Saturday Report 5/30/26 — The Trump Administration says starving Americans are “moving into the American Dream.” When did hunger become part of the American Dream?
The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion
— Jared Kushner wants to make Tehran the next Trump Tower, and you’re paying for it. Buried inside the emerging US–Iran memorandum of understanding to end Trump’s catastrophic Iran war is a quiet little provision that should make every American taxpayer howl: a $300 billion postwar “investment fund” that the United States would help “facilitate” to rebuild the country we just finished bombing. And whose bright idea was it to shovel hundreds of billions of dollars into Iranian reconstruction? Per The New York Times via Mediaite, the concept reportedly emerged from Trump’s Mideast envoy billionaire Steve Witkoff and son-in-law billionaire Jared Kushner, two real estate developers who, according to mediators, had floated “promoting real estate projects in Tehran” as part of the package. So let’s get this straight: Trump bombs Iran, Americans pay $59 billion in extra gas costs for the privilege, and then Jared and Steve get to develop the Tehran Riviera with our tax dollars while the family takes its 20%. After 45 years of Reaganomics hollowing out the American middle class so the morbidly rich can stuff their pockets, this is the natural next step: outsourcing the grift to Persian Gulf oligarchs and Iranian mullahs. The mullahs get cash, Jared gets ground-floor real estate, and you get to keep paying $5 a gallon. Welcome to the Trump Doctrine.
— A federal judge just told Trump he can’t pay himself $1.8 billion of your money — at least not yet. In a refreshing breath of judicial sanity, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema temporarily blocked the Trump administration from spending a dime out of its “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” the $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded slush bucket Trump conjured up by settling his own $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. Seriously. The President of the United States sued the federal government, then — as President — settled the case against himself, and the “settlement” requires the federal government to pay him and his designated “victims” nearly $2 billion of your money. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington aptly called it “a jaw-dropping act of presidential corruption.” Even more deliciously, AG nominee Todd Blanche wouldn’t rule out that January 6th rioters who assaulted Capitol police could collect from this fund, turning cop-beaters, cop-killers, and wannabe VP assassins into federally-compensated “victims.” Two Capitol officers who actually defended democracy on January 6th have already sued. Judge Brinkema, a Clinton appointee, scheduled a June 12 hearing. Let’s hope she sees this for what it is: the most brazen self-dealing scheme an American president has ever attempted.
— Boom for the banksters, bust for everybody else: this is what 45 years of Reaganomics looks like. This week brought the perfect split-screen of American oligarchy. On one screen, the WSJ reports that the nation’s largest banks are “raking in profits” as Trump’s chaos roils the markets, because while you panic, JPMorgan and Goldman trade. Volatility is their oxygen. On the other screen, Americans are drowning under $1.25 trillion in credit-card debt at an average 21% interest rate — up from 14.6% just four years ago — with 5.6% of cardholders now 60-plus days delinquent. Translation: working families are borrowing at loan-shark rates from the same banks posting record profits, then falling behind, while Jamie Dimon collects another $39 million bonus. When asked if the financial stress on Americans factored into ending his Iran war, Trump said, with characteristic empathy, “not even a little bit.” This is exactly the K-shaped economy Reagan promised in 1981 when he sold America on trickle-down: the top of the K soars on the backs of the bottom. Forty-five years in, the only thing trickling down is credit card interest.
— Republicans, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that dying younger is a form of liberty. A striking new study in Nature Human Behaviour by researchers Elizabeth Elder and Neil O’Brian finds that conservatives in America didn’t used to have worse health outcomes than liberals, but starting in the 2010s, they suddenly did, and the gap is widening. The reason? Republicans are increasingly avoiding doctors, refusing vaccines, and ignoring medical advice, and the mortality data prove it. Even excluding COVID deaths, conservative Americans are now dying earlier than their liberal neighbors. And it gets worse: KFF polling found that 81% of Republicans trust Bob Kennedy’s health advice as much as they trust their own doctors, a jaw-dropping endorsement of a brain-wormed conspiracy theorist lawyer who thinks vaccines cause autism and raw milk cures everything. The conservative counterargument, of course, will be: “Personal freedom! We don’t trust Big Pharma!” Fine. But personal freedom doesn’t repeal biology, and when Fox News tells Grandpa that the measles vaccine is a Jewish space-laser plot, Grandpa dies of measles. Republicans are literally killing their own voters faster than Democrats can register new ones. As a long-term electoral strategy, this seems… suboptimal.
