of financial transactions similar to Venmo and issue cryptocurrency without having to go through another institution.

Going after Gavin

It looks like Gavin Newsom is moving to the top of Donald Trump’s enemies list. California’s governor said federal agents in recent weeks have been interviewing friends and associates of both him and his wife, documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom. The feds are apparently looking into his wife’s financial ties with several of the nonprofits with which she’s been involved. Newsom, who Trump cleverly calls “Newscum,” said the Justice Department “is trying to find a crime.”

Another blow to wind

The Trump administration is paying another energy developer to abandon plans to erect wind turbines off U.S. coasts. The Interior Department announced yesterday that Invenergy will receive $765 million in taxpayer dollars when it surrenders the leases for four wind farms it was starting to build off the coasts of New York, Maine and California. It’s the third deal the federal government has made to stop offshore wind turbine projects, a personal crusade for Trump, who derides wind power whenever the subject comes up. That’s now $2.5 billion his administration has committed to killing offshore turbines.

Trump brand boom

According to the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s latest count, the Trump Organization and its foreign business partners are planning, building or opening as many as 25 Trump-branded real-estate projects in other countries, more than tripling the number of Trump properties abroad. In nearly half of those countries, developers will use contractors or seek permits from foreign governments, which creates plenty of potential conflicts of interest.

No vote, no problem!

Women in America have had the right to vote for a little more than 100 years. That apparently is long enough, according to a number of women interviewed at the recent Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit in San Antonio.

“My perspective as a Christian woman is that my husband and I are one flesh,” Alexus DeGraaf said. “I vote the same way he does, so honestly, I would be okay with giving up my right to vote, because I know that he would represent me well.” Another summit attendee, Brooke Foxworthy, agreed. “If my husband’s the head of the household, I am the neck, and we work very cohesively together,” she said. “So, I would imagine if he was voting on behalf of our household, I would be fine with that.”

Law and disorder

As the Trump administration was ramping up Dark Lord Stephen Miller’s deportation campaign last year, it considered suspending the right of habeas corpus for undocumented immigrants. That would have enabled law enforcement authorities to imprison people without having to prove to a judge why they should be jailed and deny them the right to challenge their detention in court. According to The New York Times, only a secret memo from a conservative lawyer on the White House staff to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles prevented an action the Constitution permits only in cases of rebellion or invasion.

Screwworm screwup

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins keeps insisting that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency ‘s elimination of a USAID pest monitoring program has nothing to do with the first appearance of the New World screwworm in the United States since the 1960s. But her department now says it will spend $1 billion on an emergency response and prevention plan to avoid a potential disaster for the Texas beef industry.

Gilded Age 2.0

According to Americans for Tax Fairness, billionaires in America now own a record $9.2 trillion, 32 percent more than last year. Meanwhile, the nation’s Gross Domestic Product increased only 6 percent over the same time period.

Randy Rieland, Money Trail’s “Trail Notes” columnist, is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Editor’s note: This is the second installment of Money Trail’s occasional column, “Marked Down,” which provides updates on past articles and reports on relatively recent stories worthy of note that we missed given the daily horrors emanating from the White House.

Ridding D.C. of Trump’s schlock

A federal judge gave Donald Trump’s hand-picked board at the Kennedy Center until last weekend to remove his name from the building and other center signage. Now that they’re gone and a banner of Trump hanging on the front of the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been replaced by one featuring Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, there at least four other prime examples of Trumpian excreta disgracing Washington (if you don’t count the algae-infested Reflecting Pool, the gold bling in the Oval Office, or Trump’s proposed arch, ballroom and “garden” of statues of American heroes, which may never see the light of day).

They all have to go.

First up, the banner of Trump hanging alongside one of Theodore Roosevelt on the front of the Labor Department. At the bottom of both banners it states in all caps: “American Workers First.”

The Roosevelt banner is unquestionably appropriate. After all, he oversaw the creation of the Department of Commerce and Labor (which William H. Taft split into two agencies in 1913), championed the right of workers to join a union, and was the first president to mediate a labor dispute.

But Donald Trump? After taking office, Trump issued an executive order to eliminate collective bargaining rights for thousands of federal employees, prompting a lawsuit by federal worker unions and a court injunction. He also removed key National Labor Relations Board members and left it without a quorum for much of 2025, sharply reducing its ability to process labor cases and oversee union elections. According to labor advocates, union elections dropped significantly. American workers first? Please.

Next, Trump’s mug shot hanging at the entrance to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Pennsylvania Avenue. Under his glare it reads: “Make America Safe Again.” Indeed, our felon in chief has made it safe for all sorts of fraudsters by granting them pardons for their misdeeds. But he has not made it safe for his perceived enemies. He has politicized DOJ prosecutions, purged career DOJ attorneys, and targeted private law firms, forcing them to stop representing his critics.

Third, Trump’s name on the U.S. Institute of Peace. Last December, the Trump administration renamed the institute after Trump and affixed his name on the organization’s headquarters. The State Department said it renamed the organization the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace to “reflect the greatest dealmaker in our nation’s history.”

Finally, “The Claw,” the arena constructed on the White House South Lawn for the Ultimate Fighting Championship extravaganza on June 14, which happened to be both Flag Day and Trump’s 80^th birthday. Comparing the 90-foot-tall structure to France’s Eiffel Tower, which was initially planned to be temporary, Trump said “maybe we’ll never take it down” in a June 2 video posted on TikTok. What purpose it would serve, he didn’t say.

Of course it would be a blessing to rid Washington of all of Trump’s abominations, but it would be an even bigger blessing to rid Washington of the man himself.

Pardon me! No, pardon me!

The extent of Donald Trump’s unprecedented abuse of presidential pardon power has become even more apparent since Money Trail published “All the President’s Pardons” in January. Trump has continued and expanded his unorthodox practice of granting clemency to a rogue’s gallery of fraudsters and schemers who spend millions of dollars to lobby the White House.

Trump’s freewheeling pardon mill has attracted the attention of a triumvirate of notorious white-collar criminals who are now petitioning the Department of Justice (DOJ) for clemency. They include:

• Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the once high-flying cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In 2024, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture after he—according to a statement by U.S. Attorney Damian Williams—“orchestrated one of the largest financial frauds in history.” Before sentencing Bankman-Fried, the judge in the case, Lewis Kaplan, said there was a risk “that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future, and it’s not a trivial risk.”

• Martin Shkreli, a former hedge fund manager and pharmaceutical CEO. Shkreli was convicted in 2017 of securities fraud, sentenced to seven years in prison, and ordered to pay nearly $7.4 million in forfeitures and fines. He also violated his bail conditions by threatening former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton online. Shkreli was dubbed “the poster boy for corporate greed” after one of his pharmaceutical companies jacked up the price of an anti-parasite drug frequently prescribed for people with HIV infections from $13.50 to $750 per pill.

• Charlie Javice, the founder in her early 20s of Frank, a company that offered an online platform to simplify filling out student aid applications. Javice was convicted in 2025 of faking user data to pump up the value of her startup. In 2021, Javice sold Frank to J.P. Morgan Chase for the inflated price of $175 million based on fraudulent data. Javice personally made more than $21 million on the deal. In September, Javice was sentenced to 85 months in prison and ordered to pay more than $300 million in restitution and forfeitures for her crimes. She is appealing her conviction.

Whether Trump will grant clemency to any of these convicted felons is an open question. He indicated in January that he has no intention of pardoning Bankman-Fried. That said, Trump has a soft spot in his heart for convicted crypto bros.

From Titus to Napoleon to Trump

Today’s history lesson: Arches typically celebrate military victories, not national birthdays.

Donald Trump’s proposed 250-foot-high arch is inspired by the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which in turn was inspired by the Arch of Titus in Rome. Both commemorate the death and destruction of an enemy.

French Emperor Napoleon commissioned the 162.5-foot-high Arc de Triomphe in 1806 after his victory over Austrian-Russian forces in the Battle of Austerlitz to honor soldiers who fought and died for France during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. At Austerlitz, 1,500 French soldiers were killed and another 7,000 were injured, while 16,000 Austrian-Russian coalition soldiers were killed, lost or injured and 11,000 were taken prisoner. The arch wasn’t completed until 1836, 15 years after Napoleon died in exile on Saint Helena, a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean.

The 50-foot-high Arch of Titus was built by Roman Emperor Domitian in 81 CE after the death of his brother Titus, who with their father Vespasian destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple in the first Jewish-Roman War, massacring 600,000 to 1.3 million Jews and taking nearly 100,000 to Rome as slaves.

What exactly would the Arc de Trump commemorate?

• The 180,000 to 200,000 avoidable Covid-19 deaths during Trump’s first term due to his incompetent response?

• The more than 762,000 people, including more than 500,000 children, estimated to have died in the first year after the Trump administration dismantled USAID and ended foreign assistance?

• The 73,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli forces under Trump’s ally Bibi Netanyahu?

• Or perhaps the estimated 6,700 people who died in the Middle East as of the end of May because Trump and Netanyahu attacked Iran?

It turns out none of the above. When Trump was asked by a reporter who the arch is for, Trump pointed to himself and said: “Me.”

The war that keeps on taking

Speaking of wars, after more than 100 days of an on-again, off-again military conflict, Iran and the United States have reached a preliminary agreement. Regardless, it seems likely that tensions in the region will continue, particularly since one of the major combatants, Israel, is reportedly not happy with the memorandum of understanding.

The financial costs of the Iran War have been massive. According to the Iran War Cost Tracker, U.S. taxpayers from the beginning of hostilities on February 28 through June 16 spent more than $113 billion. In addition, the United States spent about $2 billion on Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The United States seems intent on spending vast amounts of money on military adventures overseas that ultimately result in defeat or less-than-optimum outcomes. As Money Trail reported in late May, the money the United States has spent on attacking Iran comes on top of the trillions of dollars it already spent this century on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Trump’s ongoing campaign to strangle blue state economies

Although the Trump administration has reached a preliminary agreement with Iran to pause the fighting in the Middle East, its domestic assault on Democratic-governed states—which Money Trail reported on in March—continues.

An analysis by Politico found that in the first 14 months of his second term, the Trump administration approved only 23 percent of disaster funding requests from states with a Democratic governor and two Democratic U.S. senators while authorizing 89 percent of similar requests by states with a Republican governor and two Republican U.S. senators. All told, the administration blocked $250 million in disaster aid to Democratic-led states. “There has never been such a sharp partisan disparity in the approval of federal disaster funds since FEMA was created in 1979,” Politico concluded.

The Trump administration also has continued to choke off federal funding disproportionately for blue state social services, largely under the guise of combating fraud. Hawaii, Minnesota and California are among the most recent victims of Trump’s retribution campaign.

Earlier this month, the administration cut off federal funding for Hawaii’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit by refusing to recertify it due to its alleged ineffectiveness in policing Medicaid fraud.

In May, Vice President JD Vance, who chairs the executive branch’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, announced that the federal government will withhold $1.3 billion in Medicaid funding from California, which Vance said “has not taken fraud very seriously.” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Mehmet Oz said the action represents the agency’s largest deferral ever.

In April, CMS announced that it is deferring $91 million in Medicare funding to the state of Minnesota because of “serious vulnerabilities to fraud.” That announcement came on the heels of a deferral of $260 million in Medicaid funding for the state, which receives nearly $12 billion in federal funds annually to provide health coverage for low-income residents.

Calling the CMS’s action part of a “continued campaign of retribution,” Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, said, “This is a transparent effort to cut funding for . . . working people and rural Minnesota hospitals.”

The Trump administration also continues to threaten so-called “sanctuary” cities that are trying to protect immigrant rights. Last month, for example, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said he was considering punishing select cities and states governed by “radical left Democrats” by pulling Customs and Border Patrol officers from their airports because they allegedly hinder federal immigration law enforcement.

Administration officials quickly backed away from Mullin’s proposal in response to widespread opposition from local officials and the travel industry. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy panned Mullin’s plan during a mid-May congressional hearing. “We shouldn’t shut down air travel,” he said, “in a state that doesn’t agree with our politics.”

Elliott Negin is Money Trail’s executive editor. Jonathan King is Money Trail’s senior editor.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

The release of the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report prompted the usual suspects (a.k.a. “very serious people”) to bray about a large projected shortfall. Yes, as of 2032, the program is projected to be unable to pay full benefits. It would mean a 22 percent cut in benefits if no additional revenue is added. But before seniors—and seniors-in-waiting—have a collective heart attack, there are three points worth making here:

• As an economic matter, the projected depletion of the Social Security trust fund and resulting shortfall in the program mean nothing;

• The main reason for the projected shortfall is the upward redistribution of income over the last half-century; and

• The projected shortfall is far less money than the increase in military spending that Donald Trump has requested for his fiscal year 2027 budget.

Trust fund accounting

Regarding point No. 1, the money to repay the bonds held by the Social Security trust fund in 2032 comes from the Treasury. Its impact on the economy would be the same as the spending in 2033, when the trust fund no longer holds any bonds.

Just to remind people, the trust fund was built up in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s when the baby boomers were all in the workforce. The law required Social Security to buy Treasury bonds with this surplus, which is now being spent down. That means the Treasury is repaying the bonds the trust fund bought over the past four decades.

The bonds held by the trust fund are a legal commitment by the government to pay Social Security benefits. As long as the trust fund holds bonds, the Treasury is obligated to pay them off to allow full benefits to be paid. Once the bonds are depleted, as is projected to be the case in 2032, the Treasury no longer is legally obligated to pay full benefits.

This is an important legal point, but from an economic standpoint, it is money from the Treasury in either case. If the country could afford to pay full benefits in 2032 when the trust fund held bonds, it could afford to pay full benefits after it has sold all of its bonds, but the law would need to be changed.

Upward redistribution undermined Social Security

Wage earners only pay the Social Security tax up to a certain point. In 1982, the last time the program had a major overhaul, the cutoff was $32,400. Anyone who made more than that only paid the Social Security payroll tax on the first $32,400 they earned. In 1982, just 10 percent of wage income went to high earners whose income over the cap escaped taxation. Over the last 25 years, nearly 17 percent of wage income has gone over the cap, which now is $184,500.

This upward redistribution of wage income, coupled with the redistribution from wages to profits in the last quarter century, has substantially reduced the amount of revenue going into the trust fund. It shouldn’t be surprising that the people who engineered the upward redistribution of the last half-century through trade policy, stronger patent and copyright protections, bank bailouts, and tech policy, now want to reduce Social Security benefits.

Trump’s military budget is double the 2032 shortfall

As I have mentioned in previous columns, the news media seem to take great pride in reporting budget numbers without providing any context that would make them meaningful. The projected Social Security shortfall is a prime example. In this case, journalists trot out the usual gang of budget hawks to tell us mere mortals that Social Security, which we can’t afford, requires major “reform.”

Just last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Social Security, as well as Medicare and Medicaid, need to be “adjusted and fixed.”

“The reason we are in trouble is because over 74 percent of federal spending is on autopilot, mandatory spending,” he said. “That’s your entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and then things like Social Security. They have to be adjusted and fixed.”

(Note that “entitlement reform” is Washington shorthand for, among other things, raising the Social Security retirement age and reducing Medicare benefits.)

Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) wants Congress to consider Social Security and Medicare as discretionary spending, putting both programs in jeopardy every year, and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has said his “objective” is to “pull” Social Security “up from the roots and get rid” of it.

Funnily enough, we didn’t hear a peep from those same budget hawks when Trump proposed an increase in the military budget from $864 billion in the last year of the Biden presidency to $1.5 trillion in FY 2027. Even adjusting for inflation between the two years, the increase would still be close to $590 billion. Trump provided no rationale for why the country suddenly needs to spend so much more on its military. He certainly did not propose this sort of massive increase during his campaign.

Adjusting for inflation (assuming 2.5 percent annually), Trump’s requested increase would be slightly less than $700 billion in 2032 dollars. By contrast, the Social Security Trustees project that the program will face a $314 billion shortfall in its annual budget in FY 2032.

Hypocrisy on the Hill

If budget hawks in Congress insist on maintaining that Social Security poses a big problem for the federal budget, why aren’t they screaming from the rafters about Trump’s proposed military budget, which is more than twice as big?

And, as I noted earlier, we are already paying the money into Social Security; it is just coming out of a different pocket. The proposed increase in military spending, at 1.6 percent of gross domestic product, would be newly committed funds from the Treasury, which would impose substantial demands on the overall economy.

