Olivia
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Trump reported a staggering 1,051 trades in his June financial disclosure. Here are two of the more curious ones:
— June 18: Bought $250K–$500K in Boeing, the same day the Navy awarded Boeing an $880 million contract for P-8A training systems.
— June 23: Bought $15K–$50K in SpaceX, the same day NASA recorded a $425.6 million award to SpaceX.
WTF are you talking about? They're reapplying penises? Removing them? How bat guano nuts can a guy get?
The Navy is reportedly getting ready to strip the USS Doris Miller of its title, and may even be renaming it to the USS Donald Trump. The change is just the latest effort from Pete Hegseth to erase the anything deemed “DEI.”
Miller was a mess attendant aboard the USS West Virginia when Japanese planes struck Pearl Harbor. Despite being barred from a combat role, Miller sprung into action that day, manning an anti-aircraft gun he was never trained to operate, and helped move wounded sailors to safety. He received the Navy Cross and was killed in action in 1943.
Miller is an American hero, Donald Trump is a draft dodger. His service will not be erased.
EXCLUSIVE: Committee Review Finds Trump Pardons Have Cost Crime Victims $1.7 Billion and Enriched Trump Allies
https://t.co/fzbTupGLfO
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Pretty stark contrast between these two candidates for Governor of Tennessee
(H/T @Jerri_M_Green — who we’re guessing didn’t consult @MarshaBlackburn on the pic choice here😬🤷🏼♀️)
THE $1.4 TRILLION BOMB NOBODY IS DEFUSING
America just spent $1.4 TRILLION in a single 12-month span doing nothing.
Not building. Not defending. Not curing. Just renting money it already spent.
That's a record. And it's not the peak. It's the on-ramp.
Since 2020, the cost of servicing US public debt has nearly TRIPLED. Read that again. In five years, the single fastest-growing line item in the federal budget became the one that buys the country absolutely nothing.
And the trajectory is worse than the headline.
If rates simply stay where they are, no crisis, no shock, no recession, interest payments climb to $1.7 TRILLION by November 2028.
At that point, something happens that has never happened in the history of the republic:
Interest surpasses Social Security as the largest single outlay of the United States government.
Bondholders become the biggest constituency in America. Not seniors. Not soldiers. Not the sick. Creditors.
Here's the part that should keep you up at night.
This is a doom loop, and the loop is already spinning. Deficits force issuance. Issuance floods the market with paper. The market demands more yield to swallow it. Higher yields raise the interest bill. The higher interest bill widens the deficit. Repeat. Compound. Accelerate.
Every rollover of old cheap debt into new expensive debt tightens the noose a little further. Trillions in low-coupon paper from the ZIRP era are still repricing into today's world. The damage isn't done. It's pending.
Washington's only exits from here:
Inflate the debt away, and your savings pay the bill.
Tax it away, and your income pays the bill.
Cut everything else, and your benefits pay the bill.
Financially repress it, and your bond market gets confiscated by decree.
Pick your poison. There is no fifth door. There is no growing out of a debt pile compounding faster than GDP.
Politicians won't touch it, because the reckoning always lands after the next election. So the can gets kicked. But the can is now a boulder, and the road runs downhill.
America's debt bill isn't a problem to be managed anymore.
It's a countdown.
And the clock is on the wall in Washington, ticking in real time, in units of a trillion.
The Trump family's crypto company just got permission to become a bank. The permission came from Donald Trump's own administration.
Read that again, because the sequence matters.
In 2024, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump launched World Liberty Financial alongside the sons of Steve Witkoff — the man Trump would later appoint as his special envoy to the Middle East. The company's own website says it is 38% owned by "an entity affiliated with Donald J. Trump and certain of his family members."
In 2025, Trump signed the GENIUS Act, the federal law governing stablecoins — the exact product his family's company sells.
In January 2026, that company applied for a national bank charter. Elizabeth Warren, the ranking Democrat on Senate Banking, asked the Comptroller of the Currency to pause the review until Trump divested. Jonathan Gould — appointed by Trump, serving at Trump's pleasure — refused. He declined to recuse himself. He declined to hand over the unredacted application to Congress. He told Warren the agency "intends to act consistent with this duty rather than your demand."
On Friday, he approved it.
World Liberty Trust Company will be chaired by Zach Witkoff, the envoy's son. It will issue and manage USD1, a stablecoin with roughly $4 billion in circulation. More than half of that supply sits with Binance — whose founder, Changpeng Zhao, Trump pardoned in October 2025. Trump's own financial disclosures show he pulled in at least $1.4 billion from crypto ventures last year.
