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      in US Politics

      Doge employee ‘Big Balls’ has resigned, says White House official

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      One of the US so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) service’s best-known employees, 19-year-old Edward Coristine, has resigned from the US government, a White House official said on Tuesday, a month after the acrimonious departure of his former boss Elon Musk.The White House official gave no further details on the move and Coristine did not immediately return an email seeking comment.Coristine worked at Musk’s brain connectivity company Neuralink before joining the tech billionaire as he led Doge established by the Trump administration earlier this year. Doge has overseen job cuts at almost every federal agency but is starting to see losses itself. Key Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, who was in charge of day-to-day running of Doge, has also left, along with others.The White House has said that Doge’s mission will continue.Coristine’s youth and online moniker “Big Balls” became a pop-culture meme as Doge swept through the US government, seizing data and firing employees en masse.Last month, Reuters reported that Coristine was one of two Doge associates promoting the use of AI across the federal bureaucracy. Media outlets, including Wired which first reported his departure, revealed that Coristine had been active in a chat room popular with hackers and previously had been fired from a job following an alleged data leak.In March, Reuters reported that Coristine had provided tech support to a cybercrime gang that had bragged about trafficking in stolen data and harassing an FBI agent.Beginning around 2022, while still in high school, Coristine ran a company called DiamondCDN that provided network services, according to corporate and digital records reviewed by Reuters and interviews with half a dozen former associates.Among its users was a website run by a ring of cybercriminals operating under the name “EGodly”, according to digital records preserved by the internet intelligence firm DomainTools and the online cybersecurity tool Any.Run.The digital records reviewed by Reuters showed the EGodly website, dataleak.fun, was tied to internet protocol addresses registered to DiamondCDN and other Coristine-owned entities between October 2022 and June 2023, and that some users attempting to access the site around that time would hit a DiamondCDN “security check”.In 2023, EGodly boasted on its Telegram channel of hijacking phone numbers, breaking into unspecified law enforcement email accounts in Latin America and Eastern Europe, and cryptocurrency theft.Early that year, the group distributed the personal details of an FBI agent who they said was investigating them, circulating his phone number, photographs of his house, and other private details on Telegram.EGodly also posted an audio recording of an obscene prank call made to the agent’s phone and a video, shot from the inside of a car, of an unknown party driving by the agent’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, at night and screaming out the window: “EGodly says you’re a bitch!“Reuters could not independently verify EGodly’s boasts of cybercriminal activity, including its claims to have hijacked phone numbers or infiltrated law enforcement emails. But it was able to authenticate the video by visiting the same Wilmington address and comparing the building to the one in the footage.The FBI agent targeted by EGodly, who is now retired, told Reuters that the group had drawn law enforcement attention because of its connection to swatting, the dangerous practice of making hoax emergency calls to send armed officers swarming targeted addresses. The agent didn’t go into detail. Reuters is not identifying him out of concern for further harassment.“These are bad folks,” the former agent said. “They’re not a pleasant group.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘I have never seen such open corruption’: Trump’s crypto deals and loosening of rules shock observers

