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Little attention is being paid to the ways first lady Melania Trump has found to cash in on her position in government.

While President Donald Trump's grift reveals something new almost weekly, businesses linked to his company, run by his heirs, are being handed huge government contracts. But Mrs. Trump's ways of making money off of the White House are staying quiet.

The Editorial Board of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote on Saturday morning that the move is all part of "Trump’s shameless Art of the Steal." This week, Trump launched a television ad campaign, paid for by U.S. tax dollars, promoting himself and his "One, Big Beautiful Bill," set to a song that continues chanting "Love me, love me" in the background.

While there's Trump's cryptocurrency, there's also the first lady's.

"She launched $MELANIA, a memecoin that had an initial market capitalization of about $1.7 billion, but quickly plummeted by about 95 percent," the editorial board recalled. But that only came after investors banked about $100 million.

"A lawsuit accused the designers of Melania’s cryptocurrency of orchestrating a 'pump-and-dump' scheme,'" they noted.

Unlike Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Jared Kushner, and the family’s cryptocurrency ventures, Mrs. Trump does not feature prominently in foreign investment, government contracts, deregulation, or business arrangements that could overlap with White House policy. Instead, what she's focused on is ways she can benefit commercially even though she isn't formally running a major corporation or working as a "government envoy."

Mrs. Trump is building her brand and profiting primarily through media. The Inquirer suggested in the piece that while she is keeping a lower public profile than other Trump family members, her Amazon documentary and related content deal is the largest example.

Trump biographer Michael Wolff alleged this week that the first lady's new "Davos for women" initiative is really just a platform for her to orchestrate content for her latest film or reality show.

Critics have raised questions about whether a first lady should be able to use her White House status and public events as material for a private media project, particularly when the project’s commercial value is inseparable from her unusual access to the presidency. So far, she's pocketed an estimated $40 million off of the Amazon documentary. It's unknown how much she made from her memoir titled Melania.

The report goes on to highlight what Kushner and Ivanka Trump managed to score from their time in the White House. In the first term, the two "reported between $172 million and $640 million in outside income while working for taxpayers. That was before Kushner got $2 billion from the Saudi investment fund to start what is now a "fledgling private equity venture," the board characterized.

While Kushner is away claiming to negotiate an end to the wars between Russia and Ukraine and an end to the war in Iran, he is also "reportedly trying to raise $5 billion for this private equity fund from Middle East governments, even as he serves as Trump’s point person in negotiating a peace deal with Iran."

“You cannot both be a diplomat and a financial pawn of the Saudi monarchy at the same time,” said U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).

If voters cast ballots for the Democrats in November, both the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees plan to investigate these reports of using the government directly for profit. So far, it appears at least one Republican supports the move.

President Donald Trump in February directed the U.S. government to "begin the process of identifying and releasing" files on extraterrestrial life, the BBC reports.

That declaration came shortly after former President Barack Obama told a podcast host that aliens “are real" but noted he hasn't "seen them, and they're not being kept in Area 51.”

"There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States,” Obama said.

Trump was reportedly angered by the disclosure, telling reporters that Obama “made a big mistake” with his claim.

”He’s not supposed to be doing that," Trump said of Obama's statement.

The administration began declassifying the UFO files in May. In June, Trump tapped controversial Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb to lead a team studying the national security risks posed by UFOs. According to a new report by Politico, in the months since, little movement has been seen among the group “tasked with reviewing and testing existing government-collected data to determine whether aliens or their technology are on Earth.”

Loeb was hopeful that a July directive by deputy director of national intelligence Aaron Lukas would get “the ball rolling” on intelligence sharing between agencies, military branches and the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) Science Advisory Council. “But he had received no new data then or since,” Politico reports.

“It’s just amazing to think that months into this, we’ve gotten nothing,” one team member who attended the July meeting with Lukas told Politico. Still, the member “[believes] that’s about to change.”

According to the report, there’s a persistent doubt underscoring “Loeb’s mission … about whether the government will actually release the data it has been holding on to.”

“It’s been months already with little to show,” Politico reports. “Will Trump force reluctant intelligence agencies to relinquish what nearly everybody across academia involved in the scientific inquiry into extraterrestrial life believes is meaningful raw data? Will that material be made public? How will any revelations be communicated to the public?”

“There is the possibility that they are baffled by the data,” Loeb told Politico, “Or, it could be they are using me.”