This has never happened before. Not once in American history has a company owned by a sitting president's family been granted bank status. There is no precedent because every previous president understood why you don't do this.
Here is the part that should worry you regardless of party: the OCC now has to regulate this bank. It has to examine the reserves. It has to verify that the dollars backing USD1 actually exist. It has to decide, if something goes wrong, whether to enforce the law against the president's family — while the president can fire the man who makes that call.
That is not a conflict of interest. That is the total collapse of the distinction between a regulator and a business.
The company says firewalls will keep the family out of the bank while Trump is in office. Firewalls policed by whom? The agency answering to the father, the sons, and the son of the envoy.
Warren called it the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen. She is not being dramatic. She and her colleagues are introducing a bill to bar presidents, vice presidents and their families from owning or controlling a bank — legislation that should have been unnecessary, that no one thought to write, because until now no one imagined it would be needed.
Every Republican in Congress who blocked the crypto ethics guardrails last year knew exactly where this was heading. They voted for it anyway.
The charter isn't final yet. Conditions remain. There's still time for Congress to do something other than watch.
Ask your senator which side of this they're on. Make them answer out loud.
I've never seen anything like this.
The Trump admin just granted preliminary approval of a federal bank charter to the family's crypto firm World Liberty Financial.
Remember: Trump raked in almost $800 million from WLF last year.
No president has used their power to profit the way Trump has.
On Friday afternoon, a regulator Donald Trump appointed approved a bank Donald Trump's family owns, to issue a coin that makes Donald Trump money, under a law Donald Trump signed.
First time in American history.
Dropped at 4pm on a Friday, because they were counting on you not looking.
Here's what they buried:
The OCC — run by Trump appointee Jonathan Gould — granted World Liberty Trust Co. a national trust bank charter. World Liberty is 38% owned by "an entity affiliated with Donald J. Trump and certain of his family members."
That's not my framing. That's on their website.
"It's just a trust charter, it can't take deposits." Correct. It doesn't need to. That's not the business.
The business is USD1, their stablecoin.
You hand them a dollar. They park it in Treasuries. They keep the interest. And under the GENIUS Act — signed by Trump in July 2025 — they're legally barred from passing that interest to you.
All house money.
Friday's charter lets them cut out their middleman and run issuance, custody, and reserves in-house. Fatter margins. Federal seal. Institutional clients.
Now ask where the dollars come from.
A state-backed Abu Dhabi fund settled a $2 BILLION investment into Binance using USD1. World Liberty told Congress the deal likely would've used foreign currency if USD1 hadn't existed.
Meaning: it was routed through the President's balance sheet on purpose.
As of February, Binance held 87% of every USD1 in existence.
Binance's founder was pardoned. By Donald Trump.
Line it up:
→ He signed the law that built the market
→ He appointed the regulator
→ The regulator approved his family's bank
→ The bank prints the coin that pays him
→ A foreign government pumped $2B into it
→ It sits on an exchange whose founder he pardoned
→ The bank's board is chaired by the son of his Middle East envoy
He disclosed $57.4 million from World Liberty on one filing.
Elizabeth Warren: the first president in history to approve, operate, and supervise his own bank.
CREW: the most egregious example yet of the President's businesses profiting off his government job.
Democrats introduced the Ending Presidential Corruption in Banking Act the same day. It bans regulators from chartering banks owned by the president. It will not pass.
Watch who votes against it anyway.
The OCC says career staff handled the review and everyone met their ethical obligations. Fine. Maybe every signature was clean.
That IS the story.
Nobody has to break a rule when you own the people who write them.
They did it on a Friday because Friday is where things go to die quietly.
Don't let it.
Ossoff: When he first announced the tariffs, you remember that? He called it Liberation Day, and it crashed the markets because it was clown policy. You remember that?
OK, so follow me through on this. He announces the tariffs on April 2 of last year. The markets tank nonstop for like a week because it’s a disastrous trade policy, and six days into the crash, April 8, Trump buys millions in stock. I’m talking Amazon, Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, and then the very next morning, April 9, he posts on Truth Social, quote, “This is a great time to buy.” Three exclamation marks.
OK, now listen to this. Three hours and 41 minutes after that post, one day after he bought millions in stock, he canceled the tariffs and triggered one of the biggest same-day rebound rallies in market history.
He’s trying to get money. And you saw, now he’s offering paid subscriptions to presidential announcements, right? Just understand what’s for sale here: The sitting president’s pronouncements on war and peace and economic policy delivered first to paying customers.