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      Cryptocurrency multibillionaire Justin Sun could barely contain his glee.Last month, Sun publicly flaunted a $100,000 Donald Trump-branded watch that he was awarded at a private dinner at Trump’s Virginia golf club. Sun had earned the recognition for buying $20m of the crypto memecoin $Trump, ranking him first among 220 purchasers of the token who received dinner invitations.Trump’s much-hyped 22 May dinner and a White House tour the next day for 25 leading memecoin buyers were devised to spur sales of $Trump and wound up raking in about $148m, much of it courtesy of anonymous and foreign buyers, for Trump and his partners.Memecoins are crypto tokens that are often based on online jokes but have no inherent value. They often prove risky investments as their prices can fluctuate wildly. The $Trump memecoin was launched days before Trump’s presidential inauguration, spurring a surge of buyers and yielding tens of millions of dollars for Trump and some partners.Trump’s private events on 22 May to reward the top purchasers of $Trump have sparked strong criticism of the president from ethics watchdogs, ex-prosecutors and scholars for exploiting his office for personal gain in unprecedented ways. But they fit in a broader pattern of how Trump has exploited the power and lure of his office to enrich himself and some top allies via cryptocurrencies.“Self-enrichment is exactly what the founders feared most in a leader – that’s why they put two separate prohibitions on self-benefit into the constitution,” said former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig. “Trump’s profiting from his presidential memecoin is a textbook example of what the framers wanted to avoid.”Scholars, too, offer a harsh analysis of Trump’s crypto dealings.“I have never seen such open corruption in any modern government anywhere,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and an expert on authoritarian regimes who co-authored the book How Democracies Die.Such ethical and legal qualms don’t seem to have fazed Trump or Sun. The pair forged their ties well before the dinner as Sun invested $75m in another Trump crypto enterprise, World Liberty Financial (WLF), that Trump and his two older sons launched last fall and in which they boast a 60% stake.The Chinese-born Sun’s political and financial fortunes, as well as those of other crypto tycoons, have improved markedly since Trump took office and moved fast to loosen regulations of cryptocurrency ventures at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the justice department and other agencies to upend Joe Biden’s policies.As the SEC has eased regulations and paused or ended 12 cases involving cryptocurrency fraud, three Sun crypto companies that were charged with fraud by an SEC lawsuit in 2023 had their cases paused in February by the agency, which cited the “public interest” and reportedly has held settlement talks.Trump’s and Sun’s mutually beneficial crypto dealings symbolize how the US president has boosted his paper wealth by an estimated billions of dollars since he returned to office, and worked diligently to slash regulations fulfilling his pledges to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet” and end the “war on crypto”.After the 22 May dinner, Sun posted: “Thank you @POTUS for your unwavering support of our industry!”Although Trump’s crypto ventures are less than a year old, the State Democracy Defenders Fund watchdog group has estimated that as of mid-March they are worth about $2.9bn.In late March, Reuters revealed that WLF had raised more than $500m in recent months and that the Trump family receives about 75% of crypto token sales.Trump’s pursuit of crypto riches and deregulation represents a big shift from his comments to Fox News in 2021, when he said that bitcoin, a very popular crypto currency, “seems like a scam”.View image in fullscreenIn July 2019, Trump posted that “Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade”, and noted that their value was “highly volatile and based on thin air”.Now, Trump’s new pro-crypto policies have benefited big campaign donors who lead crypto firms as well as Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who spent almost $300m to help elect Trump, and who boasts sizable crypto investments in bitcoin through his electric car firm Tesla and his other ventures. Though Trump and Musk have since fallen out, the mogul’s crypto fortunes seem to have improved due to the president’s deregulatory agenda.Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, is a real estate billionaire who helped found WLF, in which he has a stake; Trump’s two oldest sons, Eric and Don Jr, and Witkoff’s son Zach have played key roles promoting WLF in the Middle East and other places.Trump’s use of his Oval Office perch to increase his wealth through his burgeoning crypto businesses while his administration rapidly eases regulations is unprecedented and smacks of corruption, say scholars, many congressional Democrats and some Republicans.“To me, Trump’s crypto dealings seem pretty explicit,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University professor who focuses on political history, told the Guardian. “Policy decisions are being made regarding parts of the financial industry that are being done not to benefit the nation, but his own financial interests … It’s hard to imagine what he’s doing benefits the nation.”Rosenzweig stressed that “not only do Trump’s extravagant crypto ventures benefit him personally as his administration slashes crypto regulations and takes pro-crypto steps at the SEC; they also benefit his tech bro backers who will take full advantage of the end of regulatory enforcement”.In Congress, leading Democrats, including Richard Blumenthal, a senator from Connecticut, and Jamie Raskin, a representative from Maryland, in May announced separate inquiries by key panels in which they are ranking members into Trump’s crypto dealings, and attacked Trump for using his office to enrich himself via his crypto operations.“With his pay-for-access dinner, Trump put presidential access and influence on the auction block,” Blumenthal told the Guardian. “The scope and scale of Trump’s corruption is staggering – I’ll continue to demand answers.”Last month, too, the Democratic senator Jeff Merkley, from Oregon, and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, introduced the “end crypto corruption” bill, which 22 other Democrats have endorsed.“Trump’s crypto schemes are the Mount Everest of corruption,” Merkley told the Guardian. “We must ban Trump-style crypto corruption so all elected federal officials – including the president, vice-president and members of Congress – cannot profit from shady crypto practices,” which his bill would curtail.Some former congressional Republicans are also incensed by Trump’s blatant use of his presidency to peddle $Trump. “Nobody should be allowed to use their public positions while in office to enrich themselves,” said ex-Republican congressman Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, who once chaired the House ethics panel. “A member of Congress would not be permitted to engage in the kind of memecoin activities which the president has been doing.”Trump and his family have dismissed critics concerns about the 22 May events and his other crypto ventures.Before the 22 May dinner, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that the president would attend his crypto gala in his “personal time” and it was not a White House event, but declined to release names of the many anonymous and foreign attendees.To allay criticism, the Trump Organization said in January that Trump’s business interests, including his assets and investments, would be placed in a trust his children would manage and that the president wouldn’t be involved in decision-making or daily operations. Trump’s family also hired a lawyer as an ethics adviser.But those commitments have been dwarfed by Trump’s public embrace of his crypto ventures and strong deregulatory agenda. In March, for instance, Trump hosted the first-ever “crypto summit” at the White House, which drew a couple dozen industry bigwigs who heard Trump promise to end Biden’s “war on crypto”.Trump’s crypto critics worry that the president’s strong push for less industry regulation may create big problems: the crypto industry has been battered by some major scandals including ones involving North Korean hackers and has been plagued by concerns about industry’s lack of transparency and risks.For instance, a report last December by leading research firm Chainalysis found that North Korean hackers had stolen $1.34bn of cryptocurrency in 2024, a record total and double what they stole the year before.The report concluded that US and foreign analysts believe the stolen funds were diverted in North Korea to “finance its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs”.Other crypto fraud schemes in the US have spurred loud alarms.In an annual report last September, the FBI revealed that fraud related to crypto businesses soared in 2023 with Americans suffering $5.6bn in losses, a 45% jump from the previous year.Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded the now bankrupt FTX crypto exchange, was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March 2024 by a New York judge for bilking customers out of $8bn.Nonetheless, a justice department memo in April announced it was closing a national cryptocurrency enforcement team that was established in 2022, which had brought major crypto cases against North Korean hackers and other crypto criminals.The memo stressed that the justice department was not a “digital assets regulator” and tried to tar the Biden administration for a “reckless strategy of regulation by prosecution”. The memo stated that a pro-crypto Trump executive order in January spurred the justice department’s policy shift.Ex-prosecutors and ethics watchdogs worry increasingly that crypto scandals and conflicts of interest will worsen as the Trump administration moves fast to ease crypto oversight at the justice department, the SEC and other agencies.Some of WLF’s high-profile crypto deals have involved overseas crypto firms which have had recent regulatory and legal problems in the US, fueling new concerns, watchdogs and ex-prosecutors say.View image in fullscreenOne lucrative deal raised eyebrows when WLF was tapped to play a central role in a $2bn investment by Abu Dhabi financial fund MGX that is backed by the United Arab Emirates in the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance.As part of the deal, the Abu Dhabi fund bought $2bn of a WLF stablecoin, dubbed USD1, to invest in Binance. Stablecoins are a popular type of cryptocurrency that are often pegged to the dollar.The WLF deal comes after Binance in 2023 pleaded guilty to violating US money-laundering laws and other violations and the justice department fined it a whopping $4bn.Furthermore, Binance’s ex-CEO and founder, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty in the US to violating the Bank Secrecy Act and failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program.Zhao, who still owns 90% of Binance, served a four-month jail term last year.WLF’s $2bn deal was announced at an Abu Dhabi crypto conference on 1 May that drew Eric Trump two weeks before Trump’s visit to the UAE capital, sparking concerns of foreign influence and ethics issues.Increasing WLF’s ties further with Binance, the crypto exchange announced on 22 May that it had begun listing the stablecoin for trading purposes. Binance got some good news at the end of May, too, when the SEC announced the dismissal of a civil lawsuit it filed in 2023 against the exchange for misleading investors about surveillance controls and trading irregularities.Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of the justice department’s fraud section, noted that SEC moves back in February “to emasculate its crypto enforcement efforts sent crypto fraudsters a welcome mat of impunity”.He added: “The recent dismissal of the SEC’s lawsuit against Binance for mishandling customer funds, days after it began listing the Trump family’s cryptocurrency on its exchange, seemed to be the natural consequence of such enforcement laxity. Victims be damned.”Other agency deregulatory moves that favor crypto interests can boost Trump’s own enterprises and his allies, but pose potential risks for ordinary investors, say legal scholars.Columbia law professor Richard Briffault noted that as part of the Trump administration’s wide-ranging and risky crypto deregulatory agenda which can benefit Trump’s own crypto ventures, the Department of Labor in late May nixed a Biden-era “extreme care” warning about 401K plans investing in crypto.“[The labor department] has rescinded the red light from the Biden years for 401K retirement plans, which is another sign of the Trump administration’s embrace of crypto,” Briffault said.Briffault, an expert on government ethics, has told the Guardian more broadly that Trump’s crypto ventures and his 22 May memecoin bash are “unprecedented”.“I don’t think there’s been anything like this in American history,” he said. “Trump is marketing access to himself as a way to profit his memecoin. People are paying to meet Trump and he’s the regulator-in-chief. It’s doubly corrupt.”In late May, in a new crypto business twist, the Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent of Truth Social, said it had sealed a deal to raise $2.5bn to be used to buy bitcoin, creating a reserve of the cryptocurrency.Meanwhile, Trump’s stablecoin fortunes and those of many industry allies could get boosts soon from a Senate stablecoin bill, dubbed the “genius act”, that’s poised to pass the Senate on Tuesday but which critics have said loosens regulatory controls in dangerous ways unless amended with consumer protections and other safeguards.Senators Merkley and Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, led unsuccessful efforts to amend the bill to thwart potential criminal abuses, protect consumers and prevent Trump from using his office to profit his crypto businesses.“The ‘genius act’ fails to prevent sanctions evasion and other illicit activity and lets big tech giants like Elon Musk’s X issue their own private money – all without the guardrails needed to keep Americans safe from scams, junk fees or another financial crash,” Warren told the Guardian.“Donald Trump has turned the presidency into a crypto cash machine,” Warren said. The Genius act, Warren stressed, should have “prohibited the President AND his family from profiting from any stablecoin project.”More broadly, Kedric Payne, the general counsel and ethics director at the Campaign Legal Center, said: “President Trump’s financial stakes in the crypto industry at the same time that he is determining how the government will regulate the industry is unprecedented in modern history. This is precisely the type of conflict of interest that ethics laws and norms are designed to stop.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘This is the looting of America’: Trump and Co’s extraordinary conflicts of interest in his second term

