What did Donald Trump do today?

He said it was "not a big deal" that his son got caught accepting even more "gifts" from the Putin regime.

ProPublica reported today that the recent wedding festivities for Donald Trump Jr. and his new bride Bettina Anderson Trump were paid for by a Putin lieutenant, Umar Kremlev. The multi-day celebrations took place on a private island in the Bahamas. 

In response, the couple acknowledged that their "dear friend" had given them the event as a "wedding gift." (Kremlev's "extraordinary gesture" is not one they had previously admitted to.) Just when and how Donald Trump Jr. and Kremlev became "dear friends" isn't clear. Kremlev is associated with a Russian front group that kidnaps Ukrainian children.

Umar Kremlev identified in a photo accompanying the ProPublica article.

In a statement today, Donald Trump Sr. said that "I have no idea who Umar is, never heard of him, and he didn’t pay for Don and Bettina’s wedding, which took place at a totally different location, and on a different day from the wedding [sic]."

Trump appears to be trying to draw a distinction between the wedding ceremony itself, and the private island that Kremlev rented for the whole weekend that followed. (Receptions, as Trump and his son know from the five marriages they've had between them, tend to be more expensive than the actual ceremonies—even when they don't involve putting up dozens of guests on private islands for a whole weekend.)

It's entirely possible that Trump really doesn't know Kremlev—or that he did, but has forgotten who Kremlev is. But whether Donald Trump Sr. is personally acquainted with the Putin regime functionary who put money in Donald Trump Jr.'s hands isn't really relevant, since the wealth of all such oligarchs is really just an extension of Putin's direct personal control over the Russian economy.

The actual costs Kremlev picked up for the Trump family are enormous by most Americans' standards, but still tiny compared to the Trump family net worth. Trump Jr.'s personal fortune is estimated to be around $300 million, much of that derived from monetizing his father's political connections. Among other things, Trump Jr. is an "advisor" to a number of companies that can benefit from having influence over Trump Sr.'s policies.

But the problem with what (for a Trump) is a small amount of money is the symbolism. It reinforces a hard truth that Trump Jr. himself once blurted out: that the Trump family owes its current wealth largely to timely Russian "investment"—much of it in the form of money laundering. That's a dependency that Trump Sr. has never freed himself from, and is a big part of why his personally pro-Putin stance is so at odds with the rest of American government.

It's also just how the Putin regime does business: as an FBI analyst quoted by the ProPublica article pointed out,  

In his statement, Trump also declared that having the Putin pick up the tab for his son's multi-day island celebration was "Not a big deal!" because he "was not present at the party."

Why does this matter?

• Any corruption this obvious is a big deal.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He made money off the presidency at one of his golf courses for the second consecutive weekend.

Trump spent the day at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, VA, watching the third round of a LIV tour event. LIV is an upstart golf tour seeking to challenge the PGA Tour's dominance. Backed by the Saudi government, with whom Trump is deeply financially entangled, it's been a lifeline for Trump's golf courses, which—like so much of the real estate empire he inherited—have often lost shocking amounts of money. As one 2021 article put it, the reason that the avid golf fan Trump can't seem to make money even on a business he ought to have some understanding of might be "incompetence, vanity, or something more sinister" like tax fraud. 

Families of September 11th victims have protested LIV events at Trump courses, correctly noting that before Trump started taking Saudi money, he had blamed the Saudi royal family for their complicity in allowing the attacks to happen. (There's no clear evidence that the Saudi government was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, but it absolutely has committed atrocities like the kidnapping and murder of Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi—and gotten Trump to run interference for it on multiple occasions.)

This is the second weekend in a row that Trump, who has been open about accepting thinly-disguised bribes during his second term, has made money off of a major professional golf tournament. Last week it was the PGA Tour's turn to pay the piper at Trump National Doral. That course saw the unveiling of a 15-foot golden statue of Trump this week, so reminiscent of a biblical idol that a televangelist supporter of Trump felt obliged to preemptively address the issue: "Let me say this plainly: this is not a golden calf."

 

 

Why does this matter?

• Using the power of the state to force people to pay you money is what tinpot dictators and Russian oligarchs do. 

• It's bad to have a president in hock to so many foreign governments, and worse that they're all dictatorships. 

• One way to avoid people thinking you're making golden idols of yourself is not to make golden idols of yourself.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He said an anonymous "friend" was donating money for the military salaries he refuses to allow Congress to fund.

Today was the 24th day of the latest Trump shutdown, already the second-longest shutdown in American history. (The longest was Trump's, too.) Most government workers missed their first full paycheck today, including those that are required to continue working during the shutdown. 

Legally, Trump doesn't get to pick and choose which government services are shut down, or which workers get paid. The Constitution specifically requires that no money can be spent that hasn't been appropriated by Congress. But Trump has demanded that money, including salaries, continue to flow to certain programs and employees in spite of the law. This appears to be a strategy of political survival for Trump, whose approval ratings are at their lowest point in his presidency, with another massive crisis about to hit Americans' pocketbooks in just a few days.