Any honest person who says funding Social Security poses a serious budget problem would have to concede that Trump’s military spending proposal poses a far bigger one. But then honesty is hard to come by when we’re talking about politicians, especially when they are backed by interested parties to continue to waste taxpayer dollars on an unaccountable Pentagon.

Dean Baker, a regular Money Trail contributor, is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. A version of this column originally appeared on Baker’s Substack site.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

More on Trump’s indefensible military budget

Stealing from social programs: Trump’s military budget would steal money from social programs that actually help people. See Dean Baker’s “On the Money: Trump’s 2027 Military Budget Would Cost Each U.S. Household $11,200,” June 1, 2026.

The high cost of war: The United States has failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. See Jonathan King’s “When It’s David Versus Goliath, America is Bound to Lose,” May 28, 2026.

What is true security? We need a new definition for national security not rooted in military spending. See Elliott Negin’s “Trump’s Gold-Plated Pentagon Budget Won’t Buy True Security,” April 22, 2026.

Epstein’s back!

Just when you thought he had retreated to a dark corner of the Hall of Villains, voila, here comes Jeffrey Epstein, rising like some pedo Phoenix from his massage table happy place. His resurrection in the news comes courtesy of bizarre revelations in an excerpt from “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” a new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. The pair are known for being particularly plugged into White House intrigue, and one or more members of Donald Trump’s inner circle shared with them stories of high anxiety and infighting over how to deal with the Epstein powder keg.

While publicly the administration tried to sell the idea that there is nothing more to see in the Epstein files—after some in the inner circle, including FBI Director Kash Patel and his former deputy Dan Bongino, had built lucrative podcasting followings by claiming there was so much to see—privately it was a very different story. According to the Times’ excerpt, top people in the White House and the cabinet met on multiple occasions without Trump in the Situation Room, the crisis management complex in the West Wing usually reserved for top secret military and intelligence matters, to thrash out an Epstein strategy.

Some, particularly Vice President JD Vance, argued for taking the transparency route. Release everything, he reportedly asserted, and point out that much of what might be said about Trump was uncorroborated. That included a mention of Trump’s supposed obsession with women’s nipples. No way that should go public, responded Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. She, perhaps more than anyone, knows how much the president wants the whole mess to go away. Bottom line, there’s new angst in the White House, now over who’s leaking this juicy stuff.

Trump loves inflation

Then there’s the inflation thing. In May, it climbed to a rate of 4.2 percent, the first time it’s been higher than 4 percent in three years. It’s now well above the average increase in wages of 3.4 percent. Nearly 50 percent of the inflation spike was driven by the high cost of gas and energy.

At one point Wednesday, Trump actually said “I love the inflation,” which probably has more to do with his cognitive decline than any affection for seeing Americans go deeper in debt. But he couldn’t have loved how the news about higher inflation, along with renewed bombings in the Middle East, tanked the stock market, his favorite barometer for the state of the economy. Dow Jones stocks plunged 950 points Wednesday, while the Nasdaq plummeted more than 500 points, or nearly 2 percent.

Cage match coin con

The Trump Organization has begun selling Donald Trump-branded souvenir medallions commemorating the Ultimate Fighting Championship matches at the White House this weekend on the president’s 80th birthday. The “We the People” silver coins start at $250, but the gold version of the medallions are going for $11,999. The website promotion proudly notes that the coins were “designed” by the president himself.

Trumps win, investors lose

Meanwhile, a new analysis by Reuters concludes that the Trump family, with little risk, has made $2.3 billion from its four cryptocurrency projects. But investors in Trump crypto haven’t done so well. As of the end of April, they had lost roughly $2.3 billion.

Mail-in ballot bout

Trump’s federal government is trying to take another step in wresting control over elections from state and local governments. The U.S. Postal Service is now proposing that it won’t deliver mail-in ballots in states that don’t hand over voter lists to the Trump administration. That’s a follow-up to an executive order the president signed that’s designed to dramatically restrict mail-in voting. So far, 23 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia are suing to block what would be an unprecedented federal power grab over authority granted to the states by the Constitution.

Trump unchained

As shocking as it was to see the White House East Wing tumbling down pretty much overnight, it was simply a preview of Trump unchained. He is now plunging ahead to tear down historic buildings and make reckless political appointments with the understanding that it will always be too late to stop him.

That questionable viewpoint was laid out bluntly in court the other day by a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney defending the construction of the president’s proposed ballroom. When asked by an appeals court judge if it’s too late to stop Trump’s pet project even if it’s found to be illegal, the DOJ lawyer, Yaakov Roth, said it probably was. Then Judge Patricia Millett asked if the courts would be helpless if Trump started dismantling the Statue of Liberty. Roth replied, “I think that’s right.”

Ballroom bonanza

Speaking of Trump’s proposed ballroom, an analysis by the nonprofit Public Citizen has found that more than half of the identified donors to the $400 million project, including Amazon, Lockheed Martin and Palantir, have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion during the past six months. Most of those same companies are also facing federal enforcement actions over alleged wrongdoing or have had such actions suspended by the Trump administration.

No Justice justice

Donald Trump has made no secret of his love of what calls “beautiful clean coal.” Apparently, that affection and generosity of spirit extend to coal magnates who don’t take environmental laws too seriously.

According to a new report by ProPublica, the Justice Department shut down an investigation into the coal empire owned by West Virginia Sen. Jim Justice, the state’s former governor and a reliable ally of the president. Agents were probing multiple violations of the Clean Water Act by extensive mining operations now run by Justice’s son, Jay. In fact, Justice family coal mines have racked up thousands of alleged violations of the law. But not long ago, while prosecutors were still fighting in court for Justice coal companies’ documents, government attorneys were told “pencils down” by the office of deputy attorney general, then headed by none other than Todd Blanche, now acting attorney general.

Erasing immigrants

A government whistleblower released a report detailing how last year the Social Security Administration seriously considered classifying 2.7 million people, including some United States citizens, as dead, even though they were very much alive. It was supposed to be part of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign.

Ultimately the Social Security Administration abandoned the plan, which would have used a government database to erase immigrants and others from the financial system, making it unlikely they could receive wages, open bank accounts, or obtain government benefits.

The whistleblower, Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at Social Security for 25 years and helped lead the agency’s information-technology modernization efforts, said he wanted the public to understand how government data can be misused.

Social Security shortfall

One consequence of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign that doesn’t get a lot of attention is the impact it’s having on Social Security. Although undocumented immigrants can’t collect those benefits, they contribute more than $25 billion a year to the Social Security Trust Fund through payroll taxes. That’s one of the factors behind an estimate released yesterday that the fund will run out of money in 2032. Recipients would still be able to receive Social Security benefits financed through taxes, but payments could be reduced by as much as 22 percent.

National Parks snafu

As many as 1,400 National Park Service (NPS) grants are bogged down in a politicized bureaucratic process at the Department of the Interior. All grants valued at more than $50,000 now have to be approved by two political appointees, creating a huge backlog of projects handled by NPS contractors, such as trail-clearing and prescribed wildfire burns.

Meanwhile, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is launching an inquiry into how the Trump administration is taking money from National Park entry fees earmarked for park maintenance and using it for what Schiff and other Democrats described as “President Trump’s vanity projects” in Washington, D.C. Contracts reviewed by The Hill, a Washington-based political news outlet, show that at least $60 million in NPS funds are funding D.C. renovation projects ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday.

Jet fuel crisis

U.S. airlines spent nearly $6.5 billion on jet fuel in April, according to government data released Monday. That’s 78 percent more than they spent a year earlier, despite the fact that they actually used less fuel this year. To try to compensate, the airlines have been raising fares, but an industry trade group is already predicting that airline company profits could be cut in half.

Consumer gloom

One more gloomy report about how U.S. consumers are feeling. The latest monthly Survey of Consumer Expectations from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that the share of Americans who say they are worse off financially than a year ago is the largest it’s been since January 2023. Meanwhile, the share who think their financial situation will be getting better shrank for the fifth month in a row.

Randy Rieland, Money Trail’s “Trail Notes” columnist, is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, competing groups are once again battling over how Americans should commemorate the nation’s founding.

America250, the official effort Congress established in 2016, is led by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and backed by more than 60 corporate sponsors. It is hosting what it calls “America’s Block Party,” a “shared celebration” across the country on July 3 and 4 that includes large and small gatherings.

Shortly after starting his second term, Donald Trump signed an executive order creating a separate White House-led initiative, Freedom 250, naming himself chair and Vice President JD Vance vice chair. Freedom 250 events include a mixed martial arts cage match on the White House grounds on June 14 (Flag Day and Trump’s 80th birthday), the Great American State Fair on the National Mall later this month, a fireworks display on July 4, and an IndyCar race on the National Mall in late August.

Unlike America250, Trump’s public-private partnership has not publicly divulged its corporate sponsors, but at least eight of them are funding both Semiquincentennial groups. Many of the Freedom 250 sponsors, which have been asked to chip in $500,000 to $10 million, have business before the government or significant government contracts. They include Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman and Palantir.

More than 50 years ago, a similar conflict emerged during preparations for the nation’s Bicentennial. The Nixon administration’s American Revolution Bicentennial Commission became embroiled in controversy amid accusations that it was promoting the president’s political interests, favoring well-connected insiders, and turning the anniversary into a corporate marketing opportunity. Congress ultimately abolished the commission and replaced it with a new agency that largely left commemorations to states, cities and community organizations.

One of the most influential critics of the official Bicentennial committees was the People’s Bicentennial Commission (PBC), a small nonprofit advocacy group founded in 1971 by 26-year-old anti-war activist Jeremy Rifkin to provide “revolutionary alternatives for the Bicentennial years.” Rather than treating the American Revolution as a corporate-sponsored patriotic spectacle, the PBC argued that its core theme was resistance to concentrated power and unaccountable government. Many of the grievances held by the colonists in 1776, the group maintained, were still relevant two centuries later, and the PBC depicted itself as the Revolution’s true heir. Indeed, one of its favorite Founding Father quotes was penned by Thomas Jefferson in 1814: “I hope we will crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

In 1972, Ted Howard—then 22 years old—joined Rifkin and wound up serving as PBC’s codirector. Over the next four years, the PBC organized rallies, protests and town hall meetings; wrote newspaper columns; and published posters, brochures and mass market paperbacks, including “Common Sense II“ and “Voices of the American Revolution.”

A year after the Bicentennial, Rifkin and Howard founded the Foundation on Economic Trends (FOET), a nonprofit that now analyzes emerging ideas in science and technology. Fifty years later, Rifkin is still at FOET, but after picking up a master’s degree in international relations and stints as a consultant and the executive director of another small think tank, Howard cofounded The Democracy Collaborative in 2000, a research and advocacy group that promotes worker ownership. After serving as the organization’s president for more than two decades, he left to create yet another group, Community Wealth Strategies, which is based in Amsterdam, where he now lives.

Rick Hind, a PBC volunteer back in the day, joined me to interview Howard about his work with the commission, the concentration of wealth and power in America today, and the prospects for a more democratic economy. Below are excerpts from our interview, which was edited for length and clarity.

Sounding the alarm

MT: Given that we’re now heading into the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, we thought it’d be enlightening to get your perspective on the People’s Bicentennial Commission (PBC), which argued 50 years ago that the official narrative and celebrations of America’s founding in 1776 largely ignored the true meaning of the American Revolution.

Howard: My involvement with the People’s Bicentennial Commission started in 1972. I had been organizing demonstrations in Miami Beach at the Republican National Convention where Richard Nixon was nominated to run for his second term as president. After the convention I moved to Washington, D.C. At that time, I started thinking about where the progressive movement, what we called the New Left in those days, stood. I had a feeling that it was organizing around a lot of symbols and political slogans that were alien to the traditional experience of most Americans.

I started going to the Library of Congress every day to research the radical commentary that was really part of the country’s fabric and could be built upon. I read a lot from leading thinkers at the time of the American Revolution and assembled a bunch of quotes from people like Sam Adams, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. One day I saw a poster in a bookstore of a hip-looking Uncle Sam figure with the words “People’s Bicentennial Commission.” I was intrigued, so I went to the address on the poster and walked in. I had no idea who the guy in the office was, so I introduced myself and we just started talking.

The other guy was Jeremy Rifkin, who started the PBC in 1971. I told Rifkin I’d been assembling all these quotations and stories about the American Revolution [which the PBC later used as the basis of the book “Voices of the American Revolution”]. He got very interested and asked if I wanted a job. He added that he could pay me. I think it was $60 a week. We eventually became codirectors.

MT: What was going on in the country in the early 1970s that inspired the formation of the commission?

Howard: If the Founding Fathers and Mothers were able to come back to see America in 1972, they would’ve concluded that King George and the British Empire ended up winning the Revolutionary War. We had large corporations dominating the economy. We had concentrations of wealth. We had a president of the United States who was acting as if he were a king-like figure. And we had an official Bicentennial commission that was supposed to be leading the United States toward a celebration of our independence and our revolution commercializing it and trivializing it with red, white and blue Chevrolets and Spirit of America ice cream. We wanted to inject into the political discourse of the day the real principles and the spirit of the American Revolution as embodied by founders like Paine and Jefferson and Adams.

We’re in far worse shape now

MT: If you fast forward 50 years later, it looks like we’re facing a very similar situation today. We have an oligarchy, we have billionaires who are buying the government, and we have a president who wants to be king. There have been No Kings rallies and public resistance to federal agents assaulting communities. But no one seems to be grounding these actions in what was going on during the American Revolution and talking about how economic equality was part of the conversation back then. Are things worse today than they were 50 years ago?

Howard: In my view, the situation in the United States these days is far, far worse than it was 50 years ago during the Vietnam War. It’s hard to believe, but Donald Trump actually makes President Nixon look fairly reasonable. The concentration of wealth today is stunning. We’ve got an actual oligarchy now and the bastardization of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution is far worse under the Trump administration. Under Nixon, it was just cheap and tawdry, but under Trump, it’s consistent with the grift and megalomania that Trump embodies.

The No Kings movement is absolutely fantastic, but there’s a big missed opportunity because it is not grounded in the fact that we are approaching our 250th anniversary. I think it should be tied much more powerfully to the American Revolution and not just be a reaction against Trump.

Building economic democracy

MT: If things are worse today, was your campaign for economic democracy ultimately a lost cause?

Howard: Not at all. Today there is tremendous interest across the country in building a fairer, more inclusive, more democratic economy, an economy much more consistent with the founding principles of the American Revolution. The question is, what do we start to move to? How do we build an economy that’s owned by the people who are doing the work in cooperative businesses where workers can exercise and learn the art of democracy and share in the decision making?

If you look at what’s happening all across the United States, the cooperative sector is exploding. City governments are creating cooperative development and democratic economy kinds of funding strategies that go far beyond what we were able to achieve back in the 1970s.

MT: You had some success in Cleveland, Ohio. Are there other examples in the United States of other city or state governments moving in this direction?

Howard: In Cleveland, the nonprofit I cofounded, The Democracy Collaborative, works with large hospitals, universities and other place-based institutions—what we call anchor institutions—to refocus their purchasing to build up local businesses owned by workers, particularly in low-income communities. Our team created the Evergreen Cooperatives, based in part on the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain’s Basque region, and hundreds of people work there now. Perhaps 50 percent of the people working there were formerly incarcerated and found it very difficult to get a job. Now they’re back in the economy and they’re sharing in the profits.

That model has been taken up in many places in the United States. Chicago has a whole program to promote this idea, and the “democratic economy” is working in Kansas City, in Los Angeles, and places in Washington State.

The key question these projects are trying to answer: How do you create a local economy where the working people in that community can stop living paycheck to paycheck and begin to own capital themselves, because building up assets and wealth, even a small amount, is what creates more wealth.

There are big issues that face humanity—none is greater than the climate crisis—but this issue of capital ownership, which most people don’t talk about, is absolutely essential if we’re ever going to have a more democratic economy, not an economy and society that is controlled by a very small autocratic elite.

At the national level, the Democratic Party is not talking about this issue. However, at the local level, I’m finding there’s much more interest in talking about it. I think there’s more willingness to entertain these kinds of ideas. This just makes sense. People see it is a way to help build their community, make it stronger.

MT: For many states and cities, the model for local economic development is largely one where they try to lure corporations with massive tax breaks to set up shop in their jurisdictions. More often than not, corporations do not honor their contractual agreements to invest in the local economy or hire a specific number of workers. We saw this when Walmart dropped plans for three stores in underserved neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., after the city had offered the company $40 million in tax incentives, and when Amazon repeatedly failed to meet its annual hiring targets at its new offices in Arlington, Virginia, after receiving as much as $750 million in subsidies.

