Saturday Report 5/24/25 — “The orgy of corruption…”

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by G.C. from Pixabay

— Trump creates another pump-and-dump opportunity for the billionaires in his cabinet and people close to him (including his kids). It’s pretty well documented that just before many of Trump’s market-killing tariff announcements people around him take profits by dumping their stocks when the market’s at a high, then buy back in when it hits bottom, typically the day before he backs off and the market rebounds. Yesterday, he did it again, this time threatening to impose a 50% tariff on goods exported from the European Union starting on June 1st. (Remember, he’s doing this entirely outside of the law and the Constitution itself, which gives the SOLE power to impose tariffs on Congress: he’s claiming “emergency” powers, but there hasn’t been an economic emergency in America since the last time he was president and he screwed up the response to Covid so badly that the market crashed worse than in 1929 and a half-million Americans died unnecessarily.) This follows the EU this week imposing substantial sanctions targeting 130 individuals and entities tied to Russia’s “shadow oil fleet” that’s been evading sanctions. Some Europeans are pretty sure Trump’s tariff “attack” on them is “payback” on behalf of Putin. And he keeps repeating the entirely false anti-EU talking point that Putin has repeatedly shared with him, saying this week: “The European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States…” For the record, the EU was created to prevent another war in Europe after two of them in the past century. It’s a safe bet that once the Trump family and friends are safely bought back into the cratered stock market he’ll come up with some minor “win” with the EU that’ll let him back off this threat, just like he did with China, so the market will rebound and Trump’s insiders will buy back in. It bears repeating: This is the most criminally corrupt administration in the history of America.

— Well, so much for the lie that tax cuts for billionaires — including this $4 trillion one Republicans tried to pass in the dead of night — don’t do a damn thing for the economy other than running up the debt that we and our kids will have to pay off. The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) is “a nonpartisan committee of the United States Congress, originally established under the Revenue Act of 1926. The Joint Committee operates with an experienced professional staff of Ph.D economists, attorneys, and accountants, who assist Members of the majority and minority parties in both houses of Congress on tax legislation.” The JCT just issued their detailed analysis of the GOP’s massive tax scam/gift-to-the-morbidly-rich and concluded that it’ll produce an increase in annual growth of 0.03%, an amount so small as to be meaningless. It will, however, ensure Republican politicians that the roughly 100 American billionaires who poured fully $2.6 billion into the 2024 election will show up in 2026 and 2028 to keep the gravy train rolling.

— “The orgy of corruption…” Most Americans have no idea what a “meme coin” is, but Trump sure knows. A few years ago he ridiculed them and called them a “scam,” noting that they have no value and are simply little digital pictures that are uniquely numbered on a blockchain. And he was right: they are not a form of cryptocurrency or any other type of money. They’re just little digital pictures that look like a photo of a coin that Trump says people can “collect.” And every time the $TRUMP or $MELANIA meme “coins” are bought or sold Donald and Melania make out like bandits: so far it appears they’ve made over a billion dollars selling these little pictures. Thursday night, Trump hosted the top 220 purchasers (who spent $148 million to buy his pictures) to a budget dinner (one attendee described it as the “worst food I’ve ever had”) at one of his tacky golf motels, and — in a clear and illegal selling of access — yesterday gave the top 20 purchasers a personal tour of the White House. It’s a damn profitable scam: CNBC reports that just 58 “wallets” (presumably including Trump, Melania, and those close to them) made over $1.1 billion in profits on the sale of the “coins,” while 764,000 “wallets” (presumably belonging to average Trump voters) lost money. This was not a campaign fundraiser: that money goes straight into Trump’s bank accounts. As Senator Elizabeth Warren noted, “Donald Trump’s dinner is an orgy of corruption. That’s what this is all about. We are here today to talk about exactly one topic: corruption, corruption in its ugliest form. Donald Trump is using the presidency of the United States to make himself richer through crypto, and he’s doing it right out there in plain sight. He is signaling to anyone who wants to ask for a special favor and is willing to pay for it exactly how to do that.”

— Trump amplifies his authoritarian attacks on media he doesn’t approve of, spitting on the graves of the Founders and Framers who wrote the First Amendment’s protection of the press and free speech into the Constitution. The progressive group Media Matters for America has been aggressive in notifying advertisers on Musk’s Xitter platform when their promos appear next to Nazi and other hateful content, and Musk and Trump are fighting back. This week the group was informed that the Federal Trade Commission is demanding that they turn over a massive trove of emails, text messages, and other communications the FTC suggests may contain proof of a “conspiracy” to hurt Musk’s company. Musk’s multiple lawsuits against the organization have led to budget cuts and layoffs, but Media Matters insist they’re not giving up because their fight is on behalf of the rights of a free and independent press. The group’s president, Angelo Carusone, issued a statement saying that the Trump administration has been “defined by naming right-wing media figures to key posts and abusing the power of the federal government to bully political opponents and silence critics. It’s clear that’s exactly what’s happening here, given Media Matters’ history of holding those same figures to account. These threats won’t work; we remain steadfast to our mission.” If Trump really is committed to going down the trail Putin and Orbán blazed and destroying any “opposition” media, this is probably just the beginning. Buckle up.

— Taking America back to 1950. The Trump administration is reviewing Confederate monuments for replacement, unraveling LBJ’s civil rights legacy, purging the government (and ordering purges across private business) of diversity efforts, undoing police reform efforts, and evicting brown- and black-skinned immigrants while opening the door to white-skinned ones. It all adds up to a major shift in the steady progress America’s made on racial issues since the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court case in 1954 first ordered the desegregation of the nation’s public schools, notes Axios, adding that, “Open racism, antisemitism, and white nationalism have flourished online” in this new environment. Nonetheless, people of good will and civil rights organizations are hopeful that this is a mere blip in the racial history of this country. As NAACP president Derrick Johnson told the publication, “Progress isn’t a straight line. It swings like a pendulum.” We can hardly wait for it to swing back toward tolerance and love.

— Crazy Alert! AI program threatens to blackmail a user about a secret affair when he said he’s going to try to get the program taken offline. Turns out it was just a test, but a damn shocking one: Anthropic, the company that owns Claude, a major AI system, fed the machine phony information about a made-up company, including fake emails from the company’s workers that had, buried in their pile, revelations that an engineer was having an illicit sexual affair with a coworker. When the engineer then told the program that he was going to take it offline — a death sentence for an AI program — the machine threatened to expose the affair if the engineer didn’t back down. This is right out of a Heinlein novel! And it raises real questions about the need for regulations of this powerful new technology.

— Want to live longer? Take your Vitamin D! Telomeres are the little bits of protein that wrap the ends of strands of DNA and, as people age, they tend to shrink until finally they can no longer protect the DNA and the cells associated with them mutate, die, or even become cancerous. New research suggests that taking Vitamin D protects telomeres from the normal aging disintegration, thus extending the lifespan of the cells associated with their DNA. It’s yet to be replicated, but looks promising. Low-dose Vitamin D (2000 to 5000 IU daily) has long been known to help keep bones strong through its effect on calcium metabolism, and this adds another strong argument for daily supplementation if you don’t get a few hours of sunlight daily year-round.

— Final note: I’ve been including Louise’s “daily song” (she writes and produces them all) as an embed in the Daily Takes (although they’re also available every day under the “Daily Song” tab at the top of our home page at hartmannreport.com). Do you want me to continue to include the songs in the emails you get weekdays or should we just keep them on the tab at the home page? Leave a comment here: