donald trump

President Donald Trump praised the physical appearance of Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH), raising attention about his previously well-established recent habit of making overtly aesthetic comments about the men in his vicinity.

"President Donald Trump has bizarrely thirsted over the body of a male MAGA senator during a midterm rally," reported The Daily Beast's Cameron Adams on Monday. "Trump, 80, attended a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on Monday evening to lend his support for Senator Jon Husted and gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy."

Adams added, "During his speech, the president praised Husted and admitted he didn’t know about his past playing football for the University of Dayton, where he earned All-American recognition as a defensive back and kick returner." Adams quoted Trump as saying of Husted, "He was a great athlete. I don’t do this with men very often, I started examining his body, because I didn’t know he was a great athlete."

Trump continued, "And I looked, and I watched up and down, and I looked at his a-- ... and I looked at the whole... and then I looked at his hands, look at his hands, he’s got these, like, claws... and I got it, you are a great athlete.”

While unorthodox, Trump often compliments the physical appearance of men around him. In 2026 alone he did so when meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and New York Giants Quarterback Jaxson Dart. He also repeatedly referred to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running for the Senate as the Republican nominee in that state, as "ugly." Yet the president is just as prone to mentioning how women appear as he is how men appear — and, just as he can kind to Husted or cruel to Paxton, he is known for being either overtly flattering (such as how he judged and spoke to contestants on the reality TV show that launched him to superstardom and a presidential campaign, "The Apprentice") or bitterly cutting toward women over how they look.

""December 6th he called Kaitlin Collins 'stupid and nasty,'"" MS NOW anchor Nicolle Wallace pointed out in December. "On November 27th he said 'are you stupid' To CBS journalist Nancy Cordes. On November 26th, he called the New York Times' Katie Rogers 'ugly.' On November 18th, he called ABC's Mary Bruce 'terrible and insubordinate' — to whom I'm not sure — November 14th, he told a Bloomberg reporter, 'quiet, piggy,'"

Because Trump seems to obsess more over people's physical appearance at present, to the point where doing so interferes with what would otherwise seem to be the responsibilities of his job, experts have expressed concern that they could be a sign of cognitive decline. Speaking to AlterNet in May, former Tufts University psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham — who authored a letter to Congress by 36 health professionals saying Trump is unfit to serve — argued that, broadly, Trump's erratic and obsessive comments are a "red flag."

“It’s a red flag,” Abraham told AlterNet at the time. “People perseverate because they can’t think of anything else to say, because they’re cognitively impaired, or they perseverate because their emotional motor is stuck in high gear. In the last five to 10 years, he has planted red flags of concern again and again and again, and they’ve clustered.”

President Donald Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, use Christian nationalism as the ideological fuel for their right-wing political movement. Yet according to one expert, they often do not understand the very Bible that they like to reference.

"He vowed that in his military, there would be 'no fatties. No trannies. No beardos. No weirdos. No wimps. No radicals,'" wrote The Dispatch's Paul D. Miller, professor of the practice of international affairs at Georgetown University, the managing editor of Providence Magazine and the Hugh Shelton visiting chair of ethics at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College Foundation, on Monday. Yet it appears Hegseth struggles to accurately connect the aforementioned philosophy with the Bible.

"Hegseth compared American servicemen to the prophet Isaiah receiving God’s commission," Miller wrote. "'‘Lord, here I am, send me,' Hegseth said, quoting Isaiah 6:8. 'Send me to fight the Red Coats. Send me to fight the Communists. Send me to fight the Islamists. Send me.' (It’s one of Hegseth’s favorite tropes. He launched a recruitment tour using the 'Send Me' slogan as the centerpiece of the pitch.) "

Miller added that Hegseth also quoted Psalm 33:12 (“Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”), Psalm 118 ("The Lord is on my side; I will not fear: What can man do unto me?”) and Ephesians 6:11 (“Our department is, you might say, putting on the full Armor of God”) through 6:12 (“while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual.”) in the same speech.

Yet "Hegseth is plainly taking Scripture out of context—King David was not thinking of America when he praised the nation whose God is the Lord," Miller wrote, adding that Hegseth similarly errs in "conflating the American soldier with a divinely inspired prophet (Isaiah) and the United States with God’s chosen covenant people (the 'nation whose God is the Lord'). If he means any of this literally, it is literally blasphemous."