Poltiico described UFOs as “the kind of deep state-countering, coastal-elite-upsetting, conspiracy-adjacent rabble-rousing that the second Trump administration has a record of responding to.”

One UAP expert argued Trump “knows more about it than people thinks he does,”

“[The expert] noted that Trump himself seems to believe the government has evidence of non-human technology and wants the truth to come out,” Politico reports.

“It’s enough to leave him disturbed about what to do,” the expert said.

According to the report, some “members of the council worry they may be risking their reputations by participating.” Some also say the CIA is stymieing efforts for public disclosures.

Devesh Nandal, a Harvard post-doc council member who spoke with Politico, called the CIA a “nemesis.”

UAP council member Peter Skafish likewise told Politico “My government sources always point back to CIA.”

“These claims about the CIA are completely false,” a White House spokesperson told Politico. “All relevant agencies have worked cooperatively with [Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters] PURSUE in order to identify records that are responsive to the President’s initiative and of interest to the American public.”

There are also concerns that “Trump might announce that the deep state is aware of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence on earth, noting there are ‘UFO people’ who want this kind of disclosure to come before the midterms,” Politico reports, pointing to a recent column in the New York Times.

According to the report, Loeb scoffed at the suggestion his council could be used a tool for the president’s midterm chances.

“If there is clear evidence beyond a reasonable doubt for alien tech, this will constitute the biggest scientific discovery ever made and the most important milestone in human history,” he said. “The relevance to the midterm elections is secondary.”

The word of the week for this Trump government seemed to be “contempt.”

There was Donald Trump’s contempt for the United Nations on display — for the United Nations General Assembly. In blatant and plain language, Trump assaulted the very reason for having created and maintained a world organization devoted first to international peace and second to resolution of outstanding global obstacles.

In its place was Trump’s assertion that it is he and whoever he chooses to let into his circle who will decide how we live, along with other countries that have wealth and military power to make it so.

We witnessed a Trump magic trick, turning years of Trump-fueled China hate into a lovefest for the arrival of its leader, Xi Jingping, in a state visit choreographed to extremes meant to sidestep all of the supposed issues with “Communism,” international trade cheating and even Covid blame into a fully upside-down acceptance of rising Chinese military, diplomatic, technological and economic effects. The contempt it all may well have reflected best was for American-style democracy, which was on simultaneous display.

Trump is playing out his spiritual and practical sneer of democratic principles just short of a finding of legal contempt from a judge by banning selected news outlets because he doesn’t like questions and criticism that challenge his often-incorrect assertion of fact, history, self-contradiction or policy with ill public effects. In barely meeting a court order to reissue press access to Politico, CNN and MSNOW only to bar them from a news event at the White House is to wave a legal red flag at the courts, which may be forced to react.

There were plenty more Trump policy challenges this week, more formal sneers against government healthcare, environmental protections, even disclosure that the vaunted ballroom project had spawned the architect’s resignation over lack of fire exits as required anywhere by the White House. The answer to the fire exits, and, in effect to the rest, is that it is Trump himself who determines what is code.

Contempt Contagion

Trump’s brand of contempt for anything that he now proudly admits is not a self-serving transaction devoid of any understandable principle except that of his gut is being dispensed in a way that is contagious.

Other voices, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, picked up where Trump left off with the United Nations, calling the dozens of nations walking out as he argued for continued fighting in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and with Iran “moral cowards.” The voices of Palestinians, Ukrainians and others facing assault from large powers effectively were muted or ignored, and we heard Netanyahu save special sneer for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for having an international rights opinion more complicated than Netanyahu’s own.

The language of our own election campaign, never a high bar, seems to be declining anew into statements of complete contempt for anything that does not fit into a complete red-blue allegiance test. Still, a month out, Trump appears to be readying himself and allies for more anti-election actions to unfold challenging the voters, the vote count, the certification and the seating of at least one house in Congress that will change majorities.

What will follow will be struggles about how much contempt to show in return against Team Trump as much as it will be towards seeking policies that overturn tariffs, war with Iran, controls over corporate behaviors and limits on the pace of technological development running faster than we seem able to comprehend or corral it.

The Daily Struggle

Increasingly, the daily struggle with prices, with White House orders that reach further into our lives, and with hearing a constant fire hose of Trump-inspired limitations are numbing us for what feels like more abuse.