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      The South Lawn of the White House had never seen anything like it. The president of the United States was posing for the world’s media against a backdrop of five different models of Tesla, peddling the electric vehicles with the alacrity of a salesman on commission.“I love the product, it’s beautiful,” Donald Trump said as he sank into the driver’s seat of a scarlet Model Y. With the Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, beside him, he went on to enlighten the American people that some Tesla models retail for as little as $299 a month, “which is pretty low”.That same day, within hours of the White House’s makeover into a Tesla showroom, the New York Times revealed that Musk had decided to invest $100m in political groups working for Trump. The massive injection of capital would enhance the nearly $300m Musk had already spent getting Trump elected.A week after the commercial on the South Lawn, on 19 March, Trump’s commerce secretary, the billionaire investment banker Howard Lutnick, went on Fox News and exhorted viewers to “buy Tesla”. “Who wouldn’t invest in Elon Musk’s stock?” he gushed. “He is probably the best person to bet on I’ve ever met.”At the time Lutnick made those remarks, he had yet to divest himself from Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm he had led for 35 years. He was talking up stock in which he still had a vested interest – Cantor held $300m in Tesla shares, a stake that has since soared to $555m. And the commerce secretary was also bigging up his friend Musk, whose SpaceX and Starlink businesses are regulated by the commerce department that Lutnick now controlled.Eight days in March, three friendly billionaires, one of them the world’s most powerful person, another the world’s richest person. Doing what friends do: scratching each other’s backs. Even though Musk later fell out with Trump – in a shocking social media spat that roiled US politics – the imagery remains powerful and highly symbolic of Trump’s second term in the White House.View image in fullscreenBetween them they committed in those eight days acts that, had they occurred during any previous presidency – including Trump’s own first administration – would have provoked howls of protest concerning quid pro quo. Yet those eight days represent just a tiny slice of the graft and possible misconduct that is unfolding.The gift by the Qatari government of a $400m luxury jetliner to be repurposed as Air Force One has become the paradigm of the blitz of ethical dilemmas unleashed by Trump. The Pentagon last month accepted possession of the plane, which will be transferred to Trump’s presidential library once he leaves office.That Trump doggedly accepted the Qatari “palace in the sky” despite widespread condemnation speaks volumes about how indomitable he feels at this moment. He has shrugged aside the rebukes even of devoted Trump supporters, including the rightwing commentator Ben Shapiro, who bridled at the transfer’s grubby appearance, calling it “skeezy stuff”.It also shows Trump’s disdain for the US constitution, given the emoluments clause’s clear prohibition. Presidents are not allowed to accept high-value gifts from foreign governments without congressional consent.Yet the luxury jumbo jet is also just the thinnest edge of a very fat wedge. There has been so much more that has flown, if not under the radar, then partially obscured from sight amid the ethical blizzard of corruption and influence.There have been multimillion-dollar TV packages, real estate deals in Arab petrostates, dinners with the president going for $5m a pop, plum job offers for contributors to Trump’s inaugural fund, cryptocurrency ventures attracting lucre from secret foreign investors, “drill, baby, drill” enticements for oil and energy donations – the list goes on, and on … and on.View image in fullscreenTrump and his team of billionaires have led the US on a dizzying journey into the moral twilight that has left public sector watchdogs struggling to keep up. Which is precisely the intention, said Kathleen Clark, a government ethics lawyer and law professor at Washington University in Saint Louis.“They have mastered the technique of flooding the zone – doing so much so fast that they are overwhelming the ability of ethics groups and institutions to respond.”Chris Murphy, the Democratic US senator from Connecticut, has delivered two long speeches on the floor of his chamber in which he has itemised Trump and Co’s most controversial transactions. The record already stretches to scores of entries, chronicling what Murphy calls Trump’s “efforts to steal from the American people to enrich himself and his friends”.In an interview with the Guardian, the senator said that Trump’s was a “pay-for-play administration. That’s the underlying theme. You pay Donald Trump money, he does favors for you. That’s old-fashioned corruption.”Clark’s analysis is even more pointed. “People talk about ‘guardrails’ and ‘norms’ and ‘conflict of interest’, which is all very relevant,” she said. “But this is theft and destruction. This is the looting of America.”Trump signaled that he would be a president like no other at the start of his first term, when he became the only occupant of the Oval Office in modern times to refuse to divest his assets by putting them into a blind trust. Though presidents are not bound by conflict of interest laws applying to other elected officials, the norm has been for incumbents to set themselves high standards, the archetype being Jimmy Carter’s sale of his peanut farm.Trump, by contrast, put his assets in a trust that remained under the control of his family, with him as its sole beneficiary. He incurred numerous accusations of first-term conflicts of interest, as foreign officials from 20 countries descended on his hotels, while Secret Service agents in Trump’s security detail were made to pay premium rates, pouring at least $10m into his bank account.Such unprecedented disregard for time-honored ethical boundaries was shocking at the time. Now it looks merely quaint.“In the first Trump administration there were ethical lapses,” said Danielle Caputo, senior legal counsel for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center watchdog organization. “With this new administration, there’s not just a disregard for ethics rules, there’s contempt.”The conversion of political power into cash began even before Trump re-entered the White House. Weeks before the inauguration, Melania Trump sealed a $40m deal with Jeff Bezos for an Amazon Prime “behind-the-scenes” documentary on her life.Trump banked millions of dollars of his own by leveraging his status as president-elect to browbeat tech companies. He settled disputes over the freezing of his then Twitter and Facebook accounts in the wake of the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, prising $10m out of his friend Musk, and $25m from Meta.View image in fullscreenTrump used the months leading up to November’s election to test-run what, as Murphy noted, has become a theme of his second presidency – pay-to-play. He invited oil executives to Mar-a-Lago and, as the Washington Post revealed, offered them a “deal” in which they would donate $1bn to his campaign and in return he would tear up profit-limiting environmental regulations once he was back in the White House.He kept his promise: on day one of his new administration he discharged a barrage of pro-fossil fuel actions.Donors to his record-breaking $239m inaugural fund have also found Trump to be a grateful benefactor. Warren Stephens, an investment banker who gave $4m, was rewarded with the role of US ambassador to the UK; Jared Issacman, a billionaire pilot and close associate of Musk’s, gave $2m to the fund and was tapped to lead Nasa (he was abruptly yanked from the appointment last month after he was reportedly discovered to have been been donating to Democrats).The pattern has continued into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Three months into the administration, Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr, launched an elite private members’ club named Executive Branch which commands a sign-in fee of a cool $500,000.Its attraction? Access to cabinet members and top Trump advisers.Not to be outdone by his own son, Trump himself has followed the same playbook at his Mar-a-Lago resort. In March, he began inviting business leaders to dine with him in group settings at $1m a seat.Prefer something more intimate? No problem. One-on-one meetings are also available, yours for $5m.For a seasoned observer such as Norman Eisen of the Brookings Institution, the sheer mass of problematic transactions puts the administration beyond the pale. “It’s over the line, unlawful, corrupt and unethical. It is un-American.”Eisen has experience dealing with knotty ethical issues. He was special counsel for ethics during Barack Obama’s first year in the White House.Obama notes in his autobiography, A Promised Land, that Eisen earned himself the title of Dr No, so strict was his approach to conflicts of interest. He would tell White House officials hoping to attend outside events that “if it sounds fun, you can’t go”.View image in fullscreenEisen told the Guardian that he prevented Obama from refinancing his family home in Chicago. “He was regulating the banking industry at the time, in the midst of the Great Recession.”The contrast between such almost pedantic strictures and the free-for-all in today’s White House astonishes and dismays Eisen. “If my somewhat tongue in cheek motto for Obama was ‘If it’s fun, you can’t do it,’ then the motto of the Trump White House seems to be ‘If you can make a buck, grab it.’”Exhibit one of such conduct, Eisen suggests, is the Trump family’s dive into the world of crypto. Shortly before the inauguration, they launched personal lines of meme coins, $Trump and $Melania.Then they issued a new cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar, known as a stablecoin. Taken together, Eisen believes that the two crypto ventures from the family of a sitting president amount to “one of the worst and most shocking conflicts of interest in our nation’s history”.Trump bragged on the campaign trail that he would turn the US into the “crypto capital of the planet”. He was more circumspect in front of his faithful followers about the big plans his sons were simultaneously developing to cash in on the currency.Since his election victory, Trump has used his presidential status and executive power to boost not only the general standing of crypto but also his personal stake within it. One of his early executive orders created a “strategic bitcoin reserve” designed to bolster the industry.At the same time, he eviscerated basic regulatory controls, halted federal crypto-related lawsuits and disbanded a taskforce trained to hunt down crypto criminals. “We have a president whose net worth now includes very substantial investments in cryptocurrency who at the same time is loosening regulations on the crypto industry,” Eisen said.The unrivalled magnetism of the US presidency helped Trump to blast his nascent meme coin, a currency almost entirely reliant on hype, into the stratosphere. It rocketed from $6.50 on inauguration day to a peak of $73.Then, when it predictably plummeted back down to below $10, he used his presidential allure brazenly once again to boost the coin. This