xianjang

Bloomberg Editor Tim O’Brian minced no words on what kind of man President Donald Trump is.

“Why does he feel so emboldened?” asked MS NOW anchor Katy Tur. “Why does [Trump] feel so free to talk about the ballroom and the gilding, etc. [with inflation like it is]

“Because this is who he is,” snapped O’Brian. “I don't think it's necessarily that he feels free to do it. It's just this is, at his core, who Donald Trump is. And he's been doing this kind of stuff since he was in his 20s. The only thing that's changed is the scale of it and the power he has to affect it have dramatically increased as he's moved through life. But he did it as a businessman. He did it as a celebrity, and he's now doing it in the White House.”

And while the Trump is at his heart a thing of corruption and rank opportunism, O’Brian said what’s “not specific to him is the inability of the Republican Party and the unwillingness of the Party, and the federal institutions” that were meant to put a check on him.

“[That] check on presidents or people in power of either party aren't functioning right now to rein him in. And they're not functioning right now to rein him in because Trump's party is scared of him. And he oversees institutions that would otherwise normally check this behavior, like the Justice Department, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, like the IRS and so on,” O’Brian added. “And trump himself is happy to do it because he's craven. He really lacks any kind of moral gravity.”

O’Brian added that Trump sees the White House as a “piggy bank” and public policy as a method to “feather his own nest.”

“He's motivated constantly by money and self-aggrandizement. I don't think he really cares about the future of the Republican Party once he's out of office, [but] … the way that translates into electoral realities is I think there is a growing part of the electorate that doesn't forgive this, that ultimately voters are probably going to be the only check on him when the midterms roll around.”

O’Brian said pollsters are identifying an expansion in people calling themselves Independents, and even through his core base in the GOP will forgive him anything, independent voters are “tired of all of this, and there might certainly be a price to pay for it at the midterms.”

Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha told Tur the facts are on the ground among voters with Democrats having “flipped 28 state House seats, while Republicans have flipped nothing,” primarily because of the lopsided enthusiasm between Republican voters and everybody else.

- YouTube youtu.be

President Donald Trump has concocted a “fantasy world” where prices were low in the months before he began his Iran war, says CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale. Prices are up and Americans are “unhappy.”

“When he’s been asked about the inflation or the unhappiness, Trump has repeatedly responded with lies — fictional stories about how low prices supposedly were before the war,” Dale reports.

He suggests that — unlike the president — consumers have a good memory of what prices were like in the days before the Iran war.

“But the president has concocted a fantasy — of sub-$2 gas, sub-2 percent inflation, and generally reduced prices — that bears little resemblance to the actual state of the country prior to the first strikes against Iran on February 28,” Dale writes.

For instance, on Tuesday at the White House congressional picnic, Trump told attendees that “inflation was at 1.6 percent for the last three months just prior to the war.” Last week, he had said it was 1.7 percent.

“Neither number is accurate,” Dale notes.

“The year-over-year increase in the Consumer Price Index was 2.7 percent in November 2025, 2.7 percent in December 2025 and 2.4 percent in January 2026,” he writes. “The inflation rate was 2.4 percent again in February 2026, for which nearly all the data was collected before the war began on the last day of the month.”

In March, it jumped to 3.3 percent and last month, 3.8 percent.

“We inherited high prices and we got the prices down, and we got them down to numbers that in some cases people have not seen before,” Trump said at Tuesday’s picnic.

“You know, when they talk about high prices, I inherited the high prices,” he told Fox News last week. “I’m getting them down; I’ve got them down incredibly.”

Dale explains that while some prices may have gone down, “the president keeps talking as if overall prices were down before the war — or even are down overall today — and that is clearly not true.”

Trump continued the fantasy with gas prices.

“We had numbers that nobody’s seen in a long time. So you had $2 a gallon,” he told reporters on May 7. “We were down — I think you were $1.85, $1.90 in Iowa, and a lot of other places.”

Dale hit Trump with a fact-check: “Nope.”

The day before the Iran war began, the national average price of gas was $2.98 a gallon, according to AAA.

“As for Iowa? Its average price for regular gas on both February 27 and February 28 was $2.64 per gallon, according to AAA,” Dale said.