Yet even if he does not mean any of it literally, Hegseth is still revealing himself to be remarkably shallow in his theology, Miller claimed.

"He tears scriptural phrases out of context and throws them in the speechmaking blender, and they come out like so many aphorisms and clichés," Miller argued. "They line his speech to elevate the bombast, to balance the jejune with the sacred. For Lincoln, Scripture serves to illuminate, judge, and humble the nation. For Hegseth, Scripture elevates, ennobles, and even sacralizes the nation."

He added, Hegseth’s misuse of Scripture is especially galling because he does this sort of thing in the name of restoring Christianity to its formerly central place in American public life while overseeing a war that is, at least, troubling in light of the Christian just war tradition."

Miller neglected to mention Hegseth's most infamous religious gaffe, when he invoked pseudo-scripture by reading lines by Samuel L. Jackson's character in the Quentin Tarantino film "Pulp Fiction" to the actual Bible.

“The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men,” Hegseth said in a speech, referencing a fictional Biblical passage (Ezekiel 25:17) recited before a hit is performed. “Blessed is he who in the name of camaraderie and duty shepherds the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother, and you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen.”

Despite the claims made by Trump and Hegseth, the co-author of the Declaration of Independence and third American president, Thomas Jefferson, coined the phrase "separation between church and state" to emphasize the importance of keeping both spheres distinct.

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State," Jefferson wrote during his presidency.

Conservative writer Andrew McCarthy voted for President Donald Trump three times, but he pulled no punches in blasting Trump’s “imbecilic” policies leading to his deal with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.

“Trump’s atrocious oil deal with Vladimir Putin, his friend and America’s foe, is impeachable flim-flam,” said McCarthy. “It’s a fraud on the American people — a desperate, futile attempt to address Trump’s self-inflicted wound of high diesel prices.”

The United States, after all, produces around 5 million barrels of diesel per day, yet consumes less than 4 million barrels per day. This excess makes the U.S. the “world’s top diesel exporter,” while Russia, in stark contrast, has “collapsed” as an exporter, said McCarthy.

“Putting aside the more appalling aspects of this deal — a gift to Putin, requiring no concessions on his part — we are apparently supposed to believe that Russia, whose energy sector is in such disrepair it was importing diesel from South Korea this summer, is going to be our savior exporter,” said McCarthy.

Putin is a war criminal, he added, who scoffs at Trumps pleas of peace after attacking Ukraine. And he “blithely persisted in his barbaric attacks on civilians, even as Trump announced the diesel deal.”

McCarthy said in making this deal Trump is trying to convince voters that he is “taking real steps to reduce the prices his unilaterally imposed policies have caused.” But that’s not going to work because prices will not decrease. In fact, they’ll probability go higher because the war “Trump started against Iran without seeking congressional authorization or public buy-in” is back on the menu. Iran — which is Putin’s ally — has stepped up attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, said McCarthy. And Iran’s Houthi allies are pounding Saudi Arabia and upsetting Red Sea shipments. Meanwhile Trump has not ended “his imbecilic trade war with Canada, our ally and neighbor,” said McCarthy.

“The second reason for doing the diesel deal with Putin is, as ever, corruption,” said McCarthy, who is — again — a three-time Trump voter.

“In early October, the New York Times reported that Trump is working on an even more execrable multibillion-dollar oil deal with Putin: The U.S. would waive sanctions so that an investor group could buy up oil fields, refineries, and gas stations around the world that are owned by Lukoil, the Russian energy giant,” said McCarthy. “The deal has been negotiated by Trump’s aforementioned emissaries, Kushner and Witkoff. Among the major beneficiaries are said to be one of Trump’s major donors (Todd Boehly, who has donated $2 million to Trump political causes) and Middle Eastern executives who have business ties to Trump, Kushner, and Witkoff.”

“What is straightforward, though, statute or no statute, is that the president of the United States is empowering and emboldening a murderous anti-American regime even as it persists in a war of aggression, savage war crimes,” continued McCarthy. “… regardless of whether statutes have been transgressed, President Trump is grossly abusing the executive power entrusted in him.”

A retired judge, once powerful enough to be appointed and promoted by two Republican presidents (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), seemed to subtly troll President Donald Trump's defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, in a Monday statement. When discussing Hegseth's decision to air live the execution of terrorist and mass murderer Nidal Malik Hasan, most have focused on the fact that America's military has not publicized an execution in nearly a century.