Howard: I think a very important point, and people understand it when you make it, is there’s a lot of money circulating through our local economies. When I worked in the east side neighborhoods of Cleveland, they had a poverty rate of something like 40 percent. However, there was a lot of money flowing around in that community. The problem was that it just kept leaving the community. There was no multiplier effect, which would happen, for example, if you spent money at a local barber shop for a haircut, and the barber then goes and spends it at the locally owned grocery store rather than a big chain. Likewise, when you buy a book at a local bookstore, you’re maybe getting 2.5 times circulation of your money locally. Whereas if you buy from Amazon, you’re not getting any. It immediately goes out of the community.

Nationally, our politics are completely torn apart. In a local community, you can get people to come together around these kinds of ideas and embrace them. People can see them as a commonsense approach that can show actual results and lift people up. We are not talking about charity. What we’re talking about is business development.

MT: You also talk about the need to broaden our definition of entrepreneurship.

Howard: Entrepreneurship is a really great thing. It’s a key quality of the American experience. But it doesn’t have to be the entrepreneurship of one person. You can have it collectively, say a group of 50 people coming together, being extremely entrepreneurial, and building something that is really for them and for their community.

I think this also harks back to what was happening in the American colonies before the Revolution, when some colonists started rejecting the authority of the Parliament in England and tried to set up their own systems by creating new structures and institutions that could fuel development. In our case today, we can build new businesses and create a shared culture of ownership in a community through training and education programs. This is community building that is firmly based on a new economic approach.

From local to global

MT: You mentioned the climate crisis as the biggest threat facing humanity. How do you link local efforts to foster economic democracy to larger, even global, movements like climate activism?

Howard: There are huge implications for addressing the global climate crisis. I think we’re going to have to move to a more localized approach.

There are now many new alternative economic frames that are not ideological—they’re not just socialist or free enterprise. They’re new. To get meaningful change, we can’t just tinker around the edges and reform the institutions and adopt, say, a new tax law. We live in this giant, global hyper-capitalist economy that cannot deal with global crises like growing wealth inequality or the climate crisis.

Our job is to build up alternative structures from the inside. We need to build new institutions, new practices, and a new culture. So, I think this approach of evolutionary reconstruction is a very important framework right now.

The final thing I’d say is that the people and the forces running the system are always trying to pit everybody against one another. We all share so much more than the things that divide us. And hopefully, focusing on a democratic economy that can serve all of us is critical to breaking down those divisions that have proven so cancerous.

Elliott Negin is the executive editor of Money Trail. For more on the history of the People’s Bicentennial Commission, see Jason Tebbe’s July 2021 essay, “The People’s Bicentennial Commission and the Spirit of (19)76.”

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

It was a bit difficult for me to read the new book “Cancelling Billionaires: The Urgent Case for a Wealth Tax” (Dundurn Press, $23.99). It wasn’t the authors’ fault. Their book is well-written and presents a solid case. It’s just that when you’ve seen Shakespeare’s Hamlet 50 times, the 51^st time might be a bit anticlimactic.

The basic argument is one that I’ve heard many times. The rich are getting an ever-larger share of society’s income and wealth, and the size of their fortunes does not in any way correspond to their contributions to society. In fact, as the book shows, it often stems from corrupt deals.

This latest version is told with a Canadian accent. The book’s co-authors, newspaper columnist Linda McQuaig and former Osgoode Hall Law School professor Neil Brooks, both hail from Toronto. They introduce those of us south of the border to some fresh villains, such as retail pharmacy baron David Katz and hedge fund billionaire Conrad Black, instead of the usual Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.

McQuaig and Brooks point out that the rich have managed to reduce their tax burden over the last half-century, leaving a larger share to be borne by the middle class and the poor, often in the form of reduced public services. Further, they provide evidence that higher taxes on the rich and less inequality are associated with better outcomes on a wide range of metrics most of us care about, including health, education, democracy, gender equality and environmental quality.

The authors also discuss other efforts to tax the rich besides the wealth tax they recommend. But I think they are a bit overly dismissive of the tax evasion and avoidance problem. When it comes to finding ways to hang on their money, the rich can be very creative, or at least hire people who can be very creative. As a genuine libertarian explained to me many years ago, if the government institutes a 90-percent top tax bracket, it is essentially paying people 90 cents for each dollar of income they can hide. That is a very big incentive.

In any case, McQuaig and Brooks cite the work of Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman on how to design wealth taxes and minimize evasion and avoidance. All three are outstanding economists who have done great work, but to my mind, the evidence is more mixed than McQuaig and Brooks suggest, but I would be happy to be shown wrong. With some luck, we will get to test this proposition in California, where a 5 percent wealth tax is on the ballot this fall.

I was initially hesitant about the proposed California tax, which would apply to anyone who lived in the state at the end of 2025. Some billionaires felt threatened enough that they moved or at least changed their official residence (these are very different things) prior to the December 31 deadline.

Having already chased away some of the excessively greedy rich, at this point there seems little reason not to move ahead with the tax. California still has enough billionaires that it could raise a ton of money if it passes and survives inevitable court challenges. In addition to affording the state more money to fund things such necessities as housing, education and health care, the tax also will provide important new evidence on the impact of these kinds of taxes.

Unrig the system

As much as I would like to see wealth taxes and other taxes on the rich succeed, it would be much better to structure the economy so no one could amass that much money in the first place. McQuaig and Brooks pay some attention to this issue, even if it is not the main focus of their book.

I have repeatedly pointed out that government-granted patent and copyright monopolies transfer an enormous amount of money from the rest of us to the rich. The sums involved are easily more than $1 trillion a year, more than a third of after-tax corporate profits. Without these monopolies, such centibillionaires as Bill Gates and Larry Ellison would likely still be working for a living or surviving on their Social Security benefits. And we would also eliminate a huge incentive for corruption, especially in the pharmaceutical industry.

The government also could restructure the financial sector. For example, a modest sales tax on financial transactions, which already exist for food and clothes, would eliminate a huge amount of waste in the sector and reduce many fortunes. Similarly, bankruptcy laws that held private equity firms liable for the debts of the companies they bought and forced into bankruptcy likely would crimp the fortunes of such private equity barons as Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman.

It makes more sense to nail the rich before they get so rich, both because it is much more efficient than trying to pry it back after the fact, but also because it takes away the rich’s shield—the “free market.” A government that funds research upfront and puts it all in the public domain is no less free market than a government that grants patent and copyright monopolies. Similarly, a government that taxes financial transactions like every other item is no less free market than one that makes a special exemption for the financial industry. And the market doesn’t tell the government how to structure bankruptcy laws.

But I can call for restructuring until I’m blue in the face, so, by all means, let’s nail the rich where we can. Folks not familiar with the tax-the-rich argument should read McQuaig and Brooks’ book. Likewise, everyone should see Hamlet at least once, but even the 51^st time may still be worth it.

Dean Baker, a regular Money Trail contributor, is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book “Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.” A version of this column originally appeared on Baker’s Substack site.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Fund and games

A grift too far? So it seemed with Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion retribution slush fund, particularly after Judge Kathleen Williams announced that she was reopening the president’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to further investigate “grievous allegations” that the deal to resolve it by creating the “anti-weaponization” fund had been “premised on deception.”

But aside from the arrangement’s dubious legal standing, it reeked politically for Republicans in Congress. That was clear from the beatdown acting Attorney General Todd Blanche recently took from GOP senators when he went to Capitol Hill to defend the deal. Multiple Republicans recoiled from the toxic stench of stashing away nearly $2 billion of taxpayer dollars in a fund completely controlled by a Blanche-appointed commission to make multimillion-dollar payouts to anyone who could show they had been unfairly treated by Joe Biden’s Justice Department, including January 6 Capitol rioters who attacked police officers. It was one big ugly stick they would be handing Democrats.

So, when Blanche returned to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to testify at a House committee hearing, he appeared to promise that the Justice Department is “not moving forward with the fund, period,” although he declined to make a commitment in writing. That seemed more noteworthy a day later when Donald Trump said he wasn’t sure what would happen to the fund, which he described as “a beautiful thing.” Also not clear is whether deep-sixing the fund also means that the president and his family would lose their immunity from future IRS audits that the arrangement would have given them. According to The New York Times, that exemption would enable Trump to potentially avoid paying a $100 million penalty for writing off losses from one of his properties twice as well as other tax-evading indiscretions.

Military secrets

The Defense Department likes to portray itself as a uniquely transparent operation. Just this week, in fact, its acting press secretary, Joel Valdez, called it “the most transparent War Department in history.”

Funny he should say that because also this week, The Washington Post reported that the department has banned journalists from entering what has long been the press office where they could meet with public affairs officers and conduct interviews. Now the Pentagon has declared it a classified space, meaning no journalists. It’s the latest restriction on reporters’ access to anyone who can answer questions about military matters. Several months ago, the Pentagon announced that journalists would need escorts even in the building’s unclassified areas.

Shooting Stars and Stripes

Also this week, Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that has long maintained editorial independence, sued the Defense Department to keep it from imposing restrictions it contends amount to censorship. It was the paper’s response to the department’s plan to “modernize” it and get rid of “woke distractions.”

D.C. street soldiers

The president keeps claiming that having National Guard troops walk around Washington, D.C., in packs of four or more has eliminated crime in the city. Here’s a shocker: It’s not true.

According to a new report by the nonpartisan Niskanen Center, the deployment of 2,800 soldiers in the city, which costs roughly $1.5 million a day, has had little impact on violent crime in D.C. They have reduced some “opportunistic” property crimes, such as thefts from cars. Researchers at the center say that’s because they are most often seen walking up and down the Mall; strolling around federal buildings, monuments and parks; and hanging around Metro stations. Trump plans to boost the deployment to 5,000 troops this summer.

Intelligence failure

When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, slashed away at the federal government last year, a core part of its hacking orders was to jettison any program, any grant and any person with a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) connection. The Trump administration, we were told, would be a model of meritocracy. Only the best, most qualified people.

Somehow, we wound up with Kash Patel at the FBI, Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, and Kristi Noem at Homeland Security. And now Bill Pulte was named acting director of national intelligence on Tuesday to replace Tulsi Gabbard at the end of the month.

Pulte will remain head of Federal Housing Finance, but he’ll also oversee the country’s intelligence community, which is spread across 18 agencies. Not only does he have no intelligence experience, he also has never served in the military, in law enforcement, or in the diplomatic corps. He has, however, shown an affinity for going after Donald Trump’s perceived enemies, including Jerome Powell and Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve, California Sen. Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Pulte’s track record as a Trump attack dog has already set off alarms about what he might do with access to the highest levels of U.S. intelligence. Not to worry, said White House spokesman Davis Ingle, “the president chooses the best and most talented people to serve in his cabinet.”

Trump tall tales

These days Donald Trump is a walking babble machine, but there was a time when he was more cogent in describing what he saw as a key to his success: “If you say something enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.” So it is with his revisionist view of what happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Once again, he shared a favorite fantasy of what happened that day: “People went there with love,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “There was so much love and friendship. It was amazing. People were crying.” Later, as you may remember, the rioters loved the hell out of the police defending the building while Trump watched the love-in on TV.

Another myth the president loves to share ad nauseum is the 2020 election was “rigged” and he actually won in a landslide—a curious claim given Biden got 7 million more votes. That suggests there was a helluva lot of rigging that, for all their efforts, Trump’s loyal band of election deniers has not been able to expose. No matter. During a recent podcast interview with The New York Post, Trump said 14 times that the election was rigged.

With the midterms approaching, expect him to beat that drum relentlessly. And, if he’s looking for a reason to send troops to polling places or even cancel the election—say, something like suspected foreign interference with voting machines—he now has, in Bill Pulte, just the guy who’s ready and willing to use his new position to help the president find one.

Science setback

In keeping with its doctrine that climate change is just another woke hoax, the Trump administration has begun dismantling a deep-ocean observation system that for the past decade has been monitoring coastal environments, underwater ecosystems, and currents that affect the planet’s climate. Scientists have been gathering data from those instruments submerged off the East and West coasts to better understand how the ocean is absorbing carbon pollution and track the growing threat of coastal flooding. But that research equipment will soon be gone, the latest example of the administration sidelining science.

“By dismantling such a system,” said Craig McLean, chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during Trump’s first term, “we push the United States back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership.”

What gun problem?

When it comes enforcing gun laws, the Trump administration doesn’t appear to be much interested. Not only have many Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents been shifted to immigration enforcement duty, but a new analysis by ProPublica found that the agency referred 30 percent fewer cases to federal prosecutors last year than the year before. Further, the administration reversed a Biden crackdown on gun stores that violate the law. There’s been nearly a 70 percent reduction in the number of dealers losing their licenses.

Alabama race redistricting

The Supreme Court came through for the Trump administration once again on Tuesday when it gave its blessing to Alabama to hold an upcoming election using a congressional map that a lower court ruled discriminates on the basis of race. The ruling will allow state officials to utilize a map drawn in 2023 giving Republicans an advantage in six of the seven congressional districts by eliminating one district designed to provide an edge to minority candidates.

Missed messages

One of the primary responsibilities of a presidential library is to preserve White House records. Apparently, that doesn’t apply to the Trump Presidential Library. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Washington Post, the library said it was unable to retrieve a single one of the more than 25,000 tweets Donald Trump posted during his first term. This snafu comes on the heels of the Trump administration insisting that it doesn’t have to abide by the Presidential Records Act, a law passed by Congress not long after the Watergate scandal. It requires public access to a president’s records after he leaves office.

Trump at work

Last month, Donald Trump posted 861 comments on his Truth Social platform, the most in any month since he started his second term. That’s an average of 27 personal attacks, AI graphics and provocative memes a day.

Randy Rieland, Money Trail’s “Trail Notes” columnist, is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

When I heard that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were coming to Washington, D.C., to play at Nationals Park on May 27, I was looking forward to seeing the show—until I saw the ticket prices. Talk about sticker shock.

The first time I saw them, in 1975, I paid $6.50 for a seat in an old movie theater. The last time I saw them, in 2016, tickets at Nationals Park ranged from $70 to $155, and I sat on the field for around $100. For last week’s concert, virtually the same seat was initially selling for more than $1,200 before dropping as low as $321 the day of the show. General-admission, standing-room tickets for the area in front of stage, meanwhile, were initially going for more than $900. (Ticket prices in the stadium grandstand were cheaper—initially in the low hundreds—but the seats are far from the stage and sound quality there is poor.)

If the cost of a $100 field seat in 2016 merely kept pace with inflation, it would run about $140 today, nowhere near $1,200. So, even after accounting for inflation, there has been an astronomical increase in the cost of big-name concerts, largely due to dramatic changes in the music industry as well as fluctuating “dynamic pricing,” which adjusts ticket prices in real time based on supply and demand, similar to what airlines have been doing for years.

Is it fair to fans? I don’t think so.

Poster boy for high prices

For decades, Springsteen cultivated an image of a working-class rock and roller whose shows were affordable for people who embody the characters populating his songs. During the opening days of ticket sales for the band’s 2023 reunion tour, however, Springsteen became a lightning rod for the backlash against Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing system, which pushed prices for premium seats to anywhere from $4,000 to $5,000.

In a November 2022 interview with Rolling Stone, Springsteen addressed the ticket price issue. “What I do is a very simple thing,” he said. “I tell my guys, ‘Go out and see what everybody else is doing. Let’s charge a little less.’ . . . For the past 49 years or however long we’ve been playing, we’ve pretty much been out there under market value. I’ve enjoyed that. It’s been great for the fans. This time I told them, ‘I want to do what everybody else is doing, my peers.’”

Springsteen said he doesn’t appreciate being the “poster boy for high ticket prices.”

“It’s the last thing you prefer to be, but that’s how it went. You have to own the decisions you have made and go out and just continue to do your best. . . . I know it was unpopular with some fans, but if there’s any complaints on the way out, you can have your money back.”

Springsteen did concede that “ticket buying has gotten very confusing” for both the fans and the artists, but pointed out that the higher prices found on such resale platforms as StubHub and Ticketmaster show the true market value of a concert ticket. “The ticket broker or someone is going to be taking that money,” Springsteen said. “I’m going, ‘Hey, why shouldn’t that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?’”

Okay, Springsteen may be the hardest working man in show business—and no doubt, he and his band deliver the goods—but do they need to charge that much money?