Now?

According to AAA, the national average price of gas for Wednesday is $4.56.

A former Justice Department prosecutor is facing court on the other side after she was caught sending herself information from special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into classified documents taken by President Donald Trump.

Carmen Mercedes Lineberger, 62, was indicted after she sent Volume II of Smith's report to her personal email account with the subject line “chocolate cake recipe” and “bundt cake recipe," the DOJ press release said.

Smith's report, Volume I, was released publicly, but Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon refused to allow Volume II to be made public.

Cannon ruled in 2025 regarding the report prohibiting "the department of Justice, its officers, agents, officials, and employees from [] releasing, sharing, or transmitting [the Report] outside the Department of Justice, or [] otherwise releasing, distributing, conveying, or sharing with anyone outside of the Department of Justice any information or conclusions in [the Report] or in drafts thereof."

Court documents for the indictment do not show that she shared it with anyone outside the Justice Department, only that she allegedly sent the document to herself on her personal Gmail account under a disguised name.

"If convicted, Lineberger faces up to twenty years’ imprisonment for destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations, three years’ imprisonment for concealment, removal, or mutilation of public records, and up to one year imprisonment on each count of theft of government property valued at less than $1,000," the DOJ release said.

The court document alleges that it violates Title 18, USC, Section 641.

National security expert Marcy Wheeler asked legal experts for their opinions on whether there were "problems" with using "641 for stealing stuff from the government."

National security lawyer Bradley P. Moss commented, "It’s literally in the DOJ manual not to bring these cases, although there is a possible exception here because it’s subject to court order and (maybe?) classified."

A retired federal appeals lawyer said that "without an express allegation that the dollar value of the stolen property exceeded $1000, the offense under section 641 is a misdemeanor."

Another person wondered if the woman could use the Whistleblower Protection Act as part of her defense.

Texas is absolutely in play,” CNN analyst Harry Enten says. He wants to put to rest the idea that Democrats can’t win Texas.

“Republican senators are running scared,” following President Donald Trump’s endorsement of Texas MAGA Attorney General Ken Paxton over mainstream Republican U.S. Senator John Cornyn. It appears Paxton is now favored to win the nomination for Cornyn’s seat.

A Paxton primary win, Enten says, could land Texas Democratic state Representative James Talarico in the U.S. Senate seat.

“James Talarico could very well win in Texas,” Enten says, noting that the scenario is now very different from 2018, when Democrat Beto O’Rourke tried to unseat Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

Enten also notes that “the numbers, at this point, absolutely support the conclusion that James Talarico can win.”

Cruz was up by seven points in the polls in May of 2018. Paxton now is down by seven points.

“Ted Cruz was actually decently popular, but Ken Paxton is anything but — in poll after poll after poll, he is underwater.”

Cruz “was clearly ahead. But look at the polling average now when you match up Ken Paxton versus James Talarico — it’s actually Talarico that’s ahead by four points.”

Enten notes that “Talarico is polling better than any Democrat in at least 24 years. You have to go all the way back to 2002 to find a Democrat, even polling anywhere close to where Talarico is polling right now.”

Texas Democrats have “dreamt” about turning the Lone Star State blue, and this time, “the numbers actually support the idea that they may actually be able to do it.”

The other part of the equation, Enten notes, is that in 2018 Trump was up by four points in Texas polling. Now, he is down by three.

“Trump is considerably less popular in Texas, which, of course, matches what we’re seeing nationally, which is that Donald Trump is less popular now than he was at this point in term one,” Enten said. “You put it all together, you look at the general election pulse. You look at the popularity of the potential Republican candidates.”

“Talarico winning in Texas is no fantasy,” Enten added on social media. “The GOP is right to be scared.”

Chief Judge Jeffrey Kuntz of Florida's Fourth District Court of Appeals appears before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C., U.S. April 29, 2026.

Law and Crime reports an ethics complaint has been lodged against a judge who paved the way for President Donald Trump’s stalled “Russiagate” defamation suit against the Pulitzer Prize board.

Press advocacy group Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) filed a complaint on Tuesday with the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission against Jeffrey Kuntz, chief judge of the Florida Fourth District Court of Appeal.