— Brooke Rollins, the Marie Antoinette of Big Macs, says starving Americans are “moving into the American Dream.” Agriculture Secretary and multimillionaire Brooke Rollins this week celebrated kicking 4.3 million Americans off SNAP food assistance by proclaiming that the newly-hungry are “moving into the American Dream.” As one expert dryly responded: unless the administration has redefined the American Dream as “losing the help your family needs to afford groceries,” she may have her metaphors confused. On the very same day, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a stunning analysis documenting a “remarkable increase in food insecurity” across America, with 10% of households now reporting they don’t have enough food, up from 4% in 2020. More Americans are going hungry today than at the height of the COVID pandemic. Food banks are slammed. Kids are skipping meals. And the woman in charge of feeding America is on TV gushing that they’re living the dream. After 45 years of Reaganomics teaching Republicans that compassion is weakness and cruelty is policy, this is what you get: a wealthy Cabinet secretary literally telling hungry children that hunger is freedom. Orwell couldn’t have written it sharper.
— Speaking of starving the poor to feed the rich: Trump just handed Corporate America another $40 billion tax-dodge gift. While Brooke Rollins was busy explaining how empty refrigerators build character, the Treasury Department was quietly carving new loopholes into the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, that 15% floor that was supposed to stop companies like FedEx and T-Mobile from paying negative tax rates. Treasury Secretary billionaire Scott Bessent’s interim guidance notices will let America’s largest corporations dodge an estimated $40 billion in taxes over the coming years, on top of the $1 trillion in tax breaks Republicans already shoveled to corporations and their oligarch owners in last summer’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” As one House Democrat put it: “While working Americans struggle to put food on the table, Trump has found another way to cut costs for the ultra-wealthy. Same story, different day.” Even the conservative Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is screaming foul. Forty-five years ago, Reagan promised that slashing corporate taxes would unleash a tidal wave of prosperity for working Americans. Forty-five years later, corporate profits are at record highs, wages have flat-lined, and the only thing trickling down is Brooke Rollins telling you that going hungry is patriotic.
— Say What?!?Alert! The Pentagon has issued a fatwa: no fatties at the President’s birthday cage match. In what may be the most surreal news item of the entire Trump 2.0 era, Mediaite reports that the Pentagon is scrambling to recruit hundreds of service members to fill the seats at Trump’s “UFC Freedom 250” cage-fighting extravaganza on the White House South Lawn on June 14, a date which, by sheer coincidence, happens to be Donald Trump’s 80th birthday. But not just any troops. According to internal Air Force memos, eligible attendees “MUST MEET CURRENT WAIST-HEIGHT RATIO” — specifically, a ratio less than 0.55 — and “current physical fitness standard,” and will appear in short-sleeve dress uniforms. Oh, and they have to pay their own travel costs. One internal Facebook post bluntly described the policy as “no fatties at UFC White House event.” Because nothing says “support our troops” like demanding they audition based on waistline and then making them buy their own bus ticket to your birthday party. But wait — it gets even better. HuffPost reported yesterday that on March 25th, Trump quietly purchased between $15,001 and $50,000 of stock in TKO Group Holdings, UFC’s parent company: the very same company whose event he is now using the White House, the military, and the presidential bully pulpit to promote. As CREW’s Jordan Libowitz put it: “one of the worst conflicts of interest you could imagine.”
So to recap this week’s grift: Trump bombs Iran so Jared can flip Tehran condos, sues the IRS to give himself $1.8 billion, lets corporations dodge $40 billion, kicks 4.3 million hungry Americans off food stamps, and orders the Pentagon to bus skinny soldiers to his birthday party so he can pump the stock he just bought. If this isn’t peak banana republic, I don’t know what is. Pass the popcorn — but only if your waist-to-height ratio is under 0.55.
Comments on Friday’s Daily Take:
America Just Expanded Voting Rights To Corporations. Yes, Really.
No surprise that America got railroaded into accepting the canard that a corporation is a person with the right to vote. With two million corporations chartered in Delaware leaning on the shoulder of the judge, how could he decide otherwise?
~ Jeffrey Hobbs
How, precisely, will corporations be allowed to vote? Will the CEO be given a ballot? How many votes will they get? this is beyond insane and must be stopped…
~ Nancy Bruski
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No words.
I applaud and encourage MAGA to disregard "liberal" health, That they die younger is a good thing for Democracy and all of us, the less of them at the voting booth,the better the world.