After all, Bruce and his band have done quite well. Springsteen’s net worth is now $1.2 billion, much of it coming from selling his music catalog to Sony in 2021 for $500 million. His wife and bandmate Patti Scialfa, meanwhile, has a net worth of $750 million. Guitarist Steven Van Zandt’s net worth is $80 million. Drummer Max Weinberg’s is $45 million. Keyboardist Roy Bittan’s is $40 million. And guitarist Nils Lofgren lags behind with a paltry $20 million.

The band’s biggest earnings came during their 2023-2025 tour, their first since 2017, which ended last July. Billboard reported that it grossed nearly $730 million and sold 4.9 million tickets.

But it wouldn’t be fair to blame it all on Springsteen. Ticketmaster, which the Justice Department says controls roughly 80 percent of primary ticketing at major concert venues, encourages acts to embrace dynamic pricing.

In his introduction to his March 2026 report on Ticketmaster’s monopolistic practices, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, wrote: “Despite the company’s recurrent insistence that decisions about ticket prices and fees are largely out of its hands, Live Nation [which merged with Ticketmaster in 2010] has exerted its enormous influence over venues and artists to increase fees and ticket prices. Ticketmaster also used its monopolistic dominance in the primary ticketing market, and deceptive marketing practices, in order to drive more tickets in the lucrative secondary market. At each stage of this process, from primary tickets marked up by dynamic pricing algorithms, to secondary sales from consumers and ticket brokers, Ticketmaster has profited handsomely while Americans have paid the price.”

Big changes in the music business

The music business has changed dramatically since I went to my first rock concert in 1968. I paid $4 ($38 in today’s dollars) for a balcony seat in Cleveland Music Hall to see Cream and Canned Heat. The most expensive ticket was $5 ($48 today).

Back in the 1960s and the 1970s, teenagers and young adults could attend major concerts regularly on limited incomes. Not only did I see Cream and Springsteen, I also saw the Allman Brothers, the Band, David Bowie, the Doors, Elton John, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Traffic, The Who and other great acts without breaking the bank. Bands toured to promote their singles and 12-inch record albums, which cost $5 in 1968 and $10 ($40 today) in 1980. Selling records was how artists made most of their money. At the time of the Cream concert, I owned their first two albums, and I bought their third when it came out later that year. Mission accomplished, although the band broke up six months after I saw them.

Vinyl records have made a modest comeback because audiophiles insist they sound better, but most people these days stream their music. By 2021, sales of compact discs (CDs), which supplanted vinyl records and cassette tapes, had dropped 95 percent since peaking in 2000. A major source of musicians’ revenue is long gone.

How to make up for that loss? Charge more for live concerts. The calculus of playing live to promote recordings has been turned on its head. Now bands issue singles, EPs and albums, all available on Spotify and other streaming services that pay bupkes, to promote their concerts.

Even so, pre-Covid ticket prices for major acts were often still under $100 for decent seats. The biggest jump occurred after the pandemic shutdown, when live-entertainment companies—mainly Ticketmaster—realized pent-up demand enabled much more aggressive pricing, opening the door for dynamic pricing for big-name acts.

Once affordable mass entertainments tied to promoting albums and CDs, concerts today are increasingly becoming luxury experiences for affluent fans with substantial disposable income, especially for such legacy acts as Springsteen and Paul McCartney, and newer artists such as Taylor Swift and Oasis.

Haves and have-nots

Like many aspects of the U.S. economy, the current live-entertainment business, which includes sporting events, is no longer designed for “average” Americans. It’s structured to attract the affluent slice of the population that has discretionary money for luxury travel, high-end restaurants, premium streaming bundles, and dynamic-priced everything. By contrast, lower- and middle-income households are consumed with paying for the essentials: rent, health care, utilities and food.

Indeed, upper-income Americans are keeping the overall economy afloat. According to a Moody’s Analytics analysis of Federal Reserve data released earlier this year, 59 percent of all U.S. consumer spending in 2025 came from the top 20 percent of income earners, a near record high, while the remaining 41 percent of spending came from the bottom 80 percent, a record low. Another Federal Reserve report found that in 2025, 37 percent of Americans did not have a spare $400 to cover the cost of an emergency.

That means that a Bruce Springsteen concert today is simply unaffordable for a high percentage of people. The irony here, of course, is the audience for an artist long associated with working-class America increasingly consists of affluent professionals and retirees. That doesn’t mean Springsteen’s fans stopped identifying with his music. But economically, many of them are no longer anything like the people in his songs.

Dynamic pricing cuts both ways

Out of curiosity, I checked the prices on Ticketmaster for Springsteen’s concert at Nationals Park the day of the show. It did not sell out. There were unsold, face-value tickets selling at a much lower price than a few weeks earlier. Seats behind and on the left and right of the general-admission standing section that had been listed for more than $1,200 were selling for $321—a lot less, but still more than double what I paid in 2016 after factoring in inflation.

There also were plenty of tickets for resale on the Ticketmaster site by speculators who apparently assumed that the concert would sell out and they could make a profit by reselling the tickets to fans desperate to go to the show. Those folks took a big loss.

For example, one speculator bought four tickets four rows back from the stage, presumably at about $1,200 each, and was trying to sell them for $1,926 each, which would have made a tidy profit of $2,900 if someone bought them all. Two seats down from those four seats, however, were two unsold seats that Ticketmaster was selling for $321 each, and there were other unsold seats for the same price nearby.

The weather also was iffy. Thunderstorms were predicted for 8 p.m. that night, likely depressing last-minute ticket sales. Fortunately, the thunderstorms held off, but a light rain fell on and off during the show.

In sum, the Springsteen show at Nationals Park provided a perfect example of the mess dynamic pricing creates. It started with very high initial prices and speculative purchasing, which was followed by a sizeable resale inventory on Ticketmaster, StubHub and other resale service sites; late-stage price declines; and fans and resellers taking losses. That’s a very different scenario than the old ticket economy, when face-value ticket prices were relatively stable and resale markets were much smaller.

There’s a broader economic metaphor in play here as well: The entertainment industry is increasingly behaving like a financial market. Concert tickets now function a bit like airline tickets, hotel room reservations, or even stocks. In all cases, prices fluctuate continuously, algorithms monitor demand in real time, scarcity is monetized aggressively, consumers are pushed into panic buying, and risk is shifted onto buyers.

Even the emotional experience of concert-going has changed. Buying a concert ticket was once straightforward: “Do I want to go?” With dynamic pricing, now it can become: “Should I buy now? Wait? Will prices rise? Collapse? Am I getting ripped off? Can I resell my tickets if I can’t attend?”

It doesn’t sound like much fun, but remember what Bruce promised: “If there’s any complaints on the way out, you can have your money back.”

Fat chance.

Elliott Negin is the executive editor of Money Trail. Note: Although Negin could not find documentation for the price he paid for a Springsteen concert in July 1975, he found ticket stubs online for other concerts that summer that cost $6.50. Correction: There were no thunderstorms, but it did rain lightly during the May 27 show at Nationals Park.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Do you feel like paying $11,200 a year on the military because our demented president is suffering from paranoia? Donald Trump says we all should fork it over, and Republicans in Congress will likely agree, so prepare to empty your wallet.

Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion military budget for fiscal year 2027 is real money. To truly understand the scope of it, you need to compare it with the Pentagon’s FY 2025 budget, the last year of Joe Biden’s term, not Trump’s FY 2026 budget, since that is what the president and Congress preceding Trump thought was needed to keep the country safe. When you do that, Trump’s proposal amounts to a whopping $600 billion increase, a jump of more than 60 percent.

Every taxpayer dollar that goes to the Pentagon is one less dollar that goes to ensure true security. It would take a lot less money to fund social programs that actually help people. For example:

• Extending enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies for one year would enable millions of Americans to keep their health care coverage at a cost of $30 billion, or $220 per household.

• Continuing the expanded child tax credit that the Biden administration put in place in 2021 would have cost roughly $100 billion a year, or $750 per household.

• Funding the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the program combating AIDS in Africa that Elon Musk delighted in slashing, was projected to cost $4.85 billion last year. That comes to $36 per household.

It’s a good bet that the vast majority of Americans have no idea about the relative size of these programs. It would take only 10 words or so to provide some context that would make the millions, billions and trillions of dollars in the federal budget meaningful. But mainstream news organizations such as The Washington Post, New York Times and NPR do not bother to do so, presumably because they are not really interested in informing the public about where their taxpayer dollars are going.

While the mainstream news media may not choose to highlight it, my Money Trail colleagues and I will continue to call attention to the preposterous amount of money Trump wants to spend on the Pentagon, which has failed every audit since 2018, when they were first instituted.

Trump says the military needs significantly more because he apparently now imagines threats that were previously missed by not only President Biden and Congress before his election, but even by himself during his first term. When Trump was president the first time around, he never made a request for a military budget remotely in the ballpark of $1.5 trillion. Has some new threat materialized in the last five years that wasn’t there in 2021, or is Trump just more insightful now than he was in his first term?

On the latter point, don’t forget that we have a president who imagined that Haitians are eating pets in Ohio, thinks refugees seeking asylum were released from insane asylums, and tells his Navy to blow up Venezuelan fishing boats because he thinks they’re narcoterrorists. Is this someone you would want to give $11,200 to squander on the Pentagon?

There needs to be a serious debate about an increase in the military budget of this magnitude. It is massive, and Republicans would use it as an excuse to avoid spending money on real needs for years into the future. Trump has already said that states should take over Medicare and Medicaid because the federal government can’t afford to fund both them and the military at the same time.

To stop him and Congress from throwing more money at the Pentagon at the expense of sorely needed social safety net programs, pressure will have to come from the public. Politicians ultimately do whatever they are pushed to do.

Unfortunately, a large percentage of the public is in the dark about how the government spends taxpayer dollars because the mainstream news media are shirking their responsibility. And with more of Trump’s billionaire friends controlling the news, it is unlikely the situation will improve anytime soon. So, it is incumbent upon all of us to stay informed, contact our representatives in Congress, show up to vote, and make our voices heard. Trump’s proposed military budget would steal money from programs that really matter, and we can’t let that happen.

Dean Baker, a regular Money Trail contributor, is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. A version of this column originally appeared on Baker’s Substack site.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

More on Trump’s indefensible military budget

The high cost of war: The United States has failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. See Jonathan King’s “When It’s David Versus Goliath, America is Bound to Lose,” May 28, 2026.

What is true security? We need a new definition for national security not rooted in military spending. See Elliott Negin’s “Trump’s Gold-Plated Pentagon Budget Won’t Buy True Security,” April 22, 2026.

More from Dean Baker on Trump’s proposal: Trump wants to raise military spending to nearly 5 percent of GDP, a level that we haven’t seen since the end of the Cold War. See “On the Money: Will Congress Push Back Against Trump’s $1.5 Trillion Pentagon Budget?” April 20, 2026.

Trump fog alert

Donald Trump sure loves to talk about his blue paint job at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. During Wednesday’s cabinet meeting, he rambled on about it for nine unrelenting minutes. As with any 80-year-old suffering from mental decline, he got confused about some things and made up some others. For example:

• He described it as “a very long lake'‘ and said, “We call it the reflecting lake.” No, for more than 100 years, it’s been known as the Reflecting Pool.

• He placed it “between the Lincoln Monument.” Actually, it’s between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.

• Then he added, “Nobody has ever seen anything like it. Longer than the tallest building in the world.” Wrong again. The Reflecting Pool is 2,030 feet long. The tallest building in the world, in Dubai, is 2,717 feet tall.

Okay, so maybe you can attribute those comments to a combination of brain fog and a lifetime fact-fabrication disorder, but the president, of course, didn’t stop there. He hadn’t trashed Barack Obama and Joe Biden yet, so he once again spun out the fantasy that together they spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to fix the pool. That is nowhere close to true.

Finally, it turns out—according to The New York Times—that Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which got a no-bid contract for the job, was awarded a profit margin of 20 percent, more than double what federal construction contractors usually get.

D.C. human cockfight

Meanwhile, not far from the Reflecting Lake, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is coming to town. You may have seen the photos of the giant metal scaffolding now towering over the White House. Huge video screens suspended from it will provide mixed martial arts fans a close-up look at guys pounding each other inside an eight-sided metal cage on Flag Day, June 14, which also happens to be Donald Trump’s birthday. But before they grapple, the fighters will first weigh in on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

When reminded during an NPR interview that the late Sen. John McCain called cage matches “human cockfighting,” Dana White, who runs the UFC, replied, “That’s where we were then. Now we’re on the South Lawn of the White House.”

Suck-up scorecard

Thanks to an analysis by The New York Times updated this week, we now know that during their marathon televised meetings with the president, members of his cabinet praised him, gave him credit, or attacked his political enemies an average of once every six sentences.

Responding to the Times’ findings, a White House spokesperson said the cabinet uses the meetings to “highlight the exhaustive list of accomplishments delivered on behalf of the American people,” but did not comment on the unprecedented display of brown-nosing.

At Wednesday’s suck-up session, Kelly Loeffler, head of the Small Business Administration, knew that as an endangered species—a woman in Trump’s cabinet—she had to gush madly about the president. And she came through. “You are leading us to the greatest economy that the world has ever known,” she told Trump. “I hear it everywhere I go: ‘Please thank the president.’ They love you.”

Ex judges nix slush fund

The Trump administration’s $1.776 billion retribution slush fund took another hit Wednesday when nearly three dozen retired federal judges appointed by presidents of both parties asked a judge in Miami to reverse her decision to dismiss Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. They argued that Trump’s suit, which ultimately led to the settlement that created the slush fund when the Justice Department dropped the case, “is itself a fraud against the court” because Trump was both a plaintiff and the person overseeing the agency being sued. The settlement, the judges wrote, “was not, and never will be, legally justified.”

More petty Kash

FBI Director Kash Patel fired Emily Morales, one of his agency’s longtime senior intelligence analysts, who was involved in the investigation of a 2017 shooting at a House Republican baseball practice. The FBI initially classified the attack, which badly injured House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, as “suicide by cop” and not as domestic terrorism, which angered GOP legislators. Patel reclassified the shooting as domestic terrorism last year. Then, on Friday, he wrapped up this part of his retribution campaign against FBI agents who displeased Republicans or Donald Trump by firing Morales, who was told to turn in her badge as she was walking out of the building.

Trump buck

Two top political appointees at the Treasury Department have been pushing the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to design a prototype of a $250 bill featuring Donald Trump’s mug and signature. Although federal law prohibits living people from appearing on currency, U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach and his senior adviser Mike Brown insisted that the agency prepare prototypes of the bill. After Patty Solimene, director of the printing bureau, pointed out the legal and procedural hurdles to creating the new currency in time for America’s 250th birthday, she was assigned to another position, according to The Washington Post. Legislation permitting Trump’s face on the $250 bill was introduced in Congress last year, but it hasn’t gone anywhere.

Don Jr.’s Vulcan grip

Pro Publica reported this week that White House adviser Peter Navarro helped a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr. land a $620 million loan from the Pentagon. Officials at Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth magnets company, said the president’s son played no role in securing the loan. But three months before it was approved, Donald Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, took a stake of undisclosed size in Vulcan Elements. Then Navarro reportedly put in a request to the Pentagon to move ahead with the Vulcan loan and do it quickly. “The call came from the White House,” a source told ProPublica. “We have to get this done.”

Charlie Kirk payback

Another person who lost a job because of a comment on social media following Charlie Kirk’s shooting death has received a large financial settlement. Suzanne Swierc will get $225,000 from Ball State University, which fired her in response to a post she made on Facebook. An administrator at the school, Swierc referred to Kirk’s death as a “tragedy,” but she also called it a “reflection of the violence, fear and hatred he sowed.”

Swierc did not intend her comment to be accessible to the general public, but someone took a photo of the post and shared it widely, prompting a flood of outraged calls and emails and threats to cancel donations to the university. Soon afterward, the school pushed her out the door.

Paxton goes low

Trump got his wish in Texas Tuesday night when the sleazy but loyal Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, trounced incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in a Republican primary runoff. But some believe that outcome improves the chances of Democrats winning one of the state’s Senate seats when Paxton, an impeached serial adulterer who’s been indicted for fraud, faces Rep. James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, this fall.

True to his reputation, Paxton is already going low. “He’s a threat to our very way of life,” Paxton said of Talarico in his victory speech. “I mean, he’s a vegan who thinks God is nonbinary.” (In fact, Talarico is not a vegan—and who ever said God has genitalia?)

Wrongly sited statue

Oh, the irony, As part of its campaign to dress up Washington, D.C., for the nation’s 250th birthday, the Trump administration is erecting 13 bronze statues of Revolutionary War heroes in a small urban park on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. Among those being celebrated is Caesar Rodney, who cast Delaware’s deciding vote for American independence. Rodney also owned hundreds of enslaved people. The park where he’s being honored is called Freedom Plaza.

The Big Lie hits 100

According to the latest count by Reuters news service, Donald Trump has claimed at least 107 times during the past six months that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Randy Rieland, Money Trail’s “Trail Notes” columnist, is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

“Americans have the watches, [but] the Taliban have the time,” former U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said ruefully after the United States withdrew its forces from Afghanistan after 20 years of military involvement. “We ran out of patience.”

Crocker was alluding to an old Taliban saying to explain how a rag-tag guerrilla army could defeat the mightiest military the world has ever known: wait it out.

Of course, there’s a biblical story that also describes the situation the United States found itself in: David versus Goliath.

The core of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan relied on overwhelming military force to crush guerrillas armed with roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades—latter-day versions of the slingshot. Their low-intensity, “asymmetric warfare” tactics drained U.S. patience—and its war chest.

All told, the United States spent about $1 trillion in today’s dollars on direct military operations in Afghanistan during the first two decades of this century. At around the same time, it rang up another $1.8 trillion fighting in Iraq and Syria.

To pay for these staggering sums, successive administrations under both Democrats and Republicans followed a classic “guns and butter” playbook. Instead of raising taxes to “pay as you go,” the U.S. government saddled future generations with massive debt by choosing to borrow the money. By 2030, these two conflicts will contribute more than $2 trillion to the national debt.

Between 2001 and 2023, the two wars spread across national borders and took the lives of more than 900,000 people in direct post-9/11 war violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen. Some 7,000 U.S. troops also died.

The result of all that blood and money? A Taliban victory in Afghanistan and a weak central government, sporadic violence, and an uneasy peace in Iraq.

The American way of war

The American way of war is incredibly expensive. The United States, which alone accounts for about one-third of the world’s total military expenditures, wields an unparalleled and sophisticated arsenal that includes stealth bombers and fighter jets, helicopters, aircraft carriers, drones, submarines, tanks and cruise missiles, as well as complex systems that intercept enemy missiles and aircraft.

The cost of these technologies is astounding. Consider just these three examples:

• The B-2 bomber, which the United States used in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, is the most expensive aircraft ever built. Each one costs more than $2 billion to manufacture. And that’s just the beginning. Because of its sensitive anti-radar coating, the plane requires specially constructed shelters that control temperature and humidity. It also needs 50 to 60 hours of maintenance for every hour in flight.

• A mainstay of U.S. strike capability is the Tomahawk Cruise missile. Since the beginning of Operation Epic Fury in Iran on February 28, the United States has launched more than 1,000 of them, according to a New York Times report in April. Replacing just one Tomahawk carries a $3.8 million price tag.

• As part of its role supporting Epic Fury, the U.S. Navy employed the high-tech $13 billion aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford with about 4,500 personnel on board. But in March, a massive fire (not caused by enemy action) broke out in the ship’s laundry facility while it was deployed in the Red Sea. The carrier now will require at least a year of costly repairs.

By contrast, anti-U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen each operated on a shoestring budget. The Iraqi insurgency and the Taliban in Afghanistan had no air force, no tanks and no navy. Their weapons mainly consisted of rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles and roadside bombs. According to a classified U.S. government report cited by The New York Times in 2006, the anti-American fighters in Iraq spent less in one year than U.S. forces did on a daily basis.

Lessons not learned

On paper, the joint Israeli-U.S. assault on Iran—called Operation Epic Fury by the United States and Operation Roaring Lion by Israel—appears to be a much more conventional war compared to the U.S. low-intensity conflicts of this century.

Roughly the size of Alaska, Iran is a nation of 93 million people with planes, ships, tanks and ballistic missiles. Iran’s military expenditures from March 2025 through last March amounted to only about $23 billion, less than 3 percent of what the United States spent on its military in fiscal year 2024.

Given that significant disparity, it quickly became clear after Israeli and U.S. forces launched their attack on February 28 that Iran was bringing a knife to a gun fight. In the space of 39 days before a tenuous ceasefire went into effect in early April, the United States hit 13,000 targets in Iran and Israel conducted more than 10,800 forays on more than 4,000 targets, dropping more than 18,000 bombs.

“Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital V military victory by any measure,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bragged on April 8. “Epic Fury decimated Iran’s military and rendered it combat ineffective for years to come.”

Hegseth’s claim of “overwhelming victory,” however, may be premature. It turns out that Iran still retains about 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile as well as 70 percent of its mobile missile launchers, according to classified assessments reported earlier this month by The New York Times and other news outlets.

Hegseth’s boast is reminiscent of President George W. Bush’s widely derided May 2003 “Mission Accomplished” speech about six weeks into the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” he declared. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

Two decades later, the U.S. military was still there.

The costs are piling up

The United States is now in its third month of hostilities with Iran. Despite a ceasefire, the two nations are engaged in dueling blockades of the Persian Gulf, occasional exchanges of fire, and a constant stream of threats.

As their faceoff continues, the price tag for U.S. taxpayers continues to mount. Epic Fury cost $25 billion in direct military expenditures in its first 60 days, acting Pentagon Comptroller Jules Hurst III told a House Armed Services Committee in late April. Many observers, however, say that’s a drastic underestimate because it only accounts for the munitions that have been used and not, for example, the cost of replacing equipment and rebuilding facilities destroyed thus far, which an unnamed source told CNN could push the conflict’s cost to between $40 billion and $50 billion.

In any case, the damage to U.S. property has been extensive. Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that Iranian strikes have “damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment.” Iranian missile and drone strikes on Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Air Base in March, for example, destroyed an E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system (AWACS) plane, which alone is worth $500 million. U.S. forces have also lost a number of expensive jets to anti-aircraft fire and accidents.

David versus Goliath

For Iran, the lesson of successful anti-American insurgencies dating back 60 years to Vietnam must be obvious: The best way for U.S. adversaries to confront overwhelming military superiority is to hunker down, attack when possible, and erode U.S. resolve to fight. Time is on their side.

Hamidreza Azizi, a visiting fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, identified a shift in Iran’s military strategy early in the war that “is tied to an acceptance of attrition as a strategy. Iran is not seeking a quick end to the war but is instead trying to sustain pressure over time—militarily, politically and economically—in order to alter the [United States and Israel’s] cost-benefit calculation.”

“[P]rolonging the conflict and increasing the costs for [its] adversaries over time,” Azizi added, “was seen as a strategic necessity.”

The development of relatively inexpensive warfare technology has made the Iranian strategy possible. “Cheap drones, missiles and mines are imposing costs on advanced militaries that are orders of magnitude higher than the price of the weapons used,” Chris Kremidas-Courtney, a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre, pointed out in a March essay.

Indeed, the advent of drones has transformed modern battlefields in the 2020 war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus region, in the Ukraine-Russia war, and more recently in the Israeli assault on Gaza.

Experience has shown that drones enable weaker militaries to strike stronger adversaries from afar—and they are inexpensive to mass produce. Iran’s Shahed drones, for example, cost $20,000 to $50,000 each, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, making it cheap to launch large numbers of them. Defending against them, however, “often requires interceptor missiles costing millions of dollars,” says Kremidas-Courtney. “Patriot interceptors cost roughly $4 million each, while a THAAD interceptor can cost $12 million to $15 million.”

The United States has reportedly fired more than 200 THAAD interceptors at Iran—about half of the Pentagon’s current THAAD inventory—at a cost of as much as $3 billion. Their targets are often Iranian ballistic missiles estimated to cost only a few hundred thousand dollars each.

“Wielding such new [relatively inexpensive] weapons, attackers aim to wear down sophisticated defenses,” James Black, the assistant director of Defence and Security at RAND Europe, explained in a March 2025 essay in The National Interest. “These new threats also place enormous strain on government finances and industrial supply chains responsible for replenishing depleted missile stockpiles.”

Guns over butter

Donald Trump is heading down a well-worn U.S. path in Iran, despite the fact that he called President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq a “big fat mistake” and pledged “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars.”

Now that he has made a big fat mistake of his own, Trump—like his predecessors—maintains that what he calls his “little excursion” will wrap up in a few more weeks, which is as unlikely as previous U.S. misadventures. And, like previous presidents, he didn’t count on his little excursion spilling over into other countries, complicating matters and driving up costs.

The Vietnam War, for example, eventually engulfed much of Southeast Asia and cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $1 trillion in today’s dollars. The U.S. war against the Taliban in Afghanistan spilled over into Pakistan and also cost about $1 trillion. Meanwhile, Bush’s Iraq invasion, which cost about $1.8 billion, set the stage for the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and led to fighting in both countries.

Likewise, Trump’s Iran war has turned into a regional conflict involving more than a dozen countries across the Middle East. As it expands and drags on, costs will continue to rise, even in the absence of all-out fighting. The U.S. naval blockade of Iran doesn’t come cheap, and the United States still provides billions of dollars in military aid enabling Israel to pursue its destructive campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon.

For the United States, the guns-and-butter approach to funding war may not be viable much longer. U.S. debt has nearly quadrupled in inflation-adjusted dollars from nearly $11 trillion in 2001 to about $39 trillion today. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is now asking for about $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon in its proposed fiscal year 2027 budget, an increase of more than 40 percent.

The $1.5 trillion question is: Where is all that money going to come from? Trump is proposing to cut discretionary nonmilitary spending by 10 percent, but that would cover only $73 billion of his proposed $445 billion increase in Pentagon funding. Trump has warned that the federal government cannot afford the butter of social programs because it is so focused on the guns. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

Trump’s war may force a debate over that tradeoff sooner than later, and given the history of major U.S. conflicts since Vietnam, Iran surely knows that the watch is ticking.

“War is an expensive enterprise,” says RAND’s Black. “The vital question is who can, and will, shoulder most of those costs, and who can make it too expensive for their adversaries to continue the fight.”

If past is prologue, Iran can make it too expensive for the United States to fight, especially since it can hold the entire world hostage by blocking the Strait of Hormuz. David just might beat Goliath yet again.

Jonathan King, Money Trail’s senior editor, is a former Center for Investigative Reporting staff member, ABC News field producer, Seattle Weekly news editor, and Pacific Northwest public radio reporter.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Now that Donald Trump has created a $1.77 billion taxpayer-funded fund to compensate alleged Biden Justice Department “weaponization” victims, it is worth taking a moment to honor Charles Littlejohn. He’s the man who made it all possible.

That makes him a hero? Let me explain.

Most people are probably not familiar with his name. Littlejohn is the guy who leaked Trump’s tax returns along with those of thousands of other fabulously wealthy people. He was working as a contractor with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which gave him the opportunity to see that many extremely rich Americans pay little or no income tax. Unlike the rest of us who work for a living, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump and other billionaires often get away with paying literally nothing.

This gross disparity apparently troubled Littlejohn. So, he shared the tax returns of thousands of rich tax-evaders with The New York Times and other major news outlets, in clear violation of the law. Tax returns are supposed to be confidential and not seen by anyone outside the IRS.

Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion in January because of Littlejohn’s leak, which revealed that in 10 of the 15 years before he won the presidency, he paid no federal income tax, and in 2016 and 2017, he paid only $750. The judge in the case had set a deadline for last Wednesday for Trump’s attorneys to explain how his lawsuit was valid. But two days before the deadline, the Justice Department announced it had worked out a deal: Trump would drop the lawsuit in exchange for creating the “weaponization” compensation fund.

So, Littlejohn, who has been prosecuted for his crime, was indirectly responsible for what amounts to a Trump retribution slush fund. But he didn’t break the law for his own personal gain. He did it as a public service. He wanted everyone to know that the very richest among us often avoid paying taxes.

The tricks of the trade

Littlejohn also revealed some of the tricks the rich use to game the system. The simplest one is to borrow money to support their consumption instead of selling stock and paying taxes.

This tactic is one worth explaining because it is so simple and pernicious. Take a very rich person, such as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Let’s say each of them spends $200 million a year on boats, cars, travel, clothes, jewelry and parties. Since both own stock worth more than $200 billion, they could easily sell some of it and cover their expenses.

If each of them sold $250 million in stock, let’s say they would each have capital gains of $200 million, which means—at the 20 percent capital gains tax rate—they each would have to pay $40 million in taxes. But like most billionaires, they don’t feel like paying taxes.

Instead, each of them can just borrow $200 million from a bank. Since their stock is worth 1,000 times that much, banks are happy to lend. Neither of them has to pay a penny in taxes on the money they borrow or on their stock as long as they don’t sell it.

Borrowing against wealth to support consumption and avoid taxes is not exactly rocket science. The possibility of doing so probably has occurred to anyone who thought about it for 10 seconds. But most of us couldn’t imagine that billionaires would be so greedy and pathetic to take this route. Or at least we couldn’t until Littlejohn leaked their tax returns. Now we know that nothing is too sleazy for the richest among us.

Paying dearly for a good deed

Littlejohn knew leaking tax returns is illegal and presumably understood he faced prosecution if caught, just as others who have broken the law for a greater purpose, such as civil rights and anti-war protestors in 1960s, understood. But he probably did not anticipate that he would get a judge who would sentence him to five years in prison.

Five years is longer than people typically get for stealing hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars from the government for filing fraudulent tax returns. It’s a longer sentence than many get for committing manslaughter. Manslaughter, by definition, means someone died because of a person’s actions. In this case, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump and other tax-evading billionaires were merely embarrassed.

We all know Trump’s Justice Department “weaponization” slush fund is a joke. Even some Republicans on Capitol Hill have broken ranks over it. But if Trump really wants to compensate someone whose prosecution was clearly politically motivated, he should look no further than the man who leaked his tax returns.

Since Trump’s slush fund will unlikely compensate anyone who truly deserves it, Congress could do the next best thing: Erect a statue of Charles Littlejohn on Pennsylvania Avenue across the street from Trump’s ballroom. That wouldn’t begin to compensate Littlejohn for five years in prison, but it would at least be a bit of justice.

Dean Baker, a regular Money Trail contributor, is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. A version of this column originally appeared on Baker’s Substack site.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Ballroom bunkum

There’s plenty going on in the world, but Donald Trump still found a chunk of time Tuesday to do an onsite inspection of the progress contractors are making on his ballroom. In the wake of the shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner late last month, Trump’s focus has shifted from lavish balls to the need for the highest level of security. The ballroom has become almost window dressing for what Trump described as a “bunker” being built underneath it, never mind that the bunker has been there all along, under the East Wing he demolished, since World War II.

Trump also still refers to the project as his “gift” to the public to be largely paid for by companies that do business with the federal government. That, of course, doesn’t explain the White House’s push to get $1 billion in public funding for the project inserted into legislation earmarked for immigration enforcement. Nor does it explain the pressure Trump put on Senate Majority Leader John Thune to fire the Senate parliamentarian after she determined that including the ballroom funding in the bill would violate Senate rules. (For more on why there’s no need for the ballroom, see my colleague Elliott Negin’s recent essay, “Why Build a New Ballroom When There’s a Big Beautiful One Nearby?”)

The president also recently provided an update on his Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool paint job. He explained that he was making what he calls the Reflecting Lake “waterproof.” Is there anything he can’t do?

Psychic stock trades

More information has come out about the president’s unprecedented stock market wheeling and dealing during the first quarter of this year. According to his financial disclosure reports, he made about 3,700 financial transactions valued at more than $250 million and possibly as high as $700 million. For instance, he purchased as much as $630,000 worth of Palantir stock in March. Then, in early April, he posted on Truth Social: “Palantir Technologies has proven to have great war-fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!” Trump also bought $500,000 to $1 million in Nvidia stock on January 6, a week before his administration approved Nvidia chip sales to China, then invested another $1 million to $5 million in the company on February 10, a week before Nvidia announced a major computer-processing power deal with Meta.

Crime pays

On Monday we witnessed the birth of Donald Trump’s retribution slush fund, a $1.77 billion pool of money set aside to compensate those poor folks the administration believes were treated unfairly by Joe Biden’s Justice Department.

Where did that idea come from? In case you don’t recall, here’s a refresher: Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for $10 billion in January because one of its contractors leaked his tax returns to The New York Times. (Another refresher: They revealed that in 10 of the 15 years before he won the presidency, Trump paid no federal income tax. In 2016 and 2017, he paid $750.) That lawsuit created the bizarre situation in which Trump, who oversees the government, was suing the government. The judge in the case had set a deadline of Wednesday for the attorneys serving Trump in various capacities to explain how the lawsuit was valid.