What remains unexplained throughout the loads of executive orders and state-sponsored cruelties is who is better off now than two years ago. The clearest answers, as we keep hearing in campaign ads, are billionaires and corporations who were doing well before and now are doing phenomenally well, and the Trump family itself.

Even with reduced eyes on the specifics of the Chinese visit, there is no suggestion anywhere that this rivalry will produce any positive effects for this country. The clear winner was Xi, who effectively told Trump to stay in his lane and out of China’s way. Taiwan, trade issues, tariffs, jobs, military bumps in the night in the South China Sea and continued Chinese help for the Iranians who target our bases in the Middle East all are uninterrupted. Atop those results, we learned most about the Chinese visit from the Chinese press, which, unlike our own, faced no barriers. Trump, who has declared his ballroom a “military installation” requiring classified information, even offered to walk Xi through the construction site.

Likewise, we’re seeing Trump reaching out to bring Russia’s Vladimir Putin back into the international leadership over the expressed wishes of European allies.

There are no plans in this White House, whose handling of its own press ban was comically inept, to address any of the myriad issues that are fueling citizen anger. That takes too much work – or a lot more than renaming bodies of water and wishing away corruption challenges with contempt.

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.

There’s a raging Republican revolt against President Donald Trump in America’s heartland, the Hill reports, and one former Trump official explained what’s “different” about the growing GOP divide.

The anonymous former Trump administration official spoke with The Hill’s Mallory Wilson and Julia Manchester in an article published Saturday, describing the public pushback against Trump from MAGA Republicans in Kansas, Ohio and Indiana, among others, as par for the course in a tough campaign season.

“If Donald Trump isn’t popular in your district or state, you should expect your candidates to try to create some distance. That is the ordinary course of business,” the former official said.

“What is different right now is that Trump is unpopular in a lot more districts, and a lot more states, than anyone expected. But the die is pretty much cast. This is his party now. If it wins, it’s because of him. If it loses, it’s because of him. There’s just no two ways about that,” the ex-official added.

The Hill report notes recent comments from Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) “critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operating in his state.” Although a Democrat hasn’t won the Kansas Senate race since 1932, the Cook Political Report this week moved the race from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican,” a sign that the once solidly-red seat could be in play.

As Beltway insider Mark Halperin wrote Friday, "While public polls are horrendous for Republicans, the private ones are worse.”

Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind) likewise “spoke out against Trump inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin to the Group of 20 (G20) summit this December in Miami," the Hill reports.

Earlier this month, Young, who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for the U.S. to “pause bombing Iran and focus on securing the country's nuclear material,” Indiana’s WISH-TV reported at the time.

The Iran war serves as a key point of contention for heartland leaders, according to the Hill, as “prices for gas and fertilizer skyrocket as a result” of the conflict.

Republican strategist Doug Heye told the Hill Republicans are “clearly … increasingly nervous about the costs of the war and that there seems to be no end in sight and still no definition of what success means.”

“No doubt we’ll hear more Republicans echoing similar concerns," Heye said.

Among those already making noise about the Iran war include “Iowa Senate candidate Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.),” the Hill reports. Former Rep. Mike Rogers, who’s locked in a fierce Senate battle in Michigan, recently called for a “quick” end to the war. And, as the Hill notes, “Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) told Politico earlier this week that ‘the war needs to come to an end as quickly as possible so that we can lower gas prices.’”

“It’s the right move to make,” Heye told the Hill. “but impossible to tell how much success it will have.”

GOP strategist Preya Samsundar told the Hill the defections come as farmers across the Midwest “gear up for harvest season.”

“That is acres upon acres of products and goods that American farmers are going to be harvesting this fall,” Samsundar said. “[Republicans] understand what the president is doing is important, but their constituencies are suffering. … They’re not seeing immediate relief, the prices continue to rise and they have to give an account for that.”

New revelations from right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson about President Donald Trump’s push to wage war on Iran earlier this year prompted the latest calls for Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment and force Trump out of office on the grounds that he is unable to fulfill the duties of the office—namely, to protect the security of the people of the United States.

“Days before the war began,” Carlson told Steve Inskeep of NPR on Thursday, the president explicitly said that the outcome of the conflict didn’t matter, because “in the end we all die, anyway.”