time he announced a “private intimate dinner” for the top 220 $Trump investors, followed by an exclusive White House tour for the top 25.The ensuing scramble for a seat at the presidential dining table reportedly earned the Trump family $148m.The $Trump meme coin is an ethics regulator’s waking nightmare. There is little transparency around who is channelling money into it, and even less around the potentially nefarious motives of investors.The same might be said about the Trumps’ other big crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which was launched last September by Trump’s sons. The president himself is listed by the company as its “chief crypto advocate”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFederal law sets tight rules against foreign parties donating to presidential campaign or inaugural funds. Yet there is nothing to prevent outside interests with connections to foreign governments engaging with World Liberty and its new product, the USD1 stablecoin.One of its biggest backers is the Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun (best known for paying $6.2m at a New York art sale for a banana taped to a wall, then eating it). Before the inauguration, Sun pumped $75m into World Liberty. A few weeks later, the Securities and Exchange Commission paused an investigation into him for alleged securities fraud.View image in fullscreenUSD1 is currently valued at $2.3bn, the lion’s share of which comes from a $2bn transaction by MGX, a firm which happens to be chaired by the intelligence chief of the United Arab Emirates. That a company with ties to the government of an Arab petrostate should be able to make such a giant investment in a crypto venture generating profit for the sitting US president and his family goes against the grain of decades of robust accountability work countering conflicts of interest.“We’ve been pretty successful in this country rooting out corruption, or at least pushing it into the shadows,” Murphy, the US senator, told the Guardian. “Now it happens out in the open.”And it doesn’t stop there. Over the past few months Trump’s second son, Eric, has been frenetically traveling the globe in search of real estate deals, throwing to the winds the pledge Trump made in his first administration to eschew any foreign business transactions.In his second administration, Trump has made no such promise. All he has conceded this time, in a document released by his lawyers in January, is that the Trump Organization will avoid cutting business deals with foreign governments.Even that boundary has been pushed close to breaking point. Eric Trump sealed his first deal since Trump re-entered the White House in April.It involves the construction of the Trump International Golf Club & Villas outside the Qatari capital, Doha, as part of a $5bn luxury beachside resort. The company managing the development, Qatari Diar, is owned by the sovereign wealth fund of the Qatari government.Two weeks after the Trump Organization announced the deal, the president himself arrived in Doha as part of his three-country tour of the Middle East. He declared the trip a huge success, having drummed up trillions of dollars of business and investments for the US.The Guardian invited the White House to comment on complaints that the president has blurred his public duties with his family’s personal profit-making activities to a degree never before seen in the US. A White House spokesperson replied with a statement which they asked us to print in its entirety, so here goes:“There are no conflicts of interest. President Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children. It is shameful that the Guardian is ignoring the GOOD deals President Trump has secured for the American people, not for himself, to push a false narrative. President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media.”The argument that there is no conflict of interest because Trump’s business is handled by his children, specifically his sons – Don Jr leading on crypto and his social media empire, Eric on real estate – is an interesting one. Sons seem to be de rigueur, to the extent that members of Trump’s inner circle who lack them might feel the need to borrow one.View image in fullscreenTake other key figures in Trump’s cabinet, which is packed with so many banking and energy billionaires that it ranks as the richest presidential cabinet in modern history. Lutnick, the commerce secretary, who has a personal fortune of about $2.2bn, has been involved in various accusations of conflict of interest since he encouraged Fox News viewers to “buy Tesla”.At the start of this year Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm Lutnick led for almost four decades, increased its investment in Strategy, the biggest corporate holder of bitcoin in the world. Cantor’s stake rose by several hundred million dollars to $1.3bn, research by the watchdog Accountable.US has found.At the same time, Lutnick was actively helping Trump create his strategic bitcoin reserve, a move that greatly strengthened the cryptocurrency.Last month, Lutnick divested himself of his Cantor stake, but he did so by transferring his ownership to his two sons. Cantor is now controlled by Brandon Lutnick, 27, and Kyle Lutnick, 28.Or take Robert F Kennedy Jr, the vaccine-skeptic health secretary. Under intense pressure from Democratic senators, he agreed to divest his 10% stake in any payout from an ongoing lawsuit in which he is engaged against Merck over its HPV vaccine, Gardasil.Government officials are not allowed under federal law to participate personally in official matters in which they have a financial interest. So what did Kennedy do? He transferred his stake in the case to one of his adult sons.And then there’s Mehmet Oz, the multimillionaire physician better known by his TV name, Dr Oz, whom Trump put in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. As the Washington Post has reported, Oz co-founded a health benefits company, ZorroRX, that helps hospitals save on prescription drugs.This would have been an indisputable conflict of interest, because in his job as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Oz wields huge sway over hospital drug policies, and thus ZorroRX profits. Since taking up the position Oz, whose wealth is put at up to $300m, has divested himself of some of his investment portfolio and is no longer mentioned on ZorroRX’s website.View image in fullscreenHis fellow co-founder of ZorroRX, however, is still listed as the firm’s head of medical affairs. That’s his son, Oliver Oz.Under federal conflict of interest law, there is no prohibition on adult children managing the interests of parents who hold public office. Yet the spirit of the law does force us to reflect on why so many Trump administration leaders are so fond of handing sensitive money-making portfolios to their sons.“By giving over to your son, you are immediately raising questions about how separate you are going to be from the success of this business,” said Caputo of the Campaign Legal Center. “Will you be focused on what’s best for the public, or will you be guided in your decision-making by what would most benefit your family?”In the last analysis, what matters most perhaps about the financial dealings of the Trump administration is what impact they are having on the American people. In particular, what is it doing to the 77 million voters who put their trust in Trump and sent him back to the Oval Office?Trump returned to the White House partly on his promise to working-class Americans that he would “drain the swamp”, liberating Washington from the bloodsucking of special interests. Yet a review by the Campaign Legal Center found that Trump nominated at least 21 former lobbyists to top positions in his new administration, many of whom are now regulating the very industries on whose behalf they recently advocated.Eight of them, the Campaign Legal Center concluded, would have been banned or restricted in their roles under all previous modern presidencies, including Trump’s own first administration.They include Pam Bondi, the US attorney general. She approved the gift of the Qatari luxury jetliner as “legally permissible”, having herself worked as a lobbyist for Qatar.Trump’s other great pledge was that he would put the wellbeing of “forgotten” working people before that of the vested elites. His appeal was pitched at the millions of rural and working-class Americans who have languished from mounting income inequality, the decline of manufacturing jobs in the globalised economy, and what he claimed was the negative effects of millions of undocumented immigrants.Evan Feinman has witnessed personally and up close how this promise has fared in Trump 2.0. For the past three years, Feinman was busy leading a $42.5bn program created by Congress to bring affordable high-speed internet to every American home and business that needed it.The project was vast and ambitious, on a par with the rural electrification drive that transformed the heartlands of America in the 1930s. Located within the US commerce department, its success is critical to the future prosperity of millions of Americans, especially those in hard-bitten rural areas of the sort that solidly backed Trump in the last election.Studies have shown that giving families access to the internet improves the grades of school students, increases college enrolment and reduces the likelihood of households falling into debt. It also helps older Americans stay in their own homes and avoid residential care.By the inauguration, the broadband project was well under way, with several states only weeks away from breaking ground and laying the cables. Then Lutnick took over the reins of the commerce department.Within a days of his confirmation, Lutnick met with senior managers and informed them he wanted to scale back on the use of fibre optic and switch to satellite. According to an account of the meeting that was given to Feinman by someone present, Lutnick specifically inquired after his friend Musk, the CEO of Starlink, which provides internet services through low-Earth orbit satellites.View image in fullscreenDays after that, Feinman was told he was being let go. His contract was up for renewal, and it wasn’t being extended.“I was dismayed,” Feinman told the Guardian, insisting that his distress was not so much related to his own dismissal but out of concern for the Americans who would be harmed by the shift. By his reckoning, satellite internet would not only be slower than broadband, it would also be much more expensive – costing users an extra $840 a year in fees.“For Americans in rural locations, that’s going to really hurt. Many of the president’s strongest supporters – up to hundreds of thousands of families who voted for Trump – are going to see slower, more expensive internet services, and all to the benefit of the wealthiest man on earth.”According to some estimates, Musk’s Starlink stands to make $10bn to $20bn should the shift from broadband to satellite internet go ahead.The episode has left Feinman “deeply saddened. I see my nation harming itself in ways that are inexplicable and entirely avoidable.”He fears for rural Americans who will pay the price. “These are communities who put their trust in this administration. They are going to find that their trust has not been honored, and it will be to their significant future detriment.” More