But two days before that the Justice Department said never mind, we’ve worked out a deal. A private commission appointed by Trump’s former personal attorney and current acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will dole out money—without any congressional oversight—to anyone it determines the Biden administration wrongly punished. They could include the likes of Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Peter Navarro, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, and any of the other 1,300 Capitol rioters Trump pardoned. Just hours after the fund was announced, Brian Morrissey, the top lawyer in the Treasury Department, resigned.

It turns out that lawyers at the IRS had prepared a 25-page memo recommending that the Justice Department ask the court to dismiss Trump’s billion-dollar lawsuit against the agency. Instead, Blanche pushed for dropping the case altogether in exchange for creating the slush fund.

It didn’t take long for a self-described Biden Justice Department “weaponization” victim to stake a claim. On Tuesday, longtime Trump ally Michael Caputo, a spokesperson for Health and Human Services during Trump’s first term, sent a letter to the Justice Department requesting $2.7 million in restitution. He was never charged with a crime, let alone imprisoned, but he was investigated during Robert Mueller’s probe into whether members of the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian election interference efforts. That, Caputo said, caused his family “to suffer greatly.”

Audits be gone

Another shoe dropped on Tuesday. Acting Attorney General Blanche signed off on an agreement that neither Trump, nor his sons, nor any of their businesses would be subjected to IRS audits of their past activities.

A swampier swamp

Remember all of Trump’s talk about draining the swamp? It’s hard to imagine a swampier move than the above abuses of power, but even with more pedestrian swampiness, the Trump administration has failed to do much draining. It sold the notion that Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, were cleaning up the muck by axing hundreds of thousands of federal workers. But anyone who has spent much time in Washington knows that the real swamp creatures are the lobbyists who get paid huge amounts of money to manipulate policy.

In the first quarter of this year alone, corporations and rich folks paid lobby shops $1.4 billion to take care of business. That’s the highest first-quarter total since 2008, when Congress started requiring quarterly lobbying reports. At the top of the list was Ballard Partners, which took in $30 million from clients in the first quarter. That was no big surprise considering that its alumni include Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, and former Attorney General Pam Bondi.

$25 billion loss

Trump’s war with Iran has cost global companies at least $25 billion with little prospect for relief, according to an analysis by Reuters. At least 279 companies reported that the war has not only triggered steadily rising energy prices but also disrupted supply chains and trade routes. They have responded with a combination of raising prices, cutting production, laying off staff, and suspending shareholder dividend payments.

Cassidy’s payback

For the first time in eight attempts, Senate Democrats—with the help of four Republicans—were able Tuesday to move a resolution limiting Trump’s war powers out of committee and onto the Senate floor. A key swing vote came from Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who just lost in a Republican primary after Trump trashed him and endorsed his opponent. Cassidy had opposed the resolution in all the previous votes. All it means at this point is that the president’s statements and actions regarding Iran will be debated on the Senate floor, but that’s a big step up from his middle-of-the-night ramblings on social media.

Trump’s social media secretary

Donald Trump’s frenzied nights on Truth Social are getting more media attention, particularly after his flurry of 55 posts within a little more than two hours last week. The Wall Street Journal has fingered Trump’s 34-year-old executive assistant, Natalie Harp, as the person largely responsible for his social media behavior. According to the Journal, Harp has been bringing the president a stack of printed posts promoting conspiracy theories and AI-generated memes, including the racist animation portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Once the president approves content, Harp—who once wrote a letter to Trump saying “You are all that matters to me”—logs onto the president’s Truth Social account and posts what he has okayed.

More climate lies

Last year was the third warmest on the planet since global recordkeeping started nearly 150 years ago. The warmest year was 2024, followed by 2023.

No matter, last weekend we were treated to another classic Donald Trump distortion. He gleefully posted “GOOD RIDDANCE!” on Truth Social, claiming that the United Nations admitted that its climate predictions were “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” and went on to rant that “for far too long Climate Activism has been used by Dumocrats to scare Americans, push horrible Energy Policies, and fund BILLIONS into their bogus research programs.” In fact, the U.N. slightly lowered its worst-case projection, but it’s still running significantly above the target set by the Paris Agreement, the legally binding international treaty adopted by 195 nations in 2015 to address the climate crisis. Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement for a second time the day he took office in January 2025. To date, no other country has abandoned the accord.

Randy Rieland, Money Trail’s “Trail Notes” columnist, is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has hammered the last nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act, Donald Trump can claim responsibility for a trifecta of actions turning back the clock on civil rights. Although Trump has not taken the country all the way back to “Whites only” water fountains or relegating Black folks to the back of the bus, the ghost of Alabama’s “segregation forever” governor, George Wallace, animates Trump’s crackdowns on immigrants and his paramilitary occupations of racially diverse cities.

The Trump-packed Supreme Court’s recent trampling of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is just the latest of his three major outrages. The other two are the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to ban the use of affirmative action in college admissions and Trump’s edict rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs across all federal agencies. Coupled with U.S. immigration agencies’ brutality, Trump’s trilogy will pave the way for Jim Crow 2.0.

No more affirmative action

Trump’s modern-day Jim Crow triple crown began with the June 2023 Supreme Court ban on colleges considering race and ethnicity in their admissions policies. Packed with a conservative supermajority by Trump in his first term, the court ruled that colleges must now be colorblind. That means the court majority willfully ignored the fact, as stated by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent, that the United States remains largely “an endemically segregated society.”

The impact of the ruling was immediate. A February analysis by the Hechinger Report, a news organization that covers inequality in education, found that the nation’s top 85 highly selective universities—71 private institutions and 14 public ones—experienced an overall 18 percent decrease in first-year Black students in the fall of 2023, dropping from about 10,000 to 8,200. The analysis also found that more than half of state flagships each gained fewer than 10 Black students after the Supreme Court decision, belying the claim that Black students squeezed out of elite private colleges will still be able to get into top state schools.

To rub salt into this wound, the so-called “gains” in Black and Latino enrollment at public flagships were “illusory,” according to a March Hechinger Report analysis, because many colleges claiming the most gains were the same ones that suffered massive drops in Black and Latino enrollment years ago when their states banned affirmative action. Worse, the analysis noted that enrollment at for-profit colleges, notorious for low graduation rates and leaving students saddled with debt, collectively increased their Black student enrollment by 15,000 in 2024.

No more DEI

Next in the triad was Trump’s bleaching the government of any consideration of racial disparities, despite the fact that Black Americans still suffer disproportionately from grievous gaps in health care, housing discrimination, and proximity to pollution, just to name a few.

Immediately after taking office for his second term, Trump issued a slew of executive orders banning DEI programs across the government, terminating federal disparity data collection, and transforming civil rights offices in a number of departments into agencies that block Black advancement.

Trump also set his sights on the private sector, unleashing the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to badger companies and contractors with DEI programs that allegedly discriminate against White people. Coupled with the ban on collegiate affirmative action, the attack had a chilling effect on corporate diversity programs, undermining any progress made in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officers. The percentage of the top 100 companies on the New York Stock Exchange whose human capital management disclosures included the term “diversity,” for example, plummeted from 96 percent in 2024 to just 36 percent a year later.

At the same time diversity programs began to disappear, jobs for Black people evaporated, whether by coincidence or causation. Start with the federal government, which has long served as a refuge from employment discrimination. In fiscal year 2021, Black women accounted for 12 percent of the federal workforce compared to 6.6 percent of the overall civilian labor force. Black women suffered 35 percent of the 271,000 job losses as a result of Trump’s massive contraction of the federal workforce, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In the overall workforce, Black women—who comprise 14 percent of all female workers—accounted for nearly 55 percent of U.S. women’s job losses from February through December 2025, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. While not as dramatic, Black men are also experiencing lower employment.

Black unemployment in general has increased significantly during Trump’s second term while White unemployment has been flat. In February 2025, Trump’s first full month back in office, Black unemployment was at 6 percent compared to 3.8 percent for White workers. Last month, Black unemployment was 7.3 percent, while White unemployment—despite all the economic chaos resulting from Trump’s war and tariffs—has remained relatively stable at 3.7 percent.

By contrast, at one point during the Biden administration, which promoted DEI initiatives as well as major jobs programs, Black and White unemployment rates reached a low of 4.8 percent and 3.1 percent respectively. It was the only time the Black unemployment rate dropped below 5 percent in the last two decades and represented Black workers’ closest parity to their White counterparts. Under Trump, Black unemployment has jumped back to double that of White workers.

No more Black representation

The Supreme Court’s April 29 Louisiana v. Callais ruling is the third installment of Trump’s racist trifecta. The high court declared that states must provide proof of “intentional” racism to consider race when drawing legislative district maps. The result? Southern states are now tripping over themselves to add Republican congressional seats by redrawing maps to carve up Black urban districts, accelerating a process that had already begun in Missouri, North Carolina and Texas. On May 11, the court issued a subsequent decision allowing Alabama to use a new congressional map that will likely eliminate a majority Black district.

The Louisiana v. Callais decision also clears the way for White racial gerrymandering at local, county and state levels of government all the way down to school boards. Black Voters Matter Fund and Fair Fight Action predict the ruling could result in 191 more GOP seats in Southern state legislatures as well as 19 more Republican U.S. House members.

Meanwhile, the Democrats’ attempt to return the favor in blue states took a major hit when the Virginia Supreme Court threw out a map that would have added four Democratic seats in Congress and the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Democrats to reinstate it.

Trump’s success in boosting White advantage in voting, education and employment has been consequential enough that his supporters are willing to overlook his failure on the main issue they claimed drove them to the polls.

In the run-up to the 2024 election, 93 percent of his voters said the economy was their top issue, but Trump is not doing too well on that score these days. In a late April Reuters/Ipsos poll, only 52 percent of Republicans approved of how he is handling the cost of living. Even so, his overall job approval rating among Republicans is still in the stratosphere. In late April, they gave him an 85-percent stamp of approval in a Washington Post/ABC News poll.

What explains that 30-point gap?

Despite cratering the economy with his on-again, off-again tariffs and his costly, unnecessary war, Trump still enjoys strong Republican support when it comes to issues related to immigration and crime, which have long been proxies for controlling people of color. In that same Washington Post/ABC News poll from last month, Republicans gave Trump an 88-percent approval rating for his handling of immigration and 89 percent for his handling of the border.

Meanwhile, an NPR/Ipsos poll from last September found that 78 percent of Republicans applauded Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Memphis, Washington, D.C., and other cities with large Black populations, even though crime in those cities has been falling since the spike during the pandemic. By comparison, only 38 percent of all poll respondents approved of the deployments.

Republicans also have no problem with the impact recent Supreme Court voting rights decisions will have. Earlier this month, an Economist/YouGov poll asked respondents about the importance of proportional Black congressional representation. While 83 percent of Black respondents said Black representation is very or somewhat important, only 47 percent of Whites and 25 percent of Republicans agreed.

The illusion of White superiority

Donald Trump has succeeded like no other modern politician in getting his supporters to embrace the illusion of White superiority so he can swindle them. Vice President-elect Lyndon Johnson explained how that works to his aide Bill Moyers back in 1960. “If you can convince the lowest White man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket,” said Johnson, who as president strong-armed Congress into passing the Voting Rights Act. “Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Six decades later, White Republicans have once again fallen into that trap, in flagrant disregard of Martin Luther King Jr.’s warning about de facto segregation. “There can be no separate White path to power and fulfillment,” King said, “short of social disaster.”

Derrick Z. Jackson, a former Union of Concerned Scientists fellow and Boston Globe columnist, is a regular contributor to Money Trail. This essay was adapted from the original version, which was published by American Prospect.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

More on Trump’s White Christian supremacist policies

Republican antisemitism: Trump’s GOP and his MAGA base are hotbeds of antisemitism. See “Making Room for Antisemites,” February 26, 2026.

Trump administration racism: Donald Trump’s racist insults grab the headlines while his administration targets Blacks and Latinos. See “Trump’s Racist Policies are Even Worse than his Venomous Insults,” February 12, 2026.

Now that oil prices are going through the roof because of Trump’s war against Iran, Trump’s campaign donors in the industry are making out like bandits. While tens of millions of Americans are struggling to cope with the $1.50 rise in the price of a gallon of gas, ExxonMobil, Chevron and other major oil companies will need a fleet of semis to cart away all the cash coming in.

There is a simple and obvious mechanism to enable the rest of us to share in the industry’s good fortune: a windfall profits tax. The government can simply tax some of the money we’re all forking over to the industry because of the Iran war and give it back in the form of rebate checks, similar to the $2,000 pandemic checks we got in 2021.

A windfall profits tax is not new. In 2022, Britain, India and E.U. countries imposed windfall profits taxes on fossil fuel companies after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove up energy prices, and in the late 1970s, the United States levied its own windfall tax when oil prices surged after the Iranian revolution. As Donald Trump is fond of boasting, U.S. oil companies are profiting from his war by selling oil not just here, but worldwide at inflated prices. There is no reason the rest of us shouldn’t share in both their domestic and internationally generated profits.

It’s not hard to structure a windfall tax to do the job. Congress could simply impose a tax of 50 percent on the industry’s excess profits, which would be determined by taking the industry’s average before-tax profit over the last five years and then adding a 15-percent inflation adjustment. Everything above that amount would be considered taxable excess profits.

In mid-March, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) reintroduced the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act to curb profiteering by oil companies. Under Whitehouse’s bill, large oil companies that produce or import at least 300,000 barrels of oil per day (or did so in 2025) would owe a per-barrel tax equal to 50 percent of the difference between the current price per barrel of oil and the average price per barrel last year, when big oil companies were already earning large profits.

Share the wealth

We can get a rough idea of how much money this sort of windfall tax would generate by taking current production levels and projecting the extra profit per barrel. The United States was producing 13.6 million barrels of oil a day at the start of the war. That amount will likely rise if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, but to be conservative, we can stick with the 13.6 million number.

Before the war, oil was selling at around $60 a barrel. Oil companies were making a profit at that price; otherwise, they would not have been pumping oil. Prices in recent days have been hovering near $100 a barrel. Most projections predict much higher prices if the strait remains closed. But even if the strait opens in the near future, oil prices will likely creep up as existing stocks run down, production takes time to ramp up, and oil deliveries from the region slowly get to their intended destinations.

Again, being conservative, we can assume an excess profit of $40 a barrel based on an average price of $100 a barrel. That comes to $544 million in excess profit per day. If it takes until September for prices to drop back close to pre-war levels—a very optimistic scenario—that means prices will have been inflated for 180 days. That would amount to $98 billion in excess profits.

Taking half of that amount for a windfall profits tax would mean $49 billion would go back to the public. Dividing it among 250 million adults would give each of them a windfall profits check of roughly $200. That may not make anyone rich, but it would be some compensation for the high gas prices triggered by Trump’s unnecessary war.

It’s worth mentioning that the checks could be considerably larger if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for a longer period of time or oil prices go as high as $150 to $200 a barrel, as some economists predict. Either scenario would be a very bad for the world economy, but at least U.S. households would get a share of the dividends.

It’s also worth noting that we wouldn’t have to worry about the tax damaging future economic prospects in any important way. There was a concern that the 1970s windfall profits tax would leave oil companies without enough money to drill for new oil. (Oil from newly drilled wells was not subject to the tax.) There was probably a kernel of truth to this hypothetical, even if industry lobbyists hugely exaggerated it.

Given the current climate crisis, we really don’t want the companies to drill for new oil. Clean energy sources, such as wind and solar, are far cheaper, and they don’t pollute. Furthermore, it is unlikely that bigger profits would encourage the industry to initiate new drilling since it expects oil prices to plunge once the strait is reopened. If companies presume the price will drop back to $60 a barrel, none of them will spend huge sums to drill for oil that costs $70 to $80 a barrel to produce.

A windfall profits tax would be a perfect way to enable all of us to share to some extent in the bonanza the oil industry is enjoying due to the war. The fallout from the war, most obviously the loss of life, is likely to be dire and long-lasting. But a windfall profits tax could make it a little less onerous, at least for Americans, and it would put a damper on Trump’s oil industry supporters’ celebrations.

Dean Baker, a regular Money Trail contributor, is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. A version of this column originally appeared on Baker’s Substack site.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Trump’s false choice

The inflation report for April was not good news. The Consumer Price Index rose 3.8 percent annually, the highest it’s been in three years. That’s also how long it’s been since the inflation rate has outstripped wage gains.