“Last February, Kuntz ruled in President Donald Trump’s favor in Trump’s frivolous defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board, even though he was seeking a nomination from Trump to the federal judiciary,” claims the FPF, adding that “he failed to recuse himself from the case or disclose his conflict of interest to the parties, in violation of ethical rules governing Florida judges.”

But then, two weeks after Kuntz ruled in favor of Trump, the White House Counsel’s Office interviewed him for judicial vacancy he sought to fill. The FPF reports Kuntz was nominated to the federal bench last month and has even faced questions from lawmakers about his failure to recuse himself from the Pulitzer case — or even to disclose his conflict of interest to the parties.

“Trump can’t win his SLAPP suits on the merits, so he finds ways to corrupt the court system instead — from extracting bribes in exchange for merger approvals to settling litigation with his own agencies to rewarding judges who rule in his favor with lifetime appointments,” wrote FPF Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern. “It defies credibility that … Kuntz didn’t think the Pulitzer Board might want to know that he was applying for a job with Trump — a president infamous for transactionalism and political favoritism — while deciding Trump’s lawsuit against them.”

“In any event, the Florida rules don’t leave it up to Kuntz’s subjective, self-serving discretion — judges must avoid even the appearance of impropriety,” Stern added.

Law and Crime reports Trump’s beef began with The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of the Mueller investigation. When the Pulitzer board released a statement backing 2018 Pulitzer Prizes for the two papers Trump screamed “defamation” and sued.

Chief Judge Jeffrey Kuntz wrote the decision allowing Trump's lawsuit to move forward in February 2025, agreeing that Trump "sufficiently pled that the 18 defendants engaged in a conspiracy to defame him."

President Donald Trump’s former communications director is going forward saying that his former boss is bad for America — and that even when he is gone, his legacy will endure.

“Trump is a symptom, not the disease,” Scaramucci posted on X on Wednesday. “If it wasn’t him it would be someone else with the same narcissistic, populist impulses — because the underlying conditions that created him haven’t changed.”

He added, “The median home in the US is $430,000. You need about $150,000 in income to cover the mortgage and have any discretionary money left. The median salary is $84,000. That’s a $50,000 gap. Fifty years ago 80% of Americans could afford the dream. Today it’s out of reach for at least half the country.”

Scaramucci argued that this rising economic inequality and suffering explains why so many Americans supported Trump.

“When people feel the system is rigged against them and nobody in power is fixing it, they check out,” Scaramucci said. “When they check out long enough, someone like Trump comes along and becomes the avatar for all that anger. They adhere to him even when he’s doing the exact opposite of what he promised. The idea that when Trump loses power in 2028 things revert to normal — that’s not going to happen.”

The ex-communications director concluded that, because this dire context still exists, Trumpism is unlikely to go away even after Trump is no longer president.

“The conditions that created him will still be there,” Scaramucci said. “Until we fix those, we’re just waiting for the next one.”

On Tuesday Scaramucci observed that Trump’s economic policies in general are setting Americans up for a worse standard of living than they had previously known.

“If Barack Obama had done half of what Trump is doing now, Fox News would have been calling for impeachment,” Anthony Scaramucci, former White House Communications Director during Trump’s first term, posted on X on Tuesday. He was referring to how Trump’s spending, much of it unauthorized by Congress, is on pace to reach $9 to $10 trillion by the start of 2029

He added, “Trump has no economic philosophy. He spent $8.2 trillion in his first term and he's on pace for $9 to $10 trillion in this one. We're at 100 percent debt to GDP held by investors — 122 percent if you count the Fed's balance sheet. Ray Dalio will tell you those numbers put you in sovereign debt crisis territory. And when that happens, the only way politicians are willing to pay for it is through inflation. Which is the cruelest possible outcome, because inflation is the worst tax you can impose on lower and middle income people.”

He even claimed his Wall Street friends oppose Trump’s policies.

"Trump is too dangerous,” Scaramucci said earlier this month. “It’s funny, all my Wall Street buddies voted for him and now they’re regretting the fact," later clarifying that "most of the people are.”

