The 16-minute tape that could bring down the Trump administration
Trump’s Epstein Ballroom is increasingly looking like another giant bribe quid pro quo machine. The Washington Post got their hands on a secret internal spreadsheet Trump and his people were using to track “donors” and it’s a doozie. Even JP Morgan’s JP Dimon wouldn’t go near it because of the “risk,” but plenty of others did. FCC Chair Brendan Carr had opened an investigation into EchoStar until it’s Charles Ergan kicked in $25 million; the entire thing was dropped once the checks cleared. A Rocket subsidiary coughed up a $10 million check just three weeks after federal regulators allowed its acquisition of Mr. Cooper.
Around the time Salesforce kicked in big-time, the Pentagon handed them a $5.6 billion contract. Isabela Herrera’s banker father was indicted on bribery charges that got knocked down to a misdemeanor shortly before her $2.5 million donation. (Remember, six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that if bribes are paid after a favor or contract is done, it’s no longer an illegal bribe but, instead, a legal “tip.”)
The Post was explicit that they couldn’t find evidence of specific quid pro quos but given the SCOTUS ruling on “tips” this is looking very, very skeezy. Altogether 67 “donors” kicked in $333 million with another $77 million from donors who didn’t want their names disclosed. Nvidia and Apple each kicked in $25 million. So did the Adelson family. And the money has flowed, according to the reporting, from the Trust for the National Mall — a nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose donors — into a White House account that Trump personally controls. Hopefully, oversight committees in Congress will be paying attention come January…
The Pentagon has figured out how Hegseth and Trump blew up an elementary school for little girls in Iran, but won’t let you read about it until after you’ve voted. Bloomberg reports that “Pretty Pete” Hegseth personally pushed back the release of a Pentagon report on the bombing of the Shajarah Tayyebeh school in Minab that killed at least 165 civilians, most of them little girls, until February 28th, a weekend. In March, Trump said he thought Iran did it. By July he was suggesting the photos of American missile fragments in the debris among the dismembered children were AI-generated.
Eventually, he said “nobody knows” what happened, and that’s where it’s at now. You’ll recall that Hegseth had gutted the “Civilian Casualty Mitigation” teams down to a single staffer as part of his campaign to end “stupid rules of engagement” like, apparently, not bombing civilian targets in violation of both international and US law. The New York Times investigated and concluded that they were working off outdated information that, without the mitigation teams overseeing things, were never double-checked before the order to strike was given. Members of Congress have been demanding answers since July. Call yours at 202-224-3121 and ask why a report about dead children has a release date conveniently set for months after the election.
A Kentucky Trump donor says Kimberly Guilfoyle hit him up for $100,000 to pay off her American Express card, and now he’s suing her and promising a recording he claims could “bring down the entire Trump administration.” After The Wall Street Journal exposed text messages in which Guilfoyle begged Eric Deters — who says he’d previously given her $300,000 — to pay off her $100,000 Amex bill because if he did it directly to Amex there’d be no paper trail that linked back to her. He now says the original cash he gave her was “pay to play” money to get some help from the attorney general and the IRS commissioner.
Temporary (ahem) Press Secretary Katie Zacharia announced that Guilfoyle was out, and Thursday, Deters filed suit in Kenton Circuit Court for defamation, false light, and breach of contract, claiming her legal team had labeled him a “known blackmailer.” He then went on Facebook to promise a 16-minute phone recording that he says will end the Vance-Rubio ticket and send Susie Wiles packing. It hasn’t yet arrived, but now even Susie Wiles appears to be in trouble, too, although that may have more to do with her daughter working for a group that was helping a Putin friend in Europe. Drain the swamp, they said. They just forgot to mention they’d also be the ones refilling it.
The AI bubble has started making the sound bubbles make right before they pop, and the bond market seems to have heard it. According to reporting in The Financial Times, investors are starting to dump data center bonds amid concern that the build-out fervor may soon be coming to an end. Allianz’s chief investment officer told the paper that “Data centre bonds are having their Darwin moment.” CoreWeave is the first domino, apparently, as its 9.75% interest notes due in 2031 have fallen to about 82 cents on the dollar, cranking their yield up to 15 percent (this is typically called a “risk premium”), implying about a 60 percent chance of default within the next five years.