Alex Kozinski, on the other hand, praised Hegseth for executing Hasan by firing squad — which Kozinski points out is actually more humane than the most popular execution method, lethal injection.

"It borrows medicine’s costume without the people and safeguards that make medicine work," Kozinski wrote in The Wall Street Journal. "Physicians are barred by the American Medical Association’s ethics code from participating in executions; similar constraints apply to nurses. The job therefore falls to law-enforcement personnel, who must obtain the drugs, find a vein, insert a catheter, and administer the substances in the right quantities and sequence. If the first attempt fails, they try again."

After describing the botched executions of two convicted murderers — first Joseph Rudolph Wood II in 2014 in Arizona, who only died after 15 injections of midazolam and hydromorphone over almost two hours, and then more recently Christa Pike, who survived two pentobarbital injections in Tennessee — Kozinski cited his own work on the Wood case when declaring firing squad more humane than lethal injection.

“Eight or ten large-caliber rifle bullets fired at close range can inflict massive damage, causing instant death every time," Kozinski had written. "There are plenty of people employed by the state who can pull the trigger and have the training to aim true. The weapons and ammunition are bought by the state in massive quantities for law enforcement purposes, so it would be impossible to interdict the supply. And nobody can argue that the weapons are put to a purpose for which they were not intended: firearms have no purpose other than destroying their targets. Sure, firing squads can be messy, but if we are willing to carry out executions, we should not shield ourselves from the reality that we are shedding human blood. If we, as a society, cannot stomach the splatter from an execution carried out by firing squad, then we shouldn’t be carrying out executions at all.”

Kozinski closed by reaffirming his statement from the Wood case.

"Deserving as Mr. Hasan may be of his punishment, no one merits a lingering, possibly excruciating death," Kozinski concluded. "I have some doubts whether livestreaming the execution is advisable, but Mr. Hegseth should be commended for his honesty, and for showing Mr. Hasan mercy."

Few are arguing that Hasan — who murdered 13 people and injured 32 others at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas as a terrorist act — should be spared. Leading evangelicals are joining hands with legal scholars to oppose the act of publicly displaying Hasan's execution on humanitarian grounds, as well as on the practical matter of the act turning Hasan into a martyr.

"The idea seemed to shock even some of his colleagues in the administration," reported The New York Times' Peter Baker on Friday. "Vice President JD Vance cast doubt that it would be livestreamed, telling reporters that “I don’t know that that’s going to happen” and adding that he would not watch if it does."

Baker continued, "But Mr. Trump said he signed off on it. 'Did I approve' he said. 'Absolutely I did.'" He pointed out that "no public execution has been conducted in the United States in 90 years, and the decision to conduct this one in front of an audience would put the country in the company of Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and Somalia."

One day after a federal judge in New York ordered the Trump administration to immediately stop airing controversial government-funded television ads featuring President Donald Trump, government watchdog group Common Cause was already ratting out the administration for countless violations.

In a two-page notice, reported by AllRise News Editor Ada Klasfeld, Common Cause told federal Judge Jennifer L. Rochon that Trump's taxpayer funded propaganda ads ran “hundreds of times” after the judge’s temporary restraining order demanded an immediate halt to them.

“Plaintiffs respectfully submit this letter to bring to the Court’s attention information relevant to Defendants’ compliance with the Court’s Temporary Restraining Order, which was entered on October 11, 2026, at 6:46 p.m. and was effective immediately,” Common Cause said, before then unloading a report of easily more than 400 spots despite the court’s binding TRO.

Trump’s “Final Battle” spot ran in 193 spots during “60 Minutes,” which aired on CBS starting at 7 p.m., said the group. And the “Maduro” ad ran in 198 spots during “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” These were in addition to many others the group was quick to catalogue Sunday and Monday.

“Plaintiffs do not presently seek contempt sanctions. But given that the ads have continued to run on October 12 — the day after Defendants insisted the ad-buy was no longer effective — Plaintiffs request a status conference to determine Defendants’ compliance,” Common Cause said in it’s Monday letter to the court.