"I’m of the belief that prices are higher,” Scaramucci added. “We have an oil crisis. He imposed illegal tariffs, which raised the pricing umbrella for all the lower-middle-income people that voted for him. He’s put us in a very vulnerable state as a country and an economy. If you want to make the case that the banks have record profits in the short term, sure — but he’s also suing some of the banking executives. You are losing the predictive capability of our justice system — what our civil rights are, what our free speech rights are. It’s very, very bad for business."

Speaking with this author for Salon in 2018, Scaramucci argued that Trump’s political movement is fueled by economic suffering.

“What I saw was in a generation we went from aspirational working class families, like the one I grew up in, to [desperate] working class families,” Scaramucci said. “What I saw is a decline in wages causing some level of economic asphyxiation for a very large group of people. And so Trump being out there, going into those areas, explaining the policies that he’s going to put in place, and then executing on some of those policies. I mean it’s not me saying, it’s just go look at ‘The Wall Street Journal.’”

Bulwark Managing Editor Sam Stein and Bulwark writer Lauren Egan say Democrats are reluctant to make President Donald Trump’s advanced age and health a political issue. Only they really should.

In Egan’s words: Trump is old. And he is a mess.

“We have all seen the signs of Donald Trump growing older,” said Egan. “He turns 80 next month. He has some weird bruising on his hands … and not only has he fallen asleep in the Oval Office. … He had an MRI last year but didn't really tell us why. He's not transparent about his health, which is obviously not exactly like a new thing for presidents. But after Biden we have all these questions. And he is he's old.”

Stein pointed out that Americans just lived through two years of “extensive, very aggressive” campaign against Joe Biden for being old and frail. But unlike Republicans and their right-wing propaganda networks, Democrats don’t appear to be up for some very easy payback against the slurring, sleepy president.

“The DNC is being kind of spicy in their Twitter account and in their TikTok account, but I think the problem for them is that their stuff just doesn't pop off in the way that it did with the RNC back in the Biden administration,” said Egan. “The RNC would clip something that Biden would do and … and it would go viral and basically the national press corps of people covering the White House would force these kinds of stories into the mix and people covered it.”

Egan went on to say that, rather than throwing up their hands, Democrats “do have a role to play in that they can force the issue” in to the pres.

“They can do things to get it into the front page of the New York Times or Washington Post in a way that Republicans really understand,” Lauren said. “Democrats like to play referee and they think that guilting you will like change something as opposed to trying to shift their strategy a little bit and force people to cover some of these things.”

Last said he recalled Republicans and their propaganda allies hammering Hillary Clinton’s email “every single day,” pushing topics such as email retention snafus into the front page because it's “all they're talking about.”

“Meanwhile, Trump's taking documents to his bathroom in Mar-a-Lago and no one seems to notice that everyone's on Signal. Who knows what kind of government retention policies they're practicing, if any, at the White House. Democrats aren't pushing that,” said Last.

But of course, there's only “so many hours in a day,” said Egan.

“You do have to make editorial choices. And if Democrats aren't out there forcing this, it's just an easier decision when there's all the corruption issues and everything else there is to cover. You understand why age might not always be top of mind.”

President Donald Trump faces immense controversy for continuing to buy and trade stocks, even though doing so creates a conflict of interest for him as president. Yet there is at least one Trump stock trade which has attracted attention for a somewhat different reason — namely, that it may have been accidental.

On Feb. 2 the president bought between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock in the conveyor belt sushi chain Kura Sushi, according to a report by the Associated Press. People online quickly noticed that, much as Trump scheduled a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in 2020 instead of the famed hotel with a similar name, he may have accidentally purchased a sushi stock instead of something else he wanted.

“Some people are speculating that perhaps Trump (and the people managing his investment portfolio) intended to buy something like FujiKura, an electrical equipment company that also makes golf equipment, or Kura Oncology, which develops cancer treatments and has the stock ticker KURA,” reported Gizmodo’s Matt Novak. “Kura Oncology’s stock is currently up 9% on the day, perhaps because so many people online are speculating about Trump’s odd stock purchase. FujiKura is down 8% on the day, but that slide kicked off yesterday after a three-year forecast dashed investors’ hopes.”