What an absolute crook.
USS LINCOLN SERVICE MEMBER’S WIFE: “I don’t think Trump thinks before he talks. Have some empathy. Take some responsibility for what’s going on with your military. It’s infuriating. He’s essentially saying we’re lying… you ‘support our troops’ — until our troops need support.”
Just so people are really aware of what this means: A Trump appointee has approved Trump’s personal crypto firm to operate as a bank
Corporations can conduct transactions in which the Trump family gets a cut
The public will not have to be informed
There’s no precedent for this
The Trump and Witkoff families are opening a bank in Florida. The investors in this bank are undisclosed. It will not have to follow FDIC rules.
I smell a money-laundering opportunity.
Vivek Ramaswamy's personal bodyguard of several years just pled guilty to federal charges of trafficking fentanyl and meth through our Ohio communities.
If Ramaswamy can’t exercise better judgment about the people he trusts with his own safety, how can Ohioans trust him with ours?
Mr. Ramaswamy is not just a scam artist who is only out for himself — he repeatedly demonstrates his belief that the rules and laws we follow don’t apply to him.
https://t.co/x3Tqc7PVWr
This is BRILLIANT.
I've been getting a lot of questions about how billionaires use sports teams to save hundreds of millions of dollars on taxes, so let me explain.
Let's use the Lakers as an example.
When the transaction closes, Josh Kushner and Bob Iger will start by allocating 90% or more of the purchase price ($12.5 billion) to intangible assets.
Kushner and Iger will then amortize these assets over 15 years under Section 197 of the tax code, allowing them to deduct the amortization against team income.
But since these deals are typically structured as pass-throughs, the excess losses don't just vanish. Kushner and Iger can use those losses to shield hundreds of millions of dollars in outside personal income, such as capital gains from VC investments, from being taxed.
This is what allowed Steve Ballmer to pay $78 million in taxes on $656 million in income in the year he purchased the Clippers for $2 billion. That's 12%.
The tax code has been this way for decades, but what makes sports teams unique is that they are not typical businesses.
While no one would argue that it is unfair for a regular business to reduce its taxable income as the value of its machinery, vehicles, and computers erode, most of the assets of a sports franchise regenerate automatically.
In other words, player contracts can be amortized even though teams just sign new players when old players leave. TV deals can also be amortized even though leagues just negotiate more lucrative deals when their current ones expire. The tax code even allows for franchise and league membership rights to be amortized even though those rights technically never expire.
President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill actually included a provision that would have reduced the amortization deduction to 50% of the purchase price for new acquisitions. But after NFL owners like Robert Kraft, Jimmy Haslam, and Rob Walton lobbied against it, the provision was removed at the last minute.
This proposed change would have only impacted new team sales, but current owners care about it because if the existing amortization advantage goes away or gets diminished, it would negatively impact valuations.
Think about it this way: If the amortization deduction drops from 90% to 50%, that would cost potential buyers hundreds of millions in tax savings. So to make up for the difference, team valuations would have to fall.
This is also why the Lakers sale is so shocking.
Walter is giving up billions in potential tax savings over 15 years for a 20% capital gain over two years.
That wouldn't make sense...unless Walter is actually being forced to sell to cover the very loans the federal government is currently investigating him for.
P.S. Today's newsletter breaks down everything you need to know about the Mark Walter investigation: why the DOJ seized his phone and laptop, how it triggered a fire sale of the Lakers, and whether the Dodgers, Chelsea, or the Cadillac Formula 1 team will be next.
I spent the last 24 hours digging into all the details, and I think this is probably one of our best newsletters ever.
READ: https://t.co/UtrdzG4nTZ
The White House normally gets $2.5 million a year for maintenance. Trump’s team has allocated $875 million.
That’s 350 years’ worth of the usual budget spent by a single administration.
The Los Angeles Lakers just sold for $12.5 billion, the most expensive sale in American sports history. And there’s some for a lack of better words, interesting connections. The seller is Mark Walter, who is under active federal investigation.
The buyer is Josh Kushner who’s brother is Donald Trump’s son in law and the man whose firm tried to buy the FIFA World Cup. The most famous franchise in sports just passed straight from a man being probed by the feds to a man who tried to privatize the world's biggest tournament. Let’s take a look at the full picture, because the full picture is ugly.
Let’s start off with some of the facts because this story is LOADED.
Mark Walter bought the Lakers 14 months ago at a $10 billion valuation. He didn't buy them to just flip them. He tore up the front office, rebuilt the scouting department, overhauled the business side, all the moves of a man planning to own this team for a decade. Then, 14 months in, he sold the Lakers?! Nobody does that. You don't buy your dream asset and unload it before you've finished redecorating, unless something changed and changed drastically.