Most of the bump—more than 40 percent—was due to the spike in gas prices. When asked by a female reporter on Tuesday if rising inflation suggests that his policies may not be working, Donald Trump lashed out, as he often does when women or people of color in the press corps ask him a question. “We had a choice,” he responded, “let these lunatics have a nuclear weapon, and if you think that, you’re a stupid person, and you happen to be.”

Another reporter asked the president whether the financial challenges Americans are facing is intensifying his push for a deal with Iran. “Not even a little bit,” he answered. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran is that they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”

Inflation deflation

Unfortunately for Trump, Americans do think about their financial situation. A new CNN poll found that 70 percent of Americans now disapprove of the way he’s handling the economy, a sentiment that never crossed 50 percent during his first term. And 77 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, say Trump’s policies have driven up the cost of living.

Truth Social frenzy

Late Monday night into Tuesday morning, some guy posted 55 times on social media over a two-hour period. Such manic behavior would raise questions about almost anyone over the age of 13. Sadly, it turned out it was the president of the United States.

Trump shared multiple messages suggesting that Barack Obama should be charged with treason, and reposted an AI-generated image of Obama, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi sitting in raw sewage in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, adding the witty caption in all caps: “DUMOCRATS LOVE SEWAGE.” And he posted images of his own face on a $100 bill.

But in some ways, Trump’s most disturbing post was when he inferred he was quoting Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana. He said Kennedy demanded that Obama return $120 million that he supposedly pocketed from the enactment of Obamacare. The accusation apparently originated on a satirical website and was all made up.

Kennedy did not take it as a joke. “Somebody told me there was something floating around on the internet about me accusing President Obama of stealing $120 million or something,” Kennedy told NOTUS. “I didn’t say that. I don’t know the basis of it.”

Reflecting Pool blues

Donald Trump also spent time on social media this week ranting about the media coverage of his Ty-D-Bol blue makeover of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. He was particularly riled about a New York Times article pointing out that the no-bid project is costing seven times more than the $1.8 million he originally claimed, and that it’s largely a cosmetic paint job that will do little to fix the leaking pipes and worn-out filtration system under the pool. To do it right would require digging it up and doing a complete rebuild.

But after all, this is a reality TV president, and for him, the Reflecting Pool is just another set piece for his 250th birthday show. The most important thing is that it looks all bright and shiny, like all of the gold ornaments sprinkled around the Oval Office.

He’s boasting that he’s saving a lot of money by “fixing” the pool his way. Which is kinda like bragging about how little you spent to replace the windshield on a totaled car. A follow-up report in the Times cited Interior Department documents noting that bubbles and small holes have appeared in one of the waterproofing layers, so the contractor is probably not going to make next week’s deadline.

Gas tax relief

It looks like the president is taking seriously the “affordability hoax” he so loves to mock. He’s pushing Congress to at least temporarily suspend the federal gas tax. It wouldn’t result in big savings for consumers—roughly 18 cents per gallon—but it’s a “I feel your pain” gesture that few politicians, particularly Republicans, won’t want to pass up.

But there are downsides, which is why the tax has never been suspended since it was first imposed in 1932. First, there’s no guarantee the full savings will be passed on to consumers by refineries. Second, the tax pays for improvements to roads, bridges and public transportation and suspending it would cost the Highway Trust Fund an estimated $2.4 billion a month. That could put a crimp in the big local infrastructure projects members of Congress love to tout when they’re running for reelection.

Vape fear

On Tuesday, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Marty Makary resigned. On Wednesday, Rich Danker, chief spokesperson for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., followed suit. Both were known to be upset over the sudden reversal of the agency’s policy against selling flavored vapes. In his resignation letter to the president, Danker expressed his concern that allowing cigarette companies to sell flavored vapes will attract more children to vape, increasing their risk of becoming addicted to nicotine and contracting cancer.

So why the dramatic policy flip? According to a New York Times report, it took root during a golf club lunch Donald Trump had earlier this month with tobacco company executives and lobbyists. They complained about the FDA regulation against flavored vapes and how it was helping their Chinese rivals. Sources told the Times that Trump, who has received generous financial backing from cigarette companies, got on the phone mid-lunch and called Makary. When he couldn’t reach him, he called Kennedy and Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, let them know he wasn’t happy, and voila: Last week, the FDA announced a new policy allowing the sale of mango- and blueberry-flavored vapes. What ever happened to making America healthy again?

ICE iced

A recent analysis by Politico found that federal judges have ruled against ICE agents more than 10,000 times for detaining people they’ve arrested since last summer. That amounts to about 90 percent of all the detention cases that have been brought. In other words, the administration has lost nearly 10,400 of the cases and prevailed in only about 1,200.

Trump turns toxic

Elsewhere, though, it appears that Trump’s erratic behavior may be starting to take a toll on the family business. Plans to build the first Trump Tower in Australia were dropped just three months after they were announced with much fanfare. The 91-story Trump International Hotel & Tower Gold Coast in Queensland was going to be Australia’s tallest building, but the local developer now says the Trump brand has become “toxic.”

“Let’s just say that with the Iran war and everything else,” said David Young, CEO of the Altus Property Group, “the Trump brand was increasingly unpopular in Australia.”

Taking in “The View”

The clash between the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and ABC is expanding beyond the president’s ongoing war against late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. The network has accused the federal agency of violating its free speech rights by opening an investigation of ABC’s daytime talk show “The View” after the show interviewed Texas state Rep. James Talarico in early February. FCC Chair Brendan Carr says the program shouldn’t qualify for an exemption from a rule requiring programs to provide “equal time” to opponents of political candidates who appear on a show. That interpretation, ABC argues, would have a “chilling effect” on talk shows booking politicians. The FCC’s position, the network says, is “unprecedented, beyond the commission’s authority, and counterproductive to the commission’s stated goal of encouraging free speech and open political discussion.”

High-rising sons

Another Trump Organization project in a foreign country is raising more questions about how the president’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, conduct business. When completed, the 70-story Trump Tower in Tbilisi, Georgia, will be the tallest building in the country. Based on past similar branding and licensing deals the Trump Organization has closed, the president could make at least $5 million from the project.

Canadians vote with their feet

New research has found that since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the number of Canadians visiting big U.S. cities has dropped 42 percent. Using a tool that tracks cell phone activity, researchers at the University of Toronto discovered a fall-off in Canadian visitors nearly twice as high as border-crossing data had indicated.

Randy Rieland, Money Trail’s “Trail Notes” columnist, is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Donald Trump just loves to spend taxpayer dollars on his vanity projects. Congress has already allocated $40 million for his National Garden of American Heroes, but lawmakers will likely have to cough up more to cover additional plans for reflecting pools, dining facilities and an amphitheater. Then there’s Trump’s makeover of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The no-bid contract he signed with his favorite swimming pool contractor to repair it and paint it blue will cost taxpayers about $13 million, seven times more than his original $1.8 million estimate. And then there’s the $15 million the National Endowment for the Humanities has stashed away for Trump’s proposed 250-foot arch across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial.

But the project that is roiling Capitol Hill these days is Trump’s proposed $400 million ballroom to replace the White House East Wing he demolished. It’s fair to say that Trump is obsessed with it. A recent Washington Post analysis of his public remarks and social media posts found that he brought up the project, often out of context, on three dozen days during the first three-and-a-half months of this year.

Democrats have seized on the project as a symbol of Trump’s misguided priorities. “Instead of dumping even more money into Trump’s golden ballroom, we need to put an end to this corruption and focus on lowering costs for American families,” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said in an April 29 statement on the Senate floor. “That is what Democrats are laser-focused on. Republicans should join us to get it done.”

The public, meanwhile, opposes the ballroom by a 2-to-1 margin. A late April survey found that 56 percent of Americans disagree with Trump’s decision to tear down the East Wing for his planned ballroom. Only 28 percent support the project.

In any case, the controversy has made great theater, and the press has been following every twist and turn. Since the beginning of the year, the dispute has generated sustained coverage from virtually every major national news organization, including The Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, AP, Reuters, ABC, CNN and PBS.

But while the news media have focused mainly on the ballroom’s ballooning cost and who will ultimately pay for it, they have missed two critical facts: First, presidents rarely hold events that require a ballroom, and second, the newly renovated, government-owned Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium—which includes an ornate ballroom and looks a lot like what Trump is clamoring to build—is located very close to the White House.

In other words, we don’t need a new ballroom at any price.

State dinners are rare

Trump originally promised that “patriotic” corporate donors would pay for the ballroom, and as late as March 30 he told reporters that “not one dime of taxpayer money is going into” it. But after the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner late last month, the project was suddenly all about national security, and Republican members of Congress—led by South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham—began insisting that the public pick up the $400 million tab. “Private donations can be used,” Graham said, “but I think they should be used for buying china and stuff like that.”

Just last week, the ballroom’s projected price tag more than doubled. Senate Republicans inserted a $1 billion allocation for the “East Wing Modernization Project” into a Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding bill they want to push through Congress by the end of the month. The proposal, which doesn’t specifically mention the ballroom, focuses primarily on “security adjustments and upgrades.” But the White House is applauding the measure, contending that it would remove the legal obstacle that the project requires congressional approval.

When the Trump White House announced its plans to build the ballroom in July 2025, its stated rationale for the new facility is a president’s inability to “host major functions honoring world leaders and other countries without having to install a large and unsightly tent approximately 100 yards away from the main building entrance.” The East Room of the White House—the largest room in the executive residence—has only a 200-person seating capacity, the press release added, while the “ornately designed and carefully crafted” White House State Ballroom will have a seated capacity of 650. (Later Trump said he wanted a ballroom that can fit 999 people, but he didn’t indicate if they would be seated or standing.)

The key question is: How often would a $400 million, or even a $1 billion, ballroom actually be used for such a big event? If the recent past is prologue, rarely.

During Trump’s first term, the White House held only two state dinners. One, in April 2018, honored French President Emmanuel Macron. The other, in September 2019, was for Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Joe Biden, meanwhile, hosted five state dinners in Washington during his one-term presidency and Barack Obama hosted only 12 during his two terms. So far, the recent state dinner for King Charles III is the only one Trump has hosted since taking office for a second time.

Likewise, there is no evidence that either Trump or Biden ever hosted a White House state dinner for anything close to 650 guests, let alone 999. In fact, available evidence suggests that the number of attendees at modern state dinners generally run in the low hundreds, occasionally reaching the 400 to 500 range when tents are erected on the South Lawn.

A golden opportunity to use an existing facility

The Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, completed in 1935 for $2 million ($48.6 million in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars), has all of the amenities—and the glitz—Donald Trump desires.

As Trump knows, there are three things that matter when it comes real estate: location, location, location. Situated at Constitution Avenue and 13^th Street NW, the Mellon Auditorium is less than a mile from the White House. Trump and his Secret Service entourage could drive there in 8 minutes at most or walk there in less than 20.

Not only is it close by, it’s also a Neoclassical beauty with a monumental temple front featuring six fluted 62-foot Roman Doric columns. Its grand interior staircase leads to the jewel of the facility, a stunning multipurpose auditorium, which can function as a ballroom that can handle more than 650 seated guests or as many as 1,000 people for a standing reception (one more than Trump’s 999). The 8,000-square-foot space features 45-foot-high Roman Doric columns lining its perimeter, a 60-foot-high ceiling, and a newly restored, gilded gold frieze. The building also contains three equally opulent smaller rooms, three foyers and an outside portico that, depending on their size, can accommodate between 50 and 250 guests. The building hosts both government and private events, including parties, weddings and concerts.

The Mellon Auditorium’s interior is made to order for a president known for his love of gold décor. After the building was renovated in 2023, the General Services Administration, which manages federally owned property, awarded Ridgewells Catering the responsibility of managing it. The theme of the company’s grand reopening gala was gold.

“Mellon Auditorium is brimming with gold adornments on the walls and ceilings, plus massive stone columns with gilded scrollwork, and the elevator doors, the grand staircase and front iron gates are dipped in metallics,” said Ridgewells CEO Susan Lacz in a press release. “And [like] everywhere in fashion right now, we’re also seeing gold!”

As it turns out, Trump knows the Mellon Auditorium well. He attended a press event there in late January to promote his Trump Accounts. He was there in July 2025 to speak at a White House-sponsored summit on artificial intelligence. And in 2020, the building served as a central hub for the Republican National Convention and was where President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence gave their acceptance speeches. Trump supporters, meanwhile, have thrown huge parties at the facility. In January 2025, the crypto industry held an inaugural ball there for 1,500 revelers.

The facility also has hosted major international conferences. The signing of the North Atlantic Treaty took place there in 1949, establishing NATO. Seventy-five years later, in July 2024, President Joe Biden hosted a three-day NATO summit in the very same building.

The National Trust isn’t backing down

Last December, a week after the Trump administration finished demolishing the East Wing to clear the way for the ballroom over the objections of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and other historical preservation groups, the National Trust filed a lawsuit challenging the president’s plan. The nonprofit argued that the administration failed to undergo legally required reviews or obtain congressional approval for the project. “No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever,” the complaint states, “not President Trump, not President Joe Biden, and not anyone else.”

In late March, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that ballroom construction “must stop until Congress authorizes its completion.” He noted that the National Trust’s lawsuit is likely to succeed, so he granted a preliminary injunction. “The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families,” the judge wrote. “He is not, however, the owner!” A few days later, however, a three-judge federal appeals panel allowed ballroom construction to continue into June. The panel scheduled arguments for June 5 to reconsider if all construction should be blocked.

After the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump’s acting Attorney General Todd Blanche asked the National Trust to drop its “frivolous lawsuit” in a social media post, while Trump argued that the incident showed how difficult it is to ensure his security at large events outside the White House grounds. (Then why does he routinely attend large sporting events?)

The National Trust declined. “We are not planning to voluntarily dismiss our lawsuit,” National Trust President and CEO Carol Quillen said in an April 27 statement, “which endangers no one and which respectfully asks the administration to follow the law.”

What’s next?

Before it was demolished, the White House East Wing housed the first lady’s office and her staff and was used for a mix of ceremonial, operational and visitor-related functions. Beneath it was the highly secure Presidential Emergency Operations Center, known as the White House bunker, which dated back to World War II. It served as a shelter and command center for the president, vice president, senior White House staff and military personnel during emergencies. It famously was used during the September 11 attacks, when Vice President Dick Cheney and others were taken there.

Although Trump plans to replace the bunker as part of his ballroom project, it is currently not available in the event of an emergency. Meanwhile, the offices above the bunker Trump bulldozed were used on a daily basis. His proposed 650-seat ballroom would be used at most two times a year, if that. It is clear that building a multimillion-dollar ballroom on the site makes no sense, especially when there is a perfectly good alternative virtually next door.

Perhaps the best solution would be to rebuild the East Wing for the offices that it housed, rebuild the bunker in the basement, and force Donald Trump to pay for it out of his own pocket.

Elliott Negin is the executive editor of Money Trail.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Sen. Ted Cruz set off alarm bells recently when he disclosed that a new savings program for children named for Donald Trump is in fact a ruse to replace Social Security.

“Here’s the dirty little secret: Trump Accounts are Social Security personal accounts,” the Texas Republican explained at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference in Los Angeles on May 4. “We’re going to be able to go to parents and say, ‘Hey, you know that Trump account your kid has? Wouldn’t you like to be able to keep a portion of your tax payments, that you’re paying already, and instead of sending it to Uncle Sam, wouldn’t you like to have a Trump account just like your kid does?’”

For Cruz, Trump Accounts are the first step toward privatizing Social Security, a longtime goal of the Republican Party.

“How did we get it done?” he said. “You remember George W. Bush tried this in his second term and, sadly, Congress ran for the hills in a display of extraordinary cowardice. How did we get it done this time? It’s because we gave the money to babies so the old people didn’t get pissed. But babies grow up.”

Is Cruz right? Will Trump Accounts eventually kill Social Security?

The short answer is no.

Trump Accounts are a bad deal

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Cruz and other Trump Accounts fans are out of touch with reality, but that’s no reason for the rest of us to take their nonsense seriously. A close look at what Trump Accounts offer compared to other tax-advantaged accounts show that they’re a really bad deal.

Trump Accounts establish an account for newborns in which the government deposits $1,000. Parents and other relatives can add to it every year, just like they can add to an education savings accounts in most states. The amount they contribute to the account is deducted from their taxable income and the money accumulated in the account is not taxed until it is withdrawn.