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      ‘Stay below the radar’: corporate America goes quiet after Trump’s return

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      From vast protests and all-caps social media posts to acrimonious legislative hearings and pugnacious White House statements, Washington has perhaps never been noisier. But since Donald Trump’s return to office, one corner of civil society has been almost eerily quiet.Those leading corporate America rapidly turned down the volume after the president’s re-election. Gone are the days of political and social interventions, highly publicized diversity initiatives and donations to important causes.For months, some of the most powerful firms in the world have nervously navigated a dangerous US political landscape, desperate to avoid the wrath of an administration as volatile as it is vocal.“CEOs like two things. They like consistency and predictability,” said Bill George, former chairman and CEO of Medtronic and serial board director. “They like to know where things are going. No one can figure out where this administration’s really going, because everything is transactional.”View image in fullscreen“Stay below the radar screen,” George has been advising senior executives across the US. “Do not get in a fight with this president.”Industry leaders from David Solomon of Goldman Sachs to Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber extoled the benefits of “Trump accounts” for babies this week. It was the latest example of knee-flexing that began on the patio of Mar-a-Lago in the aftermath of Trump’s victory last November.The genuflections have been backed by big money, with millions of dollars thrown into the president’s inaugural fund by companies and executives. That started to look like chump change before long. Amazon reportedly paid $40m for a documentary about Melania Trump. Apple announced plans to invest $500bn in the US.But those moves do not appear to have bought much favor. The White House accused Amazon of being “hostile and political” following a report (upon which the company later poured cold water) that it would start disclosing the impact of Trump’s tariffs on prices. And the president threatened Apple with vast tariffs.No CEO seemed closer to Trump than Elon Musk, the billionaire industrialist behind Tesla and SpaceX, who gave almost $300m to Republican campaigns last year, and worked in the administration for months. Their explosive fallout, days after Musk’s exit, prompted the president to threaten the cancellation of federal contracts and tax subsidies for Musk’s companies.View image in fullscreenThe pair’s rupture underlined why many executives are struggling to trust the president, according to Paul Argenti, professor of corporate communication at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. “The mercurial nature of this guy kind of just seeps in, and people start to realize they’re dealing with something that’s a bit more difficult.”His advice? “Proceed with extreme caution.”“Loyalty only goes one way with Trump,” said Dan Schwerin, co-founder of Evergreen Strategy Group, and former speechwriter for Hillary Clinton, who has previously worked with firms including Levi Strauss and Patagonia. “This is like doing business with the mafia: you’re not going to win, and you’re not going to be safe.”The standard playbook is clear: “You make a big splashy announcement: the details don’t matter, you don’t have to follow through, but you placate the White House,” said Schwerin. “That maybe buys you a little time and a little goodwill.“But history suggests that Trump will do whatever is best for Trump, and he will turn on you in an instant, if it’s better for him. And that is true for his friends, so it will certainly be true for a company that he has no loyalty to.”Extreme caution has become the name of the game – anything to avoid your company getting drawn into the crosshairs of this administration. But companies can’t just focus on the president: they have shareholders, customers and employees to answer to.View image in fullscreen“You can’t base everything on getting through the next four years,” said George. “Yeah, it’s going to be chaotic. Yes, it’s going to be challenging. But you better hold firm to your purpose and your values.”He pointed to retailer Target, where he served on the board for 12 years. “They were very, very big on differentiating themselves from Walmart, using diversity as the criteria – and particularly being, they called themselves, the most gay-friendly company in town.“And then [Target CEO] Brian Cornell, six days after the inauguration, abandoned all that,” said George. The chain faced a backlash – and boycotts – for abruptly announcing the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Breaking his silence in an email to employees three months later, Cornell claimed: “We are still the Target you know and believe in.”Contrast this with Costco, another retailer, which in January faced a shareholder proposal against DEI efforts from a conservative thinktank. The firm’s board robustly defended its “commitment to an enterprise rooted in respect and inclusion” before the proposal was put to its investors for a vote.“They got a 98% vote to stay the course, to stay true to what they were,” said George. “And their customer base is very conservative. This is not like they have some liberal customer base.”Argenti believes the period of strategic silence by many companies, and knee-flexing to the White House, might be coming to a close following Musk’s messy exit. “We’re at an inflection point,” he said. “There’s going to period where people realize you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”CEOs of companies counting the cost of Trump’s policies are “not going to suffer in silence”, he said. “You can’t win. It’s not like you can be secure in knowing if you follow this strategy, he’ll leave you alone.”View image in fullscreen“We are starting to see the pendulum swing back,” according to Schwerin, who claimed the administration’s erratic execution of tariffs had “opened some people’s eyes” that its policies were bad for business.“I think it’s crucial that we start to see a little more pushback. Better to have a backbone than to just bend the knee.”On controversial issues at the heart of political discourse, however, George does not expect much of a shift from CEOs. “It is radio silence, and I think you’ll see that continuing. There’s not much to be gained from speaking out today.”“Stick to your lane,” he has been counseling executives. “If you’re a banker, you can talk about the economy. If you’re an oil expert … talk to the energy industry. But you can’t speak ex-cathedra to everyone else.”“Only a handful” of business figures are deemed able to stand up and make bold public statements on any issue, according to George, who points to Jamie Dimon, the veteran JPMorgan Chase boss, and Warren Buffett, the longtime head of Berkshire Hathaway.“There are certain people who are really hard to take on. Jamie’s one,” he said. “If you were president of the United States, would you take on Warren Buffett?” More