Most of Trump’s other trades have involved the major tech firms that are also shaping his policies on issues like regulation and AI, including Amazon, Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft. He also has traded in the tobacco company Philip Morris, the private prison company GEO Group, the bodycam company Axon and defense contractors like Palantir and RTX, formerly known as Raytheon. All of them have direct business before the government or are at least subject to potentially costly and high-profile regulations. Some of their CEOs have joined him on high profile trips to nations like China.

“That said, there are some restaurant groups in the stocks that Trump bought,” Gizmodo noted. “Trump purchased Cheesecake Factory stock worth $15,001-$50,000 on March 4 and Dave & Buster’s stock worth $15,001-$50,000 on Feb. 26. Maybe Trump is just a big fan of skee-ball.”

Financial columnist Matthew Lynn has previously warned about the potential corruption in Trump’s stock trading while in office.

“A Rose Garden announcement triggers panic on Wall Street,” Lynn recently wrote for The Washington Post, “then a post on Truth Social sends stock prices soaring. A promise of upcoming news launches a market rally, which slumps when the actual news is delivered that evening.” In general, Trump tends to make presidential proclamations which then directly impact his stock holdings, which Lynn described as “troubling.”

“According to a recent report from the financial research firm Fundstrat, Trump was the driver of the five best trading days on the S&P 500 index since the start of his second term,” Lynn wrote. “And he was also responsible for its five worst trading days. Such as? On April 3, 2025, the S&P 500 fell 4.8 percent when Trump announced ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, and it bounced back 9.5 percent when most were suspended six days later.”

By contrast “none of the five best or worst trading days under Joe Biden were driven by one of his announcements,” Lynn wrote. “During Bill Clinton’s eight years in office, only one of the five worst days could be pinned on the president or his administration, and none of the best. Sentiment on the stock market was routinely driven by interest rate announcements, corporate earnings or economic data. Not by the guy in the White House.”

A federal judge is so annoyed with the Justice Department that she's advising those opposing the top agency to try to kill any subpoena submitted because she no longer believes they can be trusted.

U.S. District Court Judge Mary S. McElroy said at the end of a hearing over involving a pediatric hospital attempting to avoid handing over medical records of transgender minors that the DOJ “should be prepared to field thousands of motions to quash, tens of thousands maybe, because I don’t know how any party can rely on a conversation with the Department of Justice that they’re working on compliance” given the track of this case.

Bloomberg Law reported that the transcript of the case was only recently added to the docket.

“I’m not a practitioner, but as a judge I would say to anybody you should be filing motions to quash in every case where the Department of Justice is seeking information and you’re trying to negotiate it,” McElroy said, according to the document.

She said that the case was "a cautionary tale."

McElroy ultimately sided with the Rhode Island Hospital in a scathing ruling that involved removing the medical privacy of minors. She then blasted prosecutors for trying to withhold information and misrepresent the facts of the case. The exchange in court goes further, as the judge condemned Civil Division officials representing the government's case.

One, Jordan Campbell, is a deputy assistant attorney general, and is overseeing a nationwide investigation into children with gender dysphoria. The DOJ is endeavoring to end the practice of gender affirming care altogether, it confirmed in a press release. In many cases, a first step in gender affirming care is talking to a psychologist, the Gender Affirming Health Program at the University of California, San Francisco outlines.

The Justice Department was trying to "forum shop the investigation," Bloomberg reported. Judge McElroy said that the DOJ knowingly misled the judge in the North District of Texas, falsely claiming that the Rhode Island Hospital, had ignored the subpoena for months. In fact, lawyers for the hospital tried to meet with DOJ lawyers to narrow the search terms in their extensive demand for medical documents. The Justice Department never responded.

“You ghosted them,” McElroy said in court to the DOJ attorneys. She said that the DOJ lawyers never told Fort Worth-based Judge Reed O'Connor that before he agreed to enforce the Rhode Island subpoena.

The head of the DOJ's Civil Division, Brantley Mayers, was shredded by the judge as she demanded to know specifics about his experience. Mayers confessed that he's only spent one month in legal practice. He's done three clerkships in the past, but only joined the DOJ in November. The report cited his LinkedIn page showing that he clerked for a Donald Trump-appointed judge in Florida after graduating from the University of Florida in 2022.