Judge Rochon ordered the Trump administration to immediately pull a slate of taxpayer-funded pro-Trump ads that have been running on national television for two weeks. Her temporary restraining order also bars the Department of Homeland Security from spending any more of the $20 million in taxpayer funding allocated for the ad campaign. About $19 million of that allocation has already been spent on the ads.

CNBC reports the order came a day after the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office — which is defending the Trump administration in a lawsuit challenging the ads — assured Rochon that the ads would not continue airing past Sunday.

The alert by Commons Causes appears to dash that claim.

The New York Times reported that President Donald Trump personally instructed his budget director to use taxpayer money for TV ads praising him and his presidency, “setting in motion a $20 million contract that used funds from the Department of Homeland Security, according to people familiar with the matter.”

NBC News later reported that federal sources said Trump did not even alert administrators that their budgets would be footing the bill for the ads

“They didn’t sign off on it,” an official said of CBP leaders. “They were thinking, ‘There’s no way they’re going to try to take the funding from CBP for those ads.’”

On Monday, a former top adviser to President Donald Trump denounced the Republican's economic policies for increasing America's national debt — and an economist who advised a budget-balancing Democratic president agreed with him.

"This isn’t apocalyptic," posted Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Trump's communications director in 2017, on X. "It’s just math. 10-year treasury at 6 percent. $40 trillion in debt. Do the math. That’s $2.4 trillion in annual interest payments. Larger than the entire Social Security disbursement."

He added, "You cannot sustain that."

Scaramucci then urged Americans to go back to the tax rates in effect during President Bill Clinton's presidency, speculating that deficit spending could be reduced by trillions if they did so.

"No Republican is going to do that," Scaramucci said. "Trump isn’t going to do that. And when Trump leaves office, he will be personally responsible for 42 percent of all the national debt in American history."

AlterNet spoke with one of the architects of President Bill Clinton's economic policies, his Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Dr. Robert J. Shapiro. He played a critical role in developing the programs that balanced the budget and allowed Clinton to preside over four budget surpluses during his administration.

"I can't verify the numbers, but first, it is correct that the 10-year Treasury yield is higher than it's been in decades," Shapiro told AlterNet. "And whether it's 6 percent today or 5.8 percent, it's not very relevant. The rising yield on 10-year Treasuries is a signal that global investors' confidence in the U.S. economy and the U.S. government has declined. And consequently, they're saying, "If you want us to lend you money, we have less confidence in you, and consequently you're going to have to pay us more. And indeed, you're going to have to pay us more than you've paid us for the last 20 years."

Shapiro broke down the key differences between Clintonomics and Trumponomics.

"The fact is, the Clinton tax rates, both the corporate tax rate and the personal tax rate, were substantially higher," Shapiro told AlterNet. "Bill Clinton balanced the budget in large part by tax changes and economic growth that increased federal revenues by more than 50 percent over eight years. That's how he balanced the budget. That and restraining defense spending."

Ultimately, though, Shapiro agreed with Scaramucci's broader point — namely, that America's growing national debt is making outside investors wary about putting money into this country.

"Global confidence in the stability of the American economy and American sovereign debt is one of the most fundamental factors in the stability of the entire global economy," Shapiro told AlterNet. "And the erratic and uninformed and destructive economic policies of the Trump administration have shaken that confidence, and the consequences are very far-reaching."

Speaking with AlterNet in September, Scaramucci praised Clinton's pay-as-you-go policies and willingness to raise taxes on the wealthy, although he had unrelated criticisms of Clintonomics.

"I'm simply saying, in the doctrine-of-unintended-consequences category, in the second term he's pushing for more home ownership, okay?" Scaramucci told AlterNet. "Andrew Cuomo is his HUD secretary. I don't know if you remember that. They would like families to own their homes, and so they're pushing for broader credit applications with the money-center banks, which they get." He argued that these policies ultimately contributed to America's subprime housing crisis.

Also during a September interview with AlterNet, President Joe Biden's Social Security Commissioner Martin O'Malley argued that Trump and his administration are planning on privatizing Social Security on the pretext that it will help reduce the debt, even though (as he argued in October) the program could be solvent until 2032 simply by raising rates on those who make at least $184,500 annually.

"Well, his policies — as contained in the 'big, ugly bill' — accelerated the depletion date of the baby boomer surplus by a year. And he's said many times in the past that he wants to eliminate the payroll tax," O'Malley told AlterNet at the time.