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      JD Vance threatened to deport him. The ‘menswear guy’ is posting through it

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      Derek Guy was a relatively unknown menswear writer with 25,000 followers on Twitter in 2022. Now, in 2025, Guy has 1.3 million followers on the platform, now called X, where this week both the vice-president of the United States and the Department of Homeland Security posted threats to deport him from the US – the country he has called home since he was a baby.“Honestly didn’t expect this is what would happen when I joined a menswear forum 15 years ago,” Guy quipped on X on Monday. “Was originally trying to look nice for someone else’s wedding.”The threats targeted at Guy, a fashion writer known for lampooning the sartorial decisions of rightwing figures, including JD Vance, marked another alarming escalation in the White House’s ongoing project to mass deport millions of immigrants – raising the prospect of an administration wielding deportation as a weapon of retribution against its critics.But Guy’s story also laid bare the transformation of X. In a few short years, the platform has become a place where Maga and other far-right influencers not only rule the roost, but can see their trollish posts perhaps dictate policy. X may now be a sincerely dangerous place for some users to post their thoughts.It all started with Elon Musk. After taking over Twitter in 2022, the world’s richest man oversaw the implementation of an algorithmic “for you” tab that pushed content from a bizarre array of influencers on users. Through a fateful quirk in the algorithm, Guy was among the platform’s new main characters, his incisive commentary about men’s fashion suddenly ubiquitous on people’s feeds. Guy, who got his start years earlier commenting in menswear forums before launching a blog called Die, Workwear!, was suddenly being profiled in GQ and interviewed by Slate. Everyone started calling him the “menswear guy”.Musk later rechristened Twitter as X, further loosening moderation on the platform, and restoring the accounts of users previously banned for bigotry or harassment. X became even more of a far-right haven, with white supremacist and neo-Nazi accounts risen from the dead. Meanwhile Guy was frequently going viral, namely for posts teasing prominent Maga figures for their ill-fitting suits – bringing attention to the wrinkles on Trump’s trousers, and the “collar gaps” on Stephen Miller’s suit jackets.By 2025, of course, Trump and Miller were back in the White House, pursuing a campaign promise to “remigrate” millions of everyday people out of America. In recent weeks they appeared to ramp up this ethno-nationalist project, with disturbing footage emerging online of masked, heavily armed Ice and DHS agents abducting Latino people from schools and courthouses, or kidnapping them off the streets, often separating them from their children.Guy felt compelled to stand up and be counted.In a long post on X, he recounted his family’s harrowing story of escaping war in Vietnam, a journey that ended with his mom carrying him across the US border while he was still an infant. Guy revealed that he was one of millions of undocumented people living in the US.“The lack of legal immigration has totally shaped my life,” he wrote. “It has made every interaction with the law much scarier. It has shaped which opportunities I could or could not get. It has taken an emotional toll, as this legal issue hangs over your head like a black cloud.”He was sharing his story to “push back against the idea that all undocumented immigrants are MS-13 members”, he wrote. “I know many people in my position and they are all like your neighbors.”Guy’s post sent far-right influencers on X into a feeding frenzy. “JD Vance I know you’re reading this and you have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever,” a user named @growing_daniel wrote about Guy’s announcement. (@Growing_Daniel appears to be the founder of a tech startup called Abel, that uses artificial intelligence to help police write up crime reports.)Vance did see the post, replying with a gif of Jack Nicholson from the movie Anger Management, slowly nodding his head with an intense, menacing look. A short time later, the official account of the Department of Homeland Security joined the fray. The federal agency quote-tweeted a post from another far-right account, which noted Guy’s undocumented status, with a gif from the movie Spy Kids, showing a character with futuristic glasses that can zoom in on a subject from a great distance.The message to Guy was clear: we’re watching you. Vance and DHS did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment about the posts.Prominent far-right figures were ecstatic. “IT’S HABBENING,” posted Jack Posobiec, a Maga operative with more than 3 million followers on X. Michael Knowles, the prominent Daily Wire pundit, posted a photo of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, wearing a blue-and-white sash over his suit jacket. “Hey @dieworkwear,” Knowles wrote to his one million followers, “what are your thoughts on this outfit?” The subtext of Knowles’s tweet was also clear: Bukele has partnered with the Trump administration to hold immigrants deported from America, with no due process, in El Salvador’s most notorious gulag.Guy was aghast at the response. “The cruelty in today’s politics feels horribly corrosive,” he wrote. “Bringing up that hard-working immigrant families — undocumented, yes, but not violent criminals — are being ripped apart based on immigration status doesn’t bring compassion or even pause, but gleeful cheers.”Longtime critics of X pointed to the deportation threats as evidence of the platform’s perils. “…It’s been turned into a political weapon for people who wish to use it to harm others,” noted journalist Charlie Warzel, the author of a recent Atlantic essay arguing for people to abandon X. “It’s not the marketplace of ideas – you do not have to participate in this project! very simple!”For now, Guy – who politely declined to comment to the Guardian about this week’s saga – is still on X, using all of this week’s attention for what he sees as good causes.“ICE raided a downtown LA garment warehouse, arresting fourteen garment workers,” he wrote. “Many of those detained were the primary breadwinner for young children and elderly relatives. Would you consider donating to help these families?”He also took time to taunt those calling for his deportation. When an account belonging to a luxury wristwatch dealer chastised him for “disrespecting” immigration laws, Guy responded with a one-thousand word history of how the flow of immigrants and refugees across borders over the past two centuries led to the creation of Rolex, among other luxury watch brands.He also replied directly to Vance’s post threatening to deport him. “i think i can outrun you in these clothes,” Guy wrote, posting a photo of the vice-president seated at a political conference, his ill-fitting suit pants riding up to his calves. “you are tweeting for likes. im tweeting to be mentioned in the National Archives and Records,” Guy added.Guy then told the vice-president where immigration agents could find him: “Here is my house,” the “menswear guy” wrote, posting an image of a Men’s Wearhouse storefront.