Campbell, however, helped co-found “the first and only firm dedicated to exclusively representing detransitioners and victims of radical gender ideology,” his government bio reads. He has sued the Rhode Island Hospital previously while he was practicing in Dallas, Texas.

Eric Olshan, a lawyer representing the hospital, said that the lawyer's background is important because “we’re left wondering, given the nature of our communications with the government, how we wound up in this situation that we’re currently in.”

When Justice Department “attorneys came to this court to explain their conduct, the senior attorney—who was present at many of the events that took place in this case—sat silently by as his counterpart, a junior attorney who has been practicing law for approximately six months and had no relevant information, was forced to answer questions about DOJ’s blatant disregard for the proper course of negotiations,” the judge wrote in her final ruling.

McElroy is one of the federal judges who has been critical of the Justice Department under President Donald Trump. The Obama appointee has particularly taken issue with the use of conservative-friendly Texas courts to go after other states in which they have no jurisdiction.

“At least be honest enough to admit that,” McElroy said, according to the transcript.

“Admit what, your honor?” Mayers responded.

“That you chose Fort Worth where there’s two judges intentionally knowing that you were going to get a forum, since you had lost seven of these—every single one of them that were filed in other cases—right?” the judge replied.

Appointed during Barack Obama's presidency, attorney Elizabeth MacDonough has been serving as the U.S. Senate's parliamentarian since 2012. But some MAGA Republicans want her ousted from that position, including President Donald Trump —who is ramping up his push to get rid of MacDonough.

Trump angrily railed against MacDonough during a late Wednesday morning, May 20 rant on his Truth Social platform. This was hardly the first time she came under attack from the MAGA movement — Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) is a longtime critic — but according to The Hill's Ashleigh Fields, it marks a renewed push to oust her.

"The parliamentarian's role has been critical as both parties have used budget reconciliation rules to move broad packages through the Senate and avoid a filibuster," Fields explains in The Hill. "Legislation passed under these rules is not subject to the 60-vote filibuster, meaning it can be approved in a party-line vote. MacDonough's position is nonpartisan, and one of her jobs is to decide whether provisions can be included in budget reconciliation under the law. That includes rulings on the Byrd Rule, which forbids provisions that are nonbudgetary from being passed under budget reconciliation."

But Trump is claiming that Fields goes out of her way to be unfair to MAGA Republicans.

On Truth Social, Trump wrote, "Shockingly, Republicans have kept the very important position of 'Parliamentarian' in the hands of a woman, Elizabeth MacDonough, who was appointed, long ago, by Barack Hussein Obama and a vicious Lunatic known as Senator Harry Reid, who ran the Senate for the Dumocrats with an 'iron fist.' Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans, but not so to the Dumocrats — So why has she not been replaced?"

Trump went on to argue that "there are many fair people who would be qualified for that vital job."

"The Republicans play a very soft game compared to the Dumocrats," Trump posted. "It is their single biggest disadvantage in politics. The Dumocrats cheat, lie, and steal, especially when it comes to Votes in Elections, but stick together, whereas the Republicans allow the Elizabeth MacDonoughs of the World to stay in power, and brutalize us. We need THE SAVE AMERICA ACT passed, and NOW — And, likewise, kill the Filibuster, which would give us everything! If we don’t pass at least one of these two provisions quickly, you will never see another Republican President again."

Trump continued, "The Dumocrats will end up with 2 additional States, D.C. and Puerto Rico, and all that entails, including 4 Senators, many Congressmen, and many additional Electoral Votes, and they will also get their dream of a packed United States Supreme Court with their most favorite number — 21 Justices. The Dumocrats will eliminate the Filibuster on the First Day that they get an opportunity to do so."

But MacDonough has her defenders among Senate Republicans.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) urged members of his caucus to "respect" her rulings, and Fields notes that Thune has "repeatedly defended the filibuster."

But Tuberville has called for Thune to "fire" MacDonough "ASAP."

In a post on X, the Alabama senator wrote, "Unelected bureaucrats think they know better than U.S. Congressmen who are elected BY THE PEOPLE. Her job is not to push a woke agenda. THE SENATE PARLIAMENTARIAN SHOULD BE FIRED ASAP."