The reason the government shuts down when appropriations bills expire is not because it doesn't have money—it does. Taxes are still being collected and bonds being sold. Rather, it's because presidents do not get to decide for themselves what the budget is. That's not just a core principle of democracy—the idea that kings shouldn't have direct and unchallenged personal control over the treasury is something that wars have been fought over in out-and-out monarchies.

That brings us to today, when Trump insisted that a story he told yesterday, about an anonymous "friend" donating $130 million to cover the salaries of military personnel, was actually true. Again, the issue is not that the federal government can't afford to pay its workers—it's that Trump has failed to get appropriations bills passed through a Congress his party controls.

There is, to say the least, a lot of skepticism that Trump's "friend" or any such donation really exists, although the Department of Defense and the White House claimed that such a gift had been accepted—and then refused further comment.

Among the questions neither Trump nor his administration would answer today:

• whether the "friend" actually existed
• what the name of the "friend" is
• whether the "friend" is an American citizen 
• whether the "friend" was donating their own money, or acting on behalf of a third party  
• whether the payment was in the form of actual money, or the supposed dollar value of the crypto tokens Trump makes a profit from in fees every time they are traded
• whether it was an actual irrevocable gift to the Treasury, or some kind of loan or advance tax 
• what the "friend" expected in return 
• whether the "friend" has a business relationship with Trump
• how paying salaries Congress hasn't appropriated money for doesn't violate the Antideficiency Act, which explicitly forbids having private individuals pay for lapsed appropriations
• why Trump is pressuring the Republican-controlled House to stay out of session, which keeps it from passing bills to fund the government legally
• whether Trump's "friend" actually believed the government needed money, as opposed to an appropriations bill 

If it were legal for private individuals to sponsor military paychecks, $130 million would cover about eight hours' worth.

Why does this matter?

• Trump hallucinating another conversation where a "friend" gave him good news, and then the federal government lying to protect him from embarrassment, is the least problematic possibility here. 

• The American people don't need "gifts" from Trump's "friends" to fund their government, but they do need a president willing to govern under the law.  

• Trump is not a king, his billionaire "friends" are not the nobility, and even if they were this would still be an insane way to run a country.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He criticized whoever it was that used his authority as President of the United States to appoint a friend of Elon Musk to head NASA.

Trump is feuding with his chief political patron Elon Musk—or at least making a good show of it. Yesterday, Musk announced he was forming a new political party, something Trump today called "ridiculous" and evidence that Musk was going "off the rails. (Trump's first serious flirtation with running for public office was as a presidential candidate for the Reform Party in 2000.)

He punctuated his anger at Musk by, in effect, accusing himself of cronyist corruption for nominating Musk's space-industry ally Jared Isaacman to be the administrator of NASA. Trump posted to his private microblogging site that it was "inappropriate" for someone with close business and personal ties to Musk to be heading the agency that Trump intended to hollow out, thus creating more lucrative contracts for Musk's company SpaceX. 

Notwithstanding heroic efforts on Isaacman's part during his confirmation to conceal the extent that Musk had been involved in his appointment, Trump withdrew his nomination on May 31—just as his spat with Musk was heating up. In today's social media rant, Trump patted himself on the back for choosing to "protect the American Public" rather than make the "inappropriate" appointment that he did, in fact, make.

Trump did not elaborate, nor has he commented on why he gave Musk—whose fortune is almost entirely built on electric vehicle tax credits and government space contracts—enormous and sweeping powers to benefit himself directly as the head of the so-called "Department of Government Efficiency."

Why does this matter?

• This is a pretty good example of why presidents don't usually hand over the powers of their office to drug-addled billionaires who bankrolled their election. 

• Putting ultrawealthy cronies in charge of the parts of government that enrich them is called oligarchy, and it's not a great system.  

What did Donald Trump do today?

He called anti-Tesla protestors "terrorists" and threatened to send them to the same Salvadoran slave labor camp he sent other "terrorists."

 

Trump has spent an inordinate amount of time in the last few weeks working to halt a crash in the stock price of Tesla, the car company owned by his apparently indispensable political patron, Elon Musk. He held what amounted to an all-day Tesla car show at the White House, culminating in him "buying" a new Tesla. He dispatched his secretary of the Treasury, Howard Lutnick, to urge Americans to buy Tesla stock specifically. (Promoting stocks purely to pump up their price is generally illegal, and so is using government office to promote one company's stock in particular.)

Trump has even suggested that boycotts of Tesla—which is to say, individual people choosing not to buy one and urging other people to do the same—are somehow illegal. 

It is not illegal not to buy a particular brand of car.

Trump and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, have also declared that actions against Tesla like vandalism or destruction of property are "terrorism" and will be prosecuted as such. Today, Trump posted this on his boutique social media website:

I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla. Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!