Some people take advantage of such savings accounts, but most don’t because they don’t have a spare $1,000 or $5,000 or whatever to contribute. (A March survey found that nearly a third of Americans don’t even have enough money in the bank to cover a $400 emergency.) Moreover, the tax benefit does not amount to much for most moderate- and even middle-income people.

The overwhelming majority of U.S. households pay 12 percent of their income or less in taxes. More than one in five Americans are in the zero bracket, meaning they pay no income tax and would get no benefit from any tax-advantaged accounts.

Even if people wanted to put money in a tax-advantaged account, why would they choose a Trump account instead of an education savings account or an individual retirement account? People can withdraw money anytime from those tax-advantaged accounts, albeit with a penalty. Children whose parents stick money in a Trump account can’t access it until they turn 18.

Let them eat cake

That brings us to why Trump Accounts are nothing more than a cruel joke. Trump and congressional Republicans have been gleefully cutting food and housing assistance, Medicaid, and Affordable Care Act exchange subsidies. As a result, tens of millions of people will lose benefits that they previously depended on. Many of them will end up hungry, homeless, or unable to obtain needed medical care—or all three. That means two or three years from now, there will likely be tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of children with $1,000 in their Trump Accounts living on the streets, going hungry, or without medical care because Trump eliminated the programs their families need.

That would make for some great photo ops. Trump could have some homeless kids who have $1,000 in their Trump Accounts over to the White House or even Mar-a-Lago to talk about living on the streets of Chicago in winter or about the surgery they need but can’t afford. Then Trump and his entourage can brag how great the accounts are.

Empty promises

Another absurdity is the claim about how rapidly Trump Accounts will grow. The Trump gang says they will grow 10 percent a year. Amazingly, many who are not on the Trump bandwagon believe this rubbish.

Trump gangsters base their rate-of-return projection on the stock market’s past performance. Stocks have yielded close to a 10-percent rate of return over the last eight decades. But this is a case of incredibly bad induction, akin to the man who falls off an 80-story building and says as he passes the 60^th floor, the 59^th floor and the 58^th floor, “So far so good.”

Their inflated prediction ignores the fact that the stock market was valued far lower relative to corporate earnings in prior decades than it is today. Through most the 1940s through the 1970s, the price-to-earnings ratio (PE)—the ratio of a company’s share price to its earnings per share—was generally in the low teens and often considerably lower. When the PE is low, and the economy is growing relatively rapidly, it’s possible for the stock market to generate 10-percent nominal returns or 7-percent real, inflation-adjusted returns. (That’s somewhat oversimplifying the impact of inflation, but it doesn’t affect the argument.)

Today, the PE is over 30, and the economy is projected to grow at only about 2 percent a year going forward. In our world, the only way to generate the historic 7-percent real rate of return is with an ever-rising price-to-earnings ratio, and that’s not going to happen.

If we calculate the actual return people can expect with a Trump account, it would likely be close to 3 percent a year in real terms, assuming that Trump’s Wall Street friends handling the account don’t gouge them with fees. If parents open their newborn’s Trump account at birth and don’t contribute anything in the years following, that child would only wind up with $1,700, adjusted for inflation, at the age of 18.

Somehow, I don’t think that such a meager return would prompt anyone to discard Social Security. But then I could be mistaken.

Dean Baker, a regular Money Trail contributor, is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. A version of this column originally appeared on Baker’s Substack site. For Baker’s take on Social Security’s status, see his June 2025 essay, “Don’t Buy the Scare About Social Security.”

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Donald the delusional

In his grandest moments of delusion, Donald Trump has compared himself to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and has suggested that if they ran together on the same ticket, he would beat them. But it appears that his image of himself and his role in history is now in the realm of hallucination. A recent article in The Atlantic, quoting a senior administration official and a longtime Trump confidant, reports that the president sees himself as someone who will be as consequential as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon.

“He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live,” the official told The Atlantic. “He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do because of his sheer power and force of will.”

Lunatic cringe

One of Donald Trump’s favorite taunts is to call those who disagree with him a “lunatic.” But based on the definition that a lunatic is a person who engages in illogical and reckless behavior, well, there’s some serious projection going on.

In a long, muddled speech earlier this week at an event marking Small Business Week, the president did talk briefly about business, but mainly to celebrate his success in reinvigorating the U.S. economy. “Our economy is roaring,” he said. “Consumer confidence is way up. Nobody can believe it.”

But during his hour-plus ramble, his very large brain also fired off the following: “I could with one swipe of the pen say, ‘Let’s have no employment and I’ll hire a million people or 2 million people and we’ll have absolutely no employment.’”

Then he went on a tangent about “beautiful” pretzels and an even longer tangent—more than 8 minutes long—on the bright blue paint job he’s giving the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. He said people call it the “reflecting pond” or the “reflecting lake.” (In 40-plus years in Washington, I’ve never heard anyone call it either one.)

Finally, he advised the business owners in the room that they should take the cognitive test that he bragged he has “aced” three times. “They are hard,” said the president. “Many people in this room couldn’t ace them. The first question is you have a lion, a bear, an alligator, and what’s another good, a squirrel, OK? Which is the squirrel?”

Ballroom boondoggle

There’s always a catch. For months now, Donald Trump has been portraying his golden ballroom as a gift to the American people, a future national treasure whose $400 million cost would be paid for by “patriotic” corporate donors. But he offered a different spin after the shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner. The project became all about national security and Republican members of Congress, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, began insisting that the public pick up the $400 million tab after all. “Private donations can be used,” Graham said, “but I think they should be used for buying china and stuff like that.”

Now there’s a new, even more costly twist. This week Senate Republicans inserted a $1 billion allocation for the “East Wing Modernization Project” into a Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding bill they hope to rush through Congress by the end of the month. The proposal, which doesn’t specifically mention the ballroom, focuses primarily on “security adjustments and upgrades.” But the White House is applauding the measure, contending that it would remove the legal obstacle that the project requires congressional approval.

Retribution raid?

Wednesday began with an FBI raid of the office of one of the most powerful Democratic politicians in Virginia, State Senate leader Louise Lucas. The agents also removed materials from a nearby cannabis dispensary in Portsmouth, Virginia, that she owns. Indications are that it’s part of a bribery investigation, and there may be something there because the probe began during the Biden administration. But sources said it hadn’t developed into a more serious case until now.

It’s worth noting that Lucas was a central figure in redistricting Virginia that could result in Democrats getting four more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s also worth noting that former Trump attorney Lindsey Halligan, when she was running the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, had pushed hard to go after Lucas before the 2026 midterms. And finally, it’s worth noting that the Washington, D.C., Fox News station had been tipped off so a reporter and camera crew could cover the raid live.

Hegseth’s double lie

Well, at least he was consistent. When Defense Secretary Pete “Swagger Boy” Hegseth appeared before Senate and House committees recently, he told the same lie to both. In response to questions about whether he would comply with an order from the president to deploy troops to polling places, Hegseth claimed that Joe Biden did that very thing during the 2024 election. Not true. National Guard units were activated in several states at the request of governors, not the White House, and they were used to help with cybersecurity and behind-the-scenes support. In no case were they actually physically deployed at polling places.

Kash crash

You have to hand it to FBI Director Kash Patel. He has a knack for staying in the news. Unfortunately for him, it’s often for the wrong reasons.

His latest taint stems from a previous humiliation, an article in The Atlantic revealing concerns about what was described as his “excessive drinking,” including details about the difficulty his security agents have sometimes had in waking him. Now, the FBI has launched a criminal leak investigation focusing on the journalist who wrote the story, Sarah Fitzpatrick.

Ordinarily, cases like this involve leaks of classified information or state secrets, and the target is the leaker. Fitzpatrick’s reporting involved neither of the above but was based on interviews with at least two dozen unnamed sources. Now investigators, if they choose, could go after her phone records and look through her social media contacts. That again would be highly unusual. Patel has sued The Atlantic for $250 million but can’t be thrilled about another revelation from Fitzpatrick on Wednesday that he’s in the habit of gifting people bottles of bourbon with his name on the label.

More war on wind

It’s widely known that Donald Trump has a thing about wind power. Namely, he hates it. It was reported recently that his administration has arranged to pay several companies a total of nearly $2 billion in taxpayer dollars to abandon their plans to build offshore wind farms. It turns out Trump is just as rabid about breaking wind on land. The New York Times reports that the administration is blocking more than 150 wind farms around the country by delaying military reviews, which usually happen routinely.

Before turbines are erected, the military checks to ensure that they don’t interfere with radar or flight paths. But that’s not happening. “The Department of War is currently making it almost impossible to build a new wind project in the United States,” Jason Grumet, head of the American Clean Power Association, told the Times.

RFK Jr. buries research

There are more examples of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) burying research supporting the effectiveness of vaccines, The New York Times is reporting that officials at the Food and Drug Administration have blocked publication of several studies that showed widely used vaccines against Covid-19 and shingles to be both safe and effective. The studies, which cost millions of taxpayer dollars and involved an analysis of millions of patient records, had been accepted for publication by medical journals. But the scientists, according to the Times report, were told to withdraw their submissions. An HHS spokesperson said the studies’ conclusions “were not supported by the underlying data.”

Bigger hero garden plans

In his effort to bring more of the Mar-a-Lago vibe to the nation’s Capital, Donald Trump’s latest plans for his National Garden of American Heroes will now include not only 250 life-size statues of people the president considers heroic, but also reflecting pools, dining facilities and a large amphitheater. Congress has already allocated $40 million for this Trump pet project, but there’s concern that more money will be needed. No surprise, the only “journalists” who will be honored with a statue in Trump’s garden at this point are CBS’ legendary reporter Edward R. Murrow and the late Alex Trebek, host of “Jeopardy.”

More mass deportations

Things have seemed pretty quiet on the deportation front, which is to be expected as the midterms approach. Aggressive raids, let alone fatal shootings, by federal agents don’t play well with the voting public. But not to worry, says White House border czar Tom Homan, the administration is not backing away from its promise to deport more people than ever before. He told a Homeland Security conference in Arizona this week that ICE plans to “flood the zone” in cities where there’s limited cooperation with federal immigration agents. “You ain’t seen shit yet,” he declared. “This year will be a good year. Mass deportations are coming.”

Grifters gonna grift

On Tuesday, Palm Beach County commissioners approved a trademark agreement with the President Donald J. Trump International Airport, formerly known as the Palm Beach International Airport. The deal would enable the Trump Organization to choose the “approved retailers” from which airport stores must buy their airport-branded merchandise. It also allows Trump’s family business to sell that branded merchandise outside the airport and license the trademark to third parties.

Jet fuel inflation

Speaking of airports, major U.S. airlines spent more than $5 billion on jet fuel in March. That’s nearly $1.8 billion, or 56 percent, more than they spent in February before Trump started the war against Iran.

Randy Rieland, Money Trail’s “Trail Notes” columnist, is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

Editor’s note: Today Money Trail is introducing a new occasional column, “Marked Down,” to provide updates on past articles and report on relatively recent stories worthy of note that we missed given the daily horrors emanating from the White House.

Columbus Statue of Limitations

After Donald Trump issued a superfluous proclamation last fall declaring October 13, 2025, Columbus Day and calling the Genoese explorer “the original American hero,” I wrote an essay pointing out that Christopher Columbus was hardly a hero. Not only did he not “discover” America, he also never set foot in what is now the United States and was arrested by Spanish authorities and sent back to Spain in chains because of his gross mistreatment of Spanish colonists and the local Taino population. Under Columbus’ rule, Spanish soldiers tortured, mutilated, raped and killed Taino who refused demands for tribute or resisted forced labor in gold mines and on plantations. Other Taino were shipped to Spain as slaves.

In late March, Trump installed a statue of Columbus in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Originally sited in Baltimore in 1984, the statue was toppled by protesters on July 4, 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis policeman and dumped into the Inner Harbor. A group of Italian American businessmen and politicians retrieved the pieces of the statue, rebuilt it, and gifted it to the White House last year.

“In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” said a White House spokesman in a statement. “And he will continue to be honored as such by President Trump.”

Italian Americans long lobbied for a national holiday honoring Columbus to push back against rampant discrimination and celebrate their ethnic heritage. In the late 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a proclamation designating October 12 as Columbus Day and it became the federal holiday as we know it in 1971. In recent years, however, Columbus’ legacy has been tarnished by revelations of his monstrous behavior. Today at least 17 states and Washington, D.C., have adopted holidays honoring Indigenous peoples on the second Monday in October.

Trump has used the controversy to pander to Italian American voters. “You Italians are going to love me,” Trump said at a political rally in 2024. Italian Americans, he added, were “badly treated” by past efforts to replace Columbus Day and he pledged he would restore the holiday.

Ironically, it turns out that Columbus was likely not Italian. According to a 22-year-long scientific investigation released in 2024, a DNA analysis indicates that Columbus was a Sephardic Jew from Western Europe.

“The 1492 Edict of Expulsion in Spain forced Sephardic Jews to convert to Christianity or leave, prompting a dispersion to locations including the Americas and the Middle East,” Reuters explained. “Within Spain and its newfound American colonies, some conversos, or Jewish converts, kept their original faith in secret, under threat of discovery and punishment from the Inquisition.”

Scooping The New Yorker on Trump’s pardons

The May 4 issue of The New Yorker features one of its typically voluminous stories, “Pardon Me,” by former Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus on Donald Trump’s unprecedented penchant for handing out presidential pardons for a fee—a very large fee. The 10-page article, which Marcus says took her several months to report, goes into exhaustive detail about not only the millions of dollars exchanging hands under Trump, but also the controversy over pardons going back to Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention. It’s worth the read if you have the time.

But if you don’t have that kind of time and want to find out about the crux of the matter, Money Trial posted a compact, 2,300-word essay in January on the very same topic. In the article, titled “All the President’s Pardons,” Money Trail Senior Editor Jonathan King reported on the breadth and depth of Trump’s more outrageous pardons during his first year back in office, many which were cited in Marcus’ piece. Since we published King’s article, the flow of pardons has slowed to a trickle.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s fossil fuel industry connection

The May 4 issue of The New Yorker also included an article by Elizabeth Kolbert on Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin’s efforts to destroy his agency. Like Marcus’ essay on pardons, Kolbert takes readers back in history, in this case to the creation of the EPA in 1970 after such high-profile disasters as an oil spill off California’s Santa Barbara coast and an oil slick fire on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River. Kolbert also mentioned that when Zeldin was working as a consultant, a public relations firm paid him $25,000 to write just one anti-environmental opinion column.

But Kolbert didn’t mention Zeldin’s direct links to fossil fuel interests, which help explain why he embraced Donald Trump’s “drill baby drill” mantra. In March 2025, Money Trail cofounder and Contributing Editor Rocky Kistner posted an article, “Protecting Trump’s Anti-Environmental Agenda,” which pointed out that not only did Zeldin receive more than $120,000 from fossil fuel-friendly PR firms to write opinion columns, he also had an “even more lucrative connection to the fossil fuel industry via Texas oil and gas fracking magnate Tim Dunn, a major Trump campaign donor.”

“According to Zeldin’s financial disclosure statement that covered his earnings since 2023,” Kistner reported, “he received more than $140,000 from America First Works (AFW), a conservative political advocacy group that played a crucial role in drafting Trump’s executive orders. Zeldin currently sits on the AFW board as an emeritus member. AFW’s sister organization, America First Policy Institute, founded in 2021 by Dunn and other Trump advisors, appointed Zeldin chair of its China Policy Initiative” in 2024.

“A huge fossil fuel industry booster,” Kistner added, “AFPI opposes government action on climate change and programs promoting clean energy.”

Money Trail contributor wins photography awards

Derrick Z. Jackson won a slew of photography awards this spring, many for shots that accompanied his Money Trail essays, including last July’s “Trump’s Proposed Budget Cuts Leave No Refuge for Wildlife Refuges” and last November’s “The Fight for Clean Water: Majesty or Madness.”

A number of his award-winning photos feature great blue herons hunting fish, which, according to Jackson, “illustrate the value and beauty of wetlands and river cleanups at a time that environmental protections are under attack by the Trump administration.”

All told, Jackson won awards for a series and single photos in Canada’s Applied Arts Awards’ “Nature-Landscape & Wildlife” category; a third place award for the 92nd National Headliner Awards’ feature photo and individual photo portfolio categories; and was named a 12th Fine Art Photography Awards “winners gallery nominee” for a single photo of a heron and a series of photos of Atlantic puffins.

Elliott Negin is Money Trail’s executive editor.

Money Trail is a fiscally sponsored project of the Alternative Newsweekly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity, EIN 30-0100369. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.