Carlson revealed that he visited Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in late February, after having gone to Tel Aviv and interviewed Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel.

Trump expressed annoyance at Carlson, an on-and-off ally of the president over the years who claimed in April that he had “regrets” about supporting him, for challenging Huckabee on the US relationship with Israel.

Carlson had pressed Huckabee on his comment that “it would be fine if Israel took” over huge swaths of the Middle East, including parts of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Türkiye.

The host of “The Tucker Carlson Show” said he told Trump he had come away from his two-hour discussion with Huckabee understanding that the unprovoked war the US and Israel was days away from started was not aimed at ending Iran’s nuclear program—which the president had claimed was taken out of commission in June 2025 by US strikes.

The Israeli threats against Iran, said Carlson, were actually aimed at ending Iran’s “regional power,” “diminishing the power” of the Gulf Cooperation Council, and ultimately “getting the US out of the Middle East because we constrain their ambitions” by maintaining a presence in countries in the region.

As the podcaster warned the president not to be manipulated by the Israeli government into taking military action against Iran, according to Carlson, “he looked at me and said, ‘Yes, you’re right, but in the end we all die, anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”

“That’s exactly what he said,” said Carlson. “I said to him, shocked, ‘'But what about our kids and our grandkids, and like, our country?’ And he goes, ‘Argh!’... That’s a verbatim exchange.”

“I was shocked by that,” he added. “Who lives or dies does matter, the future does matter.”

The president’s assertion that allowing Israel to push the US into war—something Secretary of State Marco Rubio also openly acknowledged had happened after the conflict began—could be disastrous for the US and lead to an untold number of American deaths, was called “extremely disturbing” by Drop Site News journalist Ryan Grim, who suggested Carlson’s revelation should prompt the use of the 25th Amendment.

Journalist Pedro L. Gonzalez expressed wariness at the thought of taking Carlson at his word regarding his exchange with Trump and his current opposition to the president, while Carlson said he believed the need for Cabinet members to push Trump out of office predated the interview.

He said that Trump’s threat of nuclear war in April, when he threatened to annihilate the “whole civilization” of Iran, “never to be brought back again,” was grounds for invoking the 25th Amendment, with a majority of his Cabinet members voting to remove him from office.

“He should have been bundled up and taken out,” said Carlson. “That’s a crime.”

President Donald Trump has said every American should want a data center in their town. But his home county in Florida just voted to block them.

In a 6-0 vote, commissioners in Palm Beach County—home to the president’s luxurious private club and second residence, Mar-a-Lago—voted to enact a one-year moratorium on the construction of new “large-scale” data centers that use at least 50 megawatts of power.

The moratorium, approved on Thursday, came after Palm Beach residents expressed concerns shared by Americans around the country who’ve seen data centers move into their communities. Palm Beach already has some smaller data centers. But in July, it rejected a proposal for the 600MW Project Tango, following warnings about its potential effects on local wetlands and on families’ pocketbooks.

“Many communities want the economic benefits that data centers bring, but we all fear the higher power bills, the negative environmental impact, disruptive noise, and the depletion of water resources,” explained one supporter of the moratorium at a county commission meeting on Thursday, according to the local ABC affiliate.

A poll conducted last month by Embold Research and published by Heatmap Pro found that 75% of Americans now oppose the building of AI data centers in their area, including 61% who registered strong opposition. Aversion to data centers crosses party lines, with majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents viewing them negatively.

As AI companies spend tens of millions bankrolling Trump and Republican candidates, members of the president’s Cabinet, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, have scoffed at Americans’ concerns about the tremendous water and energy use of data centers, which have been well documented as jacking up utility prices.

In a social media post last month, Trump himself said the only reason communities would not want a data center nearby is if they “want to end up being backwards and poor.” Before that, he said that “smart communities” were “begging for them.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has become one of Capitol Hill’s leading critics of data centers and the artificial intelligence models they power, has said that if Trump truly finds data centers so desirable, he should “lead by example” by having his friend and megadonor, tech billionaire Elon Musk, build one at Mar-a-Lago.

“Trump says communities that oppose data centers will end up ‘backwards’ and ‘poor,’” Sanders remarked Friday on social media. “Yesterday, Mar-a-Lago’s own Palm Beach County passed a year-long ban on these facilities.”

“Maybe,” the senator said, “Trump’s neighbors know something he doesn’t.”