The mocking reference to El Salvador is significant. Trump recently sent some 300 Venezuelans to be imprisoned in an El Salvador slave labor camp, on unsubstantiated claims that they were members of a gang and hence a "terrorist" threat. (Many if not all of those claims now appear to be false.) Trump continues to maintain that he can do this to anyone he deems a "terrorist."

Putting it all together: Trump is lumping together calls to boycott Tesla and peaceful protests against Musk and Tesla with actual (but relatively minor) property crimes, calling the whole thing terrorism, and explicitly threatening to send Americans to the offshore labor camp he sent other "terrorists" to just this week.

Musk, ostensibly the world's richest man, has borrowed heavily against the value of his Tesla stock, meaning his business empire and political influence are threatened by a sudden drop in its price, as lenders will call in the debts faster than he can pay them back. As a result, he—and hence Trump, over whom he has enormous influence—are showing their desperation. In a recent companywide meeting, Musk himself practically begged Tesla employees not to sell their stock—or, in other words, to help keep its price propped up by passing on the chance to cut their losses. 

But company insiders, required by law to report trades of Tesla stock, aren't listening. In the last three months, company officials with access to insider information about Tesla's future have sold 745,228 TSLA shares and bought zero. 

Tesla protests are happening nationwide almost every day, mostly at dealerships. Those planned for tomorrow, March 22, include the following locations:

Tempe, AZ

Colorado Springs, CO

Seattle, WA

Renton, WA

Riverside, CA

Austin, TX

Liberty Lake, WA

Bellevue, WA

Portsmouth, NH

Chattanooga, TN

Rio Rancho, NM

San Jose, CA 

Houston, TX 

Devon, PA

North Hollywood, CA 

Tysons Corner, VA 

Rockville, MD 

Washington, DC

Louisville, KY 

Wexford, PA 

Dedham, MA

West Chester, PA 

Sacramento, CA 

Portland, OR 

Santa Monica, CA 

Vallejo, CA 

Delray Beach, FL 

Superior, CO 

Golden Valley, MN 

Indianapolis, IN

Owings Mills, MD

Raleigh, NC 

Santa Rosa, CA

Maplewood, MN 

Reno, NV 

Lisle, IL

Savannah, GA

Seaside, CA 

Loveland, CO 

New York, NY (Brooklyn and Manhattan)

Philadelphia, PA 

Kansas City, MO  

Pasadena, CA 

Eureka, CA 

San Francisco, CA

Corpus Christi, TX

San Antonio, TX 

Salem, OR 

Lynnwood, WA 

Northbrook, IL 

Boston, MA 

Long Beach, CA 

Alhambra, CA 

Cranston, RI 

Irvine, CA

Why does this matter?

• The government exists to protect the people and Constitution of the United States, not sell cars for the president's cronies.

• Nobody who threatens to send Americans to a foreign gulag is fit to serve the United States.

• Even by Trump's standards, this is dictator shit.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He took his latest bribe from companies that want to be "in the tent."

A notable feature of Trump's second term has been the prominent and sudden support of billionaire CEOs from the tech industry. Some, like Trump's biggest 2024 campaign patron Elon Musk, are clearly pulling strings in the administration and exercising the powers of the presidency without any of the legal responsibilities that a real government official would have. 

But others, like Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon CEO/Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, seem content to make sure they are on Trump's good side so that he doesn't use the power of the presidency against them.

Trump sued Zuckerberg's company Meta in 2021 for suspending his accounts on Facebook and Instagram after the January 6 coup attempt. The theory, which legal experts have called absurd, was that Facebook violated Trump's first amendment rights because it was acting in a government role when it suspended Trump—who was the actual President of the United States at the time—from its private network. The First Amendment protects against government censorship, but it does not require private companies to give everyone a platform. Trump had already lost an identical case against Twitter (prior to its purchase by Musk).

Today, Meta announced it was settling the suit for $25 million.

According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, in a post-election dinner with Zuckerberg at Mar-a-Lago, Trump explicitly demanded that the suit be settled before Zuckerberg could be "brought into the tent" of his second administration. Trump had also threatened to have Zuckerberg imprisoned for unspecified crimes.

This is becoming a pattern with Trump. ABC News recently settled a similarly dubious suit with Trump, who had sued for defamation after George Stephanopoulos used the word "rape" to describe what a jury had found Trump civilly liable for in the E. Jean Carroll case. The judge in Carroll's defamation case had already noted in his ruling that what Trump had been found to have done fit the definition of the word "rape" as commonly used (distinct from its technical legal meaning in New York state law).

Also, just before the election, the parent company of CBS was debating whether to settle its suit with Trump, in this case over his claim that it was somehow unfair to edit pre-taped interviews for broadcast. In that case, it was Brendan Carr, Trump's pick for head of the FCC who warned Paramount Global executives that Trump would get in the way of a planned merger if they didn't settle.

Why does this matter?

• Having to pay bribes the leader to avoid being targeted by the government is what happens in tinpot dictatorships.