He added, "Let me put it this way. His policies have certainly accelerated the depletion date by a year. At the end of President [Joe] Biden's administration, that date had actually been pushed further into the future by a year. So there you go — a net swing of two years. That's what his policies have done to make the situation more imminent and worse."

O'Malley concluded, "Having said that, the damage he's done to the trust fund and the damage he's done to customer service at the agency and its operations are both solvable problems — but he doesn't appear to be in a mode to solve them. He appears to be in a mode of wanting to privatize Social Security."

It’s here, reports Bloomberg. “The return of 7 percent mortgage rates in the Trump era has hit the US housing market like a thunderbolt, sending pending sales tumbling to near 12-year lows.

“The mood in the real estate industry has significantly shifted,” said Daryl Fairweather, Redfin Corp.’s chief economist. “When interest rates go up like this, fewer people can afford to buy homes, which means sales have to fall.”

President Donald Trump and MAGA elements can’t get enough of complaining about high interest rates under former president Joe Biden. However, Bloomberg reports pending home sales plunged 4 percent in September from a month earlier. This is “the biggest decline in more than three years, to the lowest level since 2014 outside the early months of the 2020 Covid pandemic, according to seasonally adjusted data from brokerage Redfin.”

With homebuying dropping to the lowest level since pandemic freeze, the supply of homes for sale climbed to its highest level since March 2020, frustrating sellers who are eager to move.

The September surge in borrowing costs drove homebuying demand down to levels seen in the aftermath of the 2007-to-2012 foreclosure crisis, reports Bloomberg. In the weeks leading up to the war against Iran, the Trump Administration was celebrating as interest rates on new home loans had dropped to their lowest levels in nearly four years. At the time it seemed the stagnant U.S. housing market was finally on the mend. Now Bloomberg reports the new economy is exposing the market’s fragility following years of soaring prices.

Pending sales fell in all 50 major US metropolitan areas tracked by Redfin for the first time since September 2023, when mortgage rates were similarly high.

“Nearly one in five sellers cut their asking prices last month and buyers grew increasingly concerned about rising mortgage rates, with 14.5 percent of purchase agreements falling through, Redfin reported, the highest percentage in the firm’s records.

The situation does nothing for first-time buyers in the Trump economy, reports Bloomberg. A so-called seller’s market means nothing if rising mortgage rates price potential buyers out of the market. And this could be contributing to a near-record share of homebuying deals falling through, reports Redfin, as more homebuyers back out of deals “than ever before.”

Nearly 19 percent of home buying deals in San Antonio, Texas, fell through in September, according to Redfin research. And nearly 20 percent of buying deals collapsed in Jacksonville, Florida.

“Nationwide, 14.5 percent of homebuying deals that went under contract in September were canceled – the highest share since the start of the pandemic,” reports Redfin. “Other than March and April 2020, it’s the highest share on record.”

The new Trump housing economy hit particularly hard in Seattle, with that city suffering the biggest decline in pending sales among major metros. Those plunged 24.4 percent from a year earlier as high borrowing costs compounded a slowdown in the city’s tech-heavy job market. Los Angeles, San Diego and Anaheim, California, all posted similar declines in pending home sales of more than 15 percent, according to Redfin.

Home prices were already creeping out of reach for many who would like to buy last year, with the tariff drama under Trump making it both more expensive to build new homes and making the future more unpredictable for would-be homebuyers,” reported NPR.

President Donald Trump is continuing to destroy historic trees in order to build a private golf course — and one of his officials took to X to gloat about actions that the involved judge described as a "massive fire drill" for democracy.

"I missed the part of the Constitutional Convention that put federal judges in charge of golf course maintenance," Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, posted on X on Monday. "The Left is endlessly enraged that, after allowing DC to decay for decades, the Trump Administration is making it safe, clean and beautiful."

Miller was responding to a story by journalist Kyle Cheney, Politico's senior legal affairs reporter.

"HAPPENING NOW: Judge Reyes is furious," Miller wrote. "She has repeatedly told the government to inform her before any major demolition work was done on the golf course. The abrupt removal of 500 trees, without notice, 'has cost the government all of its credibility' in this case."

Vox editorial director Benjy Sarlin darkly joked about how Trump, by defying court orders that he stop construction on public property, was triggering a potentially historic legal battle over a matter many would regard as mundane.