      This article was updated on 14 June 2025 to correct that the movie the gif of Jack Nicholson was from was Anger Management, not The Departed. More

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      What Elon Musk wore to the White House foreshadowed his downfall

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      In case you missed it, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have fallen out.For some – and in particular anyone looking at the tech billionaire’s White House wardrobe – this will come as little surprise. Long before anyone hit send on those inflammatory tweets, or tensions spilled out over Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB), Musk’s political downfall was written in the stitching.During his time in the White House, Musk shunned the sartorial rulebook of someone at the shoulder of a president, where suits and ties are the common code. He wore dark Maga baseball caps at the Oval Office and told a rally in New York: “I’m not just Maga, I’m dark gothic Maga.” Then there were the T-shirts with slogans such as “Occupy Mars”, “Tech Support” and “Dogefather”. At campaign rallies, commentators noted he looked “more like he belonged at a Magic: The Gathering tournament than a political event”, his dress sense the style equivalent of the k-holes that it is claimed Musk frequently disappeared into.The more casual styles of Musk and his Silicon Valley tech bros – where stiff collars are eschewed in favour or crewnecks, tailored jackets softly pushed out the door by padded gilets – are light years away from those of the suited-and-booted US Capitol.But if Musk’s clobber signalled a new DC power shift, it also spoke to different norms. “Disruption might be a badge of honour in the tech space,” says DC-based image coach and style strategist Lauren A Rothman, “but in politics, chaos has a much shorter runway. The White House has been around for a long time. We’re not going to stop wearing suits … This is the uniform.”View image in fullscreenAll of this dressing down, dressing objectively badly and dressing “inappropriately” has form. Consider, if you can bear to, the case of Dominic Cummings. The former Boris Johnson aide subjected Westminster to dishevelment, Joules gilets, beanies, Billabong T-shirts and tote bags advertising the 1983 gothic-inspired horror novel The Woman in Black. He wasn’t just a Tory, he was a gothic horror Tory.As Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian columnist and host of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast, notes: “Dressing down is usually a power move in politics, just as it is in the boardroom: only the most powerful can get away with it.” That was, he says, the message Cummings sent “when he roamed Number 10 in a gilet: ‘You lot are worker bees who have to wear a uniform, whereas I’m so indispensable to the man at the top, I can wear what I like’.”It was the same with Musk, whose threads were a flipped bird to all those Oval Office stiffs in suits. As Rothman puts it: “His uniform of casual defiance stands in sharp contrast to that traditionally suited corridor of political power.” And that contrast screams out his different, special status.Before him, there was “Sloppy Steve” Bannon, a man never knowingly under-shirted. On this side of the Atlantic, Freedland points to former David Cameron adviser Steve Hilton and his penchant for turning up to meetings barefoot: “ditching the shoes was an instant way of signalling his membership of the inner circle”.It’s that age-old question: who has the privilege to be scruffy? As Freedland puts it: “Musk was happy to stand next to the Resolute desk of the president looking like he was dressed for a gamers’ convention. That was his way of reminding everyone of his superior wealth and unique status, outside conventional politics.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBut what Cummings and Musk share in sartorial disorder, they also share in political trajectories. Scruffy Icaruses who flew too close to the sun; their clothes a foreshadowing of their fall. Trump might talk about draining the swamp, but his Brioni suits are very much swamp-coded – plus, while Johnson might have had strategically unruly hair and ill-fitting suits as crumpled as a chip wrapper, suits they still were.Ultimately, nobody likes a bragger. Because dressing in a way in which your privilege is omnipresent if not outright stated, is a surefire way to piss people off. Not least Trump, who noted that Musk had “some very brilliant young people working for him that dress much worse than him, actually”, in an interview on Fox in February.“The contrast between Musk’s garb and Trump’s cabinet,” according to Freedland, “made them look and seem inferior: servants of the president rather than his equal. It was one more reason why more than a few in Trumpworld are glad to see the (poorly tailored) back of Elon Musk.”To read the complete version of this newsletter – complete with this week’s trending topics in The Measure and your wardrobe dilemmas solved – subscribe to receive Fashion Statement in your inbox every Thursday. More

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      Why are people so triggered by the Mexican flag at the LA protests? | Daniel Peña