Here's what happened. Walter is under federal investigation, a probe into the insurance companies he controls, the same case where the FBI reportedly seized his phone and laptop off a private jet at a Chicago airport. Separate investigations by U.S. prosecutors and the SEC are underway.
Now there is no proof of guilt yet. No one has pointed out for sure that the investigation forced this sale. Walter hasn't been charged with anything. The teams themselves are not named in the probe. Every serious outlet says the connection is unproven, and it is.
But you're allowed to look at the picture, and the picture is ugly. A man under federal investigation does not sell his trophy asset 14 months after buying it, at $2.5 billion above what he paid, in a matter of days, for no reason. That's not a normal exit. That's a fast, wildly profitable, remarkably clean getaway from the spotlight, executed at the precise moment the spotlight turned into a liability. You don't liquidate the Los Angeles Lakers this quickly unless you have a reason to want out. What that reason is, only the investigation knows. But the timing is not small.
But then who is buying it is a whole new story.
The buyer is Josh Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital. Weeks ago, that same firm was the lead investor in Gianni Infantino's $20 billion plan to sell off the commercial rights to the FIFA World Cup, the scheme that collapsed under a global revolt and nearly cost the FIFA president his job. Same man. Same firm. Different sport, different continent, weeks apart.
And there's a layer under the Kushner name that makes this bigger than sports. Josh Kushner is the brother of Jared Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump. Which means the most famous franchise in American sports is now owned, in part, by the sitting President's son-in-law's brother. Not the President himself, to be clear. He has no stake in this and no role in it. But the Lakers just became connected by marriage to the First Family, at the same time the seller is under a federal investigation run by that same administration's Justice Department. You don't have to allege anything to notice that's a crazy plot twist.
Two of the biggest money scandals in sports right now, a federally investigated owner on one side and the private equity operator who tried to buy the World Cup on the other, just resolved into a single transaction. The investigated man sold America's most famous team to the FIFA guy, in days, at a record price, and most people are reading it as a fun headline about the Lakers getting a new owner.
Here's the thing about the money at the very top of sports. Fans watch 30 teams, 30 owners, 30 separate franchises with their own colors and cities and rivalries. But the capital behind all of it is a small room. It's the same few dozen people, and they keep turning up in each other's deals. The Lakers, the Dodgers, the Giants, the Heat, Liverpool, the World Cup itself, pull the thread on almost any of them right now and you find the same handful of names, buying from and selling to one another.
That's the lesson that runs underneath all of this. At the level fans watch, sports is a game. At the level that actually owns it, sports is an asset class, and it is a far smaller and more connected world than anyone lets on. The Lakers didn't just get a new owner. They moved one square on a board most people don't know they're looking at, from a man under federal investigation to a man connected by marriage to the President.
The Buss family owned the Lakers for 46 years. Mark Walter owned them for 14 months. The next chapter belongs to the man whose firm tried to privatize the World Cup, and whose brother is married into the White House. That tells you everything about how fast the money moves at the top now, and how very few hands it moves between.
Donald Trump posted a graphic targeting Abdul El-Sayed and his wife, comparing them to him and Melania with the caption “Two Very Different America’s.” Here’s how El-Sayed flipped it right back on him live on CNN:
El-Sayed: Yeah, he's right. One in which your overlords are two people who don't like each other, but joined in the interest of making billions of dollars off of you.
Or two people who genuinely love each other, enjoyed some pancakes together, want to come together to build the kind of America where they can raise a family and know that that family is going to have the good things.
So, yes, you got two different visions of America. Donald Trump's vision is the one you're living in right now. Can you afford your gas? Can you afford your groceries? Do you believe, when you look your kids in the eye, that they're going to have a better future than you did?
And Sarah and I are running because when we look our daughters in the eye, Emmalee and Shireen, we want them to believe that they're every bit as able to have a better future than the one that they could have had under the Trump administration. That they can live together with their sisters and their brothers in America in a way where they lock arms to build the good things that they deserve together.
Where they know they'll have the healthcare that they need and good jobs, and that they don't have to go 15 minutes and know that there are kids who live 15 minutes away whose lives are very, very different than theirs because we've been, for far too long, okay with a level of inequality in this country.
I want them to live in an America where they can breathe clean air and drink clean water.
And actually, Sarah and I like each other. I don't know about the First Lady and the President, but from what I've heard, it's a bit of a rocky road.
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