"It would be the most Trump II thing possible to make the golf course the Constitutional crisis point," Miller wrote.

Another critic of Trump, former United States Attorney Joyce Alene, expressed skepticism about whether Judge Ana C. Reyes will act as necessary to compel compliance from Trump.

"Listening to the hearing with a retired Judge who characterized this as 'she’s really p - - - - off,'" Alene posted on X. "The question is, what is she prepared to do about it & ultimately, will SCOTUS back her."

Many MAGA supporters joined in Miller's gloating, including the head of an influential right-wing publication, The Federalist.

"As everyone knows, the Constitution vests the power of cutting down trees with random unelected judges," wrote Sean Davis, CEO and co-founder of The Federalist, on Monday. "The president must also get unanimous approval from every unelected inferior judge before spraying or pulling weeds. Raking traps is a gray area. But don’t even think about spreading seed without judicial approval."

Trump's defiance of Reyes' court is hardly uncharacteristic. In various legal cases he has refused to follow court orders in states and municipalities like New Jersey (more than 50 times), Minnesota, Rhode Island, Illinois and Washington, D.C. So far, all Reyes has done to force Trump to comply is order the deputy director of National Park Service to retain all communications about the East Potomac Golf Course and make sure all relevant notes pertaining to Trump's attempted construction are preserved.

In addition to allegedly breaking laws in order to build his golf course, Trump is also accused by golf expert and sportswriter Rick Reilly of being an inveterate golf cheat.

Reilly has written that, “Among the many hilarious things about club championship #43 is that he lies so much about them he loses his place. We went from 26 to 36 overnight, then skipped 39, 40 and 41. Actual number: 0.”

He later questioned Trump's claim to have won that event with a score of under 70, arguing that “just so non-golfers know[,] No 80-year-old on earth with a pancake swing and the chip yips has ever shot TEN SHOTS under his age. Club members let him win because nobody wants to get audited the rest of their lives.” For the uninitiated, “chip yips” are involuntary twitches or freezes during a chip shot that disrupt a golfer’s normal motion and cause mishits, and are often the result of anxiety or injury.

The Wall Street Journal reports two multibillion-dollar projects President Donald Trump plans to restore U.S. manufacturing prowess are “easier said than done.”

As part of Trump’s push to revive U.S. iron-ore mining, steel production and East Coast shipbuilding, Trump is pushing a $5 billion shipyard project in Philadelphia, but analysts say the project needs more space for shipbuilding, and it has challenges attracting more customers beyond its owner, Korean company Hanwha Shipping.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, a company with an unproven record in the U.S. steel industry, is developing what it claims will be one of the largest and most expensive steel mills in the country.

“But the two projects have attracted doubts about the soundness of the business plans — and drawn comparisons to other ambitious Trump plans that didn’t pan out,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “like when Taiwan’s Foxconn seemed set to produce high-definition screens at an enormous, $10-billion plant in Wisconsin.

Supply-chain problems and high costs in the Foxconn endeavor got the project downsized, says WSJ, and part of the site was later converted to a mere data center.

The Wall Street Journal reports that South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and Trump made big news about Hanwha’s $150 billion investment in the U.S. shipbuilding industry. But since then, no other Korean firms have shown interest in investing in U.S. shipbuilding.

“The current order book beyond the Hanwha order consists of three containerships for Hawaii-based Matson Inc. at $330 million each,” reports WSJ, which is “twice the price of a mega vessel built in South Korea or China.”

“It’s hard to justify a high valuation multiple for a U.S. shipbuilder like Philly from a foreign buyer, based on pure economics,” said Basil Karatzas, head of consulting firm Karatzas Marine Advisors.

In Iowa, Trump’s planned Mesabi mill will require Mesabi to staff itself with people familiar with an industry the company itself has never worked.

“Although its parent company, India’s Essar Group, previously built and operated steel mills in India … Mesabi took nearly 20 years to complete its iron-ore mine in northern Minnesota, overcoming years of delays, missed deadlines and a bankruptcy,” reports WSJ.

Worse, the mill could become a victim of its own success if it manages to increase the U.S. steel supply. The company purports to add up to 10 million tons of steel annually to the U.S. market.

“You’re going to have excess production capacity, and that’s going to create much more competition between mills to drive down prices, and that hurts profits,” said Josh Spoores, an analyst for steel market forecaster CRU.