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      Republicans are using images of Ice protesters waving Mexican flags atop burning Waymo cars to foment fear among Americans. Like this photograph that Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday: a shirtless protester wielding the Tricolor atop a vandalized robotaxi as flames billow toward the weak sunlight backlighting the flag. His dark curls fall to his bare shoulders. He stares into the camera.Frankly, the image belongs in a museum.I understand my reaction is not the feeling Republicans hope to inspire in Americans broadly this week. Their messaging thus far about the protests against immigration raids in Latino communities has largely been alarmist – proof, they say, of an “invasion” of “illegal aliens”.“Look at all the foreign flags. Los Angeles is occupied territory,” said Stephen Miller on X. According to Adam Kinzinger, a former congressman and more moderate voice, the Mexican flags carried by protesters are “terrible … and feeding right into Donald Trump’s narrative”.“I just think that it would be much stronger if they were carrying American flags only,” he said on CNN this week.By this logic, Mexican flags are proof-positive that Mexican Americans are not really American; that we are somehow collaborating on a planned “invasion”; that we harbor secret loyalties to Mexico; that we’re here to displace white people and undermine the American way of life via some Plan de Aztlan. In short, none of this is true.View image in fullscreenIn front of Congress Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, cited the presence of “flags from foreign countries” in LA to legitimize supporting Trump’s deployment of the national guard. This unilateral invocation of Title 10 by the Trump administration, without the consent of the governor, is exceedingly aggressive. So is the deployment of 700 US marines to be used to crush American protest in an American city.The subtext here is that by many metrics, Americans’ patience for Ice and its antics is wearing thin, even as Ice’s deportation numbers are anemic compared with past administrations. The Trump administration realizes something has to change. Fanning outrage about a flag is both a legal pretext to pursue martial law and a diplomatic means of getting consent from the American populace to do unpopular things in the name of security.But what is it about the Mexican flag that triggers so many people?I’d argue that in the American context, the Mexican flag is not a nationalist symbol but something decentered from Mexico as a nation-state. Historically, it was a key banner of the Chicano movement, flown by supporters surrounding Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez during the California grape boycott in the 1960s. It flew alongside the United Farm Workers flag, the American flag and banners of the Virgen de Guadalupe as a means of fomenting cultural unity. It also served as a reminder of a fundamental truth: we are from here; we are also from there. We’re children of the in-between, or what the Tejana writer Gloria Anzaldúa referred to as nepantla in her seminal work Borderlands/La Frontera. Nepantla is simply Nahuatl for the liminal space between cultures, identities and worlds. To this end, we might think of the Mexican flag as a symbol of double-consciousness in the Mexican American psyche specifically. We understand our middleness, yet we also understand how America sees and defines us: Mexicans. We take that prejudice and transform it into power.It’s through this lens that I see the Mexican flag as just one banner among many, a remembrance of roots but also a shared experience between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants alike. Night after night, you can see captivating scenes with Mexican flags flying in the downtowns of Dallas and Houston and Atlanta and New York, as a solidarity grows between those explicitly targeted by Ice and those soon-to-be targeted by Ice. This is not hyperbole. Today, phenotype and politics are grounds enough for detention: in order for Ice to meet the Trump administration’s goal of 3,000 arrests a day, targets have increasingly included student protesters, tourists and even American citizens. The only rule is to meet the metric at all costs.Amid these burgeoning protests, the Mexican flag is a bold articulation: we are like you; you are like us. We have struggled and persist in this place together. See me and don’t be afraid; I see you and I am not afraid. To wield the flag amid a protest is to paint yourself a target, to take both your body and your future into your own hands. This is precisely why the marines have been called in. To intimidate these bodies. Or to destroy them.What Trump fails to realize is that the bones of Mexican people are the metadata of the land in California and indeed the rest of the country. Our place here is in the food, in the street names, in the name of Los Angeles itself.Already, I can hear some within my own community admonishing my defense of Mexican flags at American protests as treasonous or ungrateful or something along those lines. To them I might ask: why is it that the protesters’ allegiances are held to higher standards than an American president who seeks to turn the US armed forces against American citizens?From Republican leaders, ​you’ll never hear such questioning rhetoric surrounding other foreign flags that fly prominently in America. The Irish flag on St Patrick’s Day instantly comes to mind. As does the Israeli flag at both political and non-political events. And, of course, the Confederate flag, though white supremacists have explicitly stated goals of both overthrowing the US government and taking back US land. Heritage is the most commonly used defense. Though wouldn’t heritage apply to the Mexican flag as well?View image in fullscreenI’m reminded of James Baldwin when Mexicans Americans and Mexicans call for restraint from using Mexican imagery in US protests: “In Harlem,” Baldwin wrote, “… the Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.” We think our respectability will protect us. But we know historically and empirically that has not been true. Respectability did not protect Japanese Americans from being interned. Nor did it protect Vietnamese veterans who fought alongside Americans in Vietnam from facing discrimination in the US. Nor did it protect Afghan translators from having their visas revoked.Our American bona fides are not the things that will save us now. Not in the era of detention metrics and collateral targeting and now the prospect of authoritarian violence.It should be said: I don’t go looking for these images. For my sins, having clicked on one, the algorithm floods me with them now. Protesters with Mexican flags getting a haircut in front of police. Protesters with Mexican flags forming a human chain. They just keep coming to me. But other images, too. Like one of a guy popping a wheelie past a ton of burning Waymo cars. I mean, come the fuck on – it’s cool. The thing that immediately jumps out to me is the frivolity of the image. A body perfectly in balance, perfectly in motion. It moves of its own volition. It is completely in command of its trajectory and space in the landscape.It is beyond the fascist impulse to live so beautifully as this. Luckily, it also is beyond the fascist ability to remove the memory of this body from the land. More

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      The Trump-Musk feud exposes America’s wealth-hoarding crisis | Gabriel Zucman

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      As the world watches Donald Trump and Elon Musk publicly fight over the sweeping legislation moving through Congress, we should not let the drama distract us. There is something deeper afoot: unprecedented wealth concentration – and the unbridled power that comes with such wealth – has distorted our democracy and is driving societal and economic tensions.Musk, the world’s richest man, wields power no one person should have. He has used this power to elect candidates that will enact policies to protect his interests and he even bought his way into government. While at the helm of Doge, Musk dramatically reshaped the government in ways that benefit him – for instance, slashing regulatory agencies investigating his businesses – and hollowed out spending to make way for tax cuts that would enrich him.Musk is just one example of the ways in which unchecked concentration of wealth is eroding US democracy and economic equality. Just 800 families in the US are collectively worth almost $7tn – a record-breaking figure that exceeds the wealth of the bottom half of the US combined. While most of us earn money through labor, these ultra-wealthy individuals let the tax code and their investments do the work for them. Under the current federal income tax system, over half of the real-world income available to the top 0.1% of wealth-holders (those with $62m or more) goes totally untaxed. As a result, billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have gotten away with paying zero dollars in federal income taxes in some years, even when their real sources of income were soaring.On the other side, millions of hard-working Americans are struggling to make ends meet. Their anxiety is growing as tariffs threaten to explode already rising costs.A broken tax code means unchecked wealth-hoarding. The numbers are staggering: $1tn of wealth was created for the 19 richest US households just last year (to put that number into perspective, that is more than the output of the entire Swiss economy). That was the largest one-year increase in wealth ever recorded. I have studied this rapidly ballooning wealth concentration, and like my colleagues who focus on democracy and governance, I am alarmed by the increasingly aggressive power wielded by a small number of ultra-wealthy individuals.The good news is, hope is not lost. We can break up this dangerous concentration of wealth by taxing billionaires. There is growing public support for doing just this, even among Republican voters. A recent Morning Consult poll found that 70% of Republicans believed “the wealthiest Americans should pay higher taxes”, up from 62% six years ago.With many of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy set to expire this year, legislators have an opportunity to reset the balance driving dangerous wealth-hoarding. Rather than considering raising taxes on middle-class Americans or even households earning above $400,000, they must focus on the immense concentration of wealth among the very top 0.1% of Americans. This would not only break up concentrated wealth, but also generate substantial revenue.One mechanism for achieving this goal is a wealth tax on the ultra-wealthy. The Tax Policy Center recently released an analysis of a new policy called the Five & Dime tax. This proposal would impose a 5% tax on household wealth exceeding $50m and a 10% tax on household wealth over $250m. The Five & Dime tax would raise $6.8tn over 10 years, slow the rate at which the US mints new billionaires, and reduce the billionaires’ share of total US wealth from 4% to 3%.While breaking up dangerous wealth concentration is reason enough to tax billionaires, this revenue could be invested in programs that support working families and in turn boost the economy. Lawmakers could opt for high-return public investments like debt-free college, helping working families afford childcare, expanding affordable housing, rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, and strengthening climate initiatives.Ultimately, taxes on the ultra-rich could transform American society for the better and grow the economy by discouraging unproductive financial behaviors and promoting fair competition – leading to a more dynamic and efficient system.Critics will inevitably claim such a tax would stifle economic growth or prove too challenging for the IRS to implement. But in our highly educated nation, the idea that growth and innovation comes from just a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals does not withstand scrutiny. And while there are challenges for administering any bold proposal, America has always been up for a challenge.After witnessing the consequences of billionaire governance firsthand under this administration, Americans understand what’s at stake. We are seeing how unchecked, astronomical wealth has corrupted American democracy and stifled the economy. It’s not too late to act. Now it’s time for lawmakers who care about the country’s future to embrace solutions that empower everyone, not just the few at the top.

      Gabriel Zucman is professor of economics at the University of California Berkeley and the Paris School of Economics More