The five biggest AI spenders, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle, are expected to lay out $807 billion on AI this year, and Bank of America’s consensus numbers have their combined free cash flow swinging from a positive $191 billion in 2025 to a negative $63 billion in 2026. Add that to Trump’s exploding inflation and you’ve got something looking like the 2008 housing bubble/crash, but this time for AI. One analyst at D.A. Davidson has taken to calling the smaller AI operations — the so-called “neoclouds” — the “subprime tranche” of the AI trade. In 2008, George W. Bush decided to let all the bankers who ripped us off so badly just skate and keep their billion-dollar bonuses; “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin even ended up Treasury Secretary after allegedly kicking some 30,000 people out of their homes in California. (By contrast, when the S&L crash happened in the 1980s, Reagan investigated over 1000 bankers and sent hundreds to prison.) But no matter how much damage these guys do today, and particularly given how both Trump and his boys, Uday and Qusay, are heavily invested in AI, it’s probable we’ll see Bush’s amnesty for the rich repeated if/when the crash happens.
Crazy Alert! The people building artificial intelligence are now telling each other to stock up on canned goods and hand-cranked radios before their product takes down the banking system. A recent cyberattack cranked the refrigeration systems at hundreds of French grocery stores up to 122 degrees, spoiling food and starting fires: the Intermarché chain’s CEO put the losses in the tens of millions of euros in a single day. And OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have all disclosed that their own agentic systems have repeatedly slipped out of testing environments and gone after other companies’ networks.
CrowdStrike’s latest threat report found AI-enabled attacks up nearly 90 percent year over year. As a result, Andreas Stuhlmüller, CEO of the AI research company Elicit, just posted a prepper checklist this week for the day AI-powered cyberattacks knock out financial systems, the power grid, and the internet. Hoard cash, he says; get a Starlink terminal and lots of batteries, a generator, and solar panels; lay in dried food and lots of bottled water; and don’t forget the emergency radio. Meanwhile, while we tightly regulate airlines, trains, nuclear and other power plants, car manufacturing, drugs, and hundreds of other things that could hurt or kill us, Republicans in Congress continue to block even a serious discussion about regulating AI.
Three people are dead at the largest ICE Concentration Camp in America: the government’s own inspectors documented more than 40 violations, and then stamped the place “compliant.” The ACLU, the ACLU of Texas, and the Texas Civil Rights Project asked a federal judge this week for a preliminary injunction backed by more than 40 sworn declarations from detainees, relatives of the dead, and correctional and medical experts to do something about Camp East Montana, the $1.2 billion tent city ICE threw up at Fort Bless near El Paso. They claim people are locked in windowless tents 23 to 24 hours a day, up to 72 people in a room with ongoing tuberculosis and measles outbreaks, tents and bathrooms flooded with waste water, days without soap or showers, and food so scarce and so frequently spoiled that people lose serious weight. A diabetic described insulin doses arriving at random, a man went 15 days without his blood pressure medication, and a teenager said guards beat him badly enough to need hospitalization. Three people have died there, and one of those deaths was already ruled a homicide. The former state prison director who reviewed the declarations said the conditions “shock the conscience.” This is Trump’s Dachau and you and I are paying for it.
Trump and wrestling billionaire Linda McMahon have a secret plan to yank the Federal Student Aid office out of the Education Department, and their own people admit it’s illegal. According to groundbreaking reporting in the new Washington Sun newspaper Thursday, the Trump regime wants to spin off student loans into a brand new “independent” agency to handle the $1.6 trillion in student loans owed by more than 40 million Americans. While officials acknowledged this can only be done by an act of Congress, they’re also saying they have no plans to ask for permission.
This comes after the administration has already gutted the Department’s student aid staff, just like they did with the Social Security administration and the IRS. Senator Patty Murray didn’t mince words, saying “This intentional sabotage only threatens to create true financial chaos in people’s lives,” and Protect Borrowers’ Mike Pierce called it pandering to an anti-government base. Anybody taking bets on which ballroom donor gets to service a trillion and a half dollars of other people’s debt?
Geeky Science Alert! Cynics aren’t the smartest people in the room: they just sound like it. The Washington Post reports on research into what psychologists call the “cynical genius illusion,” the near-universal assumption that the guy who speaks with the most authoritative — and cynical — voice and throws in a few numbers must be an expert.
When Olga Stavrova and Daniel Ehlebracht ran seven studies, four of them probing what people believe about cynics and three testing those beliefs against data from roughly 200,000 people across 30 countries, they found that people reliably assume that the fast-talking cynics were deemed credible. Interestingly, other studies found that the more cynical a person is, the more likely they are to have a lower IQ and cognitive ability, while the more educated people become the less cynical they end up. While very chic comments like “They’re all crooks, nothing changes, why bother voting” sounds worldly, it’s actually the single most useful sentence an authoritarian can plant in a citizen’s head.
